By Kaushik Raj and Vipul Kumar
New Delhi: Early this year, a Hindutva mob barged into an old Muslim man’s shop in Uttarakhand’s Kotdwar, asking him to change the name of the shop from ‘Baba’. The mob claimed that ‘Baba’ was a ‘Hindu’ name. A 42-year-old Hindu gym trainer, Deepak Kumar, confronted the mob. When charged with questions on his religious identity, Kumar had said that his name was ‘Mohammad Deepak’. This stirring act of secular amity did not melt the mob, which returned in larger numbers to attack him.
A crowd later arrived to attack Deepak Kumar for standing up for the Muslim shopkeeper. While Deepak Kumar had named Aman Swedia, Siddhant Badoni, Bhupi Chaudhary, and others in his complaint, Uttarakhand Police lodged FIRs against ‘unnamed’ individuals for disturbing peace.
Meanwhile, Deepak, who stood up for his Muslim neighbour, has lost money on his gym ever since. With locals boycotting his sole source of income, reports say that he may have to vacate his gym and move out of the city.
The men he had named have seen very different days, meanwhile.
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A man laced up with a microphone walks into a shop and says, “It’s been 12 years since you rented this shop to him. They are running away with our sisters. You are strengthening them.”
It turns out that the person being spoken to is the owner of a building and a Hindu. The shopkeeper, to whom he has rented the premises, is a Muslim man.
In a three-minute 15-second-long video with multiple cuts, the man goes on to call for the economic boycott of Muslims and says they are purveyors of ‘love jihad’ – a bogey popularised by Hindutva politics claiming that Muslim men convert Hindu women through marriage.
“If a Muslim asks to rent a shop from you, never rent to him. Even if you have to rent a shop to a Hindu for a lesser price, rent it to a Hindu. They take shops for jihad, not for business. Your money is used for love jihad and spit jihad,” the man is heard saying.
He then brings up a third kind of jihad – “name jihad”. “They have named the shop ‘Aasu’. I want to know if Aasu is a Muslim or not.” He is seen going up to a young boy, probably a minor, and asks him for the name of the owner. The boy replies, “The owner’s name is Ehsaan.”
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.