Bullying Bhakts

It’s tempting and probably justified to roll your eyes at hashtag activism. At stars posing for pretty pictures with pretty placards but doing little of practical value. The hideous rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu has brought out the virtue signallers in their self-righteous hordes. Better an army of insincere bien pensants leaping onto a passing bandwagon, though, than the awful people who see a conspiracy against Hindus in the coverage of even so vile a crime. One Hyderabad journalist found herself on the wrong side of these raging, spittle-flecked trolls when she published a cartoon on her Facebook page. A shocked Sita, having read the headlines in the newspaper, tells Ram that she is “glad” she was “kidnapped by Ravan and not your bhakts!” Some of the easily outraged mentioned Gauri Lankesh and the murdered journalists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as examples of the retribution meted out to journalists who offend. Or “hurt sentiments” in the cloying but chilling phrase favoured in India. One obscure Hindu organisation sent a legal notice to the journalist in question, and another whose offence was sharing the cartoon. Imagine reserving your bile not for those capable of raping and murdering an eight-year-old child but for those who see in the crime signs of a divisive, vitiated atmosphere attributable in part to the rhetoric of Hindutva? And imagine, in these circumstances, using rape threats and sexually charged abuse to make your anger apparent.