After being crowned with the title of rape capital of the world, recently India also got the title of land of intolerance. Following the Dadri incident, there was widespread reporting on growing intolerance in India both in domestic and international media and how Hindus have become intolerant in a year since they elected BJP to power at the national level. Since Dadri — which was an isolated incident in a country of 1.2 billion people — was used to define Hindu society and India by the west, let us analyse what standard they follow in their own backyard. To summarize, western media and their leaders are just a bunch of hypocrites and hardly the role model to sermonize others. In the next few paragraphs we will list the scale of intolerance afflicting the west which has no parallels in India. First, we will look at beacon of morality i.e. western Europe and then look at current developments in the US.
Let’s first look at France, the country which banned Hijab a few years ago. Recently, there was a massive anti-Muslim rally in the French province of Corsica. Here, the “tolerant protesters” vandalised mosques and attacked Muslims. But western media ran this story for three days before forgetting that such an incident ever happened. There was no constant whining of intolerance and racism by far right wing etc. in the media, nor was there 24/7 news coverage for the victims (Corsican Muslims) for 3 months. There was no advice against Islamophobia nor any sermons on religious tolerance to the French by any major leader like Obama did to Indians when he visited India. The above attack should be seen in the broader context of the emergence of Front National — the conservative far right wing party in France — which won approximately one-third of the votes in the recent municipal elections.
The UK is not far behind and recently passed a law to officially monitor the Muslims and mosques of the UK. There was no call for an intolerance debate, no constant blitz on growing far right in UK or call from other countries to restrict the visa for the UK’s Prime Minister. The news ran for two days before the media there conveniently found other pressing issues to focus on rather than discuss this official spying of 5% of their own population.
In Cologne, following the sexual assaults on German women by immigrant Muslims on New Year’s eve, their mayor advised women to stay away from strangers and blamed the victims for the horrors they faced. But even here, their media was quick to categorize this as a bad opinion of just one woman — somehow, when one or two random Indian rapists think women ought to be blamed for rape, it becomes the opinion of the entire nation and feminists from the UK come to India to make documentaries on Indian women while they have a rape rate which is 20 times worse than India. Even more hypocritical is the negligence on the part of big media organizations in Europe as they took more than a week to report the Cologne attacks when it became impossible to suppress this news.
The developments from across the Atlantic are not less hypocritical either. Recently, Donald Trump, the leading Republican presidential nominee, called for a total ban on Muslims entering their country, even though Muslims form less than 1% of their population. Ever since he announced such a proposal he has been gaining popularity in the polls and has now built a huge momentum around his ban-Muslims statement. This rhetoric has been taken to the point where he chose this statement to lead his election ad campaign. He has been criticised by the media to a large extent, but again no one wants to blame American Christian society and instead try to blame it on the lone man Trump — even though it is pretty clear from the polls and surveys that more than 50% of Americans view Muslims unfavourably and an equal number want them banned. Yet Obama for some reason has more reason to sermonize India on tolerance than tend to the growing intolerance and racism in his own country as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.
If these incidents are any indication, it is pretty clear that most of the westerners are rank hypocrites who have no morals other than their own best interests at heart. A good example is the way they treat themselves let alone outsiders like Indians. The UK — the same country which passed a legal resolution to officially spy on their Muslims — has no problem contemplating a ban on Donald Trump for his anti-Muslim comments. This is also the reason why Obama thinks that India needs lessons on intolerance when their own government has unofficially sanctioned racial profiling under the garb of security and when their own presidential election front-runner asks for a blanket ban on Muslim entry to the USA.
India recognised Christmas as an official holiday when the Christian population was less than 1%. Contrast it with the western world which has a Hindu population of more than 1% today and yet no country in the west has recognised Diwali as an official holiday. For these people, tolerance and freedom of religion are just excuses which they use for spreading their own religion and culture. Modi government and Hindus became “intolerant” after the Modi government banned foreign NGOs involved in subverting Hindus and converting them to Christianity and stalling development projects. They use freedom of religion and this fake tolerance debate as a tool to further their agenda — nothing more than cultural and ideological imperialism.
So it’s high time Indians stopped seeking western approval for their actions on what is best for them. It is time for India to pay them back in their own currency and make documentaries on intolerance in UK or Sweden, the rape capital of the world. But there is also a lesson to be learnt from these hypocritical standards of the west — protect national interest at all cost and subvert other nations through information war. Islam is seen as a problem in all these nations, which led to the current surveillance law in the UK. India should also actively seek to fight this Islamic menace and not shy away from hard questions and laws, instead of going soft on fanatics to polish its tolerant image in the eyes of the western ayatollahs — who, as shown above, perfectly fit the description of the emperor without clothes.