Death of a Muslim

For more than a couple of weeks I have been reading about death of a Muslim guy called Rizwanur Rehman. This 30 years old guy, coming from a poor and rather uneducated family and working as a multimedia teacher in a private company at Kolkata, allegedly fell in love with a 23 years old Hindu girl student Priyanka Todi, and married her against the wishes of her family members, her father being a wealthy and powerful businessman.

Two weeks after the marriage, Rizwanur was found dead on railway tracks. Police and CID say that he committed suicide. Communists, human rights activists, and Muslims say that he was murdered. They blame top police officials of West Bengal and Priyanka’s father for the alleged murder. The chief minister of West Bengal is more than willing to believe these guys than his own police force. Media, especially a television news channel called CNN-IBN, is hell bent upon delivering justice to this dead man. Secularism is the in-thing.

Interestingly, the Hindu girl Priyanka was contacted by West Bengal’s Women Commission and she denied any pressure or coerciveness from her father and didn’t suspect any foul play in the death of her husband. But her views don’t matter to our secular heroes, the clairvoyants know the truth, and battle for truth and justice has been flagged off.

And I confess, I see it as a battle against Hindus.

For the communist politicians, the battle serves dual purpose – it appeases their Muslim vote bank and it helps them burden Hindus with another charge of being murderer of Muslims. Of course, Hindus like me don’t treat it as a burden, rather I feel proud that I can also be as violent and brutal as Muslims and battle it out with them. But it is the fence sitters like XYZ who are cursed to carry the burden of being intolerant and murderers.

Why is this state government behaving in a manner as if it was the rarest of the rare cases? Haven’t their own policemen tortured people before? What happened in Nandigram and Singur? Did the chief minister then care to pay a visit to the aggrieved families?

And they claim to be disciplined administrators. The whole issue came into limelight because Muslims from Rizwanur’s colony (one of the several lawless Muslim ghettos of this country) got violent, pelted a police station with stones, and harassed innocent bystanders. When other Indian citizens, read Hindus, show such aggression against establishment, they are termed as anarchists and lawless, but when Muslims do it, their actions are treated with Gandhian grandeur. Is this the way a disciplined administrator allows law and order to be taken hostage by crowds?

What was really so special about this case? A daughter of a rich industrialist defies him and marries a poor man outside her social class and it results in a murder. Is this again the rarest of the rare cases? In western Uttar Pradesh, around each month a murder takes place because couples defy their parents and marry against their wishes. Why doesn’t CNN-IBN make a headline out of that?

So whose battle is it really? And against whom? I’m pretty sure, it’s one of those several attempts to demoralize Hindu consciousness and appease the minorities. But XYZ says I’m reading too much into this. As always, he is innocent enough not to believe in conspiracy theories. While Muslims get away with Godhra and 9/11 conspiracy theories, he refuses that there could be any against Hindus. It’s important that people like me exist so that one day he can see the other side of the story too.

Anyway, XYZ says that it is one of those stupid attempts by media and government to prove that they care for the citizens of this country (see, how innocently he has confused care for Muslims as care for common citizens).

XYZ thinks that an unfortunate death or murder has been used by one television channel to gain TRPs and by a government to gain goodwill. He sees Rizwanur’s case as being no better that Jessica Lall or Nitish Katara cases, where media tried to shove their socially conscious image down the throat of Indian viewers by making use of these dead names. All the time Indian news channels show crap and useless stories, they need such stories now and then for hogwash, to clean their own conscious too, while government has been shrewd enough to use the opportunity to gain goodwill. Both of them (media and government) will now conveniently ignore similar cases in future, as they would have already ‘proven’ themselves once.

XYZ tries to reason with me that it’s just happenstance that the victim this time was a Muslim. I would have liked to believe him if this whole case would have been dealt by government, media, intellectuals, and human rights activists as a law-and-order problem. But haven’t I been reading and hearing words like ‘secularism’, ‘minority rights’, ‘intolerance against Muslims’, and many other such brotherhood words in the whole episode?

XYZ, it just can’t be so simple.