Earlier last week, a controversy erupted in Lulu Mall, Lucknow, after a video of Muslims offering namaz inside the mall premises went viral on the internet. Following the incident, a conscious effort is undertaken by sympathisers of Islamists to peddle an alternative theory that Hindus were the ones who had offered the namaz inside the mall.

Social media platforms are awash with conspiracy theories saying that people who offered namaz in Lulu Mall were Hindus and not Muslims. They cited the arrest of Hindus in a different case to allege that those who were offering namaz inside the mall were not Muslims, but Hindus.

Ahmed Khabeer, Editor of the Islamist propaganda portal The Jamia Times, shared a screenshot of a tweet posted by Lucknow Police to allege that Hindus posing as Muslims had offered namaz in the mall.

The screenshot of the tweet posted by DCP Lucknow carried the press note of the police about the arrests made in connection with the offering of unauthorised religious activities inside the Lulu Mall. The press note was about the arrest made on July 15 of youths who had gathered outside the mall for the recitation of Sundar Kand.

However, in his bid to malign Hindus, Khabeer conveniently ignores to share the complete details of the case. The four men arrested in the case were taken under custody on July 15 after they had gathered outside the Lulu Mall to recite Sundar Kand to oppose the offering of namaz inside the mall, videos of which had gone viral on the internet on July 13, two days before their arrest. One Arshad Ali was also arrested by the police on July 15 after he had gone to the mall to offer namaz.

But Khabeer used the press report of their arrest to weave a twisted narrative that depicted Hindus as villains for defaming Muslims by assuming their identity and offering namaz in a public place. The group of Muslims offered namaz on July 12, while the arrests of Hindu youths for gathering outside the mall for the recital of Sundar Kand took place on July 15. But Khabeer expediently muddled the facts to assert that the Hindu men arrested by police were held for offering namaz.

As it turned out, Khabeer was just a cog in the wheel of the giant and rampant propaganda effort aimed at shielding Muslims who offered namaz inside the mall and placing its blame at the feet of Hindus. The well-oiled Congress ecosystem also partook in the efforts to malign Hindus as imposters who posed as Muslims and offered namaz inside the mall premises.

Congress supporter Dr Pooja Tripathi quoted the UP polices tweet on men arrested for reciting Sundar Kand, claiming that they posed as Muslims to offer namaz in the mall. Pawan Khera, chairman of the media and publicity department of the All India Congress Committee, also participated in this disinformation campaign as he quoted Tripathis tweet and lent his support to the insidious propaganda that entailed misrepresenting police communication of Hindus arrested as taken under custody for offering namaz.

Congress leader Salman Nizami also shared the fake news that said Hindu men posing as Muslims were arrested by the police. However, after being called out over his fake news, Niazi promptly deleted the tweet.

Radio Mirchis Sayema, who has often displayed little hesitation in promoting fake news that serves to bolster Islamist propaganda, also shared the misinformation being peddled about the arrest of Hindu men. Sayema quoted Khabeers tweet and promoted the misinformation that Hindu men posed as Muslims to offer namaz inside the mall.

Islamist website Siasat, too, played its part in perpetuating the warped propaganda that men who offered namaz in the mall are not Muslim. In an article, the portal claimed that the CCTV evidence confirmed that it was a purposeful prank intended to tarnish the mall and incite communal hatred. Interestingly, the article offers no evidence to substantiate the claim that CCTV footage from the mall proved that those who offered namaz were not Muslims.

Realising how the propagandists were using the news of the arrest of Hindu men to fuel disinformation, the official Twitter account of Lucknow Police issued a clarification, stating that the claims made on social media that men were arrested for offering namaz are misleading and baseless.

For a long time now, apologists have either shifted the blame on the victims or appropriated their identity to shield their Islamist brethren. A certain section of the Muslim fundamentalists and their supporters loves peddling such conspiracy theories as it shows Hindus in a bad light while whitewashing the crimes of the Islamists.

While the intellectuals resort to twisting facts and weaving an alternate reality to absolve the Muslim fundamentalists and frame Hindus as the guilty, their allies in the form of Islamists and Islamic terrorists use Hindu disguises while carrying out attacks to shield their coreligionists from the fallout.

For instance, during the Godhra Train burning incident, the propagandists tried to deflect the blame of the tragedy on the Hindus, promoting preposterous theories to claim that the conflagration took place from within the bogey and the Islamists did not attack the train from the outside.

Even during the 9/11 attacks, the Islamists and their supporters had tried to play down the involvement of Muslim fundamentalists, alleging that the terror attack was a result of sabotage carried out by Americans and pinned on the Islamists to justify the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.

In India, too, such conspiracy theories blaming everyone but the Islamists have taken root, especially in the immediate aftermath of the incidents when factual details are scarce. After the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, a section of propagandists pushed conspiracy theories linking the lone terrorist captured alive, Ajmal Kasab, to Hindu organisations, citing the Kalwa he wore as a symbol of his Hinduness.

However, the plan to implicate Hindus as terrorists went awry after Mohammed Ajmal Kasab shed light on their nefarious plan to portray the attack as a case of a Hindu terror attack. It came to light that fake Hindu identities and Hindu symbols were deliberately attached to the terrorists, to project the attack as a handiwork of Hindu terrorists.

Nevertheless, it did not stop the Congress party from linking the terror attack to Hindus. Congress leader Digvijaya Singh released a book that blamed RSS for the terror attack, whitewashing the Pakistani antecedents of the terrorists and pinning the blame of the tragedy on Hindus.

It is worth noting that Congress was the first one to invent the Hindu Terror bogey in the wake of the 2006 Malegaon blasts as a parallel to Islamic terrorism. With this imaginary construct, the Congress party wanted to assert that terror has no religion. However, their real intention was to shield Islamic extremism that was responsible for a string of terror attacks in the tumultuous decade between 2000 to 2010. The Congress party then wrongly implicated Sadhvi Pragya to firm up their Hindu Terror fabrication.

More recently, the same methodology was once again employed to assassinate Hindu samaj leader Kamlesh Tiwari. Two assassins, Farid-ud-Din Shaikh and Ashfaq Shaikh came dressed in saffron kurtas at Tiwaris office-cum-residence at Lucknow andassassinatedhim. They carried sweet boxes in which they had concealed weapons with which they killed the Hindu leader. They were able to get close to Kamlesh Tiwari by the virtue of being dressed in saffron robes, which attracted little suspicions about their possible intentions to make the visit.

Similarly, earlier last year, a foiled assassination plot to kill Yati Narsighanand Saraswati, the chief abbot of the Dasna Devi Temple, revealed how the Islamists planned to use Hindu disguises to execute their nefarious designs. The terrorist who was planning to kill Yati Narsighanand Saraswati was caught and the police recovered a Bhagwa kurta, a Kalava, a Mala and a Chandan-tika from the terrorist, highlighting how he was working straight out of the Islamist playbook that ordains radicals to commit the acts of terror under Hindu disguises.

As the controversy over namaz offered inside the Lulu Mall erupted, the left-liberal intelligentsia and the Congress party resorted to distorting facts and using the arrest of three Hindu youth for the recital of Sundar Kand to propagate fake news that they had been arrested for offering namaz in the mall.

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Islamists, Congress leaders spread fake news that Hindus posed as Muslims to offer namaz at Lulu Mall: The reliance on conspiracy theories to shield...