Warped Justice

In Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal, freedom of expression is a conditional privilege, revoked when it fails to appease the political whims of her government’s core constituency. This grim reality became unmistakably clear when the state’s police force travelled over 1,500 kilometres to arrest a 22-year-old law student and Hindu social media influencer for a video critical of Pakistan and Islamist terror. Her supposed crime? A profane video denouncing jihadist ideology following the Pahalgam terror attack. The actual offence, it would appear, was daring to speak as a Hindu with unfiltered rage.

That the video was swiftly deleted and followed by a public apology mattered not to the West Bengal police. Nor did the deluge of threats - from rape to decapitation - that the young woman received from radical Islamists online. The West Bengal government, unmoved by such calls to violence, sprang into action not to protect the citizen under siege, but to punish her. In Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal, you may mock Hindu gods with impunity and riot in the name of religious grievance without consequence. But criticising Islam (or Pakistan) can land you in jail. Dissent is criminal if it inconveniences the ruling party’s vote bank. And law enforcement is not an impartial arbiter of justice, but an outsourced instrument of appeasement.

Consider what the state did not do. When Islamist mobs tore through Murshidabad on April 11, unleashing targeted violence against Hindus under the pretext of opposing the Waqf Amendment Act, the government did nothing. Hindu homes were razed, water supplies poisoned, and women threatened with gang rape unless they abandoned their faith.

In Sandeshkhali, the horror was worse. There, women had accused local TMC leaders with direct ties to Mamata’s political inner circle of abducting, raping and threatening them with death. The state’s reaction was both callous and cowardly. The Chief Minister, a woman herself, dismissed these credible allegations as ‘minor incidents.’ It took a court order from the Calcutta High Court to initiate a proper probe, which the government opposed with stubborn zeal.

Yet the arrest of this social media influencer was executed with impressive speed and surgical precision. This is not secular governance but selective enforcement.

India does not have a blasphemy law nor should it. But Mamata Banerjee’s government has found a way to mimic one. Insult Islam, however tangentially, and the state will hunt you down.

This is no longer a local crisis but a national embarrassment. The Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and equality before the law. West Bengal, under its current dispensation, delivers neither. And as long as vote-bank politics dictate who can speak and who must remain silent, the state will continue its descent into communal opportunism and authoritarian caprice. India must decide if it will tolerate this perverse inversion of justice. If a young woman can be jailed for defending her country while those who threaten her walk free, then the idea of a plural and free India is in mortal peril.