Rana Ayyub on the Delhi Riots

Rana Ayyub writes in Time Magazine-

Two days before the anti-Muslim riots began in Delhi this week, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet said Muslims should have been sent to Pakistan in 1947 during the partition of India.

As a matter of fact, millions of Muslims were sent to Pakistan in 1947 while millions of non Muslims were similarly ethnically cleansed from that country. Muslim emigration continued in the Fifties and Sixties. One reason for this was that Refugees would claim a share in Muslim property on the grounds that a member of that family had emigrated. Many Muslims who had taken refuge in Pakistan hoping to return once things quietened down were deprived of citizenship by Law.

Giriraj Singh, Minister for Animal Husbandry and Fisheries in the Modi Government, said “It is the time to commit ourselves to the nation. Before 1947, [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah pushed for an Islamic nation. It was a big lapse by our ancestors that we’re paying the price for. If at that time Muslim brothers had been sent there and Hindus brought here, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

This is a reasonable view. However, neither country wanted to get rid of poor labourers and people doing the dirty jobs. Thus Pakistan had a rule preventing the emigration of mainly Hindu 'night soil carriers'. However, the Sikhs decided to exchange Muslim 'untouchable' service castes for Sikhs of a similar type. It is noteworthy that Punjab did well because of its increased homogeneity. Speaking generally, those who relocated to where their own community was in the majority did better than minorities who remained behind.

Shortly after one lawmaker attempted to rewrite our history, another made a call to arms.

How is this 'rewriting history'? Giriraj Singh was expressing a widely held view. Many people in many countries regret having a Muslim minority.

A legislator in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Kapil Mishra, made a provocative speech in New Delhi standing next to a high-ranking police official, in which he condemned the Shaheen Bagh protestors demonstrating against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill that threatens the existence of the 200 million strong Muslim population in India. Either the cops must clear them out, he said, or we will take things into our own hands.

Kapil Mishra was a legislator in Kejriwal's 'Common Man' Party. He is now with the BJP but he is not a legislator. He was right to condemn the Shaheen Bagh protestors just as we would be right to condemn Rana Ayyub for saying that the Citizenship Amendment Act is discriminatory. It is a fact that only non Muslims are persecuted on account of their religion in Islamic Republics. It has been the settled policy of the Indian Government to accept non Muslim refugees but to refuse Muslim economic migrants. This is not a threat to Indian Muslims. However, if they initiate violence, history shows they will suffer disproportionately. Mishra succeeded in his aim which had to do with combatting the extension of Shaheen Bagh type protests to North East Delhi. A new Police Chief was appointed and the riots stopped because Muslim rioters knew they would be shot.

Within hours, many did. Mobs, some carrying saffron flags, vandalized mosques and set fire to properties belonging to Muslims.

But, it appears that the Muslims started the violence and paid dearly for it. If the police are too demoralized to take action, the majority batters the minority and chases them out of the area.

In one, an 85-year-old woman was burned alive while the mob outside chanted Jai Shri Ram, a Hindu devotional that has become a racist dog whistle against Muslims.

Will this woman also say that 'Allah hu Akbar' is a racist dog whistle against non Muslims? That might get her killed, so it would be safer to keep quiet.

As hate festered in the national capital, the Narendra Modi government that has ignored hate speech by countless legislators and ministers in the last six years was busy hosting United States President Donald Trump in Ahmedabad.

Either Modi himself believes that Muslims are evil or he is a 'Secularist' like Nehru- who presided over the killing of 20,000 Muslims in Delhi.

As I write this, the official number of those killed has reached 42, a majority of them Muslims. It took three days for our Prime Minister to issue a statement while his backyard was burning.

So what? Issuing a statement helps nobody. What was needed was a new Police Chief.

This surprised nobody. As a journalist who has covered Modi’s political career since 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, I have witnessed his lust for power and his ease with bloodshed from close quarters.

