Balbir Punj By

Islamic radicalism is on rise the world over, and India is no exception. The riots of Muzaffarnagar and Moradabad are still fresh in our minds. Last Tuesday, newspapers carried reports from Meerut of kidnappings of girls, forcibly marrying them to Muslim youngsters, their conversion and turning them into victims of human trafficking in order to enlist them in Islamist jihad in the Gulf region with the lure of jobs in Dubai.

And yet another report appeared last Thursday on newspapers about the conversion and marriage of a minor Hindu girl belonging to Loni in Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh to a 24-year-Muslim boy. As usual, the police was reluctant to act in the beginning. The dailies from the national capital exposed a part of the conspiracy in a detailed report from Meerut.

In Sarawa village (Meerut), an FIR has been registered after a Hindu part-time teacher of a madarsa was abducted from her residence, held captive in Mustafa colony, Muzaffarnagar, for days, repeatedly raped, then forcible converted, married and locked up along with many other girls similarly. The girl alleged that all this was a part of the operation to take the hapless girls first to Pakistan and then to Dubai to be enrolled in the Islamist rebel groups marauding Syria and Iraq.

The “secular media” and the communalised administration, rather than investigating the substance of the grave allegations by the affected girl, have been busy picking holes in the victim’s version to dilute the seriousness of the sordid incident.

The Uttar Pradesh police, in order to rubbish the victim’s story, said they did not find any Hindu girls in forced confinement when they raided Sultania madarsa. Do you seriously expect the criminals to leave any evidence intact after the details of the crime have become public?

The chain of events in the victim’s words is: “When Ramzan started, again they started trapping me. I was taken to a madarsa in Hapur on July 23 where I was gangraped and got pregnant. They did an ultrasound and got me operated on. I was taken to another madarsa in Muzaffarnagar on July 30 where an old woman would beat me up and feed me cow meat. There were other girls too… They made someone else sign on an affidavit that claimed I had become Muslim and changed my name to Jannat. They got a cleric who gave the girls a book called Aapki Amanat Aapki Seva, written by one Kalam Siddiqui. It was about Hindu girls converting to Islam.”

In last year’s Muzaffarnagar riots the trigger was provided when a Hindu schoolgoing girl was molested by someone in a community’s stronghold area while passing through it. How could several Hindu girls—as newspaper reports say based on a statement by the victim who managed to escape and get back home—be pushed into such a situation and trafficked to join Islamist militants in faraway Gulf countries?

The long-time suspicion of a well-planned conspiracy to utilise “Love jihad” as a terrorist weapon against this country has now surfaced with all its ugly face. Earlier, there were some reports of this nature from Kerala and Hyderabad but no effective action was taken by the state police under the influence of the Congress/ Marxists-led governments as the case may be under their appeasement policy.

Even now, days after the event all that the UP administration has done is a mere police step of arresting some of the accused and being on the look out for others. There is a total refusal to look at the core of the problem. As expected, the UP government is not reading the riot act to the madarsa people who have made this girl and others detained along with her to sign affidavits to get a legal cover for their activities.

For the UP government it is merely a case of abduction and rape. The forcible conversions, etc. are not crimes in its eye. How can it be otherwise when the party running this government has a history of kowtowing to Muslim orthodoxy and ignoring forcible conversions?

The state government refuses to perceive the larger picture of what is happening in its own backyard, let alone in the rest of the globe. Recruitment for the international jihadi campaign through a combination of allurements, ideological brainwashing and abductions if the other two do not work, marrying abducted girls to Muslims and then forcibly converting them to give a legal cover to their detention in select places, brainwashing to believe in the jihadist violence, etc. is evident if the administration is prepared to look beyond its nose.

Only a few days ago a noted Muslim cleric right in Lucknow openly called for preparing a five lakh strong “army” of Sunni Muslim youngsters from India to join the international jihad to be supported by Saudi Arabia. Days have passed, nothing has been done to stop such appeals.

The man who has made such an appeal remains free and not even an FIR has been slapped against him, whereas even an obscene photo posted on the social network can under our laws get you into a prison. This cleric’s appeal was made in the open. In fact by making this appeal he was daring the state or testing the waters on how far the establishment would go while the local jihadis were conspiring and implementing plans to drag their community wholesale into a foreign-inspired and funded war that is against India as well.

Uttar Pradesh is not alone. Other so-called secular party-led governments are no less guilty. In Maharashtra it has come out in the open that several Muslim young men have gone abroad and joined the jihadi warmakers in Iraq.

Has the Maharashtra government done anything since the report about many persons from Thane joining the Iraqi rebels? Nothing.

Even if the states run by self-styled secular governments refuse to act when the international context clearly link such incidents to a global threat to non-Muslim (and even among Muslim, to non-Sunni) governments, can the Centre merely watch from the sidelines?

Muzaffarnagar, Moradabad, Shamli—the list of spots where riots are engineered by the jihadi elements go on lengthening even as moves to build an ideological wave in favour of jihad within India as much as within the Gulf, north African and even European countries, in Russia and China and elsewhere are on.

Latest is the ISI-sponsored use of the Rohingya refugee Muslims from Burma in India to spread both ideology and organise terror modules. A national action plan against this renewed jihadi threat needs to be designed and implemented.

The author is national vice president, BJP.

E-mail: punjbalbir@gmail.com