Not a day goes by when a murder, rape or other attack on Hindus by Islamist elements does not occur in Bharat. Most such hate crimes are either censored or watered down by the English-language mainstream media. Local Hindus gather to protest and demand justice, the issue trends for a few days on social media, and then things go back to business as usual. Such is the never-ending deluge of hate crimes that even dedicated Hindu activists are hard-pressed to remember the details after a few months.

On the other hand, the rare incident in which a member of the minority is a victim lives on in collective memory as it is repeated ad-nauseam by multiple outlets, including international ones. Often times, the incident is distorted to create an aura of victimhood whereas facts are exactly opposite – such as in the case of Tabrez Ansari who was thrashed by villagers after being caught stealing. The well-funded left-liberal-secular ecosystem ensures such cases are covered from multiple angles, and they are not shy of manufacturing fake narratives to demonize Hindu society and inflame the victimhood complex among so-called minorities.

How many of us know that a Hindu youth called Manish (25) was brutally stabbed to death on October 1 in New Delhi, the nation’s capital? He was stabbed over 60 times by Bilal, Aalam and Faizan in the Sunder Nagari locality of North East Delhi. After killing him, the men shouted at horrified locals “We have killed him. Pick up the dead body. We will kill two more.”

The reason for the murder? In June 2021, Mohsin, Qasim and Shakir had stabbed Manish while trying to steal his mobile. After they were arrested, their families started pressurizing Manish to withdraw his complaint. Manish’s family also received death threats, but he refused to budge and also informed the courts about the threats he had been receiving. Manish had given testimony on September 28, and hence Mohsin’s brother Sajad decided to eliminate him three days later in such a brutal fashion that it would send a message to others in the area. So he directed Bilal, Aalam and Faizan to carry out the crime.

All accused are now arrested, but how long before they walk out on bail or end up before a judge who subscribes to the ‘every sinner has a future’ theory, is anybody’s guess. Why wasn’t our system able to protect Manish despite him and his family being repeatedly threatened?

Why does English-language media (ELM) dismiss such important news with terse articles that whitewash the crime using the catch-all phrase ‘due to old enmity’? In a way, the clash between Islamic hegemony and all other religions is indeed a centuries-old enmity, but what our ELM and secular police is trying to say here is that this is a ‘routine crime’ with no ‘communal angle’. However, when a calf-thief and butcher like Md. Akhlaq is killed by his neighbors, then the ‘old enmity’ trope goes into hiding and the ‘Hindu communalism’ card is pressed into service right away.

9 days later after this brutal murder, how many of us remember it or Manish’s face? Forget those who rely solely on mainstream newspapers like Times of India, The Hindu or outlets like Scroll, NDTV, Quint – there is zero chance that they would have even heard of it. But even those who read alternate news outlets like OpIndia, HinduPost, Swarajya or follow handles like @hgenocidewatch or @tracker_hatet that diligently try to track anti-Hindu hate crimes…even they would struggle to remember it, such is the staggering daily volume of crimes against Hindus and the resource crunch that Hindu media and activism work struggles with!

It is a matter of shame that we don’t even know Manish’s surname – not even the Hindi media outlets who usually do a decent job of covering such crimes have provided that.

But there is life yet in Hindu society. We are the inheritors of a 10,000-year-old civilization (at the very least) who have stared down some of the worst genociders history has seen. Some of us have sworn not to let this relentless assault on Hindu society, ironically taking place under the cold gaze of the ‘secular’ state, go unchallenged. Some outfits are working to organize and empower Hindu society to defend itself. And this is what rankles our liberal-secularists. ‘Why don’t these pesky Hindus just die’, they seem to wonder.

In the aftermath of Manish’s murder, an ‘Aakrosh Sabha’ (protest meet) was organised on Sunday by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). For the uninformed, Sunder Nagari is yet another area of Delhi that has seen a steep decline in Hindu population over the last decade or so. Refer to this 2016 report by HinduPost to understand the reasons – it’s the usual story of stalking/harassment of Hindu girls and Love Jihad, deteriorating social environment, rising crime, attacks on temples and Hindu traditions, mob intimidation etc, all made possible by police and political apathy. In short, it is exactly what our post-colonial successor state has been designed to achieve – the gradual extermination of Bharat’s Hindu identity.