If Ayyub is right in her allegations about Modi, she must accept that the vast majority of non Muslims loathe Muslims and want to see them gone. By saying that the CAA is about deporting Muslims, Ayyub & Co. are making the unthinkable thinkable. She is helping the Islamophobes by showing that far more discriminatory policies against Muslims will be a vote winner. 

In February 2002, as Gujarat burned in communal flames for days and a thousand Muslims were killed, leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, gave speeches provoking Hindus to teach Muslims a lesson.

The result was that the BJP became unassailable in Gujarat. Modi himself became Prime Minister a dozen years later. What Ayyub is doing here is encouraging Islamophobia. It seems 'teaching Muslims a lesson' is the route to progress.

Modi himself gave the most incendiary speech mocking riot victims, calling relief camps set up for Muslims, child producing factories.
I was 19 when Modi made this speech, working as a relief worker during the anti-Muslim carnage in Gujarat. In the dingy relief camps, young women raped by Hindu nationalists lay unattended with no help from the state. Their bodies marked with the scars of the sexual violence, flies sitting on their wounds, their young children making castles of mud nearby while Modi and his ministers demonized them.

Modi had never held any political office before 2001. Ayyub is saying that encouraging people to rape and kill Muslims is the way to rise to the top of the greasy pole. What she isn't doing is showing that there is some good reason not to harm people of this hardworking community. In the present situation, this is what is needful. Saying 'freedom of expression' is so important that minorities can create any type of nuisance is utterly foolish. The majority can keep such freedoms for itself while denying it to minorities. Indeed, this is what actually happens.

Such was the intensity of the crime against Muslims in 2002 that the Supreme Court of India called the Modi government in Gujarat “Modern day Neros who looked the other way while young women and children were burnt alive.”

Either Modi & So were looking the other way or they were encouraging it. Still, what is important is that Islamophobia is popular. Muslims need to get better at P.R, otherwise things may get much worse for them.

As for the Supreme Court, it gave Modi a clean chit and then the Gujarat Hing Court decided that Maya Kodnani too had been wrongly imprisoned.

To this day, neither has Mr.Modi apologised for the loss of thousand lives under his watch nor addressed the press even once in the last eighteen years.

And this has done him no harm whatsoever.

The carnage in Delhi this week took me back to those days in 2002. New Delhi’s GTB Hospital looked like a warzone with dead bodies and injured trickling in by the hour. The mortuary of the hospital with wailing mothers and children aimlessly staring at the cameras surrounding them is not a sight for the weak.

What is Ayyub saying? That Kapil Mishra will displace Kejriwal? How is this a helpful argument to make at this time?

This did not take place overnight. It was a result of a sustained campaign of hate against Muslims in the six years since Modi assumed power.

Just as the Partition riots, in which 20,000 were killed in Delhi was a result of a 'sustained campaign of hate' conducted by...whom? Nehru? Gandhi?

The hatred is plain to see among Modi’s chief lieutenants.

Sadly, the hatred is plain to see among non Muslims who live next door to Muslims in North East Delhi. They may not be 'lieutenants' of Modi. But they are going to be his supporters.

This week while Trump and Modi addressed a million strong audience in Ahmedabad, his minister for Corporate Affairs, Anurag Thakur sat in the front row along with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Four weeks ago, Thakur addressed a rally on the topic of the nationwide protests by Muslims. Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko, he said. (“Traitors of the country, shoot them”)

It seems, this the wave of the future. Whether in America, or in Europe, or in India, taking a tough line with Muslims is the route to power.

The Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, the man who is responsible for maintaining law order in the country made the most communal speeches during the recently concluded Delhi elections which the BJP lost to the Aam Aadmi Party. He asked the voters to press the voting button with such anger that the (Muslim) protestors at Shaheen Bagh felt the current.

Thus the BJP increased their seat count. Had the riots happened before the elections, they would have swept the polls.

