How The Quint journalist Fatima Khan remembered Imam but reduced non-Muslim victims of Nuh violence to mere statistics

Days after Islamists executed a sinister pre-planned conspiracy to attack Hindu devotees of Jalabhishek Yatra in Haryana’s Nuh, their intellectual allies among the Left ecosystem, who are always ready to shield Islamists, made a beeline to soft-pedal their role and portray Muslims as the predominant victims of the violence. The Quint, in its recent article authored by one Fatima Khan, slyly tried to push the propaganda of Muslim victimhood concerning Nuh violence.

While reporting about the victims of the violence that engulfed Nuh, a Muslim-majority region in Haryana’s Mewat district and known for cow smuggling, love jihad, and assorted criminal activities, The Quint writer deviously mentioned the identity of the lone Muslim victim while describing the other dead as mere “locals” and “home guards”.

The Quint’s @khanthefatima reports on deaths in Nuh violence – two unnamed “locals” and one “Naib Imam” pic.twitter.com/I8raZS1Kz4

— Swati Goel Sharma (@swati_gs) August 4, 2023

“A total of five have been reported dead in the state so far, including two home guards and two locals in Nuh and one Naib Imam in Gurugam’s Sector 57,” read The Quint article that also sought to deny Yatris were held hostage at the temple by Islamists.

OpIndia debunked the claim here, referring to the temple priest who said that his statement was misused by the leftists to spread propaganda.

It is worth noting that while Naib Imam was named as a victim, the others killed due to violence were reduced to being just ‘home-guards’ or ‘ locals’ as if they had no names and no religious identities.

The Quint and Fatima Khan perhaps did not bother mentioning the religious identities of two home guards and the two locals killed due to the Islamist violence because, after all, they were not Muslims and citing their identities would puncture the narrative of Muslim victimhood that they had been assiduously pushing ever since violence first broke in Nuh on July 31.

In fact, they even got the count of victims wrong. Not 5 but 6 people perished in the violence after Islamist mobs, as per a preplanned conspiracy, attacked a Hindu procession that was on its way to Nalhar Shiva Temple.

But since none of the others killed in the violence were Muslims, The Quint and Khan probably did not bother to verify the numbers first, much less reveal their identities.

For the unversed, here’s the lowdown of the remaining 5 non-Muslim victims of Nuh violence

Among those killed by the Islamist mob include two home guards, Neeraj and Gurusewak. Gursewak sustained an injury on his liver which led to his death, as per the post-mortem report. The cause of his injury was blunt force impact as the officials were attempting to control the Islamist mob which went on a killing spree following an attack on a peaceful Hindu Shobha Yatra.

Another Homeguard Neeraj Khan lost his life while trying to do his duty. His autopsy report mentions blunt force impact as the cause of death. Several large-scale injuries were also found on his body indicating the severity of the attack launched at him by the jihadis.

Abhishek Rajput, a Hindu devotee who participated in the Jalabhishek Yatra, was another victim of the bloodthirsty mob of Islamists that not only shot at him but also slit his throat and crushed his head with stones, a stark resemblance to the methods Taliban and ISIS terrorists to kill their victims.

Not just Hindu devotees who participated in the procession but local Hindus, too, were caught in the crosshair of the Islamists, who remained indiscriminate in killing and attacking Hindus regardless of whether they took part in the Jalabhishek Yatra or not. A sweet seller Shakti Saini was also killed by the Islamist mob. As per eyewitness accounts, Saini was abducted from the shop and taken elsewhere and later killed and then the dead body was dumped at the same Badkali square around which his shop was located.

Similarly, Pradeep Kumar, a Hindu devotee and a Bajrang Dal activist, was the sixth victim of the violence that Islamists had planned as an interrogation of the arrested youth has revealed, who confessed that WhatsApp groups were created as early as July 21 to July 23 and responsibilities assigned to group admins to gather stones and collect glass bottles to attack Hindu procession scheduled to take place on July 31.

Pradeep Kumar, as per an eyewitness account, was rescued safely from the Nalhar temple, where several Hindus were hiding to save themselves from the Islamist mob, and brought to the Nuh police lines. The Islamists, however, ruthlessly killed him on Tuesday, August 1, while he was returning from the police station. 

Kapil Tyagi, another Bajrang Dal activist who was accompanying Pradeep Kumar when he was attacked and killed, spoke to Opindia. Recalling how the murderous Islamist mob launched a vicious attack on their car while they were returning from Nuh police lines in the early hours of Tuesday, Kapil Tyagi said that it appeared as if these Islamists were waiting in ambush the entire night. “When they saw our car, they launched a murderous attack on us. Pradeep Kumar, who could not defend himself due to being badly injured, died.” Kapil Tyagi also suffered a lot of injuries in this attack and is undergoing treatment.

The duplicity of leftwing media when victims are Hindu and perpetrators are Muslims

Ever since PM Modi ascended to the country’s highest office, the leftwing media has been consciously driving a narrative of Muslim victimhood—to allege that Muslims are perpetually facing the threat of persecution under the BJP government. This narrative demands the dehumanising of Hindu victims of Islamist violence while whitewashing Islamists of the religious fanaticism they routinely indulge in.

Last year, when Mohammed Zubair’s dog-whistling against Nupur Sharma triggered Sar Tan Se Juda violence by Islamists across the country, leading to the deaths of at least 6 Hindus, including Kanhaiya Lal, Umesh Kolhe, etc., the left-leaning liberals invested all their energies in painting a target behind Nupur Sharma and accusing her of making derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad without once fact-checking her comments. The victims such as Kanhaiya Lal and Umesh Kolhe hardly featured in their discourse. And when they did talk about them, it was only to blame Nupur Sharma for their deaths, conveniently giving a clean chit to Zubair and the Islamists who were responsible for their brutal murders.

Apparently, for the Indian Left, Hindu victims of hate crime, be it Kanhaiya Lal, Kishan Bharwad, Umesh Kolhe, Abhishek Rajput, Pradeep Kumar, or Shakti Saini, are just a mere statistics, whose deaths do not evoke the same degree of poignancy as someone like Naib Imam’s death does, because they are kaafirs after all.