On August 22, 2020, Bloomsbury India announced that it will be withdrawing advocate Monika Arora’s book, Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story. In 1988, the Indian government, on the demand of the Islamists banned Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses¹. And, many decades ago on April 6, 1929, Raj Pal was murdered by Ilm-ud-din for publishing a book, Rangeela Rasool² which again offended the Islamists. What do these incidents and many other such incidents over the past 100 years have in common? All are meant to censor voices that would have forewarned the future generations to not look at the hate incidents in isolation, but rather link them to the common ideological link that drives them. While censoring the other side, the left-Islamist nexus ensures that their one-sided narrative is the only available option for the masses to consume.

The reality of the Delhi riots was very different from the narrative that the leftists and the Islamists wanted to set globally. The February 2020 riots in Delhi were a culmination of several events since December 2019, when the parliament of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019. This act fast-tracked the citizenship process for persecuted religious minorities from the Islamic neighbors of India. While the law has no impact on the Muslims of India, a section of Indian society was still offended for not including the Muslims of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan in the law.

After the law was passed, the Islamists started violent protests by burning trains, assaulting police personnel, and burning public properties across the country. As public opinion started shaping against the Islamists, the violent protests strategically transitioned to protests in the Islamic universities, Jamia Milia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University. In parallel, the Islamist women supported by the leftists blocked a major 6-lane arterial highway in Delhi. Protests across the universities as well as on the lanes of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi were used to present a narrative of ‘revolution’. In reality, during such protests, hateful anti-Hindu slogans were raised such as ‘Hinduon se Azadi (freedom from Hindus)’, and ‘Hindutva ki Kabr khudegi AMU ki chaati par (Hindu-ness will be buried in AMU)’ etc³.

To the left’s dismay, the majority of Indians ignored and moved on with their lives despite the provocations. The idea of revolution would not have succeeded if the protests had died a silent death, hence a conspiracy was hatched to bring matters to a boil with a riot during the US President’s visit to India in February 2020. This would bring international attention to the imaginary oppression of Muslims by the government in India. Later, a Delhi court hearing the arguments regarding the Delhi riots also concluded that the riots appeared to be a part of a “deep-rooted conspiracy”⁴.

For the Islamists, winning legal battles vis a vis the Delhi riots was not as important as influencing the impressionable minds of the masses right after the riots. They realized that such cases drag on for years, and the public will absorb whatever information is easily available, not the legal observations of the courts. Hence, the protagonists of the Shaheen Bagh protests first launched the book ‘Shaheen Bagh: From a Protest to a Movement’ by Ziya Us Salam to create a narrative of ‘peaceful’ revolution against an oppressive government. In parallel, the global network of the left was activated. Wikipedia pages were filled with outright lies painting Hindus as the perpetrators, rather than as the victims of the riots, and then locked to prevent further editing. The Wall Street Journal was managed to present half-truth and lies, and the WSJ obliged by making the frankly ridiculous claim that the Intelligence Bureau officer Ankit Sharma was lynched by a Hindu mob when in reality it was the Muslim crowd that had done the deed⁵, as was observed by the court as well. The goal as always was to make the hero of the Islamist perpetrators and shift blame away from them.

The Hindus were aggrieved at the misrepresentation in the mainstream media, and hence were eagerly waiting for the book, Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, hoping that it will present the version of the Delhi riots as they actually happened. The Islamists were threatened about their control over the victimhood narrative if a book as anticipated as the Delhi Riots 2020 were to hit the shelves and become a bestseller. Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story threatened to bring down the castle of lies that was built by the conspirators of Delhi riots and supported by the western media. As the current government would not have supported a book ban, strings were pulled to ensure that Bloomsbury India instead withdrew the book. Leftist historians such as William Dalrymple pressurized Bloomsbury UK, building an international network of nefarious pressure aimed at Bloomsbury.

The sudden withdrawal of the book by Bloomsbury India set social media off with protests. While the left almost pulled off a victory, the online outrage against the attempted censorship by the left spoiled the party. An already anticipated book further came into limelight, and more than 30,000 pre-orders were placed with Garuda Prakashan, the publication house that decided to publish the book after the Bloomsbury withdrawal. In solidarity with the sentiments of online protestors, several Indian authors such as Sanjeev Sanyal, Anand Ranganathan, and others also withdrew their upcoming books with Bloomsbury India. 

The left and the Islamists have used similar modus operandi of one-sided media blitzkrieg in the past as well. Post 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, the left released a book, RSS Ki Sajish. The book was again aimed at whitewashing the Islamic terror angle in the 26/11 attack, and instead, create a narrative of an imaginary Hindu terror to pin the blame on Hindus themselves. Similarly, Rana Ayyub, released her ‘investigative’ book, Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up, again attempting to shift the blame of starting the 2002 riots from the Islamists who had burnt 59 Hindus alive in a train, to the Hindus. The Supreme Court of India said “The Book by Rana Ayyub is of no utility. It is based upon surmises, conjectures, and suppositions and has no evidentiary value”. While books such as the RSS ki Saajish and Gujarat Files do not stand the scrutiny of law, they do make an impact in the narrative setting with their wider reach. A counter-narrative built through books is hence more concerning for the left-Islamist nexus than the legal judgments.  

The public outcry on forcing the withdrawal of Delhi Riots 2020 came as a big surprise to the intellectual mafia who, in the past, with their stronghold over narrative setting had succeeded with the lies such as RSS Ki Saajish and Gujarat Files. However, Monika Arora’s fight has given the truth-seekers strength, and signals that days of one-sided narratives are over. For the left-Islamist nexus, their takedown on social media means that after losing election after election, they are also on track to lose their artificially manufactured credibility. And, needless to say, all of us who don’t align with the left-Islamist nexus must read the ‘forbidden’ book.

^{1 https://scroll.in/article/758288/when-india-became-the-first-country-to-ban-the-satanic-verses-much-before-the-iranian-fatwa
2 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/indic-positive/the-ghost-of-rangeela-rasool/
3 https://www.opindia.com/2019/12/boomlive-wrongly-fact-checks-opindia-hinduon-se-azaadi-amu-jamia-video/
4 https://www.news18.com/news/india/delhi-riots-result-of-deep-rooted-conspiracy-sessions-court-denies-bail-to-suspended-aap-councillor-2713667.html
5 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/times-fact-check/news/fact-check-ankit-sharmas-brother-denies-saying-his-brother-was-killed-by-those-chanting-jai-shri-ram/articleshow/74355310.cms}