The anti-Muslim pogrom in the national capital was inevitable. Muslims in India have been waiting for it to happen. I myself am a child of the Mumbai riots unleashed by Modi’s party, the BJP, in 1992. I was nine, a cripple, when Hindu nationalists came home with swords to select me and my sister for gang rape. We survived when our Sikh neighbour came to our rescue.

There is a pattern here. The 1992 Mumbai riots started because of Muslim terrorism in response to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The 2002 Gujarat riots started because some Muslims killed Hindu pilgrims. The 2020 riots started because Muslims were protesting against the CAA bill. What was the outcome of all these riots? The Ram Temple will be built. The CAA bill will be implemented. What more could happen? Muslims could be deprived of the vote- as some senior Muslim politicians have suggested. Already, in Assam, it appears Constituency boundaries will be re-drawn so that the indigenous people have a majority. It is also likely that anti-sedition laws will be tightened. The first amendment may be further amended to criminalize Shaheen Bagh type protests. The fact of the matter is that it isn't Muslims who pose the problem, but rather ambitious politicians and 'social entrepreneurs' and stupid 'public intellectuals' and media personalities.

For decades I have been under treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and a part of various groups to help heal my manic periods of anxiety. Almost once every month, the nightmare revisits me when I wake up sweating after a night long of trauma when I reimagine men with swords at my doorstep.

But those men with swords will turn up at more and more doorsteps unless the nuisance posed by 'activists' and 'public intellectuals' is curbed.

But I am a privileged Muslim from a upper middle class family, with access to therapists and the best medical facilities.

That can change overnight.

Those killed and injured in Delhi come from the lower socio-economic strata where therapy and psychological care is a luxury they cannot afford.

But trouble of that sort can easily spread. Wealth and Education don't actually constitute a 'cordon sanitaire'.

As I write, many student bodies and activists are collecting money to provide the basic amenities, medicines to those whose lives have been destroyed in the violence.

But it is those student bodies and activists who created the problem. Whatever money the collect won't be enough.

Modi is yet to visit the families of those who bore the brunt of his political animus and shall continue to live in fear. He is yet to announce compensation for the families who have lost their loved ones and their livelihood burnt to ashes.

Yogi Adityanath's police killed 22 people in U.P. The families of those killed won't get any compensation. Thus there will be no more riots there.

Now, hundreds of Muslim families are leaving New Delhi for safer cities fearing another attack as Modi’s ministers continue to make hate speeches.

So, the result of the CAA agitation is that Muslims have to leave their homes. What a wonderful victory!

I write this piece knowing that there will be no closure for me and thousands of riot survivors in India because we are being led by a man whose political career has been marked by the blood of innocents.

There will be no closure for Ayyub because she has been barking up the wrong tree for 20 years. The problems of the Muslims in India are exacerbated by their attempts to stop things that the majority want. Those who egg on the Muslims may get a reputational benefit but, if they themselves are Muslims, they may find it safer to do so from some other country. The problem is that emigration or refugee asylum is now more difficult- for Muslims.

But the cost of Narendra Modi giving his blessing to bloodshed is being paid by the people of this country, who fear this democracy will never be the same again.

The cost of Ayyub & Co talking bollocks is being paid by poor Muslims who have had to run away from their homes. But this may change. Rich Muslims too may get it in the neck. The advent of Democracy in India meant ethnic cleansing and second class status for minorities. It also meant extra judicial killing on an industrial scale of separatists and other trouble makers. Some people may get paid a little money to pretend that India was a paradise of secularism till Modi got elected. But secularism is now a bad word- like 'multi culturalism' or 'globalization'.

Is there any silver lining to this shit-show? Yes. The Law will become more draconian. The nuisance of 'freedom to protest' will be curbed. Police Chiefs will shoot rioters before things escalate. Muslims and non Muslims can unite to address bread and butter issues. But this means the Rana Ayyubs of the world will be out of a job. Still, it is a worthwhile sacrifice.