PM Modi and Hindus are a favorite punching bag of the anti-Hindu brigade masquerading as liberals as is seen in the article by Fatima Bhutto where she turns a Pakistani Islamist issue into a pan-subcontinental problem. Trust the ‘liberals’ to bring in the Bharatiya PM and Hindus even in issues that aren’t remotely connected with them.

In her article for The Guardian while speaking of the murder of Sri Lankan national Priyantha Diyawadana on charges of blasphemy, Bhutto writes:

Across the border in India, where Narendra Modi’s rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has held power for the last seven years, the cases of lynchings are too many and too grotesque to count. The Indian right has all but made living as a Muslim a crime, and routinely paints Muslims as jihad-hungry fifth columnists: Muslim men who marry Hindu women are accused of committing “love jihad”. Recently, saffron-clad mobs assembled in Gurgaon, a Delhi satellite, with the sole purpose of stopping Muslims from performing their daily prayers. “There will be no namaz here,” screamed angry Hindu fundamentalists. When Muslims, with fewer and fewer mosques to pray in, began to offer their prayers outside on the dirt of Gurgaon’s open roadsides, the furious men howled that they would not tolerate Muslim “land jihad”.

Like a true ‘liberal’, Bhutto twists facts to suit her agenda – defending Islam even while parading as a liberal. Grooming jihad is a serious issue in Bharat where Muslim men assume Hindu identity to dupe Hindu women. Bhutto makes it sound as if every Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman is targeted in Bharat.

She propagates the myth of fewer mosques to justify Muslims offering namaz on the streets of Gurugram. This is nothing but a blatant lie as Central Waqf Council member Rais Patha had recently pointed out that there are more than 4000 mosques in the state for the people to pray.

In one of his tweets with a picture of an empty mosque, Pathan questioned why roads were being blocked while mosques were lying empty. He also appealed to Muslims to offer prayers in mosques and not fall for the propaganda by fake liberal Muslims. He opined that these fake liberal Muslims want you to break laws by performing prayers in the open while they themselves never offer namaz. Bhutto should do a fact-check before putting out baseless allegations.

The instances of Hindus being lynched in Muslim-dominated regions in Bharat are on the rise but that certainly doesn’t fit in with the ‘liberal’ narrative of ‘minorities under threat’ in the Modi regime.

Even though blasphemy is a purely Abrahamic concept, Bhutto chooses to project the radicalization of Muslim youth on external factors rather than acknowledging that is a problem of Islam. This is the reason why Bhutto attempts to defend Islamists using the false equivalence of Hindus being intolerant. Essentially, people like Bhutto only use the liberal tag to hide their Islamism.

“The Islam that I know gives women a lot of rights. Take for instance the terms of the divorce. When a Muslim woman signs her nikahnama it also allows her the rights to set the terms of her marriage and her divorce. So, you automatically have a legal contract that says if you do this-this-this, I’m entitled to a legal divorce, which a woman can pick and choose for herself—and to me that is power”, opined Bhutto.

The reality of the position of women in Islam is that the practice of polygamy allows a Muslim man to marry multiple women. Nikah-Halala is a practice of a divorced woman having to consummate the marriage with another man and then getting a divorce from him before remarrying her previous husband.

In numerous instances, it has been seen that the woman is forced to have sex with multiple men by the husband after giving her the Triple Talaq. Bhutto would be glad to know that in Hindu Dharma women are worshipped as Devi and don’t face the threat of triple talaq like Muslim women do.

“Women don’t wear the burqa because they love not having peripheral vision, or because they want to be oppressed. Everyone connects the burqa to oppression, but this isn’t the full story. In some places it actually allows women to leave their houses. They can be mobile when they otherwise couldn’t be”, she says adding that burqa is a freedom of expression.

The reality of many self-professed ‘liberal’ Muslims is that not only do they fail to call out the ills of Islam and rather defend it but also that a latent Hindu hate lurks behind the liberal facade. They can neither appreciate any goodness in Hindu society nor can they admit that Hindus have a tradition of respectfully debating different spiritual approaches within Dharma, and living with a plurality. This explains why Bhutto dragged the Bharatiya PM and Hindus into a purely Islamist extremist issue.

(Featured Image Source: The Guardian)