In the deluge of reportage on the supposedly “random” Facebook post #Notinmyname that went viral and was followed by mobilized protests across 15 cities in India, not one thought it was important to question the elitism and bigotry in the very idiom chosen to represent this protest. What were the few thousand elites who protested under the umbrella of this hashtag thinking when they came up with “Not in my name”? Are we to assume that besides these few thousands all the other million Indians support lynching and killing of fellow citizens or where they like Pontius Pilate pontificating to the rest of us “We wash our hands off this murder” and that these murders happened in our name and not theirs? The monumental arrogance of these elites boggles the mind.
These are the not elites of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” who walked away to establish a new world order. No, these are those who grew fat feasting on state largesse and now find themselves starving under a new dispensation that has not the time of the day to listen to their self-serving blithe homilies. Make no mistake though these carrion will hang on by their polished talons in a desperate bid to see if they can somehow bring about a change in dispensation through manufactured outrage and haughty dissent so that they can once again feast on free lunches and scavenge for the crumbs that earlier dispensations like the UPA threw at them.
These are the remnants of the post-colonial Nehruvian sludge that all the waters of the Ganga may not be able to wash away for so deep is the entrenched elitism and entitlement that their nostalgia and yearning for the return of an earlier world-order which privileged them – the perfumed classes and crushed the heathen masses is clearly palpable and finds expression in a variety of creative ways – all of which have failed miserably (Church attacks, Demonetization, Award-Waapsi, Intolerance).
If the outraging on social media and the streets was pathetic and blatantly one-sided, the writing by those who subscribe to this biased world-view where the Hindus are the perpetual villains and the Muslims the victims has been characterized by excessive hyperbole and blatant fear-mongering with an attempt to internationalize what is a local law and order problem.
A paragraph from Tabish Khair’s article in The Hindu is a perfect example of the whataboutery, bias, and lack of nuance that defines the MSM in India
“The lynching of a (Muslim) police officer by (Muslim) separatists in Srinagar is by definition a criminal act, and its perpetrators will be prosecuted by the government as required. But violence by vigilante groups in the name of the law is another matter — because it seeks not just to attack the state but also to circuitously involve it in its own demise.”
– An argument so circular and vacuous that it makes the reader giddy. To put it in perspective, what Tabish is actually saying is that the lynching of the Muslim police officer was acceptable because he was in uniform; and he was a Muslim who was killed by “fellow” Muslims who were fighting a just cause i.e. the separation of Kashmir from India. When a mainstream media house like The Hindu allows its pages to be used to spew such vitriol and hate what can be said of leftist social media lumpen elements who litter the highways of Twitter and Facebook with their abuse, ridicule, and hate.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writing in the Indian Express must have had a momentary epiphany of hyperbolic proportions to have come up with something as puerile as “A monstrous new moral order is unfolding, irrigated by the blood of our citizens. But this monstrosity is also wickedly clever. It is unfolding slowly, picking on individual victims, manifesting through a thousand cuts, rather than through a big cataclysm.” He is insinuating without a shred of proof that there is a concerted and sponsored attempt to slowly and systematically pick and choose victims belonging to the Muslim community.
Then Shekar Gupta of the “fake coup fame” not to be left behind came up with a tweet that plunged the depths of vulgarity and depravity calling India “Lynchistan” in a poorly improvised ditty that he seemed extremely proud of.
No one supports lynching and killing of innocents, least of all this author but in the selective outrage that is the hallmark of the coverage of these incidents by the mainstream media (MSM), nuance, balance, and the truth are all casualties. It is no one’s case that the lynching of a Dalit or someone belonging to the minority community is any less important. What is not acceptable is the selectivity and the massaging of facts to suit a pre-fixed narrative where the narrative is already written out and all it requires for someone is to cherry-pick those facts alone that suit this narrative.
That it required an Anand Rangarajan through a series of tweets, a Rupa Subramanya in an analytical article, and a series of tweets from the twitter handle @audit_uscirf none of who is a full-time journalist to call out the bias and skullduggery of the MSM is a shameful indictment of the kind of reportage and writing that goes under the name of journalism in India today. You can read each of these articles/twitter-threads here, here, and here
That on the same day two events in two different parts of India evoked grossly disproportionate levels of outrage only because one was a Muslim killed by a Muslim mob and the other was a Muslim killed by a Hindu gang, is a reflection of the visceral hatred that these people have for the Hindus of India.
Make no mistake this is a fight between an emerging Bharat that will no longer accept the bias, pseudo-secularism, and minority appeasement of an older India where the legitimate rights of the majority community have to be sacrificed at the altar of minority appeasement and a tired, bedraggled, motley bunch of sore losers who cannot accept the fact that they have missed the bus and no longer have the power or the access to it.
The truth is that the selective, pseudo-liberal and pseudo-secular cottage industry has been exposed for what it really is and that incidentally is the only truth in a so-called post-truth world.