There is an urban legend around Prime Minister Narendra Modi: the more you hit him, the stronger he gets. People say it with a hint of shamanic mystique, as he possesses dark powers.
The reality is more mundane. Modi has had an incredible streak of good luck with adversaries who relied on propaganda over facts, lies over honesty. In that, they continually exposed themselves and made their enemy look more right than ever.
The latest to lead the global propaganda cell against Modi, Hindus and India is a British-American political journalist Mehdi Hasan, born to Hyderabadi Shia Muslim parents. He has come up with a capsule on his MSNBC show with the alarmist title: ‘How the Far-Right Could Cause Genocide in India’.
Apart from a cursory and disingenuous disclaimer that he means Hindutva and not Hinduism (‘Hindutva’ literally means the state of being a Hindu), he goes on to tar an entire community as violent and bigoted genocide planners. The word genocide is liberally thrown in by his guests journalists Rana Ayyub, a prominent Hindutva-baiter, and Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch, who has been associated with the Indian American Muslim Council, which reportedly had links with the banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and is one of the most vocal platforms of anti-India and Hinduphobic propaganda in the US.
First, what are Mehdi Hasan’s credentials to speak about hate and bigotry?
He has been a long-outed Islamist who ranted against non-Muslims, boasted about the supremacy of Islam over other religions, and denigrated LGBT+ persons. To salvage some credibility, he had to apologise for his Islamist rants. He attributed it to the folly of youth, although he seemed to be in his thirties in the videos.
“Like a lot of journos (humans?) I’ve said things years ago that I now deeply regret. Chief among them for me is, more than a decade ago, in my 20s, when I wasn’t a public figut re, I gave a bunch of speeches to students on Islam/extremism. And I said dumb offensive ranty stuff,” he said in a Twitter thread on Monday.
Gentle reminder that Mehdi Hasan has previously characterized non-Muslims as immoral people who “live their lives like animals,” and lumped homosexuals together with pedophiles and sexual deviants in his speeches: pic.twitter.com/ZX7b71EvSJ
— Ali A. Rizvi (@aliamjadrizvi) March 21, 2019
His apology would have been gracious if he was not so unconvincing thereafter that he had left his Islamist past behind.
“He continues to regularly speak on platforms alongside Islamist clerics who incite hatred against minorities. Last November, for example, Hasan was happy to share a stage with Dawud Walid, who preaches about the evils of Jews,” writes Sam Westrop in Islamist Watch. “A few months earlier, Hasan moderated a debate at a conference with Hatem Bazian, who has complained about Jews in ‘control’ of universities and was censured by his employer for tweeting anti-Semitic cartoons. The conference, hosted by the Islamic Society of North America, also featured dozens of the most extreme clerics in America, such as Hussain Kamani, who claims that Muslim men may fulfil any sexual desires ‘with a female slave that belongs to him’.”
Mehdi Hasan begins the propaganda show with flourish, comparing Modi with Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Marine Le Pen to elicit maximum western liberal sympathy. He says Modi is greater evil.
“Narendra Modi and his far-Right nationalist party are bent on creating a lost Hindu kingdom which they call the Hindu Rashtra,” says Hasan. “After Modi’s coming to office, hate crimes against minorities have skyrocketed. “Scholars the literally warning about genocide. Minorities from Christians to Muslims and beyond are facing the greatest threat to their existence since Independence.”
He claims a sharp rise in the incidents of lynching and violence against minorities. But he does not provide a shred of supporting data. He predictably won’t discuss Islamist attacks and killings of non-Muslims in the Modi era.
The prime minister has never spoken about Hindu Rashtra. But even if he did, would it be so wrong and communal? Fifteen countries including England and Denmark have Christianity as their State religion, while 27 nations are run by Islam’s writ. Hasan has never questioned those. Communists have more than half-a-dozen countries, Jews have Israel. Why is it abhorrent for Hindus to claim India as the homeland for Indic religions like Hindu dharma, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism?
Then comes the bizarre strawman. Mehdi cites how the lone-wolf, Norwegian white terrorist named Anders Behring Breivik had praised Hindutva and its resistance to Islamism.
That apparently makes Hindutva a murderous ideology, while thousands of people killed every month across the globe in the name of Islam do not deserve mention or censure.
The rant against Modi glosses over the reality that under him, of the 2.31 crore houses built under the prime minister's housing scheme, 31 per cent were allocated in 25 minority-dominated areas, 33 per cent beneficiary of the farmers’ Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, 37 per cent of the nine crore beneficiaries of the LPG scheme Ujjwala, and 36% beneficiaries of the Mudra scheme were minorities.
Under Modi, instant triple talaq, which had ruined the lives of millions of Muslim women over the decades, was outlawed. Early in his tenure, the PM came up with the slogan for Muslim youth: “Laptop in one hand, Quran in the other.”
Hasan or Ayyub mention none of that. It is unlikely that he would ever call on his show a new wave of patriotic Indian Muslims voices emerging today.
Hasan copiously rues the fact that Modi is being embraced by every world leader including Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Joe Biden. This is despite the Gujarat “genocide” of 2002, chimes in Rana Ayyub. Begs the question: In which genocide do the ‘victims’ kill more than 300 of the ‘perpetrators’?
Hasan paints Ayyub as a hapless victim of Modi administration’ tyranny and vindictiveness for being stopped from traveling abroad. He fails to mention that Ayyub faces serious charges by the Enforcement Department of money laundering in the name of Covid relief. A particularly depraved act, if true, at the time of such a terrible global tragedy.
Mehdi Hasan is also angry about Indian home minister Amit Shah calling illegal Bangladeshi immigrants “termites”. He does not care to explain the demographic, economic, cultural, and religious takeover of large parts of India, especially Bengal and Assam, because of such infiltration. Perhaps that fits snugly into Hasan, Ayyub, and ‘genocide expert’ Staton’s agenda.
In the show, there is no historical contextualising of how Pakistan and Bangladesh were carved out of India because of sheer Islamist bigotry. The host or guests do not explain how Muslim demographic takeover in India has continued unabated, how Islamist terror and violence is an regular occurrence in places like Kashmir, Bengal and Kerala, how Hindu festivals were attacked in more than 10 states by Muslim mobs, and how rape, deceitful marriage and conversion is used in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as a systematic expansionist and terrorising tool against non-Muslims, and how the Taliban in Afghanistan has killed or flushed out the last surviving Hindus and Sikhs.
Mehdi Hasan’s journalism may not merit a detailed mention. But this template of Hinduphobic attacks and propaganda against India and Modi needs to be identified and exposed. It will be used more often by closet clerics in the media. Islamists are getting increasingly desperate because a new India has stalled their dark march.
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