The article ignores those crimes committed in which perpetrators were Muslims and the victims were Hindus

BBC News on September 2, 2021 published an article with the headline “Beaten and humiliated by Hindu mobs for being a Muslim in India.”

With its bigoted agenda, the BBC article has all along attempted to push anti-Hindu narrative by selectively reporting crimes in which the alleged accused were reportedly Hindus and referred to it as a ‘hate crime’ while deliberately ignoring those crimes committed in which the alleged perpetrators were Muslims and the victims were Hindus.

The article starts with the sentence “Unprovoked attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs have become routine in India.”

Thereafter, the article talks about two incidents in the month of August - a 45-year-old Muslim man in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh was assaulted by a group of men and allegedly forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram” slogans; a Muslim man in Indore, Madhya Pradesh was thrashed by locals for selling bangles in a ‘Hindu locality’.

In the first incident, the local police said that a relative of the victim e-rickshaw driver was involved in a legal dispute with his Hindu neighbour.

In July last year, the two sides had filed a lawsuit against each other in the case. The incident, which is not justifiable at all, was linked to a legal dispute. The police arrested six people in this case under strict IPC charges.

The Police had to release three of them in view of the Supreme Court order against overcrowding in prisons during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The BBC article, however, terms this incident as ‘unprovoked’ and nowhere mentions its link with a legal dispute.

Instead, the article links this incident with the “anti-Muslim violence” and “Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi” to propagate its anti-Modi agenda.

Also, the article gives a wrong spin to the release of three of six accused men by saying that “three men arrested for the attack were freed on bail a day later.”

In the second incident, a 25-year-old Muslim bangle-seller Taslim was beaten up by a mob for allegedly ‘selling bangles in Hindu locality’.

A video of Taslim being beaten up had gone viral on social media, in which unidentified men can be seen beating up the bangle-seller.

The BBC article, however, does not highlight the police version of the incident.

The local police had booked the bangle-seller for allegedly assuming a fake Hindu identity and under POCSO and other charges, after a First Information Report (FIR) was registered against him for allegedly molesting a minor girl.

The locals who assaulted the bangle-seller had accused him of molesting a minor girl.

The FIR was lodged by the girl’s family and also claimed the man had shown them a fake Aadhar card with a Hindu name.

According to the girl, Taslim allegedly molested her when her mother had gone inside her house to fetch money.

Three among the attackers accused of beating up the bangle seller were also arrested by police. The BBC article deliberately skips these facts.

***The writer is a Delhi-based journalist; views expressed are his own