The BharatiyaJanata Party’s (BJP) communal agenda has seeped through the cracks once again. On Thursday, Uttar Pradesh minister and BharatiyaJanata Party leader KapilDev Aggarwal refused to meet with the families of two Muslim men killed during the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests last week in Bjinor, UP. He, however, visited the home of Om Raj Saini who had been injured in the violence which took place in the district’s Nehtaur area.
Describing Muslim men as ‘vandals’, Aggarwal told the Press Trust of India (PTI), “Why should I go to the place of vandals? How can those who are involved in vandalism and put the entire country and state in arson be social?”
Clarifying that he wasn’t discriminating against anyone on religious grounds, he said, “Listen to me, those who are doing vandalism and want to inflame passions, how are they part of society? This isn not about Hindu-Muslim.”
https://twitter.com/CNNnews18/status/1210159180989882368
#BREAKING – I will not visit homes of rioters: UP Minister Kapil Dev Aggarwal.@pranshumisraa with details pic.twitter.com/SvzPmHRB73
— News18 (@CNNnews18) December 26, 2019
Aggarwal’s statements allege that the UP police was right in killing the men and arresting scores of others who were protesting against the CAA and NRC. It also gives the police a freehand to act with additional force, however unjustified their actions may be. Not only this, it has led to the further singling out of a particular community which is already facing an unclear future in the wake of the government’s CAA.
The top brass of the BJP has gone on record time and again to say that the poor and the marginalised, especially the Indian Muslims have nothing to fear with regards to the CAA that seeks to offer citizenship only to religiously persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, but some BJP leaders have been quite clear in their tactics of inciting communal hatred and engaging in intimidation.
Before Aggarwal, BJP’s Karnataka Minister for Culture and Tourism, CT Ravi warned the people of a ‘Godhra-like’ situation if the ‘majority’ lost its patience and the protests in the state did not stop. He was reminding them of the Godhra genocide after riots took place there in 2002.
BJP leader from Delhi Kapil Mishra too, at a pro-CAA that he held in the capital gave a call to ‘shoot the traitors’, referring to those who were protesting against the CAA. Earlier this year, during the festival of Diwali, he had put out a tweet that compared Muslim children to pollution.
Out of the 25 killed in the anti-CAA protests in the country, around 20 have been from the Muslim community. In Uttar Pradesh, the government sealed shops has issued around 230 notices to people for destroying public property during the protests, again most of them being Muslims who were reportedly found to be unrelated to any protest or violence in the state.
The violent attacks on the students of the JamiaMilliaIslamia University and the Aligarh Muslim University by the police are also representative of the Centre targeting a particular community, while claiming to assure its safety in the wake of the CAA and NRC’s implementation.
Protests across the country have mounted against the CAA and NRC being discriminatory towards the marginalized. If the CAA is implemented, in Assam, 13 lakh Hindus out of the 19 lakh excluded from the NRC could be deemed fit for citizenship, while the remaining 6 lakh Muslims will potentially face a future in detention camps.
Keeping in mind the repercussions of the extension of the CAA-NRC exercise to the rest of the country and the politics of communal hate that the ruling party leaders indulge in, how can it be said that the Act and the NRC are in the best interests of everyone?
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