Under the secular state, Islamist radicalization is slowly but surely spreading its tentacles into the 2 Himalayan hill states/regions that managed to remain untouched from Islamic invaders who ravaged the rest of the country for centuries.

While the situation has reached breaking point in Uttarakhand, forcing locals to hit the streets of Purola in protest, there are signs that Himachal is headed the same way. After last year’s brutal murder of 15-year-old Prachi Rana inside her own home by stalker Asif Mohammed in Una, Himachal has witnessed yet another horrific crime, this time with the victim being a Hindu man from Bandal village, Saluni tehsil in Chamba district

Manohar Lal (21) had left his home on 6 June and went missing. It is said that he was in a relationship with a Muslim girl, and her family was opposed to this. So they lynched Manohar to death and then dismembered his body into 8 parts, stuffed those into a gunny bag and threw it into a drain.

On 9 June, locals noticed the foul smell and informed the police. Upon investigation, police zeroed in on the Muslim girlfriend and her family. As per Dainik Bhaskar, the police has made 5 arrests – the Muslim girlfriend, her brother and sister-in-law, and her chacha (uncle) and his wife.

Speaking to OpIndia, Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Vinod Kumar Dhiman vehemently denied any ‘communal angle’ in the matter. “Though the victim was Hindu and the accused are Muslims, there was no communal angle in the matter. The victim and accused were having an affair. We have arrested five people, two juvenile females, and three adults. Prima facie, there is no evidence of the communal angle in the murder,” said ASP Dhiman.

Though police was tight-lipped about the identities of even the adult accused, the OpIndia report names two of the accused as the girl’s brother Shabbir, and her uncle Musafir. And as is often the case, it is only Hindu outfits like Bajrang Dal and local BJP leaders who are standing with Manohar’s family, demanding swift justice.

‘No communal angle’

The phrase ‘no communal angle’ is the stock in trade of the ‘secular’ Indian Republic and its institutions, whether politicians, police, bureaucracy or judiciary. It is the go-to reaction of police whenever a crime involving a Hindu victim and a Muslim perpetrator takes place.

When minor girl Prachi Rana was brutally murdered by stalker Asif Mohammed last year, the Una SP Arjit Sen had made the same comment – ‘there is no religious angle’ during a press conference.

Let us repeat the questions we had raised then –

“Has police probed the mosque that Asif Mohammed was attending, the Islamic organizations that he was part of? Has police checked that he was not indoctrinated by sermons and teachings that dehumanize ‘idol worshipping’ Hindus as lesser beings who will benefit spiritually if they convert to Islam, or which label non-hijab wearing girls as ‘loose characters’ who deserve to be raped, or that radicalize one to consider non-Muslim girls as maal-e-ghanimat, i.e. legitimate targets for sexual exploitation or that seed misogyny in general.“

When Umesh Kolhe was murdered by Islamists for putting a WhatsApp status in support of BJP leader Nupur Sharma, the Amravati police initially tried to downplay the crime as ‘robbery related’. It was only when the local MP Navneet Rana raised the issue and accused the city police commissioner Aarti Singh of hiding facts that the truth came out that it was an STSJ (Sar Tan Se Juda) murder – part of a series of violent incidents triggered after Islamist ‘fact-checker’ Md. Zubair edited Nupur’s TV debate video to accuse her of ‘blasphemy’ and dog-whistled the global Islamist ummah to bay for her blood.

In February, when an Islamist mob attacked a Hindu marriage party during the bride’s vidaai over a trivial matter in UP’s Mahoba, brutally assaulting and molesting the bride’s family while shouting casteist slurs, Mahoba SP Sudha Singh termed it a ‘minor altercation’.

In a recent case from Delhi where one Shahrukh was arrested after he pretended to be Hindu to lure a girl into a relationship and started blackmailing her after she broke up on discovering his true identity, Additional DCP Sandhya Swami said that as Shahrukh didn’t forced the Hindu girl to convert to Islam, it is ‘not love jihad‘.

When a Muslim is killed by villagers for suspected cattle smuggling, the same media and police is quick to brand it a ‘communal crime’, notwithstanding the fact that the deadly cattle smuggling mafia kills dozens of villagers and security personnel each year, thus forcing poor villagers to self-organize to protect their livelihood. Even when a Hindu is killed over suspicion of cattle theft or just plain theft, it hardly makes any news and police treat it as a routine crime, but if a thief like Tabrez Ansari gets beaten up and later dies in police lock up, it becomes ‘communal’ and a national talking point that all Hindus must be ashamed of and answerable for! In an earlier article, we had analyzed how certain lynching incidents are cherrypicked to build an anti-Hindu narrative.

The brutal murder of Manohar Lal has all the signs of being a brutal hate crime. If the girl’s family were opposed to the inter-faith relation, why not just warn the man and send him away? Why not approach his family to resolve the matter? And what kind of deep indoctrination results in an entire family, including juvenile females, being involved in a gruesome murder where a body is chopped into 8 pieces? Isn’t it logical to connect this with the deep hatred for kafirs that so many Islamic seminaries across this country drill into their followers day in and out?

Police can say ‘no communal angle’ all they want, but the reality is that murders of both Hindu women and Hindu men at the hands of Islamists over so-called ‘inter-faith relationships’ is shockingly common.

So here’s the bottomline – when a representative of the Indian state says ‘no communal angle’, it most likely means ‘keep sleeping, Hindus’.

Of course, there are notable exceptions like ex-IPS Nirmal Kaur, a 1983 batch IPS officer who retired as DGP Jharkhand and last year acknowledged that Muslim men deliberately entrapping Hindu girls has become a culture. Some other IPS officers also admit that grooming jihad or love jihad has acquired social sanction among a large section of Indian Muslims. although they may not say so openly.

Why does police act the way it does?

Here is one theory on why police is often quick to take the position it does in downplaying religiously-motivated hate crimes against Hindus. They don’t want the heat and attention, the pressure for answers that they know acknowledging the true nature of such crimes will bring. They don’t want an aware and robust Hindu community asking tough questions and demanding justice.

Our police knows that Muslim protesters can besiege & even attack police stations at the drop of a hat and exert pressure via various lobbies for any grievance, real or concocted. It is one of the unwritten rules of the Indian State that ‘minorities’ exercise a street veto. It is for the same reason that police avoids entering the no-go zones like Mewat, that are littered all over Bharat. So the state has learnt to appease such elements and humor them.

Police also knows that the entire left-liberal socio-political ecosystem and Lutyens’ intelligentsia will be breathing down their necks if they take some meaningful action against the epicenters of the Islamist indoctrination machinery; so most IPS/IAS officers just mouth feel-good, secular homilies for the duration they have to serve in ‘sensitive’ (i.e. Islamist-dominated) areas, and bide their time waiting for a transfer.

Hence, the same State apparatus under no circumstance wants Hindus to adopt similar tactics and ‘increase their workload’, so to say. So the easiest solution? Dismiss Hindu grievances, ignore the vicious religious propaganda and hate speech directed against Dharmics, and crush the scattered Hindu voices who dare to speak the truth and ask uncomfortable questions.

And to be honest, this approach has worked reasonably well when seen from the perspective of the Indian State and its elites. But unfortunately for them, the ordinary Hindu is now awakening due to advent of social media and democratization of discourse.