By most accounts, Vir Sanghvi would be among the Indian media elite. He has studied at all the right schools, colleges and universities. He has been seen with all the happening people in media.
Yesterday, Vir Sanghvi came out with a column about the ‘shameful persecution’ of Munawar Faruqui and the ‘bogus controversy’ around the web series Tandav. In his piece titled “Of harmless humour and manufactured anger,” he took the BJP governments heavily to the task. He used words like “authoritarian,” “emergency” and “tyranny.”
If you are like me, you are probably not surprised by this. How can a day pass without an elite telling our elected government to its face that they have taken away the right to free speech? You know, sort of like the Communist USSR or Nazi Germany.
But, would you believe that liberals are furious with Vir Sanghvi over this article.?
Surprised? See if you can guess what their problem is:
Did you catch that? Liberals are furious. It’s okay if someone thinks that the BJP government is authoritarian or tyrannical. But how dare someone speak disrespectfully of the maulvis? Indeed, when have Muslim fundamentalists been to blame for anything at all? In fact, is there even such a thing?
Sample the anger.
Vir Sanghvi’s tweet has been quoted nearly 200 times and most people seem to be bashing him for this reason. How dare he disrespect the maulvis? On his timeline, Vir seems to have retweeted two people who came out in his support. It doesn’t appear that there are too many more.
In other words, anti-Hindu hatred among India’s liberal-secular class is simply out of hand. Now this class does not allow even the slightest criticism of any member of the Muslim community for any reason. You cannot even criticize the BJP by calling them Hindu fundamentalists and then equating them with Muslim fundamentalists. That would be an acknowledgement of the existence of Islamic fundamentalism! You can’t have that any more.
In the prescribed new format of Indian liberalism, you must accuse the BJP of Hindu fundamentalism. And you must also say that they are the most evil and the only evil people in the world. So evil that they cannot be compared to anything in the past, present or future.
In his column, Vir Sanghvi described the BJP’s strategy thus:
“It is a strategy that has been successfully mastered by many Muslim fundamentalists. Take the most famous example: The controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. None of the people who called for the banning of that book had even read it. They had no idea whether it really ridiculed Islam. But they ordered the protests anyway and got the novel banned, a crazy spiral that reached its apotheosis when Ayatollah Khomeini, who had never heard of Salman Rushdie or the book before, was told that it made fun of the Prophet. Khomeini promptly issued a fatwa urging the faithful to kill Rushdie.“
Get it? Even if you compare the BJP to Ayatollah Khomeini, that’s not condemnation enough. What did the poor Ayatollah Khomeini ever do to deserve comparisons with ‘fascist’ BJP?
This is how extreme the Indian liberal has become in their hatred against Hindus. If you seriously believe that India has voted in a government that is worse than Ayatollah Khomeini, you can’t be a reasonable person.
A final note. Yesterday, Badruddin Ajmal, the head of AIUDF, now a member of Congress’ grand alliance in Assam, spoke thus at a rally.
” “The BJP has a list of 3,500 mosques in the country. If it comes to power again at Centre again, they will demolish all those mosques,” he claimed at an election meeting on Wednesday in Dhubri district’s Gauripur.
Ajmal targeted the ruling BJP in the state as well and claimed that if the BJP wins the Assam elections again, “they will not let women go out wearing ‘burqa’, grow a beard, wear a skullcap or even offer ‘azaan’ at mosques”. Will you be able to live in such a way?” he questioned those gathered at the rally.”
Incidentally, Badruddin Ajmal has studied theology from the Darul-Uloom Deoband is listed among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. A true liberal, you see.
