But things were happening on the other side too. OpIndia, a website aimed at providing a counter-narrative to the usual liberal narrative, was launch… - Rahul Roushan

I remember that during one of the tiffin breaks, while we kids were playing some silly games, a Muslim boy caught hold of a big empty earthen pot, which was used to store drinking water for the students during summers, and raised it with both hands shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. He was imitating the Ramayana TV serial scene where Lord Hanuman raises big boulders and throws them at Raavan’s army. Today, forget Muslims, our intellectuals are busy teaching even Bengali Hindus that ‘Jai Shri Ram’ is not part of their culture and they shouldn’t chant this phrase.

To give you a small but recent example, in December 2019, a statement in support of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—an act that enabled non-Muslim refugees living in India but originally hailing from the three neighbouring Islamic nations to seek Indian citizenship—was released and signed by hundreds of academicians and researchers across various universities and institutes. The statement, along with the names of signatories, was published on OpIndia, a website run by the company I currently head. Within 24 hours of that statement being published, I was approached and requested by those who coordinated the campaign to collect these signatures—something that could happen only because Modi had returned to power and some people could feel a little secure in opining ideas that did not conform to the leftist worldview—to remove the link to a public document that contained the full names of all the signatories, because one of the signatories was hounded by his leftist colleagues and students to the extent of being threatened of physical assaults and fake sexual harassment charges. He finally gave up and asked his name to be removed from any publicly accessible document. We obliged.

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.