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Writer's pictureAslam Abdullah

Hindutva has gone Berserk in India


Lulu, Meaning in Arabic, means pearl; precious; peaceful; protected, and calm. In Swahili, it is a girl's name in Swahili. Hawaiian and Tanzanian people use a variety of beautiful meanings, including "precious," "peaceful," "protected," and "calm." In English, it refers to someone or something very unusual or extreme, often in a silly or unpleasant way

a lulu of a storm.

India's Hindus recently turned Lulu, meaning peel, into Lulu unpleasant. In Uttar Pradesh, a Keralite-based business group headed by Yusuf Lulu recently set up Asia's biggest mall, Lulu Mall. Lulu is a worldwide business. Still, 75 of its products come from India, generating thousands of jobs and earning billions of dollars in foreign exchange for India. Its annual revenue is over 10 billion, and over 225 stores worldwide, including in the United States.

UP's Hindutva Chief Minister opened the Lucknow Lulu mall in July. He offered silent Hindu prayer while inaugurating the mall. However, the controversy began when the video of eight people wearing Kufis and pretending to offer prayer on the second floor of the building. The Chief Minister's party members and coreligionists condemned the prayer offering and called the mall an extension of love jihad. The Hindutva supporters alleged that 80 percent of the employees were Muslims and the remaining 20 percent comprised Hindu girls to promote love marriages.

The Hindutva followers also demanded that the management allows them to perform Hindu rituals, including purifying one to decontaminate Muslim prayer. They also asked Hindus to boycott the mall.

These demands prove that Hindutva warriors have lost any sense of decency and surpassed all limits of their hatred against Islam and Muslims.

Offering prayer in public places is not a crime in India as long as there are no restrictions. The Lulu management should have made known to its visitors that no religious community is allowed to use the premises to pray openly inside the premises. Secondly, the identity of those who offered prayers raises many questions about the incident. The people pretending to offer prayers used the wrong directions. They all wore traditional Muslim dresses with skull caps. They finished their prayers in less than 20 seconds, a world record in the history of Muslim prayers. Furthermore, they assigned an individual to record those moments to upload them and circulate widely. A cursory look at the whole process suggests that most of those who forwarded the video to others had handles associated with the Hindutva groups.

One can rule out an organized conspiracy in staging the fake prayer and turning it into a Hindu-Muslim issue to spread hatred against Muslims and hurt the business.

The Lulu mall is private. Its management would determine its policies, and no religious group can dictate what those policies should be. It reserves the right to refuse service to anyone. Hindutva groups cannot decide on those policies.

The bigotry of Hindutva forces and the hatred they consistently show to Christians and Muslims in India should alarm all investors worldwide. Why should they invest money in a country that does not value religious diversity and promote hatred based on ethnicity and religion? Moreover, what would happen if the people in the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and Australia start boycotting Hindutva businesses because of their bigotry.

Hindutva has become a destructive force in the world. It is a threat to the world economy and peace. It leads Hindus to commit genocide of non-Upper caste Hindus in India and hurts India's economy. India is not safe under Hindutva. But when people become insane and go berserk, nothing can bring them back to rational thinking. Unfortunately, India's Hindutva groups have entered into that phase of insanity under the leadership of the ruling elites.

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