Hindu extremist mob breaks into historic mosque, perform pooja inside
A Hindu extremist mob broke into Karnataka state’s historic Mahmud Gawan Madarsa mosque and performed pooja, a Hindu ritual, inside. The incident occurred at around 1 a.m. in Bidar city, where a Hindu mob taking part in a religious procession forcibly broke the lock on the mosque and entered to perform pooja while filming and chanting Hindu religious slogans.
The violent breaking and entering not only violates the Muslim community, but also the historical sanctity of the mosque, which is under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).
Advocate Syed Talha Hashmi stated that complaints were made by the local Muslim community as well as by the ASI. So far, only one person has been taken into custody.
The vandalism of this historic mosque is the latest in a nationwide string of attacks on Muslim places of worship, ranging from local shrines to highly significant historic mosques.
Kashmiri man killed by Indian government forces, police claim accidental fire
A Kashmiri man succumbed to his injuries after being shot by Indian government forces in Kashmir’s Pulwama district. The victim, Asif Ahmed, is the latest in a long list of Kashmiri civilians who have lost their lives to India’s brutal military presence in the region over the past three decades.
Hurriyat Conference Official, a coalition of 24 Kashmiri socio-political parties, has responded with outrage and calls for justice.
“The authorities are calling it ‘accidental firing’ but that’s another name for murder in Kashmir,” the coalition stated on Twitter.
Quoting an article on the subject, the coalition also tweeted, “‘The accused cop has been arrested and the case will be investigated,’ for accidentally killing an innocent civllian or murder?”
Human rights violations remain rampant in Kashmir, particularly after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist government stripped the Muslim-majority region of its special semi-autonomous status in 2019.
Mainstream TV newscaster celebrates Gujarat police’s public assault on Muslims
Prime-time news anchor and news outlet News 18’s senior editor Aman Chopra disturbingly celebrated the brutal and humiliating public flogging of a group of Muslim men by Gujarat police. With no care for the victims, he called the horrific incident a “new form of ‘dandiya’ by Gujarat Police.” Dandiya is a folk dance commonly performed during the Hindu festival Navratri and symbolizes the fight of good against evil.
Chopra appeared to bask in the humiliation and suffering of the victims, repeatedly making jokes about the flogging and asking his crewmen to show a six-minute long video of the incident with “good angles and audio.”
His clearly sadistic behavior has drawn criticism from a number of prominent journalists, including fact-checker Mohammad Zubair, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize.
“I’ve just reported a tweet by a TV Anchor working at Ambani’s News Channel @CNNnews18. Let’s see if [Twitter] takes down this tweet by a News Channel & Anchor praising and celebrating public flogging,” he tweeted.
Journalist and author Swati Chaturvedi called Chopra a “repulsive bigot” who “applauds Gujarat police’s mob rule” and “calls lack of the rule of law ‘dandiya.’” She also called the segment “garbage.”
The Editors Guild of India has compared India’s media to Radio Rwanda, which infamously ratcheted up hatred leading to a genocide of 800,000 people in that country. The Guild has pointed out that media supportive of Modi promotes genocide by “deliberately creating circumstances that target vulnerable communities by spewing hatred towards them and their beliefs.”
