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Dear Prashant Bhushan, have you no shame? Your tweet ignores the religious persecution of Hindus and negates their demand for equal rights

January 2, 2021
Shivaprasad P

In the aftermath of the devastation wreaked upon the Krishna Dwara Temple in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan by a mob allegedly numbering in the hundreds, Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan has made an insensitive tweet on the incident. In his tweet, Prashant Bhushan compared the temple’s wanton destruction with an instance of the vandalism of a mosque in Madhya Pradesh, and tweeted “Secular India? Where have we come?”

However, the lawyer is guilty of making a false equivalence in his tweet. As media reports show, the police acted swiftly to prevent any damage to the mosque, and the Hindu crowds only managed to place a saffron flag on top of the structure. The police also arrested the miscreants responsible. Compare this to the temple destruction in Pakistan, and as reported in The Commune, the police didn’t show up for hours and no arrests were made at the time.

Prashant Bhushan’s tweet also completely — and willfully — ignores the painful and traumatic history of Hindus’ experiences with Islam over a period of more than a thousand years. Hindus have the brunt of Muslim oppression and intolerance for the better part of the last millennia. Not only were Hindu temples, monasteries and universities plundered of their wealth and wiped out by Muslim warlords and religious leaders in the subcontinent, there was economic exploitation of the Hindu masses too — be it the Sharia-mandated jizya tax exacted upon Hindus by several Muslim rulers, or any one of the forty taxes squeezed from Hindus in the Mughal Empire (there was the pilgrim’s tax, taxes to be paid on the birth of a male child, and also a tax to immerse the ashes of the departed in the river Ganga), or the “breast-tax” imposed by the Nizam of Hyderabad on his subjects.

An abundance of minority welfare schemes and Muslim population growth in India

Furthermore, the tweet also negates the lived experiences of Hindus not only in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also in places like Kashmir. From 23% in 1947 to merely 3-4% of the population in 2016, the Pakistani government has waged a genocide against Hindus and other minorities. Hindus were roughly 35% in the erstwhile East Pakistan, and the number dropped to 20% after the liberation of Bangladesh. In 2016, Hindus were at a mere 7% of the total Bangladeshi population. Abul Barakat, a professor at Bangladesh’s Dhaka University, wrote in his 2016 book The Political Economy of Reforming Agriculture: Land Water Bodies in Bangladesh that an average of 632 Hindus leave Bangladesh every day due to religious persecution and that, at this rate, there will be no Hindus left in Bangladesh after 30 years. In fact, as reported by The Commune, this is the second time that the same Krishna Dwara Temple was demolished, the first time was in 1997.

Compare this to the skyrocketing growth of the Muslim population in India. According to the 2011 Census, Muslims are the only community in India who are growing in numbers, while the proportion of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists in the population has shrunk. Muslims in India also have the highest proportion of the nation’s youth population, with 47% of Muslims aged below 20 years. In Kerala, Muslims form 36.74% of the population aged 0-6 years.

If this isn’t enough to the show that Prashant Bhushan’s tweet was fallacious, the Government of India has been running numerous and infamous minority appeasement schemes, many of which are still continuing under the Narendra Modi-led BJP government. As of 2019, the Modi government had spent a whopping 22,000 crore on minority-welfare. There are no welfare provisions on this scale that cater to the needs of Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Moreover, there are organisations like the Zakat Foundation, with their links to extremist and terrorist groups, that seek to make sure that “the PMO belongs to our boys and girls for the next 35 years”. It must also be pointed out here that Muslims and Christians are allowed to manage the administration their religious institutions, while Hindu temples are administered by the Indian State. Hindu temples in India are also regularly vandalised, as was the case during the anti-CAA riots in Delhi in 2020 or more recently when the murti in a Kodanda Rama Temple was desecrated in Andhra Pradesh.

More brickbats for the advocate

The tweet also earned brickbats from noted journalist Swati Goel Sharma.

The scribe pointed out that “India routinely sees construction of new mosques” and that 5 acres of land were allotted to the Muslim community “as compensation over a non-functional mosque”, referring to the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Ayodhya Ram-Janmabhoomi case. “Wikipedia says India has 3 lakh active mosques. Pakistan has reportedly 30 functional temples”, she added.

Prashant Bhushan’s tweet is utterly nonsensical. One look at reality would deny the narrative his tweet tries to propagate.