Kishan Bharwad, a 27-year-old man from the Dhandhuka district of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, and father of a (barely) month-old toddler, posted a video on social media which didn’t go down well with Muslims. They felt it was blasphemous and decided to deal with the incident in the Islamic way: He was brutally shot dead by two Muslim youths on January 25 for posting the video that allegedly hurt the feelings of peaceful Muslims. What did the video contain?
The video shared on Facebook on January 6 showed the image of Prophet Muhammed. It quoted Lord Jesus as saying he is God’s son, Mohammed as saying he is God’s Prophet, and Shri Krishna as saying he is God himself. None of these were his personal statements. This is what we have been told since time immemorial by the scriptures of the respective faiths. It could have been created by someone else, which he just happened to share on his timeline.
But this left the local Muslim community obstreperous as they went on to file police complaints about allegedly hurting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community by repeating what the Prophet said. Kishan was an animal lover, and he regularly served the cause by saving cows from illegal slaughter at the hands of Muslim butchers. He was forced to apologise a few days before his murder by the Muslim youth, but that wasn’t enough as per Islamic instructions.
It was on January 25 at 5:30 that he was hunted down by two bikers who shot him to death from behind as he, along with his cousin, was passing by the Modhwada locality on his two-wheeler. The two killers, Mohammad Shabbir, 25, and Mohammed Imtiaz Pathan, 27, have been arrested and have been taken into custody by the police. It was found out that they committed the murder on the orders of a Maulvi, named Mohammad Ayub Jarawala, who regularly preached killing for blasphemy as part of Islamic radicalisation. He provided the killers with ammunition and was in contact with another Maulvi from Delhi. Mohammed Shabir, who fired bullets at the late Kishan Bharwad, was a local vendor, and he came in touch with the Delhi-based Maulvi sometime ago, who had later introduced him to Maulvi Mohammad Ayub Jarawala from Jamalpur, Ahmedabad. He had met Maulvi Ayub several times where they plotted to murder Kishan, displaying the organised nature of the terror that resulted in the victim’s death.
Not to mention that it is not the first time that a crime of this sort has been committed against Hindus. Late Kamlesh Tiwari had allegedly called Prophet Muhammad the first homosexual in the world, and this didn’t end well for him. He was shot, stabbed 15 times, and had his throat slit on October 18, 2019 at his house in Lucknow, states his Wikipedia page. And this isn’t a local phenomenon in India, as the shootings at Charlie Hebdo continue to echo internationally, the Islamic preaching has spilt the blood of people who don’t subscribe to the Mohammedan ideology.
In 2015, two French Muslim brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, made their way into the Paris offices of the French satirical weekly publication Charlie Hebdo. They killed 12 individuals and injured 11 others while armed with rifles and other weapons. It was only in December 2021 that a mob in Sialkot tortured a Sri Lankan Hindu man to death who worked as a manager at a local plant over blasphemy claims before burning his body. A similar case happened recently when a Pakistani woman was sentenced to death over a “blasphemous” WhatsApp story. The identical nature of these incidents across countries is a reflection of the Islamic framework of demonising and brutalising anybody who doesn’t agree with its myopic regulations.
These murderers will, of course, be provided with legal aid and community backing through organisations like Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the Islamic organisation that provides halal certificates. This often heightens a religious agenda that protects itself under the vicious garb of “halal”, which ensures economic and social exclusion for non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are made to pay Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind through halal certificates for even vegetarian food items such as Namkeen. The same money is later diverted to aid the perpetrators who kill innocent non-Muslims like Kamlesh Tiwari and Kishan Bharwad.
Gujarat home minister (MoS) Harsh Sanghvi tweeted about his horrendous murder, stating that “justice shall be served”. But this raises many stark questions about the secular fabric of this country. Religious tolerance should be at the heart of secularism, but going on killing innocent people is not something that should be endured in the garb of blasphemy. We wonder if Kishan Bharwad will receive justice, or will this case, like so many others under the benevolent eyes of our “secular” country, fizzle out and be thrown under the rug?
The supremacist, exclusionary, and barbarian nature of Islam has become a hazard to the safety of the common man and the secular fabric of this nation, and we have failed to address the very root of this bizarre problem as a state. A state that has failed to answer these real questions:
1. Isn’t it understood that a religion that asserts its supremacy by repeating “I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is God’s messenger” when they chant “La illaha illalah”? Is it not five times a day through loudspeakers that it is the one that superimposes intolerance on others?
2. Should a Muslim expect a non-Muslim to be secular after knowing the meaning of the Shahadah?
3. How is secularism thus serving others like Hindus who are not bloodthirsty towards people who don’t follow their religion?
4. How is the Indian state planning to provide justice to the innocent people who succumbed to Islamic fanaticism in the name of blasphemy? Are there going to be enough laws to prevent such acts of terror?
5. Should we soon be expecting the law at the hands of such people who are here to make all decisions without an iota of guilt or humanity?
6. Do we deserve to be worried about our children posting something on social media because, literally, it can get them killed?
We are not seeing much of real media coverage of something this heinous. We wonder if justice will really be served in a country where religious tolerance is a one-sided love affair. Whether in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Islamic republics like Pakistan, or secular democracies like India and France, Islam’s flirtations with blasphemy are soaked in blood. As a civilised country, we must prosecute every criminal who directly or indirectly participates in the grisly act of murdering innocent citizens under the guise of blasphemy. For now, it is clearly understood that these murders in the name of blasphemy aren’t committed in the heat of the moment but rather in a well-organized, syndicated manner, demanding us to revisit the matter constitutionally and spiritually. Yesterday it was Kamlesh Tiwari; today it is Kishan Bharwad; and tomorrow-who knows, you or I will be killed in the name of hurting Muslim feelings, with the entire prerogative of deciding what hurts their feelings being in their blood-stained hands?
Yuvraj Pokharna is a Surat-based educator, columnist, and social activist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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