Yesterday, the Special cell of Delhi police had arrested two women named Natasha Narwal and Devangna Kalita in the North-east Delhi riots case. The two women belong to the far-left activist group Pinjra Tod.
It was found that on February 22 evening Pinjra Tod members had mobilised local residents for protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and directed them to gather at Jaffrabad metro station. “Anti-CAA protesters gathered at the metro station on February 22 night at 10 p.m. We thought they would gather at the old site at Seelampur service lane, which is around a kilometre away,” sources said.
It now turns out that both women arrested for inciting the Delhi riots were the founding members of far-Left group Pinjra Tod which was established in 2015. Pinjra Tod was started primarily in opposition to hostel curfews at Delhi’s colleges and universities, however, their far-left agenda has been evident since long.
One of the co-founders of Pinjra Tod who has now been arrested for inciting the Delhi anti-Hindu riots, Natasha Narwal was also a columnist with several Left-leaning online portals in the past.
Natasha Narwal had written three articles for far-left propaganda portal The Wire.
Harbouring deep-seated hatred and Hinduphobia, Natasha Narwal had also written for NewsLaundry during the release of the movie ‘Padman’.
Displaying her hate, Natasha Narwal in her Newslaundry article had written about a marathon organised by ABVP just before the launch of Padman which was flagged off by Akshay Kumar. The marathon was reportedly a race to demand that GST on sanitary pads be lifted by the government of India.
In her article, displaying staggering ignorance, Natasha had written:
“The RSS-affiliated outfit’s move for empowerment is at odds with its imaginations of a Hindu Rashtra in which a woman’s role is reduced to a biological reproducer of its members (“sons”); limited to mothers/wives/sisters in need of protection; contained into cultural signifiers who are the markers and reproducers of cultural boundaries/differences; and idolised into figures whose bravery is realised through self-sacrifice/erasure. In this imagination of the nation, women carry its burden every day, manifesting in diverse forms of regulations and restrictions that bind and cage her, in the policing of her autonomy and freedom that she has to negotiate and resist, and even internalise every day”.
Interestingly, in all her writings on the two platforms, while Natasha displays substantial hatred for Hindus and their traditions, even misrepresenting and lying about what the place of women is in the Hindu society, she seems to have stayed clear from any targeted criticism of women’s place in Islam and the Muslim community.
Delhi Police sent notice to Pinjra tod
Earlier, Delhi Police special cell had issued notice to 50 members of the Jamia coordination committee, former office bearers of Congress’ student’s union, National Student union of India, far left ‘activist’ group Pinjra Tod for their alleged connection with rioting and criminal conspiracy pertaining to anti-Hindu riots in north-east Delhi that had claimed the lives of 53 people and had left, over 400 injured.
It was earlier reported that police believed that Pinjra Tod activists were present in the Seelampur-Jafrabad area on February 22 evening and urged the anti-CAA protesters at the dharna site and other nearby areas to make their anti-CAA protest more impactful by creating a roadblock at the Jafrabad Metro station road. According to the report, it was this event that finally led to a show of strength from the other side and eventually, led to the Delhi riots.
“The assessment is that there may have been two reasons behind getting the anti-CAA women protesters to shift from the small Jafrabad dharna to an arterial road. One, an attempt to create an alternative protest site in the apprehension of the Supreme Court moving to end the dharna at Shaheen Bagh, and second, to create a negative image of India coinciding with the US President’s visit”, a Delhi police source had told TOI.
The police also seem to believe that the Pinjra Tod activists were not only involved in their capacity of expressing solidarity with the protesting women but were instrumental in the escalation of the protests. Police sources have said that even if these activists are given the benefit of doubt, their involvement in an already tense situation is being seen as instigation and is being probed further.
Sharjeel Imam was also a columnist with The Wire
It is pertinent to note that earlier, another columnist with The Wire, Sharjeel Imam was arrested for inciting the anti-Hindu Delhi riots. Sharjeel Imam had written about his toxic Islamic fundamentalism in The Wire long before he incited riots in Delhi where he had eulogised Jinnah in his article for The Wire. From his eulogy of Jinnah on The Wire, it is evident that Sharjeel does not find any fault with Jinnah’s conduct that led to the partition of the country. He does not even believe that partition was necessarily a bad thing. He says, “In order to demystify Jinnah and to resolve such contradictions, a fuller discussion of Partition should have been a part of our educational setup. However, it has been made impossible to know such a historic figure by attributing violence of Partition to him. This as an attempt by Congress to hide its failures to accommodate the genuine Muslim demands and aspirations for political proportional representation.”
Sharjeel did not stop there of course. He says that the ‘questions’ raised by Jinnah “are just the starting point of a larger debate which will inevitably take place again and again, as the situation of Indian Muslims is made to worsen.” He believes that Jinnah led a righteous struggle to protect Indian Muslims from Hindu rule. Also, Sharjeel goes to great lengths to prove that Jinnah was a leader of Indian Muslims. He says, “Indian Muslims, despite having been indoctrinated for generations now, retain some memory of Partition and Jinnah. For many of them, Jinnah is the author of Partition and yet one of the greatest leaders of “Muslim India” in the last century, who made the Muslim League into a national party by mobilising millions of Muslims across British India.”
He stated further, “Jinnah’s communalism is positive communalism as discussed above, and need not be understood through the contemporary meaning of the word. He did not believe that India was a nation, as is shown by the frequent use of the term ‘continent’ as well as ‘subcontinent’. He was merely representing one community in this grand ocean of communities, and in this process, he was trying to secure rights for all numerically inferior communities.”
