In one of India’s most chilling hate crimes, a Railway Protection Force jawan named Chetansinh Chaudhary shot four train passengers dead on July 31. Three of those people were Muslim. Chaudhary had roamed through the train he had been entrusted to protect, hunting for people who looked Muslim, asked for their names and then pumped bullets into them. In the middle of this terror rampage, Chaudhary also accosted a Muslim woman in a burqa and forced her to chant “Jai mata di”, a popular invocation to the Hindu goddess Durga.
What drove this mass killing? The answer was provided by Chaudhary himself. As a Muslim man lay writhing on the floor, having just been shot, Chaudhary delivered a speech – which he forced other passengers to record. In his rant, Chaudhary spoke of a shadowy theory of people operating from Pakistan. “Inke aqa hai wahan,” he said. Their leaders are there in Pakistan.
His source for this unhinged information, he declared, was the Indian media. He ended by invoking his Hindutva heroes: “If you want to vote, if you want to live in India, then I say, Modi and Yogi [Adityanath], these are the two, and your Thackeray.”
Hate news
Chaudhary’s rant claiming a conspiracy emanating from Pakistan involving India’s Muslims might seem deranged – except that it is regular programming on the Indian media, especially large English and Hindi-language TV news networks.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here