Two Kashmiri men, accused by the Delhi Police of abetting and executing the Sarojini Nagar bomb blasts in 2005, were recently acquitted by a sessions court in Delhi after these men spent 11 years behind the bars for no reason and the real culprits remained aloof from the claws of law. The reason why the Delhi Police, which is notorious for its allegiance to the doctrine of Hindutva and for its communal prejudice, arrested and tortured these two men can be ascribed to its desperation in demonising the Muslim community with support from the corporate media and to hide its own failure (or hand-in-glove relationship with the perpetrators) in nabbing the real culprits.
Despite the court acquitting several men, mostly from the Muslim community, in the past years due to lack of evidence, the Delhi Police has not scrapped its utmost anti-minority and anti-Dalit bias, which it adopted in the early 1980s following the swing of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government towards the soft-Hindutva camp. The Delhi police Special Cell is notorious for its implementation of the Hindutva campaign’s anti-Muslim slur by planting evidences against innocent youth from the community and torturing them in the most barbaric way to extract a confession and later slapping many of the unresolved terror cases against these men and women and leave them to rot behind prison bars for years, before they are either sent to gallows to appease the “collective conscience” of the majority community, or are acquitted after decades for lack of evidence.
In every few weeks people come across news published by the corporate media that showcase the police or security forces busting one or another module of Islamic terrorists in different parts of the country and nabbing few men, mostly from Muslim community, and against whom, the government agencies claim, there are serious charges of abetting or planning or executing terrorist operations. Without verifying facts or waiting for any legal verdicts, these people are stamped by the society as “terrorists” and the security establishments of the ruling classes successfully secures favourable public opinion of the elite and middle class urban Indians, whose views are considered India’s view by the corporate controlled mainstream media.
When we read the sad tale of these two Kashmiri men, who had been languishing in one of the most grotesque prisons on earth, Tihar, for over a decade, we are left with no choices but to question the functioning of the very institution of internal security, which was founded and developed by the colonial British rulers to serve their purpose of keeping the Indian people’s rebellion against the former at bay and to arrest and torture revolutionaries. The very institution is now carrying forward the anti-Muslim agenda of global monopoly and finance capital, which is now guiding the course of governance in India through their trusted lieutenants in all major parliamentary party and principally through the BJP and the Congress.
The Delhi Police was, not surprisingly, found as one of the most corrupted organisations in the town. There were several reports in the mainstream media regarding the corrupt practices of the Delhi Police and as per the protocol, no action was ever taken against the most powerful and organised state-terror enterprise.
The Hindutva agenda found a ground in India and grew so rapidly by spreading the venom of communal bigotry throughout the nation since the 1980s due to the extensive financial aid it received from the global monopoly capital owned corporations and foundations that work as the think tanks for the big corporations. The foreign intelligence agencies of the West under the leadership of the CIA was too keen to erect a new danger following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. The Saudi Arabian and Pakistani puppets of the US helped them in identifying a “new threat”, the Muslim world.
Exasperating campaigns were launched in India to isolate the Kashmiri people’s justified struggle against Indian expansionism and with the help of the Pakistani government and its intelligence unit, the Indian government was able to label the entire militant movement in the Kashmir valley as pro-Pakistani and pro-Islamist movement to incite jingoism, which is now called “patriotism”, among upper-caste Indian Hindus. The Delhi Police and its most notorious units, manned by upper-caste Hindus exclusively, were deployed by the ruling bloc in the national capital to carry out a PR campaign on behalf of the Hindutva forces along with the corporate media, which took to itself the task of propagating the lies and slurs against the Muslim victims of state repression with full vigour and force feed Islamophobia among the common people since the 1990s.
Earlier the Delhi Police and its various arms also carried out a similar nefarious design to alienate the Sikh community during the heydays of the Khalistan separatist movement in Punjab. The anti-Sikh slurs were extensively propagated by the mainstream corporate media until the mid-1990s and the propaganda painted the Sikhs in the darkest shades at that period. The same exercise is extended to the Muslims and it’s more vigour and intense due to the support of the international monopoly and finance capital owned corporations that are drooling to plunder the natural and mineral resources of India and retain the neo-colonial status of the modern Indian state machinery and society.
