A shameful sign of our vitiated times

It is a shameful sign of our vitiated times that the worst train tragedy of our times was sought to be communalised and used to insinuate against the country’s main minority community. While the train accident in Balasore district shocked and distressed the nation, there was a deliberate attempt to channelise that distress into distrust and suspicion of Muslims. The intention was to blame Muslims for the accident and to dub them as saboteurs and anti-nationals. The platform for the campaign was naturally the social media which has the power and reach to make any lie ring true, any suggestion credible and any suspicion, a certitude. There is no doubt that it was a deliberate attempt to malign the Muslim community, and the perpetrators of the vicious campaign would have known that they were making inventions and innuendos without a basis in facts. This makes it all the more despicable and deserving of punitive legal action.

Soon after the news about the accident broke and its magnitude became known, messages started circulating which said “it’s a Friday, just saying”. It was then claimed that a small white structure seen in some photographs of the accident scene was a mosque. The obvious suggestion was that the mosque or activities there had some link with the accident. On fact-checking, it was found that the structure was a Hindu temple. Then a message went viral which said that ‘Mohammad Sharif, station master of the Bahanaga railway station’ where the accident occurred, was absconding after the accident. But the person in charge of the station was Assistant Station Master S B Mohanty, and there was no-one by name Mohammad Sharif among the staff. All this was not just wrong or fake news but mischievous and tendentious concoctions created with a purpose.

When everything that happens in the country is used to malign a community, it is clear that there is a pre-conceived plan to target it. When it is a bad thing, the blame is for the community whether it had anything to do with the event or not. When it is a good thing, it is said that it happened despite the community. This is because of the toxic environment of hatred, prejudice and exclusion that is growing in the country. It promotes a mindset primitive in its passions, shorn of humanity in its ways, and crude and unthinking in its actions. This ecosystem of hatred at the social level has close links with the political environment, and both feed and nourish each other. This will ultimately sap the spirit of the nation and make it a crash site of communities moving on unyielding lines and clashing with each other.