UP Police has arrested five Muslim youth who molested Hindu girls during a Dahi Handi celebration and subsequently assaulted Hindu boys who protested their act. The incident took place at street no 1 in the Delhi Gate area of Aligarh on Friday, on the occasion of Krishna Janmashtami. A total of 12 people have been booked.

According to a young man named Ayush, some Muslim youth molested girls during the program. When he and others protested, they left. But soon they returned with more people and dragged Ayush and few others into a nearby mosque and assaulted them. When people came to try and rescue them, they were pelted upon wth stones.

The Police rushed to the spot to prevent the situation from deteriorating further. City BJP leaders also reached the police station late at night and an FIR was lodged. People who were injured were taken to hospital for treatment.

Will HINOs who lecture Hindus for disallowing non-Hindus from entering festival celebrations like Garba/Dandiya during Durga Puja, have anything to say on this incident?

Aligarh Police has issued a news byte on the incident, which waters down the entire incident as one related to an ‘altercation between two communities following caustic/hurtful comments’ and ends with the assurance that there is ‘complete peace’ in the area.

This is standard operating procedure for our police, which knows that tackling the Islamist mindset ripping communities apart in our town and cities is beyond them. So they take refuge in platitudes that appear to blame both sides equally, and focus on ‘restoring the peace’. That is, until the next incident of aggression by Islamists, at which point the entire cycle repeats again.

What makes things worse is that police often kowtows to the very same mosques and maulanas responsible for indoctrinating this poisonous mindset in Muslim community, in the name of ‘community policing’.

Aligarh is home to AMU, touted as one of the most ‘progressive’ universities in the country. The reality is that it is the home of supremacist Ashrafi Muslim attitudes in the subcontinent and was founded by the father of the two-nation theory Syed Ahmed Khan.

Sexual attacks on Hindu girls and women are the norm in Aligarh. This is what Hindus were saying around 6 years ago in a place called Babri Mandi in Aligarh, after the molestation of a newly wed woman finally brought some media attention to their dire situation –

“It is not possible to live in this area. We are in a minority. Ten families want to sell their houses right away but every family wants to eventually leave…Our daughters are not safe here. Hooliganism and harassment are the order of the day. The roads are narrow and some boys from a different community sit on both sides of the path making it difficult for our girls to even go to school. Many of them have refused to attend class fearing for their safety.”

There is no doubt that the Yogi government has brought relief and a renewed sense of security to people of UP. Brazen lawlessness by politically-empowered goons and criminals during the SP regime is a thing of the past. But attacks on Hindus have not ceased, even if their frequency and intensity has come down. Rapes and cases of grooming jihad are still reported with sickening regularity. Hindu festival processions are still attacked. One senses that Islamists are merely biding their time, waiting for a regime change to go back to their old, brazen ways.

The reality is that our secular state and present governance system have no lasting solutions to the problems facing this country, especially its Hindu majority. All it can offer is patchwork fixes, to temporarily ‘maintain the peace’.