Aftershocks

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“In some areas, the grief and anger [among Hindus] here have already erupted into violence [against Muslims].”

Since the voiceover and McGivering’s report constitute BBC’s own position, we must underline the biases in both. Without evidence, the voiceover blames Muslims for the death of fifty-seven who are explicitly identified as Hindus. That is, BBC ensures that viewers take Muslims as attackers and Hindus as victims. The subsequent report legitimizes this framing because the anti-Muslim pogrom that continued for three days in Gujarat and which led to killing of over 2,000 Muslims is described as “erupting” from “the grief and anger” among Hindus.

Mark that while BBC describes the burning of the train as an act by Muslims as a group, hence planned and coordinated; the anti-Muslim pogrom is termed simply as having “erupted” and hence spontaneous. In the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘erupt’ means a natural, unplanned processes such as coming of teeth through gums. Clearly, the anti-Muslim pogrom was neither spontaneous nor unplanned.

BBC’s twin strategy of blaming Muslims for the death of fifty-seven Hindus and terming the violence of anti-Muslim pogrom as eruption are not only factually incorrect and grossly biased, they in fact partake in the language supplied by BJP or Indian/Hindu nationalism. Recall Modi justified the pogrom in Newton’s language of action and reaction: “Earlier, these people [Muslims] had murdered women teachers [in Godhra]. And now they have done this terrible crime for which a reaction is going on.” The dominant phrase “post-Godhra riots” used not just by BJP but also by its rival parties, including by most media, belongs to a repertoire that takes it that Muslims invite violence against themselves because it is they who initiate it.

In part two, the documentary names Hindus engaged in the barbaric lynching of Muslims not as killers or criminals but as “cow vigilantes.” Far from being critical, note that cow vigilante is a dignifying term supplied by BJP. Historically, cow vigilante as a term belongs to the anti-Muslim, Hindu “cow protection” movement of Indian nationalism in colonial India. Contrary to its own documentation of such lynching backed by politicians, the documentary incomprehensibly describes the issue as “enmity between Hindus and Muslims.”

Obviously, to analyze violence in terms of Newton’s action-reaction maxim is anything but “impartial and independent,” the motto of BBC. That leaders in a democracy uphold it is, to say the least, alarming. More alarming is the ratification in 2012 of Modi’s theory of action and reaction by a special investigation team appointed by the Supreme Court.

And this theory is pervasive, including in law. The attackers at Godhra train station were tried under the new anti-terrorism law, while culprits of “retaliatory” pogrom against Muslims under the Indian Penal

Code. The creation of different categories of criminals and their placement under different laws emanate from colonial-orientalist knowledge.

After the failed anti-British rebellion in 1857, Orientalist W.W. Hunter depicted Muslims as “fanatic.” To Hunter, violence by Muslims emanated from their religious “fanaticism.” The “postcolonial” Indian power elites liked this Orientalism, amplifying that violence by “peaceful” Hindus is always “defensive.” Examining the post-9/11 politics of law, anthropologist Julia Eckert remarked that “there was the perception of a growing double standard in Indian law or of a dual law that judged Muslim violence and protest as terrorism and Hindu violence as ‘natural reaction’ or spontaneous ‘outburst.’”

Astonishingly, the documentary is silent about counterterrorism accompanied by Islamophobia. Can one, however, understand Indian or international politics since 9/11, which also marks Modi’s entry into open politics, without the global war on terror? Before becoming Gujarat Chief Minister and soon after the horrific 9/11 attacks in the US, in a TV debate and as BJP’s general secretary, Modi had linked Islam with terrorism. To him, terrorism was innate to Islam and the “whole world” had witnessed terrorism “for 1,400 years” (since the Prophet Muhammad’s time).

Despite the fact that post-9/11 politics, including Modi’s, revolves around Islamophobia and terrorism, how to explain their absence from the documentary? The absence seems due probably to BBC’s own contribution – minor or major – to Islamophobia. Only days after she had vilified Islam, describing deception as integral to Muslims’ faith, BBC, for example, invited Melanie Phillips as a guest in its program, Politics Live, in 2019.

Such a practice is not a one-off. In April 2014 and before he was elected Prime Minister, Ritula Shah of BBC Radio 4 described him as “charismatic.” Based on her own reporting from an election rally she covered, Shah said: “Narendra Modi is a compelling orator. At a rally I attended in Delhi recently, the crowd was rapt attentive, almost mesmerized by this broad-chested bare of a man.” Shah preferred not to tell her listeners that Modi the orator had his speeches filled with Islamophobia such that listening to his speech while he was Gujarat Chief Minister, a young woman sitting in the front row screamed: “Kill the Muslim motherfuckers.”

Clearly, my point is not that there is nothing critical in the BBC documentary. There is. Referring to the British government’s report about the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Jack Straw, the then British Foreign Secretary said: “These were very serious claims – that Chief Minister Modi had played a pretty active part in pulling back the police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.” However, he simultaneously stressed that “we are never going to break diplomatic relations with India.”

From the perspective of justice-seeking humanity brutalized by the Gujarat pogrom carried out under Modi as Chief Minister, Straw’s later statement cancels the earlier one. On this matter, the BBC documentary has no hope for the future either. Toward the end in the final part, two European academics are interviewed. They observe that since the West needs India as an ally to counter China, it is unlikely that the West will raise any consequential voice against the ongoing violent dehumanization in India. One is left wondering if such a message is either independent or impartial (or neither).

So, what the raid by Income Tax officials at the BBC offices shows is this: the government desires sameness, not only similarity, between its own worldview and that of the media such as the BBC.

George Orwell, briefly employed by BBC during WW II, had privately described his employer as “a mixture of whoreshopand lunatic asylum.” Aware of our own context as different from Orwell’s, readers can judge if and how his observation needs to be revised.

Irfan Ahmad (PhD Cum Laude, University of Amsterdam) is Professor of Anthropology-Sociology at Ibn Haldun University, Turkey. Until early 2022, he was Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. A public intellectual, he has taught at Australian (Monash University and Australian Catholic University) and Dutch Universities (University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University). He tweets @IrfanHindustan.

continue after the massive earthquake in Turkey/Syria

Community support for the victims of the disaster has been swift from Australia with donations of cash, clothing and sleeping bags on their way already.

Muslim bodies including AFIC and ANIC have called on the Juma congregations today at Mosques Australia-wide to pray for the victims and donate generously to reputable charitable and humanitarian organisations helping the victims of this disaster.

The number of injured people in war-torn Syria is still rising fast across all affected territories some areas are controlled by the government while others are held by the rebels.

Rescue teams have now stopped digging out survivors including children fighting against time and hampered by cold weather with a lack of power and heavy equipment, especially in Syria.

Earlier after the earthquake, tens of thousands of survivors were evacuated from the affected Turkish cities with the government in emergency action mode.

However, due to the conflict in Syria, the victims especially in rebel-held areas have nowhere to go and are without shelter, power and external aid.

It took more than three days after the earthquakes for the first delivery of aid supplies from the United Nations to cross into northwest Syria yesterday from Turkey.

The flow of humanitarian aid was disrupted due to logistical issues and damage to the road connecting Turkey to the UN transhipment hub Turkey.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for more aid access to north-western Syria from Turkey so that delivery of aid can be facilitated through more than one border crossing.