As millions of cricket fans were left in sorrow after India lost the ICC World Cup final match, the liberals of India had found a reason for being joyous – they found it an occasion to blame Gujaratis and berate Gujarati culture. Even as cricket fans were discussing what went wrong on the field, liberal eyes were fixed on one thing – identity, the Gujarati identity.
Thousands of tweets – some blatant while some subtle – were posted by social media accounts identifying themselves as liberals that targeted Gujaratis for lacking sportsmanship and lacking a ‘sporting culture’ because the crowd apparently failed to cheer the home side properly. At the same time, the crowd, which was assumed to be completely made up of Gujaratis, was also accused of being a ‘jingoist’ who failed to appreciate the rivals. It was trademark liberal behaviour – heads, I win, tails, you lose.
Gujaratis were declared as lesser people, and liberals demanded that no future big matches should be hosted in Ahmedabad. Most of this behaviour was displayed on X (formerly Twitter), where anti-Gujarati sentiments ran high. Lots of these comments went unchecked because the supposed custodians of the ‘moral compass’ of the society were in synch with them, however, some spoke up.
I was in the crowd @atulkasbekar
— Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj (@DeepikaBhardwaj) November 19, 2023
It wasn't Ahmedabad crowd. It was INDIA crowd. I know people who travelled 12-14 hours on road to come to Ahmedabad. People travelled all the way from Mumbai too. Indians staying abroad came to watch it too
We cheered. We shouted on top of our… https://t.co/T828Fxw6MF
Really? Let’s go back to the 1996 WC semi final. India Vs Sri Lanka in Kolkata? Did the crowd behave in the ‘spirit of the game’ .. they threw stuff on the field and the match was awarded to Sri Lanka. 1999 After the Sachin run out Kolkata didn’t applaud Pakistan’s fielding,… https://t.co/BFYY88f1cU
— Aadit Kapadia (@ask0704) November 20, 2023
Return of “Gujaratis are traditionally effete people”!
— Alok Bhatt (@alok_bhatt) November 20, 2023
For those who don’t know it was @bdutt who used that description for Gujaratis and tradition continues to date.
PseudoLibs will never cease to amaze me for their hatred of Gujaratis! pic.twitter.com/UvuClMIgGB
Bright sparks (these are former journos or top notch professionals) on twitter feel no point building stadia in the country because viewers show no enthusiasm to cheer rivals when their home team is losing. Blind hate towards Gujaratis because of one man having won elections
— Smita Prakash (@smitaprakash) November 20, 2023
The preaching and hate against the Ahmedabad crowd – which indeed wasn’t all made up of Gujaratis or whose behaviour wasn’t out of sync with how an average emotional cricket fan would behave – is indeed a manifestation of hate against Gujaratis as well as against anyone supposedly ‘jingoist’ that has been on the rise since Narendra Modi won the general elections in 2014.
Initially, it was about ‘jingoism’ with intellectuals literally wishing that India wouldn’t win the 2015 ICC World Cup because that would aid the supposed ‘hyper-nationalism’ that had engulfed the nation under Modi.
Rahul Gandhi was among the first to target Gujarat and Gujaratis with hate. In 2021, during the run-up to the Assam elections, Rahul Gandhi said that if Congress came to power in the state, he would increase the wage rate of tea workers. That’s great. But while making the promise, he said that he would take money from Gujarati tea traders to fund that extra wage rate. What was the need for divisive politics? Was there a need to single out “Gujarati Tea Traders? While he makes promises of “Mohabbat Ki Dukaan” and a hate-free India with his ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, these ghosts from the past are not going to get buried as the hate continues.
In September 2021, when authorities were busy busting drug rackets, which are often used for terror funding, Rahul Gandhi again attacked Gujaratis and cast aspersions that we are drug addicts. This hate against Gujaratis was spread by other politicians, too. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, in a statement, suggested that only Gujaratis could be fraudsters in the current scenario, as they would be forgiven for their actions due to the fact that both the Prime Minister and the Home Minister are Gujaratis. In January 2022, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and MP Akhilesh Yadav spewed hatred on Gujaratis and accused them of ‘taking away everything’. Prior to that, Mamata Banerjee had led a hate campaign against Gujaratis and vowed not to let ‘Bengal turn into Gujarat’. In a blatant display of hatred against Gujaratis, she alleged, “Gujaratis are trying to capture Bengal by bringing goons from UP and Bihar.” The West Bengal CM had emphasised, “We will not allow Bengal to become like Gujarat.”
What makes it even sadder is that the hate for Gujarat and Gujaratis rooted in these politicians is in sync with the hate-filled in Khalistanis. A video surfaced from the UK where a pro-Khalistani goon can be seen threatening a man of Gujarat origins. The viral video shows a Gujarati Hindu man trying to have a conversation with the protesting pro-Khalistanis when one of them got agitated and started shouting at him.
Watch: In a viral video today, a radical Khalistan extremist can be seen threatening a Gujarati passerby in foreign country pic.twitter.com/H48rUYRtEH
— DeshGujarat (@DeshGujarat) March 22, 2023
One of the most recent examples of hate for Gujaratis was of Sujata Anandan – the editor of the fraud-accused Congress mouthpiece National Herald, who equated vegetarianism of Gujaratis and Jains living in Mumbai to “food terrorism”. Sharing her article on X, Sujata Anandan posted, “Go back to Gujarat if you don’t like the smell of fish and rice – Maharashtrians begin to reclaim their own state.” In her article titled ‘Dietary apartheid: Mumbai gets a taste of food terrorism’, Sujata Anandan wrote, “Fish and rice are the staple of Maharashtrians and they don’t see why they should give up their diet to please later settlers, like the Gujaratis who hate even the smell of fish.”
Go back to Gujarat if you don't like the smell of fish and rice – Maharashtrians begin to reclaim their own statehttps://t.co/UgXZMnU9q9
— Sujata Anandan (@sujataanandan) October 24, 2023
India didn’t win the World Cup Cricket 2023, and ‘nationalism’ continued to be decried by the liberal crowd. Celebrity journalist Rajdeep Sardesai even wrote an article titled “Yes, I Am An Anti-National” and went on to say he was proud to be one.
Despite all the shaming of ‘nationalism’ in the first term of Modi, the BJP, under Modi’s leadership, won the 2019 general election by an even bigger margin. Since then, this hate for Modi, which initially manifested as hate for ‘nationalism’, has now been transformed into hatred for Gujarat and Gujaratis.
This has been amply aided by politics, where hate for Gujaratis was used as a winning formula in the Bihar assembly elections of 2020 (as Biharis vs Baharis, i.e. outsiders) and then in West Bengal assembly elections of 2021, where ‘dhandha minded’ Modi-Shah were presented as evil Gujaratis trying to capture Bengal, the land of bhadraloks. This has been further helped by the political rhetoric of the Modi government favouring Adani-Ambani (incidentally both Gujarati businessmen) and being controlled by them.
The political opposition and the liberals are playing a very dangerous game where they are vilifying an Indian community just because it suits their political expediency. They have found a soft target in Gujaratis to unleash their hate just because Modi and Shah beat them politically twice. Tragically and ironically, all this hate is being dished out from ‘Mohabbat ki dukaan’. Will this hate help them grow and triumph, only citizens of India can decide.
