Tripura is burning with hate
Tripura is burning with hate
India can find any excuse to persecute people who stand up for the rights of Muslims
On November 6, the northeastern Indian state of Tripura charged the operators of 102 Twitter accounts under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Many of these were journalists, activists and lawyers who have used them to denounce anti-Muslim violence in Tripura, which is run by Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP.
The police in Tripura have done little to arrest the perpetrators of a daylight attack on a mosque and on Muslim neighborhoods on the 21st of October. But they have, with great alacrity, charged people tweeting about the incident with disturbing the community and promoting enmity between Hindus and Muslims, even as leading ministers in the Modi government and many high-profile party members brazenly insult India’s Muslims. It is difficult to see these charges as anything but an attempt to silence people who expose the complicity of the state in the violence itself.
Among those charged are journalists Shyam Meera Singh, Mohammed Sartaj Alam, student activist Sharjeel Usmani, activist CJ Werleman, and lawyers Mukesh Kumar and Ansar Indori, who were a part of a civil society fact-finding team on the Tripura anti Muslim violence.
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That team also included Supreme Court lawyers Ehtesham Hashmi and Amit Shrivastava who had accused the state government and the Modi administration of enabling the communal violence; the leaders, they said, had turned a blind eye to the activities of right-wing organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which led the anti-Muslim protest march and subsequent vandalism.
The Editors Guild of India called the charges ‘an attempt by the state government to deflect attention away from its own failure to control majoritarian violence, as well as to take action against the perpetrators of this. Governments cannot use stringent laws like UAPA to suppress reporting on such incidents”
As news of the attack—one of many being carried out, seemingly experimentally, across India with the tacit permission of the Modi administration—trickled in on on social media, a few days later, the Tripura government went on the offensive not against the rioters, but against journalists and activists on social media who had reported news of the attack in the absence of any information from mainstream Indian media.
With a few exceptions including the East Mojo, the Maktoob Media, Scroll, and a few other independent news publications, big newspapers and television channels had no interest in covering what is now a new normal. Muslim lives and dignity are cheap to a majority intent on celebrating its hatred, captured it on camera, and spreading it approvingly on social media and WhatsApp.
On the 21st of October, an elected BJP leader, Dilip Das—who was a part of a rally organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—delivered an incendiary and provocative speech at exactly the wrong moment.
In his speech, quoted in the Daily Mojo, Das said, “The atrocities are carried out on the Hindus since 1946. It is being done in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hindus were at 28 per cent in the population ratio in these places, but now it has reduced to 8 per cent. This is for the first time that the entire nation and the world and people from various religions have come together against the Taliban mentality and the Muslims who carry out attacks on Hindus.”
In a state where the communal temperature was already running high, an elected leader attacked minorities despite restrictions already in place (the Tripura government had invoked Section 144, limiting public assemblies).The rally itself and the words of the ruling party were already a mockery of law and order; they wwere followed by violence in Muslim areas by the VHP, videos of the same published and circulated by local publications.
The mob vandalised Muslim neighborhoods and set fire to two shops at the Chamtilla area in North Tripura district. “Three houses and a few shops, reportedly owned by members of the minority community, were also ransacked in nearby Rowa Bazar. A group of rioters from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad threw stones and damaged the door of a mosque in the Chamtilla area during the rally,” reported the Eastern Mojo.
In a report published by the Indian express, a Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO) Soubhik Dey confirmed that the VHP protest rally had contained around 3,500 people, and had been organised in Panisagar. “A section of VHP activists at the rally ransacked a mosque in the Chamtilla area,” he said.
In the last week of October, I spoke to at least two reporters and activists from Tripura who said that situation was extremely volatile and that elected leaders and right-wing terrorists were given a free pass to spread terror in Muslim areas. The mosque, they said, had been targeted because the members of the VHP had been allowed by the Police to hold a rally in defiance of the law.
Activists on social media simply repeated the truth: that Muslims in Tripura were living in fear.
After the attacks, a joint delegation of activists and members of Muslim organisations went on a fact finding trip to Tripura October 29th.. On the 3rd of November, they held a press conference and reported that “many shops owned by Muslims in remote parts of Tripura and about 16 mosques in the state were vandalised and torched, resulting in some of them being completely burnt down.”
Ironically, the arson and rioting was supposedly retaliation for violence against Hindus in Bangladesh—which Prime Minister Shaikh Haseena did not merely condemn, but charged the perpetrators with their crimes.
Indeed, Bangladeshi sportsmen and Muslim cultural figures took to social media to condemn the attack on Hindus. In Tripura, the brazen attack on Muslims was met with silence not just by the leader of the country, his ministers, and our cultural figures, but also the press—some of whom scoffed at the evidence and called it yet another narrative of Muslim victimhood.
The violence reeks of complicity. For the Tripura police to accuse Twitter users, Supreme Court lawyers, and activists of sedition—simply for speaking about violence—suggests a confidence that the police themselves be protected, not just by the regime that rules us, but also by a media (with a few exceptions) that would not dare question of them.
Tripura is burning with hate like the rest of the country, where communal polarisation is being used to win votes from the Hindu community by stoking fears of the ‘Muslim enemy’. Three months ago, I and five other Muslim journalists and activists were booked in a case where we were charged by the UP Police for tweeting about a hate crime against a Muslim man; the situation in Tripura feels worryingly familiar. It is time for the Supreme Court of India to intervene on behalf of the citizens of the country; our respected judges who speak the language of democracy must address this abuse of a law that was meant to protect and unite us against hate.
The Modi government seems to be oblivious to the fact that India's soft power resources, reputation as a parliamentary democracy with equal rights for all citizens, freedom of press and so on have been squandered.