While attending the VHP event, BJP MP from West Delhi constituency Parvesh Singh Verma called for boycotting Muslims. He also spoke of the threat posed by illegal Rohingya Muslims, many of whom have settled in illegal colonies across Delhi and contribute to skyrocketing crime and violence like the city witnessed during anti-CAA protests and subsequent riots.

“Boycott them completely… don’t buy anything from their shop, and don’t give them any wages,” Verma said during his speech.

Of course, this common sense advice to a society that is under unprecedented stress is being played up as ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’ by the usual suspects. It also shouldn’t surprise anyone that when Islamists and other radicals issue boycott calls endorsed by their religious leaders to bully Hindus and push their nefarious agenda – see here, here, here, here, here, here – the left-liberal conscience is not pricked. But when Hindus try to organize in self-defense, all hell breaks loose.

Would Jews and the rest of the world be blamed if they were to boycott all German establishments around the time when Nazis were dominating German society? Isn’t such a boycott a legitimate way of sending a message to a community to weed out the extremists among them? Isn’t economic boycott an accepted tool of international diplomacy to tackle rogue regimes?

Only a delusional fool, Ghazwa-e-Hind dreamer or cynical secular Indian politician would pretend at the moment that Indian Muslims and the entire subcontinental Muslim society is not under the grip of radical Islamic organizations. Apart from stray voices supporting the ban on terror outfit PFI, most mainstream Muslim outfits like Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), AIMIM, Majlis-e-Mushawarat have stridently opposed the ban while others like Jamaat-e-Ulema Hind (JUH, representative of Deoband – the most renowned Sunni school/seminary) have maintained a studied silence.

The impact that the Deobandi-Barelvi mosque-madrasa network and outfits like Tablighi Jamaat have had on indoctrinating Muslim minds, including fueling the rise of the Taliban, is not lost on anyone. Lutyens’ analysts will split hairs and argue that it is the Saudi Wahhabi/Salafi strain of Islam that is dangerous, but the reality is that differences among these different schools of Islam are either superficial or irrelevant for the ‘polytheist, idol-worshipping kafir’ i.e. Hindus.

Till the time a new wave of Muslim intelligentsia – and there are some green shoots and voices of reason and reform – and the Indian state is able to tackle the Islamic hardliners head-on, and are able to reduce their pernicious effect on Muslim society, it is in everyone’s interest for communities to maintain a safe distance. Hindus also need to rediscover their Dharmic roots and coalesce behind organizations that are disseminating the true egalitarian message of Dharma, and/or helping Hindus stand with self-respect.

Such an approach is bound to offend the HINO (Hindu in Name Only) upper-middle and elite class. For them, Hindu lives are cheap and what matters is the approval of their Western liberal counterparts. But self-preservation and self-defense is a universal human right, and no amount of grandstanding or virtue-signaling by Harvard-educated judges or writers like Ramachandra Guha can take that right away from us.

The ugly reality is that Hindus living in mixed population areas have a sword hanging over their head. There are thousands of mini-Pakistan/no-go zones that have mushroomed all over Bharat due to the callous and/or anti-Hindu approach of successive governments. Today, something as mundane as buying vegetables or  fruits, delivering pizza, ordering food, eating out, attending birthday parties, calling a plumber, newspaper delivery, going to a doctor, making sworn brothers/tying rakhi, celebrating your festivals – is fraught with risk for non-Muslims.

And even good-intentioned Muslims run the risk of being mistaken for Islamists. Hindu society is jumpy at the moment, and with good reason. When we see cases of vegetable vendors/fruit sellers/cooks wash their goods in urine or spit into them, we are bound to look askance at even honest vendors from the other community and untoward incidents can occur as people’s trust in the law enforcement machinery is quite low after 75 years of pseudo-secularism. So its in interest of larger communal harmony to maintain a separation till supremacist goals of Islamizing the entire country are completely eradicated.

Left-liberals will dismiss this as ‘paranoid scare-mongering’ or ‘hate mongering’, but they are living in safe spaces and can pull strings to have the system work for them. Most of all, they don’t care for ordinary Hindu lives, not even if citizens are falling prey to Islamists in the national capital just a few kms from the centre of our Republic’s power – Hiralal Gujarati, Gopal, Rinku Sharma, Dablu Singh, Ankit Saxena, Priti Mathur, Sajjan, Riya Gautam, Kanti Prasad, Pankaj Narang, Mukul Adhikari, Shubham, Dhruv Tyagi to name a few.

(With IANS inputs)