PREVENT THE POWER OF PROPAGANDA RAVAGING
THE NATION
Anil Bhat
If BJP’s 2014 victory was
a body blow to the Congress, then its even greater victory in 2019 was like
salt on wounds. Having nurtured Nehruvian socialism, leftism, pseudo-secularism
and having twisted and supressed history and having been too soft on vital
aspects of national security (except for Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965 against
Pakistan and Indira Gandhi in 1967 against China in Nathu La as well as in
1971aginst Pakistan) for 67 years since Independence, an inevitable result of
BJP coming to power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was a process of
churning in which the much collected sediment got shaken and began to show up.
The churning which continued with some more vigour
after BJP’s second victory in 2019, resulted by the beginning of 2020 in an unprecedented attack on the State
of India by, ironically, not directly by its old adversary, Pakistan, but by
Indians, who resorted to the modus operandi of the Kashmiri separatists, lackeys
of and supported by Pakistan’s military establishment. This concerted attack of misinformation/lying/rumour-mongering
that that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is a danger to India’s Muslims
and begun as an agitation it, was timed to peak to bloody communal riots on the
exact days of US President Donald Trump’s February 2020 India visit.
In 2016, an agitation in Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU) over raising of its hostel’s modest room charges degenerated into, or was
planned to be a long rally of anti-India
and pro-Pakistan sloganeering, with some violence. West Bengal’s Jadavpur
University followed suit with something similar. The outbreak of this ‘anti-India
influenza’ in the JNU got publicised and the term ‘tukde-tukde gang’ (let India
break into pieces/Break India) became well-known. Anti-India conclaves were the
norm in JNU but they never made much news as the ‘environment’ during those
almost seven decades under Congress was most conducive for the so called
liberals, apologists, pseudo-secularists, pseudo-intellectuals, human rights
activists etcetera who in the name of freedom of expression did everything to
belittle/ridicule India, within and globally. And they prospered, as they were
patronised by the ‘Lutyens gang’ of the dynasty loyalist Congress leaders. Yes,
of the same Congress which allowed Kashmir to become available to Pakistan,
allowed Kashmiri Pandits to be massacred and threatened out of the Valley,
messed up majorly on the 1962 Sino-Indian war and welcomed as well as legalised
millions of illegal Bangladeshi migrants
to the extent of altering the demography of at least eleven of Assam’s
districts. It took almost seven decades since Independence for many of us
Indians to realise or acknowledge that there is a large constituency in India
which thrived on working against its well-being and going so far as to try to
break it.
The frustration/ desperation of the Lutyens and
Tukde Tukde (LTT) combo kept rising till they stooped to doubt the valiant
achievements of the Army in Jammu & Kashmir. They shamelessly raised doubts
about the success of Indian Army’s surgical strikes in 2016 and of the Indian
Air Force’s Balakot bombing in 2019. Then came BJPs hat-trick of the striking
down of triple Talaq, the legal clearance to build the Ram Jamnabhumi temple at
Ayodhya and the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir, all
successful and amounting to a serial of very telling blows for the LTT. But it
was the passing of the CAA, in which this combo saw a golden opportunity to
stoop even lower to launch a campaign of outright lies, misinformation,
indoctrination, which began to show some success and the agitations began
again.
With the JNU back in action along
with Jadavpur, Aligarh Muslim and Jamia Millia Islamia universities, a new
bastion in North East Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh was created to agitate against not
only the CAA, which was claimed as anti-Muslim, but even the National Register
of Citizens, which has not yet been instituted. Also at this time, another
bunch of anti-India players, the Popular
Front of India (PFI), which since its
inception, is allegedly involved in various antisocial and anti-national
activities, which include connections with various Islamist terrorist groups,
possessing arms, kidnapping, murder, intimidation, hate
campaigns, rioting etcetera, became better known.
The Shaheen Bagh “peaceful” agitation by largely women of
that area, administratively supported 24x7 for meals and other necessary
paraphernalia, featured among well-known leading LTT personalities like Mani
Shankar Aiyar, new faces like Sharjeel Imam, an alleged mastermind
and main coordinator of the Shaheen Bagh
agitation causing roadblocks. The road, still blocked for three months now, affects more
than 100,000 vehicles a day making their 25 - 30 minute journeys take 2 - 3
hours. As the area is also a border point into the capital, thousands of trucks
are being diverted to other border points. Requests to the protesters to stop
as a result of the inconvenience being caused to hundreds of thousands of
commuters have so far been outrightly rejected by the agitators.
In a video which went viral on social media, Sharjeel Imam
ranted that Muslims of the country should break India by cutting of the
North-east from the rest of the country went viral. “Our main aim is to
permanently cut Assam and North-east India from rest of India……If 5,00,000
Muslims are organised then we can cut the North-east from rest of India. If we
cannot do permanently, at least we can cut North-east from India for months………
Our responsibility is to cut the Assam from India then Govt will hear our voice.
If we have to help the Assam then we will have to cut the Assam from rest of
India”, Imam said in the video and also made
provocative and seditious remarks in his hour -long speech against the CAA, at
Aligarh Muslim University, where he was invited to speak.
The “peaceful” Shaheen Bagh women’s
chants also included ‘Jinnah wali azadi’, suggestive of a second partition,
while some of their children chanted “Modi ko maaro” (kill Modi), or words to
that effect kind of slogans. The National
Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has asked authorities to provide counselling
for children present at the protests. A complaint was received saying that
the children have been misinformed by their parents about the CAA and detention centres.
That was not all. While more Shaheen
Bagh type agitations were organised in in Kolkata, Bihar, Prayagraj, Mumbai and
Bengluru, in North East Delhi, a substantial arsenal of stones cut specially with sharp edges to ensure maximum damage,
truckloads of bricks, hundreds of acid and petrol bottle-bombs with
bomb-hurlers fashioned out of tyre tubes were installed at various locations
got detected. One such cache found in the house of the AAP’s Tahir
Hussain left little doubt about the involvement of that party in this
anti-BJP and anti-India campaign.
Delhi and central
armed police forces deployed were ill-prepared and poorly led. Their basic action
of firing at lethally armed rioters was not taken. Policemen were also
lynched-the worst being Ankit Sharma who was reportedly stabbed repeatedly, his
intestines disembowelled and eyes gauged -much like what Pakistan army
personnel did to young Indian Army officers in 1971 Indo-Pak war, to Capt
Saurabh Kalia in 1999 and many other unfortunate Indian Army brave-hearts.
Shaheen Bagh and all other “agitations” elsewhere bore the signature of what
Pakitstan’s Inter Services Intelligence directed Kashmiri separatists to do for
decades to radicalise Kashmiris in the Valley and keep it burning.
Union Minister Prakash Javadekar hit
out at Congress chief Sonia Gandhi alleging her of inciting the violence in
Delhi, quoting her call for a ‘fight to the finish’ made in December 2019. He
also hit out at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, saying, “AAP should have
worked for peace. Instead, Chief Minister Kejriwal identified riot victims by
religion in Assembly.” He however reportedly evaded the question of BJP party
leader Kapil Mishra’s alleged involvement in the recent clashes.
The violent clashes in the North East
Delhi took the lives of at least 37 people and injured more than 200. With over 700 rioters visually
identified, many arrested and being legally proceeded against, the months long
daily biryani picnics at Shaheen Bagh ended, but the agitators
reduced from thousands to 15-50, have not yet relented and the road remains
blocked despite Delhi Police urging them go back home and clear the road and despite
the corona virus pandemic.
It can only be hoped
that all the guilty are appropriately punished for the very sake of India’s
integrity.
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