The big crucial factor that also looms large is that bulldozing of homes is seemingly done along a particular political strain, ripe with the right-wing slants! by Humra Quraishi.
So much destruction and violence!
Today, not just homes getting bulldozed but psyches and forms and the very survival spirit! Bulldozing of homes is barbaric, as it leaves families and clans roofless, and with that affected on all possible fronts.
The big crucial factor that also looms large is that bulldozing of homes is seemingly done along a particular political strain, ripe with the right-wing slants! Why is it that homes of the minority communities and disadvantaged sections can be so very easily targeted! Look around and see that homes of Dalits and Muslims and also of Hindus from the disadvantaged socio-economic strata are bulldozed…along one alibi or the other! On mere suspicion or accusations or on the basis of those very basic findings or along political slants and biases!
It gets just too shocking to see bulldozers destroying home after home. With that, the entire families sitting on the roadside, just too baffled and shocked, and traumatized. Their refuge was destroyed in minutes! No possible means to build another one. Roofless and homeless they will have to spend whatever remains of their lives!
Together with bulldozing of homes of hundreds of our fellow citizens, deeply disturbing are the killings on …ongoing. It’s just too shocking and disgusting to see how the goon brigades are calling the shots.
Lynching and humiliating Muslims on the beef alibi is increasing by the day. Last fortnight, an elderly Muslim gentleman was hounded and humiliated by three men inside a running train in Maharashtra, on the alibi that he was carrying beef in a packet, though later, through thorough investigation, it was confirmed that it wasn’t beef.
Last fortnight, two stark incidents of lynch killings in Haryana, along the beef alibi, raised little hue and cry. A Muslim migrant worker from West Bengal, Sabir, was lynched to death and another worker, Asiruddin, seriously wounded, after the two were attacked by the Hindutva lot in Haryana’s Charkha Dadri, on the alibi that they had eaten beef. And then a Hindu student, Aryan Mishra, was killed in Faridabad by the so called cow vigilante group members, on suspicion that he was a cow smuggler! He was mistaken to be Muslim!
See, how this communal madness has been spreading out and peaking in the last ten years. Killing hundreds of innocents on the various alibis along the communal strain!
Communal attacks that took off from the barbaric lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri have continued to spread out, towards the outlying locales and villages of Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana… Towards the interiors of Jharkhand, where a few years back, at least two Muslim cattle traders were killed and their bodies hung from trees! One of the victims was a 13-year-old boy. Yes, he was killed out there in the open, yet we sat all too quiet! No cries, not even from any of the Minority Commissions nor from the Child Rights forums! I wonder why this silence!
One horrifying incident after another taking place in these years. In the autumn of 2016, in district Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, two young Muslim men were not just thrashed, but forced to eat cow dung and drink cow urine! Mind you, this incident didn’t take place in some jungle land but barely 20 kilometres away from the capital city.
A few years back, it was painful to see the plight of the four young Kashmiri students studying in Rajasthan’s Mewar/ Chittorgarh region. They were made to stand as though they had committed theft or some heinous crime. All that they did was to buy 300 grams of mutton from the local market. That was enough to trigger off rumours that it was beef, followed by the expected attacks on them! Mind you, this was not an isolated incident but one of the many reported ones…
Summer of 2017 saw the blatant killing of the 16-year-old Mohammad Junaid on a train taking him and his brothers to their village in Haryana’s Ballabhgarh district. Killed in public view, by fellow train passengers, before ‘beef eater’ comments hurled on his fractured skull.
Today there is a systematic communal propaganda that only Muslims and Dalits and Christians relish beef or mutton! To relay that these communities kill and devour! Mind you, this propaganda that Muslims go devouring meaty chunks is unleashed by the communal brigades, to portray the Musalmaan as ‘adamkhoors’/cannibals!
The stark fact is that the meat industry in the country is controlled by non-Muslims. I’m not talking of small-time sellers but of the well-established meat and poultry suppliers and owners of this industry. And if one were to talk to meat-suppliers and eatery owners from across the country, they would detail that the biggest consumers of the non-vegetarian fare are non-Muslims.
The ‘beef scare’ alibi has also been impacting the socio-economic patterns. Joblessness and poverty and scare of the Hindutva brigades is definitely on the rise, impacting lives and livelihoods and even the social customs. In recent years, when I’d attended marriage festivities of two middle-class Muslim families, there was no trace of a single meat dish. Pure vegetarian fare. Why? The hosts were taking all possible precautions. “Who will prove to the goondas that it’s mutton or chicken. Didn’t want anyone from the Hindutva brigades to disrupt the shaadi.”
In the background, lurk around the communal unleashes. Speeches and utterances of those in power dripping with communal outpourings. Quite obviously it will have a trickle-down effect. In the last one fortnight, the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has been coming out with anti-Muslim statements and getting away with all those blatantly communal unleashes! Shocking to hear the chief minister of a state come out with such provocative statements but then he is a BJP politician! So, his utterances and speeches are along the expected lines, in these dark turbulent times!
Tell me where we are heading with these build-ups! Each single day drags along dismal happenings. Destruction is on. Facades are over …even the façade that we are living in developed times. No way! Never before one witnessed this level of onslaughts in every single sphere. Survival getting tough, where even the basics are destroyed, under one alibi or the other!
