Ziya Us Salam

What started with Sheikh in Pune has since spread across India. With Muslims now being attacked for no reason except their faith. A little over 17 years ago, while reviewing noted film director Govind Nihalani’s film Dev, I began the piece with the words, ‘They judge everybody by the foreskin.’ It was enough to outrage the sensibilities of an editor. The sentence was deleted from the review. But today, as I review the Muslim killings, the truth of the words comes back to haunt me. In the initial years after Modi’s elevation, a fig-leaf allegation or suspicion of cow slaughter or transportation of animals for possible slaughter was enough to trigger a mob to vent its fury on a helpless man. None of the allegations of animal slaughter was substantiated. Worse, none needed to be. At least not in public perception. Neither did the dead come back to life. By 2019, even these flimsy excuses were done away with. Being a Muslim was enough to be vulnerable to murder, to one’s house being set on fire or bulldozed. Not every instance was as gory or gruesome as the ones we have read about till now. But there were instances when a clean-shaven shopkeeper with no visible sign of his faith--no beard, no skullcap, no amulet, no tehmat--was murdered on a whim! In some cases, the man was asked to ‘pull down trousers’--the attackers, you see, judged by the foreskin, its absence being a life-threatening condition. As Imran Khan, a street hawker, discovered in the north-east Delhi violence. In others, the victim was asked to say ‘Allah-u-Akbar’ by goons. The ability to pronounce the first line of the Muslim call for prayer was deemed sufficient for them to unleash the most macabre violence in full public view. Thrashing a Muslim was no longer a crime furtively and hurriedly carried out in the dingy by-lanes of small-town India. It had become a public administration of violence, even death. It was a spectacle to be viewed by scores of passive but not necessary non-approving observers at the site and was to be later devoured and even celebrated by thousands and tens of thousands on the Internet, after the video of the attack was uploaded by the ‘brave defenders’ of sanskriti (culture). The murder of innocents had become a ritual. Muslims in modern India could as well be the cattle of ancient India! It forced noted legal eagle Dushyant Arora to tweet in October 2020, ‘To be a Muslim in today’s India is to fear for your life 24X7.’