This February, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police arrested two Muslim youth named Zia-ul-Haq and Zuber from Okhla of South East Delhi, which is one of the most densely crowded Muslim ghettos in the city, and tortured them for few days alleging them to have connections with the derailment of the Patna-Indore express at Kanpur last year. After carrying out their sadistic activities and torturing the duo for days, the Delhi Police released them saying that no proofs were found about their connection with the main accused in the case. One of those who was tortured has reportedly lost his mental balance due to the barbaric tortures he faced during his captivity.
Though the entire operation that blames the “terror angle” for a huge train accident, which experts claim happened due to the fault of the Railway ministry led by BJP’s Suresh Prabhu, is itself quite shoddy, the inhuman torture meted out to two youth from the Muslim community by a force manned by upper-caste Hindus, Jats, and Gujjars raise serious questions on the state apparatus fed by the money collected from the common people in the form of indirect and direct taxes. With no scope of questioning the Delhi Police and its actions (including beating up protesters alongside the RSS goons in the city) that conform to the ruling clique’s ideology of bigotry, the state machinery is pushing the Muslims and the marginal communities to a state of existence where they will be forced to accept the superiority of the upper-caste Hindus and Hindutva on their lives and live as second-class citizens in India; a demand raised since decades by Savarkar’s followers and present day rulers.
Arresting people and planting evidence against them by the Delhi Police to ensure they don’t get justice and rot in jail or hang in the gallows for their religious identity, for their birth, and for their nonconformity with a certain ideology, is itself a fascist act and it needs all out condemnation. However, there are few major problems in the present socio-economic condition, which is preventing large-scale mass participation against the state-terror unleashed on common people.
Firstly, the entire corporate media, including the hardcore pro-Hindutva media, is standing beside the state apparatus to meet the expectations of their investors and advertisement providers, who happen to be foreign monopoly and finance capital owned MNCs or Indian comprador enterprises. A strong Brahminical bias against Muslims, Dalits and Tribal people reigns in the corporate news industry where more than 361 media conglomerates or top media houses are owned by upper-caste Hindus from North India, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. These media houses follow the practice laid down by the state, which discourages raising questions on the claims of the security establishments. These corporate controlled mainstream media houses work extensively as the PR agencies of the police and security establishment and publish the state’s viewpoint as gospel truth.
There is no opportunity to dissent or disagree and even if within the organisational structure of these mainstream media houses any journalist dare to raise question on the work ethics, which is nothing but stooping to the ruling bloc, written down as “management policies” and only journalists and columnists who meet the tonality of the management’s right-wing viewpoint can make it in the media world. The rest are either mowed down or forced to scrap their standpoints and convert into toady scribes.
These media houses have carried out vitriol against the Muslim community since the 1990s through mostly covert and sometimes overt campaigns against the community in India. By inciting a feral mob of Hindutva thugs using the reports of these media houses, the Brahminical RSS was able to consolidate its position in the Indian polity and become a formidable foe for the Indian people to deal with. The anti-Muslim stories are so vivid, so thrilling, and so much fear-mongering that they give rise to the TRP and circulation and the advertisement revenue increases manifold. The corporate media knows that stories on Muslim terror“sells” in the market and thus, despite paying lip service to the ethics of secularism, they are constantly milling lies about the Muslim community following the leads from the police force like Delhi Police.
Secondly, Bollywood has become the cultural propaganda tool of the Indian ruling classes and the bloc of foreign monopoly and finance capital owned corporations that are eyeing absolute hegemony on Indian natural and mineral resources. The rise of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai during the 1980s and the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 gave Bollywood its flood of Hindutva-inspired films and lately, TV serials. The portraying of bearded Muslim men with heavily kohled eyes, shouting Allahu-Akbar and swearing to destroy India by force, was all that was required to brainwash two to three generations of Indian men and women. The Bollywood model was replicated unaltered throughout the regional cinema industries and Islamophobia was incited through hatred spewing films since last two decades.
