Unknown miscreants. That is how the police refer to them.
We interviewed one of them.
“We will chase them out with love. We will cordially chuck them out of here. We will not let them do business here, will not let them open shops. Then they will leave on their own.”
Can you guess who is ready to go on record with the most blatant anti-Muslim statement that could get a jail term of at least 3 years?
A fringe extremist? No. The district general secretary of Bharatiya Janata Party’s Schedule Caste wing in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district.
The Reporters’ Collective interviewed him during our journey to the small Himalayan town of Purola in Uttarkashi to investigate a communal fire that has been raging since May 26 over the alleged bid to abduct a minor Hindu girl by two youths – a Muslim and a Hindu.
The alleged crime has been spun into a communal frenzy that threatens the life and livelihood of Muslims as Hindutva organisations and their allies have now set a deadline for Muslims to leave the town, and other places.
Rallies were taken out against Muslims accusing them of love jihad, their shops were vandalised. Posters were pasted on their shops warning them to leave before June 15, when a mass gathering has been announced by an unknown entity but actively promoted by the BJP leaders and other Hindutva organisations.
Several Muslim families had fled the town by the time The Collective reached Purola on June 6. But the police and administration have dismissed threats asking Muslims of Purola town to leave as media hype, but The Collective found in plain sight leaders targeting Muslims.
Purola isn’t an isolated incident. Rallies were held in parts of Uttarkashi against Muslims and all of them were laced with messaging on “love jihad” and other typical Hindutva tropes against Muslims.
Even the top leadership of the state, chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, has supported such claims against Muslims, emboldening his partymen and MLAs to go the whole hog in hounding Muslims.
The police, expectedly, are unable to find the ‘unknown miscreants’ fomenting communal hatred in the state.
In the ground report, Tapasya and Hemant Gairola have mapped the rising hate crimes that are turning the state into a communal tinderbox and have held the police and administration to account for pussyfooting around the peddlers of hate speech.