OPINION - As usual, Kamini Prakash is very selective about the news she chooses to base her letters on and which portions to focus on (“Indian event allowed Covid-19 to spread”, Daily News, April 9).
Just as the media and governing BJP are doing in her neighbourhood of India, she is using the Tablighi Jamaat meeting to stigmatise and vilify Muslims in that country.
However, writing in the Financial Times, award-winning author Arundhati Roy says the Muslims held their - admittedly ill-advised - mass meeting before the Indian lockdown was announced, contrary to Prakash’s assertion that they defied the lockdown.
Roy says the BJP, aided by a media which is becoming very chary with the truth, is using the incident “to stigmatise and demonise Muslims”.
“The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad,” she says. This is the level to which the Indian governing party and compliant media will stoop in their campaign to stir up resentment against the Muslims of that country.
Roy also reports on the lead-up to the epidemic in that country. The first Indian Covid-19 case was reported on January 30, but Narendra Modi only called for a single day’s “people’s curfew” on March 22, nearly a full two months later.
There was also the Delhi Assembly elections, which the BJP lost despite “a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of ‘traitors’”.
Having lost anyway, Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the loss, were punished.
“Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi,” says Roy.
She adds that the response to the announcement of the “people’s curfew” on March 22 was men jumping into barrels of “sacred cow dung”, and BJP supporters holding cow-urine drinking parties.
This is the other side of the story.
D PLAATJES Durban