-An insight into Indian Islamophobia
DM Monitoring
We arrested 91 persons within 24 hours, and placed them in front of the court. The court granted 14 days judicial custody. Around 35 persons were arrested the next day.” We tried contacting Locket Chatterjee, the BJP MP for Hooghly. However, she has yet to answer our calls. Kailash Vijayvargiya, a BJP national general secretary and the party’s central observer for West Bengal, on May 12 afternoon tweeted a video of Chatterjee in which she is seen claiming, “Hindu houses were being burnt. I am getting a lot of distressed calls from the local people. This is a one-sided war.” She also lashed out at the state government machinery, saying “State administration is a mute spectator and Telinipara is burning.”
A lot of fake news also circulated on social media, planting a similar narrative that Hindus were in danger in Telinipara. A Wikinews page dated Tuesday, May 12, 2020, bore the title “2020 Telinipara Anti-Hindu Pogrom.” The Wire also found that a fake news website purporting to belong to Anandabazar Patrika– the largest circulated newspaper in Bengal – was spreading false and inflammatory news about the Telinipara incident. The ‘news’ portal, which became active on April 7, has subsequently been taken down.
Screenshots of the fake Anandabazaar website, used by rightwing activists to push fake news about the Telinipara violence. An India Today fact-checking team found that images of unrelated violence in another country were passed off as purported anti-Hindu riots in Telinipara, and widely circulated on social media. Twitter and Facebook users also shared these fake images. However, India Today busted the lies and said: “The pictures are from Pakistan, where members of the Hindu community were beaten up and their houses set ablaze.”
The Wire spent over three hours in violence-hit Telinipara, and spoke to multiple people from different communities. What we found on the ground was maximum damage in the Muslim neighbourhoods.
We also found that some houses belonging to Hindu families in Raja Bazar were partially damaged. From all that we saw in Telinipara, our primary assessment is that what occurred on May 12 was a planned attack which was systematically executed. There is multiple evidence on the ground to show that Muslim houses and shops were singled out and strategically targeted. The locals allege that the attack was carried out by people coming from ‘outside’, aided by some locals familiar with the area.–(Concluded)
