Religious intolerance from the administrative side in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh is breaching all bounds, with whatever a Muslim-named person does being made a punishable offence, however flimsy and hollow the matter may be.
The latest instance came with the arrest by the Muzaffarnagar police of a food vlogger named Anas, whose non-veg vlog showed a Shiva temple apparently as part of suggesting a landmark, but was construed as hurting religious sentiments, drawing backlash from online users who accused the police of harbouring a “Sanghi mindset” and practising selective punitive action.
The controversy erupted after Anas, a food blogger based in Muzaffarnagar, uploaded a promotional video for a restaurant identified as Al Yameen Chicken Centre, wherein he commenced the vlog with fleeting visuals of the iconic Shiv Chowk temple, a structure widely regarded as one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks and routinely used in visual references associated with the locality.
The remainder of the video contained ordinary footage of chicken dishes being prepared, the presentation of the meals and the vlogger reviewing the food in the familiar cadence of commercial food content proliferating across social media platforms.
Despite the conspicuously innocuous nature of the video, complaints were rapidly lodged alleging that the juxtaposition of the temple visuals with non-vegetarian cuisine had wounded religious sentiments and generated public outrage, following which the Muzaffarnagar police moved with haste to initiate legal proceedings.
The police stated that the matter had been taken into “immediate cognisance” and that an inquiry conducted by the Khalapar police station culminated in the arrest of Anas, son of Sarfaraz and resident of Laddawala under Kotwali Nagar police station limits.
The arrest triggered backlash across social media, with numerous users describing the police action as emblematic of an increasingly majoritarian administrative culture in which Muslims are subjected to disproportionate scrutiny and criminalisation over matters critics called laughably flimsy, arbitrary and politically motivated.