Earlier yesterday, Ankita Kumari, who was being treated after a neighbour named Shahrukh Hussain poured petrol on her and set fire to her four days ago, died in a hospital. Ankita Kumari, a student studying in class 12, became the victim of unrequited love after she refused the advances of Shahrukh Hussain, who set her on fire for rejecting him.
The horrific attack on Ankita happened on Tuesday (August 23) morning in Dhumka in Jharkhand. Ankita had told the police in a critical state that her neighbour, Shahrukh, used to harass her every day. He used to approach her and seek her friendship. He had also obtained her phone number and used to call her repeatedly, asking her for friendship. When Ankita chastised him for not stopping, he threatened to kill her.
Ankita informed her father of this on Monday. When she woke up the next morning, her body was in flames as she ran up to family members who attempted to extinguish the fire. Her family then hurried her to the hospital. It was found in the hospital that Ankita had suffered severe burns. It turned out that Shahrukh went to Ankita’s house on Tuesday morning, poured petrol on Ankita through a window when she was asleep in her bed and torched her, and then fled from the scene.
Shahrukh was subsequently arrested by the police. A video of him being arrested has gone viral on social media in which he is seen smiling unrepentantly and having no regrets about the heinous crime he had committed.
The incident should have provoked angry reactions from the Left, ceaseless debates, and undying outrage in the form of lengthy op-eds in leading publications over how a Hindu girl was killed by her spurned Muslim pursuer. But it did not spark any kind of outrage among the Left. However, perhaps since the perpetrator was a Muslim and the victim Hindu, the media organisations and elite commentariats who like to comment on every issue under the sun conveniently gave a pass to the horrifying tragedy that fell upon Ankita. Many mainstream media organisations and left-wing media personalities have so far not reported on the death. Those who did, most likely grudgingly, resorted to obscurantism, carefully hiding the identities of the perpetrator and the victim in their headline and using a more generalist title to report about the incident. India Today published a report, representing Shahrukh Hussain as one ‘Abhishek’.
However, there is little surprise to this enduring deceit that has come to define the Left and the media ecosystem controlled by them. Unabashed hypocrisy has become a hallmark of the Indian left intelligentsia. They would continue to harp on the faith of the perpetrator should they be a Hindu and the victim a Muslim or a Christian. In that case, they would hunker themselves to weave fictitious stories about the “persecution of minorities” and “rising intolerance” in the country even though the crime committed had no religious connotation. The same standards are not applied when the identities of the perpetrators and the victims are reversed.
This dichotomy stems from a bloated sense of entitlement among ‘liberals’, who often subject others to higher standards of noble beliefs and virtues while refraining from holding themselves to the same rigorous standards. They labour under a mistaken belief that they are a cut above the world, with a false sense of the notion that they are exempted from being evaluated by the same token as they use to judge others.
For instance, the left-leaning liberals had recently displayed unmatched alacrity in criticising Nupur Sharma for her remarks on Prophet Muhammad in a TV News debate. The same lot that moralised over how Sharma was wrong for her comments, effectively painting a target on her back and granting legitimacy to the ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’ threats issued by Islamists, made a shameless volte-face when Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair, whose dog-whistling made Sharma the target of Islamists, was arrested for hurting sentiments of Hindus with his disparaging posts against Hindu Gods and Goddesses.
They defended Zubair, claiming that his arrest was the suppression of free speech in India. Some of them even floated the theory that Zubair was arrested because he was a Muslim. The fact that Hindus such as Kanhaiya Lal and Umesh Kolhe became the victim of his dog-whistling was conveniently swept under the rug by the Left eager to shield Zubair and project him as a victim of state repression. That Nupur Sharma and those supporting her faced ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’ threats by Islamist mob was also paid no heed to by the Left that outrages over even most innocuous statements made by Hindu leaders or BJP politicians.
The deaths of Lal and Kolhe, who were killed by Islamists for social media posts supporting Nupur Sharma, were met with silence and indifference from the Left, with some of the members even holding the former BJP spokesperson responsible for their killing. The treachery seems to have persisted in Ankita Kumari’s case as well, where the mainstream media has abstained from focusing on the religious identities of the perpetrator and the victim as it undermines their meticulously crafted propaganda of minority victimhood.
Intersectionality: The significance of mentioning the identities of victims and perpetrators
While several media houses and Left intelligentsia are driven by their motive to break the Indian society, the rationale behind highlighting the identity of Muslim victims has a separate origin altogether. The theory essentially believes that the victim would have been at a lower risk had her identity not been that of a Muslim and hence, mentioning the religious identity is essential as even if the crime is not motivated by religious animosity, the victim was at a higher risk by virtue of his/her religion. This sociological concept is called as ‘Intersectionality’, the point where multiple identities of an individual meet.
Intersectionality is thus a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of one’s social and political identities (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, etc.) might combine to create unique modes of discrimination. So when a Muslim victim is identified by his/her identity, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that his/her faith has played a role in the discrimination or atrocities meted out on him/her. In addition to this, in such cases, the identity of the perpetrators also holds significance since the crime is committed on the premise of existing religious inequities. The media houses, therefore, fall over themselves in case the perpetrator of such atrocities happens to be Hindus.
Gaslighting Hindus into guilt-tripping
By contrast, they refrain from placing emphasis on identities when the victim is a Hindu and the perpetrator of the crime is a Muslim. When the non-left highlights the identities in such cases, the allegation that is often levelled by left ideologues and media organisations is that non-left is blatantly ‘communalising’ an incident. This is nothing but a shameless attempt at gaslighting Hindus into guilt-tripping, into making them believe that raising voices against atrocities meted out on them could touch off communal conflagration for which they would alone be held responsible.
Apparently, as per the Indian left’s understanding, incidents are communalised only when the perpetrators happen to be Muslims and victims Hindus. When it is the other way around, the media organisations feel no qualms in harping on the religious and caste identities of the victims and assailants, to insinuate how minorities are attacking people from the majority community like they would normally do when the identities of the victim and the perpetrator is reversed.
Behind this transparent hypocrisy, lies the nefarious aim of the Left, who in connivance with their supporters in the media have concocted the farce of “perpetual threat facing minorities in India” to prevent the consolidation of the Hindu majority and thereby undermine their outsize influence on the country’s electoral politics. The Left works studiously to reinforce the narrative that Muslims, Christians, and other minorities in India perpetually remain under threat as long as the Modi-led BJP is at the Centre.
The Left also gains from the consequence of such an insidious narrative, which helps to instil fear of persecution among minorities, polarise and consolidate them against the majority and political parties that seek to end the decades-old tradition of appeasing minorities and treating them with kid gloves.
To prevent this trope from falling apart, the media organisations consciously refrain from invoking religious identities when a Muslim perpetrator is found to have committed an act of brutality against a Hindu as witnessed in Ankita Kumari’s barbaric murder when Shahrukh Hussain decided to end the life of a Hindu girl who exercised her agency and rebuffed his advances.
