Thursday 16 February 2023

Shraddha Walkar’s Murder: A Rude Wakeup Call

The grisly murder of Shraddha Walkar in the national capital which came to light five months after the incident sent the nation into shock. The mind-numbing brutality and gut-wrenching monstrosity have few parallels in recent times. This has heightened the fears of the lurking dangers in society and unabated violence against women.

A decade ago, the gangrape of a paramedical student in a moving bus in the national capital shook the nation. People from all walks of life hit the roads and pressurized the government of the day to bring out legislation warranting an exemplary punishment to deter such crimes. Indeed, the influential opinion-makers implored the foreign media to pronounce a judgment on the precarious safety of women and hell broke loose until the international agencies pronounced Delhi as the rape capital of the world.

But a decade later, Shraddha’s grotesque murder in the national capital hardly evoked any response from the commentariat, the feminists, and the apostles of human rights that regularly descend on the political dispensation to bring justice to the victim. What has changed now? Why is there a muted silence now and what explains the comatose lethargy of the elitists in unequivocally condemning the most heinous incident to date? Why it is now inconvenient for people to objectively assess this case?

Amid a threatening rise in violent attacks on non-Muslim women especially by the members of a particular community, the saviours of humanity have donned a strategic silence. Genuine concerns are being rubbished as unwarranted fears and attaching fancy labels the perpetrators are even sheltered from any scrutiny. Deeming these concerns as bigotry while they are brushed under carpet, a similar pattern of attacks against women is witnessed across the globe.

In the past week, a Hindu woman trapped in a relationship was chopped into pieces and dumped in sewage in Bangladesh1. On the other side of the globe, another incident with close parallels surfaced in California2. Refusing to give in to ‘political correctness’ UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed a major action in tackling the ‘grooming gangs’.  While recent conviction and deportation of members of the grooming gang members offered some hope in UK in this direction, the reticence of societies in calling out the crimes for what they are is emboldening the perpetrators.

Back in India, there has been an exponential rise in attacks on Hindu women in interfaith relationships. Appearance of stuffed in suitcases, badly bruised, chopped bodies of women on expressways have become a common place. Most of these cases have a pattern to it which is unmissable. People are jumping into the fray offering a panoply of analyses, worse so, psycho-analysts are even employed to create an alibi for the accused. Brazening these organized attacks, a section of a specific community is eulogizing the accused Abdul as a hero validating the existence of a structured covert coterie. 

Even as numerous FIRs are filed against these violent attacks which most often led to the loss of life of the victim, there has been an adamant refusal to acknowledge the culpability, if the offender belongs to a particular community. In 2009, Kerala court has appealed to the government to frame rules to stop forced conversions under the garb of inter-faith love marriages3, a fatalistic phenomenon.  The first conviction on the Love jihad3 vouches for the wariness of society towards the proliferation of this menace.

Still, secular liberalists continue to deny its existence and apportion the blame on people who call out the bluff of these violent attacks on non-Muslim women. Indeed, the purveyors of this distorted discourse blame the entire society if the culprit is a Hindu but perpetrate a victimhood narrative if the accused is a Muslim.

These attacks have two aspects to them. First, is the reluctance to objectively dissect these cases which bolstered their tenacious recurrence, and the second aspect is the egotistical naivete of the victim community who refuse to discern the motives, larger agenda, and the driving force behind these persistent attacks against non-Muslim communities.

Despite the mounting rise of these incidents, the community, majorly the Hindus at large are disinterested in comprehending the standard operating protocol or a standard template followed in these incidents. Hallucinating in an alternate world of every religion/ ideology is the same and enamored by a Western style of living that has effectively deracinated the community from its roots, they continue to pay a heavy price.

Suffused by the ethos of the western, illiberal education system that systematically extricated generations of Hindu Indians from their culture and values even the connotations of ‘kafir’ or ‘infidel’ have failed to alert them of impending othering. Tricked and conditioned to divorce themselves from their dharma and the civilizational mores, secular Hindu parents having outsourced parenting are now inadvertently throwing their children to wolves. Under the garb of senseless inconsequential modernity, the Hindu community is falling prey to the noxious grooming jihad.

For centuries Hindus have been at the receiving end of religious fanaticism. Lamentably, they refuse to revisit history and learn from the mistakes of the past. Hardwired to blindly believe the modern education system that treats indigenous civilizations with contempt, the educated but civilisationally illiterate majority of India is blissfully undermining the threat of these attacks at their own peril.

In addition to the government’s insouciance, the snail-paced judiciary has been a huge letdown to the society that is anticipating justice. Instead of futile anticipation, it is time to wake up from a deep hypnotic slumber. It is time to get back to our roots, our dharma, and get acquainted with Shatrubodh. Above all, it is time to seek inspiration from stories of tremendous courage and educate children on the heroic tales of our ancestors who fiercely defended the country, civilisation and themselves.


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