The Tablighi Jamaat has emerged as a superspreader in India. Cases linked to the Islamic missionary have popped up across the country. Furthermore, they have engaged in despicable conduct with the healthcare staff attending to them. Even so, there have been dedicated attempts made to whitewash the deeds of the Islamic missionary organization. The latest to join the fray is Leftist rag The Wire run by an American citizen, Siddarth Varadarajan, and Newslaundry. At the heart of it is a crossword puzzle. On the 7th of April, one of the most popular Hindi dailies, Dainik Bhaskar, offered its readers a crossword puzzle to solve.
The questions of the crossword puzzle revolved around the Tablighi Jamaat and its role in spreading the Wuhan Coronavirus. However, The Wire accused the Hindi Daily of attempting to ‘communalize’ the pandemic for basing its puzzle around the facts of the pandemic in India. As per the far-left propagandist website, “The clues to the crossword are loaded to criticise the Tablighi Jamaat and praise PM Narendra Modi.”
Propagandists at The Wire stated, “If you thought solving puzzles could be fun during the lockdown, Dainik Bhaskar, one of the biggest Hindi dailies, has other plans for you. In an attempt to further communalise the coronavirus pandemic in India, the daily published a crossword on April 7 that amplified the role of Tablighi Jamaat’s cluster and also heaped praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
Newslaundry published a similar report on the crossword puzzle. However, it refrained from making any editorial remarks in its report, probably aware that they were clutching at straws in the report. The far-left rag only reproduced the crossword puzzle with the addition of minor information. It said that the daily’s editions for Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh and New Delhi carried the “corona crossword” and that it did not appear in the Rajasthan editions of the paper, in cities like Jaipur, Alwar, Sikar, Jodhpur and Kota.
The questions of the crossword puzzle included questions such as “Which association’s negligence led to a surge in coronavirus cases in the country? (4,3)”, “Who is the head of the Islamic association in Delhi that gathers thousands of people? (3,2)”, “The reason for fewer coronavirus cases in our country is the _ solutions taken by our government. (3)”, “Our prime minister has made _ attempts to not break the morale of our countrymen. (4)” and “Which building in Delhi was sealed after a gathering of thousands of people?”
It was quite obvious that the Dainik Bhaskar based its crossword puzzle on the contribution of Tablighi Jamaat to the spreading of the Wuhan Coronavirus across the country. However, for basing the crossword puzzle on facts and actual events, The Wire has accused it of ‘communalizing’ the issue. The Wire has been at the forefront of making the baseless assertion that criticism of the Tablighi Jamaat is aking to spreading hate against the entire Muslim community. It once again demonstrated its flawed conception of reality in the report on Dainik Bhaskar’s crossword puzzles.
Ever since Tablighi Jamaat’s contribution to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic emerged, numerous attempts have been made to downplay and whitewash their malicious conduct. A former journalist from Kapil Sibal’s Tiranga TV asserted that she refused to believe that the spurt in Coronavirus cases was due to the Islamic missionary organization and accused the central and state governments of engaging in a conspiracy to save their own face using the Markaz Nizamuddin incident.
A columnist from the Wall Street Journal had claimed that the allegations of sexual harassment levelled against members of the Tablighi Jamaat by nurses at a hospital, which included roaming around the hospital naked and making lewd gestures at the female staff, ‘ring false’ because they are Islamic conservatives. The Wire journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani, too, accused the nurses of lying and call the sexually predatory behaviour of the Tablighi Jamaat members ‘propaganda’.
