By Aakar Patel
It’s sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the past in order to understand the present.
Four years ago, in 2020, evangelical Muslim organisation Tablighi Jamaat held a meeting in Delhi from March 10 to 13. This was scheduled long before the onset of Covid-19 and at a time when the Narendra Modi government was itself dismissive of the threat of a pandemic.
A March 13, 2020 PTI report had claimed: “Covid-19 is not health emergency, no need to panic”.
The Tablighi meeting was held before India issued guidelines on public gatherings. But as cases in India began to rise towards the end of March, the government determined it would scapegoat Muslims and enlisted the media to do this.
The Union government made much of evacuating the area where the congregation was being held. The PM sent National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to “reason” with the organisers, who had been asking for safe evacuation for days. The virus’ novelty and the first deaths coincided with the Tablighi Jamaat gathering and open season was declared on it.
“The main reason for increased number of cases is that members of the Tablighi Jamaat have travelled across the country,” said Lav Agarwal, health ministry joint secretary. On April 1, BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya tweeted that the Tablighi gathering was like an “Islamic insurrection”. On April 4, MNS chief Raj Thackeray suggested the group’s members be shot. In Uttar Pradesh, the group’s members were jailed and booked under the anti-terror National Security Act.
On April 5, Lav Agarwal said: ‘The doubling rate in India is 4.1 days, had the congregation at Nizamuddin not happened and additional cases not come, this would have been about 7.14 days.” As later events proved, this was nonsense, but it was par for the course for this government.
On April 18, Agarwal made another claim, that the group was the dominant single cause of the pandemic. Thus, the poisonous lie was spread and its effect began to take place in the citizenry as fast as the COVID-19 itself. A Hindi daily reported that Tablighi Jamaat members quarantined in a facility in western Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur had “demanded” non-vegetarian food and were defecating in the open inside the hospital. The Saharanpur police tweeted no such thing had happened and the story was taken down.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here .