The Bollywood not only portrays the Muslims as villains and stereotypes the terrorism allegation labelled by the ruling clique, but it also justifies police torture, extra-judicial killings, and demeans the struggle for human rights by reiterating the Hindutva fascist rhetoric regarding the rights of state-sponsored terror perpetrators. For years the films have justified terror, extra-judicial killings, and torture as the only “macho” way to deal with the menace of crime and terrorism.
Rather than helping in developing the consciousness of the common people on social issues, Bollywood and its regional lackeys have repeatedly justified the fascist methods and the system of fascism and by playing with the inherent Brahminical supremacist belief system of upper-caste Hindus, the film industry has commoditised the propaganda of the ruling clique of foreign monopoly and finance capital, their lackey Indian comprador capitalists, and the feudal landlord-gangster nexus.
It’s due to the propaganda by the film industry through a host of films made since the late 1980s that a majority of urban elite Indians, mostly the upper-caste Hindus, now support the police torture, the fascist onslaught on the progressive and democratic forces, and mob violence. Standing on the foundation laid by the remnants of feudalism and comprador capitalism, the Indian state machinery happily helps this very film industry to carry forward its own vile propaganda campaigns against specific socio-political groups and religious and ethnic minorities to build up mass opinion before launching more attacks against them.
Thirdly, the deeply rooted Brahminical prejudices, the prevalence of caste and communal apartheid and the many other signature evils of the feudalistic production relations that exist in the Indian countryside and is buttressed by the global monopoly and finance capital for its own interest, is one of the principal source from where the state apparatus gets their guts to act with complete impunity and remain scot free. Since the entire Indian state machinery is revealing the most grotesque Brahminical fascist face by tearing off its pseudo-secular mask, hence the loose cannons like the Delhi Police, Chhattisgarh Police, and other paramilitary and armed forces are able to force people to live under their diktat. The modern Indian state is a pseudo-democratic state, which is actually a military dictatorship imposed on the people by the corporate sharks, the feudal landlords, and their lackey politicians.
The tie-up between the above three is proving to be a lethal danger for democratic and progressive values to survive in a nation-state, which is officially endorsing majoritarian fascism through all its institutions and wings. The vociferous and burly mob of self-styled “patriots” funded by foreign corporates are out on the streets to help the biased police and security establishment in terrorising the Muslims, the people of marginalised communities, and the democratic and progressive forces that are raising fists in protest against fascism. The mob violence is the order of the day that the government is endorsing and encouraging and even the courts are delivering verdicts to satisfy the “collective conscience” of the majority community’s upper-caste elites. These developments and the intensification of fascist oppression is a sign of the dangerous future yet to come.
The problem of the Muslim community, alike any other community, is its over-dependence on the elite and upper-stratum people of the community and remaining confined within the boundaries led by those who are leading the community. The utmost fundamentalist Muslim leaders are themselves serving the interest of the fascist Hindutva brigade and create a big wall of separation between the toiled Muslims and the toiled people of other communities and marginalised section of the society, lest it challenges their authority.
Within the confinement of the religious and political stalwarts of the community, the Muslims are barred from being a part of a larger democratic movement going on against the Hindutva fascism, which is largely a Hindu and Dalit-Tribal movement until now. The integration of the Muslim forces in the anti-fascist camp and their unity with the other people and communities seeking the end of the Brahminical apartheid will not only strengthen the democratic forces, but it will also help the Muslim community, especially the downtrodden, exploited, and oppressed Muslims to purge the filth of religious and political opportunism that is now acting as the contractor of the community. There is no way the Muslim community’s most oppressed and downtrodden people can gain their legitimate rights within the present framework unless they shun the present leadership ruling them and join the bandwagon of the democratic struggle seeking a transformation of India into a truly egalitarian, democratic, and secular country.
