Communal tensions flared up in Delhi’s Hauz Qazi area in Chandni Chowk after a brawl over parking space took an ugly turn. According to the police, around 10:55 PM Sunday, a man identified as Aas Mohammed was parking his two-wheeler outside one Sanjeev Gupta’s home. The argument over the parking spot turned physical when a group of men from one side bashed up the other. The two were held and brought to Hauz Qazi police station for further investigation.
While Mohammad and Gupta were held in the police station, a false rumor spread that a man had been beaten to death. Following that, a group of men gathered outside the home of Gupta and allegedly attacked his family and vandalized a temple situated in the area.
“Around 350 people gathered outside the police station and some went outside Gupta’s home, where a temple is situated. It is alleged that some unidentified men vandalized the temple,” an officer said.
Not surprisingly the mainstream media staying with its stance has decided to conveniently underplay this heinous crime as the identity of the accused does not fit well with their political agenda. Mainstream media has been called out time and time again for blatantly whitewashing or totally eliminating the reportage of crimes committed by certain sections in India. Several ground reports from the affected area are clearly in opposition to the ‘dara hua musalman’ theory which has been propagated by a certain section of mainstream media for long. The Chandni Chowk case has not only debunked this flawed theory but has also exposed the distortive and selective approach of mainstream media on critical issues.
One similar ground report published in Swarajya by Swati Goel Sharma and Arihant Pawariya sheds light on the ground situation in the affected areas. The report consists of accounts of several witnesses of the mob violence that unfolded late on Sunday night.
Swarajya reported, “Another resident said the mob seemed to have come with full planning. “They had rods, sticks, stones and what not. They were shouting slogans of Allahu Akbar and abusing us, daring us to come out,” he said, recalling that a youth said “saare Hinduon baahar aao, hum tumko batayenge kaata kaise jaata hai. Kaatna humse seekho” (All you Hindus, come out, we will teach you how to cut)”.
He said some of the youths shouted political slogans, saying “Modi murdabad, hamara Imran Hussain zindabad. Kejriwal zindabad.”
Far from reality, the mainstream media had tried to cover up these tensions and concerns behind a wall of flawed reporting and misleading claims. The mainstream media missing out on these details is surely shocking and given the proximity of the affected area with the media houses surely raises some ethical questions.
Also breaking the trend of mainstream media is Sudhir Chaudhary. Editor-in-Chief of Zee News and World is One News, his reportage on temple vandalism is hitting at right points, and for all the right reasons. The report is not mincing words or even following the accepted norms of “political correctness”, but is a simple and crisp account of the situation on the ground.
However, this is just a part of mainstream media’s hypocrisy over these events. The media also turned a blind eye to the case of a 17-year-old boy who went missing after the mob violence. It was first reported by the Organiser, which wrote, “Speaking to Organiser, the parents of the boy alleged that the group of Muslims who attacked the temple, barged into their place and abducted their son after creating an atmosphere of terror. Sangeet Saxena (name changed) was abducted from the vicinity of the temple, where the family lives.” According to latest updates the missing boy has returned and put out the sequence of events that unfolded on Sunday night. However, the mainstream media is still silent on the alleged abduction of a minor by a violent mob.
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While the law takes its course, the mainstream media have been trying hard to divert the public opinion away from the alarming nature of the incident by painting it as just a ‘parking dispute’ while underplaying the larger concern that a Muslim mob decided to attack a temple of Hindus exposing the state of communal safety in the capital.
HuffPost India also came up with an appalling piece belittling people’s outrage on social media over the attack on the temple and its desecration. Insinuating that it was some sort of sponsored and coordinated viral activity by supporters of the BJP and had nothing to do with the horrendous crime, the article on HuffPost titled, ”How BJP Supporters Turned A Fight Over Parking Into A ‘Terror Attack’”, exposed the acute levels of dishonesty infesting the mainstream media establishment and laid bare the depths to which the cabal can dive to make pathetic attempts at whitewashing such crimes.
While the mainstream media tries to weed out certain aspects of the crime and calls it a ‘parking dispute’, the nation has been calling for strict action on the perpetrators. Nonetheless, India does not need the hypocrisy of mainstream media to fight against ghastly crimes irrespective of the identity of the perpetrators and this horrific act surely calls for the harshest of punishments by law.
The geographic location of the affected area provides for easy public scrutiny and access to journalists despite that the mainstream media has not shied away from its tactic of manipulation and distortion of facts. The reporting of Chandni Chowk is just another incident which exposes the mainstream media who has always keep objectivity on the back seat while peddling specific and tailored agendas.
The hazy reporting of the mainstream media when it comes to the cases of Hindu victims follows a well-established pattern. There are numerous instances when media straight up worked towards burying the story rather than highlighting it. In 2016, the large-scale intimidation and targeted violence against Hindus in West Bengal’s Malda was, for a long time, considered by media not worthy of airtime. Only when the plight of Hindus was highlighted by several prominent web portals (including rightlog), the mainstream media took notice and even then chose to undermine the plight.
Similarly, in late 2016, scores of Salafi anarchists and terrorists, high on bigotry, went on a rampage in Dhulagarh or Dhuliagora, a town barely 18 km. away from the Howrah region of Kolkata, destroying untold households of native Bengalis, especially Hindus, maiming them, expelling them from their own homes, media reacted in the following manner.
Such downplaying of crimes against Hindus is not limited to Dhulagarh or Malda riots. It forms a long pattern which includes the attack on nationalist students by Kashmiri Muslims at NIT Sri Nagar, the Kaliachak riots and the almost systematic suppression of news reporting of non-Muslim victims of lynchings.
The most disturbing aspect of media’s conduct in Chandni Chowk case, however, is the sheer brazenness with which the media is manipulating or hiding the facts even when the site of the attack is barely 15 Kms away from the center of power and the public scrutiny is immense.