By Apoorvanand / Scroll
Our jovial, fun-loving and mischievous (in a pleasant way) lord Ganesh is being recruited in the war of Hindutva politics. After Ram, it is his turn. It would be more appropriate to say that the lord is being used as a cover. Hiding behind him are people with forked tongues who know that they still cannot say directly that they want to take over the land and property of Muslims.
Why can’t they say and do this openly? Even though their governments are now almost everywhere and the police and other state agencies will find a reason to defend their action? One of the reasons is that there is still some life left in the judiciary. The sense of justice has not completely disappeared, as was evident on the eve of the Ganesh Chaturthi.
On August 30, a three-member bench of the Supreme Court held an extraordinary hearing, sitting late into the evening. This was because the Karnataka government insisted that it wanted to allow Ganesh pandals at Bangalore’s Idgah ground, which has traditionally been used by Muslims for prayers on special occasions.
The Idgah committee first went to the Karnataka High Court, asking it to prevent the government from doing so. This is a property owned by Muslims and only Muslim festivals have been held here for the last 200 years. A one-member bench of the Karnataka High Court had refused to give the state government permission to hold the event at the site. The government went to court to appeal this decision.
An outsider watching this development would be left wondering about the government’s interest in this matter. Why is it so adamant about using this particular ground for the Ganesh festival?
Of course, anyone who has been observing the direction in which India has been moving in the last eight years would not be surprised at all. This is also in keeping with how the Karnataka government has been behaving: it was not so long ago that it decided to ban students wearing hijabs in educational institutions.
#Hubballi municipal council has allowed #GaneshChaturthi celebrations at the controversial #Hubballi Idgah Maidan ground.Only one organisation has been given permission.There are six applicants. #Sriramsene's Pramod Muthalik distributed sweets calling it as victory #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/cADF3D6Scs
— Imran Khan (@KeypadGuerilla) August 30, 2022
This story was originally published in scroll.in . Read the full story here