A few days ago, two major violent interactions took over the talk all over India. The first was the attempted riot in Kanpur, and the second was a small clip from a television debate, broadcasted by Al-Jazeera, the Qatari royal family's mouthpiece to the world, alleging a statement of blasphemy by the BJP's National Spokesperson Nupur Sharma.
While UP police reacted immediately to the riot in Kanpur and not only brought the situation under control immediately, but also started identifying, publicizing and arresting the rioters, there was lull on Nupur Sharma's statement quoting Sahih Bukhari about the prophet's wife Ayesha for the first 3-4 days, and people had forgotten all about it. Then, as per his day job, Alt News "fact-checker" Md. Zubair started circulating a distorted clip of the debate from a few days ago, and it was picked up by Al-Jazeera.
As the clip reached the world, a bunch of OIC countries from the Arab world started echoing the objection raised wrongly by Zubair, taking it as an opportunity to show down Zimmi India its place, as they were extremely irritated by the fact that India has increased its buying of Russian crude oil from less than 1% to around 17% of its need since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, and it was at the cost of the OIC countries, many of which are part of OPEC as well.
While the BJP government supported our foreign minister Dr. S Jaishankar in telling the West to back off, on this issue, they decided to placate the Muslim countries. But Why? They could very well have shown the clip to the objecting parties and supported their spokesperson, stating she simply quoted what is in the Hadis. The matter would have died off, and no one would be the wiser.
However by assuaging the Muslim countries, they have made sure that the hullabaloo doesn't die off. This in fact is deliberate in my opinion. In order to understand why it is so, we must pay attention to the actions taken by the government after placating the ambassadors. While the outrage of BJP's ever widening support base continues to hog the media, the government has put its agencies on task to mark and destroy major troublemakers from the forever-rebels and secessionists. While they are yet to touch the likes of Owaisi or Mohua Moitra, many second rung troublemakers have already had FIRs made against them on grounds of hurting religious sentiments, while includes the likes of Saba Naqvi. On the other hand, the troublemaker's outrage over Kanpur arrests is getting suppressed by the so-called persecution and abandonement of Nupur Sharma as well.
Nupur has not only been removed as a spokesperson of the BJP, but her primary membership of BJP has also been suspended, and Delhi Police has lodged an FIR on her under respective clauses of IPC. What does that translate to though? It translates to a well-orchestrated fabricated punishment, from which Nupur Sharma will come out unscathed as long as the BJP doesn't actually wash their hands off her, in which case it will easily go to the looney crowd's anger finishing her off. Her trial will end in acquittal as it will be easily proved that she did not twist anything from the Hadis, and her statement was verbatim. On the other hand, every major figure who has in past few years spewed venom on the cosmology of Sanatana Dharma will face strong punishment, if the judiciary's mind is not tilted towards being Zimmi.
It appears that the BJP has started to learn the utility of plausible deniability, and this time it may be used in testing capacity, but if the tactic succeeds, the enemies of Bharat and Sanatana Dharma should be shivering in fear.
