Apart from the promise of a highly questionable and unrealistic minimum income guarantee scheme, the Congress party’s campaign in the ongoing Lok Sabha election is revolving around negative campaigning. The party is attacking the BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi non-stop as part of its election strategy. Congress has released several videos attacking the government.
As a part of that, Congress party is producing a video series titled Bhakt Charitra, which means the character of Bhakt. Today the party released the ‘anthem’ for the series, a rap song in Hindi. The song is filled with Hinduphobic narrative, projecting saffron clad Hindus as murderous mobs. The song mentions the narrative being spread by media for that last five years, that hate crimes by Hindu lynch mobs increased many times during the Modi government. They have used photographs of some people that became victims of hate crime, with a caption saying “all killed by lynch mobs”.
Five photographs of lynch mob victims used in the song including one police officer, and on close scrutiny, it can be seen that the police officer is Muhammad Ayub Pandith, who was the Deputy Inspector of Jammu and Kashmir Police. And although his photo has been used a victim of Hindu lynch mob, the fact is that the police officer was killed by a mob of Muslims who were shouting slogans in support of Pakistan as well as Islamic terror organisations.
Muhammad Ayub Pandith was killed by a mob on 22nd June in 2017 outside Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, where he was posted as part of security for the devotees coming to the mosque. He was stripped and stoned to death by the mob, and it was reported that Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Sajid Ahmad Gilkar played a key role in this attack.
Therefore, the Congress party used the image of the police officer killed by an Islamic terror supporting mob to push the propaganda of Hindu lynch. Earlier too, several cases of mob violence where the victims are Muslims have been attributed to communal violence by Hindus to spread the narrative of Hindu lynch mobs, when the incidents happened due to other reasons and the religion of victim was related to the crimes, or even when the attackers themselves were not Hindus.
