By Hussain Haidry and Alishan Jafri
It’s been more than a week since a mob of Hindutva supporters assembled at Jantar Mantar in the centre of New Delhi to chant genocidal slogans against Muslims.
These calls came a little over a year after mobs killed 53 people (three-fourths of them Muslim), destroyed shrines/mosques and vandalised businesses and property worth hundreds of crores in North East Delhi, most of which belonged to Muslims.
More recently, hundreds of Hindutva supporters gathered in Dwarka to protest the construction of a Haj house. Two months ago, dozens of Muslim fruit-sellers were boycotted, attacked and evicted from Uttam Nagar by right wing mobs who had labelled them as Rohingya. A street vendor named Rizwan was badly injured there, reportedly by a mob chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’.
After the anti-Muslim video from Jantar Mantar went viral, a wave of shock, shame and anger was felt across the mainstream and alternative media. Various political parties, the BJP included, agreed that the slogans raised were unlawful and unacceptable. While two of the accused – Uttam Upadhyay and Pinky Chaudhary (now granted protection from arrest) – are absconding, and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay has been granted bail, public anger forced the BJP to distance itself from the slogans and condemn the actions of its leaders and affiliates.
This time around, the argument that these are some fringe elements who should be ignored was rendered invalid by the sheer brazenness of the hate mongers at the event. The fact that it happened right in the heart of the national capital, not far from parliament, and in the presence of leaders of the ruling party and the police, is a lesson to those who still want to use the “ignore the fringe” argument.
‘Strategic’ restraint
Yet, not every party chose to make an issue of this shocking event. The most prominent amongst Delhi’s politicians who remained silent was chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. This, despite the fact that he won the 2020 assembly election in the aftermath of public revulsion against the “goli maaro” slogans of BJP leaders. In Muslim areas, voters overwhelming turned out to back his Aam Aadmi Party.
In the face of Twitter trends pointing to Kejriwal’s silence, AAP spokespersons sprang to defend their leader. To every question, they had just two answers: First, Amit Shah controls the police. Second, Kejriwal is showing restraint and preventing polarisation by keeping quiet.
In the face of persistent questioning, some AAP spokespersons also launched ad hominem attacks against those who had demanded something as basic as the chief minister’s condemnation. The language used not only amounted to gaslighting the critics, but was also utterly disrespectful to anyone objecting to Kejriwal’s silence.
‘Kejriwal does not control the police’
The AAP used the widely known fact that Delhi Police is controlled by the Union home ministry as an alibi for the silence of its chief minister. But the party ignored the fact that what Kejriwal was being asked to do was not to direct the police – which he cannot do – but to take a stand as a leader and tell the people of Delhi what was right and what was wrong.
Kejriwal does not need control over the police to condemn hate speech and genocide mongering in the city he serves as the chief minister. He could still have filed an FIR on behalf of the Delhi government, just as an FIR was filed by it against the Tablighi Jamaat for the violation of COVID-19 protocols last year. Kejriwal also has the power to order a judicial probe into the event, something he did just a week back in another criminal case. He can address the media and reassure Delhi’s Muslims that he will resist any attempt to disturb communal harmony in the national capital. But he chose not to do any of these things.
‘Kejriwal was silent so as to stop polarisation’
What about the polarisation argument? In our view, AAP and its chief minister insult the intelligence and humanity of Delhi’s Hindus if they believe that something so basic as condemning slogans like ‘Jab Mulley kaatey jaaenge, Ram Ram chilayenge (When Muslims are slaughtered, they will scream the name of Ram)’ will alienate or polarise them.
Curiously, this aversion to making “polarising” statements has not prevented AAP leaders from resorting to dog whistling in the recent past.
In February 2021, a young man, Rinku Sharma, was killed by some Muslim goons in New Delhi. Although Delhi Police ruled out a communal angle in the murder, AAP and BJP leaders disagreed. This is what AAP spokesman, Raghav Chadha said after Sharma’s murder: “Is raising the Jai Shri Ram slogans not safe now?” Chaddha was not the only person from AAP to make this kind of polarising comment. AAP leader Saurabh Bhardwaj and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia also joined in. “Unfortunate that murders are taking place for ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and the BJP keeps mum. Today, it is unsafe to say even ‘Jai Shri Ram’ in the country. If this slogan cannot be raised in India, then where should one raise it? In Pakistan?” Sisodia had said. Even if the AAP leaders were merely trying to use the BJP’s own language to score points against its political opponent, they should have realised the polarising effect of these statements.
AAP’s COVID-19 Islamophobia
In May 2021, AAP’s official account had tweeted a list of countries, all predominantly Muslim, to show that the BJP is anti-Hindu and is giving India’s COVID essentials to “them”. The dog whistle nature of this tweet was subsequently softened, after huge outrage, by listing the other countries that had also received vaccines from India. Last year, it was AAP which started the witch-hunt of Tablighi Jamaat by feeding the Islamophobic media narrative around COVID-19. It was not Adityanath who started a separate category for “Markaz Masjid” cases in his state’s daily COVID 19 bulletin but the AAP government of Kejriwal. This was called out by the Delhi minorities commission.
In 2019, former JNU student Umar Khalid, wrote, “In Okhla, where I live, thousands of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) posters adorned the walls appealing to the people to vote for the party if they want to defeat the BJP. That is it. The posters had nothing more to them. These were customised posters for Muslim-dominated areas, whereas, in other areas, you were talking about the achievements of the AAP in terms of health care and education. What explains this double standard of your party in terms of the different strategies of campaigns for different areas?”
In retrospect, AAP is essentially now only giving to the Muslims what it promised in the first place: neither development nor safety but the BJP’s defeat. But should Muslims quietly accept hate and violence only because it is happening under a non-BJP government?
BJP’s defeat not enough
AAP often says, “we are fighting communal hate with development.” This is not only an inadequate approach to the present radicalisation underway but also an undemocratic one. This approach essentially reduces the status of Muslims in Delhi to mere voters whose support is needed to defeat the BJP, and not citizens with equal rights. The debate on AAP’s failing also has national importance: the time has come to insist that all political parties step up to the crease and confront the growing hate and violence against Muslims.
Muslims never objected to Kejriwal’s “strategic” assertion of his Hindu identity when he chanted Jai Hanuman in reply to BJP’s Jai Shri Ram or when he spent state funds on a massive Laxmi Pooja, emulating Modi’s Ayodhya Bhoomi poojan. But it seems, Kejriwal wants to go a step further. What AAP supporters do not realise is that the BJP cannot be defeated by “dipping into its poisonous Hindutva lexicon”.
This story first appeared on thewire.in
