Somehow all this responsibility goes for a toss if a Muslim couple were to claim something similar. Recall how allegations of many Muslim men who cla… - Rahul Roushan

I won’t say that I was immediately attracted towards these handles and initiatives, but they gradually exposed me to a counter-set of views, many of which sounded logical and convincing to me. Instead of countering them on facts, many of the celebrity journalists decided to discredit and label these voices by using terms such as ‘Internet Hindus’ and ‘trolls’— which was not a very smart strategy, as it made the Sanghis appear to be victims of vilification.

There are countless such examples—a Muslim model claiming to have been denied a flat in Mumbai due to her religion while in reality many Muslims were already living in that building, a Muslim boy in Delhi claiming some men beat him up and asked him to chant ‘Jai Mata Di’, but later his friends, who were Muslims too, revealed that nothing of that sort ever took place, a man in Mumbai claiming that an auto-rickshaw driver beat him up because he was carrying a leather bag, which the driver suspected to be made of cow skin, but subsequent reports revealed that the story was entirely made up by the man who reportedly admitted that he hated Hindus —and all of these were reported by the media without waiting for any verification or confirmation by the police. But somehow the same journalists decide to wait and become ‘responsible’ if a Hindu man or woman claims to be a victim of communal hatred.

But apart from the violence, what triggered the Sanghi in me during those days was an article by Teesta Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand in The Indian Express, barely a week after the rioting at Azad Maidan ... The hypocrisy was staggering. Setalvad and her husband were virtually arguing that the police did the right thing by letting the Muslims vent out their anger against perceived injustices. Well, that’s exactly what they accused Modi of saying and doing — that he asked the police in Gujarat to let the Hindus vent out their anger over the Godhra train carnage.