Some days ago, an angry mob of 20,000 surrounded a Hindu village in Rangpur area of Bangladesh and burned down 30 homes.
The reason? A rumor about a Facebook post ‘insulting Islam’. Yes, what happens in West Bengal also happens in East Bengal.
It is hardly a surprise that Indian liberals would not find this worth talking about. Just 30 homes of poor Hindus burned down next door from our country. I don’t know about you, but when the ‘burkini’ was banned on beaches of distant France, my Facebook feed was exploding for weeks with righteous anger of liberal friends.
But Bangladeshi Hindus (or Pakistani Hindus) are one of those inconvenient people groups that modern liberal India prefers not to see at all. Their sufferings provide an obvious counterpoint to the whole “religion of peace” thing. It’s almost like if you took India and cut her into two pieces, one majority Hindu and the other majority Muslim, the Hindu majority part would remain secular while the Muslim majority part would declare itself an Islamic state.
That almost suggests that India remains secular due to its Hindu majority. What an inconvenient conclusion!!! As it is, Pakistani Hindus are down to like 2%. Why don’t they just disappear so that liberal and communist historians can claim that they never existed in the first place?
So, we all knew that liberals would remain silent over the attack on Hindus in Bangladesh. But, well, Scroll managed to touch a new low.
Yes, liberals have now gone over and above just staying silent on atrocities on Hindus. They are now actively condemning anyone who dares to comment on atrocities on Hindus.
Welcome to the terrifying new face of modern liberalism.
From now on, whenever Hindus are victims, liberals will not just roll up and go conveniently silent till the news cycle moves on. Those days are over. From now on, they are going to speak up and shout you down if you dare speak on victimization of Hindus.
Let’s read Scroll’s reasoning:
Yeah, you read that right. Liberal internationalists who tear their hair out over America’s President and Israel’s actions in the Middle East cannot believe that India would care about riot victims just across the border.
Yeah, why would India “involve itself” in an affair that does not concern India? We should go pick a fight with Myanmar over Rohingya Muslims instead, right? Let the Bangladeshi Hindus remain at the mercy of murderous mobs.
Unprecedented indeed. Because India has much better things to do, such as supporting Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza strip. And what about that Trump and what he may or may not be doing to Muslims in his country? And why would India’s mainstream political parties turn their backs on Jagmeet Singh, the dashing Canadian politician who has done nothing but support “self-determination” for whether Punjab should be its own country. So intolerant of Modi’s new Hindu nationalist India.
That’s modern liberalism for you.
Let me tell you a story from 2006. So, there’s these guys and they are in a faraway country called Denmark. And what do these guys do one day? They decide to draw some cartoons in a local Danish newspaper.
Here is the official response of Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of the Republic of India, to cartoons published in a Danish newspaper (in a letter to the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid)
That’s right. The Indian government got involved with cartoons published in a newspaper in a remote Northern European country. About pieces of paper with ink on them. But how dare they talk about actual human beings getting their homes burned down by angry mobs in Bangladesh next door? The latter would be “unprecedented”, because the victims in the latter case were Hindus.
So, if 20,000 people surround a Hindu village and burn it down, demanding punishment for the rioters is communal. Justice is the new bigotry.
They always believed it. Now they are saying it.
