On the 30th of June, a Muslim mob went on a rampage at Old Delhi and desecrated a Durga Mandir at the Lal Kuan area of Hauz Qazi. The conflict initially began with a fight over parking but soon turned escalated into a hate crime.
There is hardly any doubt over the fact that only Hindus were the victims of the hate crime that was committed on that night and consequently, all the perpetrators of the hate crime belonged to the Muslim community. However, the so-called fack checking portal factchecker.in, an initiative of IndiaSpend, begs to differ.
What happened: Muslim mob vandalise temple in Delhi, pelt stones at Hindu houses, shout slogans like Allahu Akbar & Naara e Takbeer@FactCheckIndia: Muslim is still the victim. Tension flared because of right-wing outfits
Such jokers pic.twitter.com/lhRjeItQVt
— Swati Goel Sharma (@swati_gs) July 9, 2019
According to factchecker.in, tensions flared in the area on the 2nd of July after bike rallies by Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. They also classify Muslims as victims of the hate crime and Hindus as alleged perpetrators even though only a Hindu Temple was vandalized and Murtis were desecrated. The fact is that tensions were already high after the vandalism of the Durga temple on 30 June. They say the market was returning to normalcy albeit with the presence of security forces. Just because there is no visible fight among people does not mean the situation is normal.
No hate crime was committed against the Muslim community at all and yet, factchecker.in somehow managed to portray Muslims as victims in this particular incident as well where they were, without a shadow of a doubt, the perpetrators of the hate crime. It only goes on to show how agenda-driven factchecking websites peddle dubious propaganda to portray Muslims as victims using fictitious narratives.
At OpIndia.com, we have regularly demonstrated on several occasions the extremely problematic aspects of factchecker.in’s Hate Crime Watch. Swati Goel Sharma of Swarajya Mag, too, has busted the intended narrative on several occasions. There have been occasions when factchecker has deliberately twisted the facts of the matter to increase the number of Muslim victims in its database by including cases where the victim and the perpetrator both belonged to the Muslim community.
On other occasions, the organization has continued to maintain a case in its hate crime database even after it was proved that no such incident occurred merely because the alleged victim was from the Muslim community and the alleged perpetrators Hindu. According to the luminaries at FactChecker, the Pulwama Terror Attack wasn’t a hate crime either even though the Terrorist himself proclaimed that he was carrying the attack against ‘Cow-Piss drinkers’.
Despite their bigoted agenda and dubious track record, they were awarded an international prize recently for their ‘Hate Crime Watch’ database. It only shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the global liberal ecosystem that it not only tolerates such mediocrity, it celebrates them.
