Recently the so-called “liberals” and concerned citizens of the country came up with a new campaign called #NotInMyName, which purportedly sought to protest the supposed rise in lynching the country is witnessing since Narendra Modi won the general elections. The campaign idea was criticised because most of the people associated with the campaign had pre-decided to focus only on “Muslim” victims of lynching incidents, even though victims are from other communities too.

However, some still claimed that the campaign was about lynchings of all sorts, and did not focus on any religion or ideology. This claim was lynched by the mobs that gathered to protest, and it became clear that the campaign was a partisan political propaganda. As one can see, not only the protesters refused to include public killings of Hindu activists in Kerala, they even refused to include incidents where Muslims were killed because they were not seen as “Muslim enough” by Islamist mobs – these include lynchings of an army jawan and DSP in Kashmir and a Muslim BJP leader who was hacked to death in Karnataka.

Apart from that, it includes incidents in Jharkhand, which were known to have no connection with religion as the almost equal number of Hindus were also killed under the same suspicion of child theft by local villagers. This lie was first spread by Huffington Post, which had later retracted, but the propagandists at the #NotInMyName decided to further the lie. Apart from whitewashing crimes of Islamist mobs, the campaign was used as a platform to propagate Hinduphobia and fuel anti-Hindu bigotry, as was evident by a few posters at the events.

Then there were others, who openly abused Hindus and Hinduism, and called for armed aggression from Muslims i.e. virtually calling for a civil war the way Jinnah had asked for ‘Direct Action’. The tragedy is that despite it being a campaign of hate, the organisers, thanks to their connections in media and the elite class, will be able to paint themselves as “concerned citizens”. An example of how their hold on narrative successfully gets support even for their hate campaigns, was visible when young Bollywood actor Varun Dhawan tweeted in support of it.

I completely support the #NotInMyName movement. It was a peaceful protest and stood for the values of what our country stands for.

— Varun Dhawan (@Varun_dvn) June 28, 2017

Essentially, it is “cool” to hate, if you can call yourself “liberal”.