ON 13 August, just two days before India’s Independence Day, student activist Umar Khalid had a narrow escape from a shooter in the heart of central Delhi, outside the Constitution Club.  

Two men brazenly issued a video claiming to have carried out the attack and declaring that they would ‘surrender’ in the village of Bhagat Singh’s mentor and revolutionary freedom fighter Kartar Singh Sarabha. On the day they had promised to surrender however, a Left organisation Naujawan Bharat Sabha gathered with red flags in the village, declaring that they would not allow the Sanghi terrorists to claim to represent Kartar Singh Sarabha or the socialist revolutionary Bhagat Singh. The Delhi Police’s Special Cell delayed arresting the two men for many days, but eventually has made the arrest.   

What allowed two goons and potential killers to claim publicly that their at-tempt to assassinate Umar was an act of patriotism? They were emboldened by a sense of impunity - relentless propaganda by the Modi Government and its pet media channels to feel sure that their victim would be branded the ter-rorist while their act of terror would be applauded and protected.   

Khalid, who has just submitted his PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), is an activist who along with other JNU students was, on the strength of doctored videos, cast in the role of the ‘anti-national’ by some Indian television channels after he organized a poetry reading on the theme of Kashmir, on 9 February 2016. While other students too faced such targeting, Umar was es-pecially viciously singled out for Islamophobic slander by the hate-mongers as a Muslim. A channel News X ran a story claiming Umar was a “Jaish-e-Mohammed sympathizer”. Videos with anchors of this channel spreading this poisonous slander can still be found online. None less than the Home Minister of India, Rajnath Singh, declared on the strength of a parody account that JNU students like Umar were backed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed.  

In the two years since February 2016, channels like Times Now and Republic have targeted JNU students as well as Left and democratic activists countless times as “Tukde Tukde Gang” (‘dismemberment gang’, referring to the fake video purporting to show JNU students raising slogans calling for the dismem-berment of India). The Republic channel has even referred to me – a well-known Left and feminist activist - as a ‘lawyer for the Lashkar-e-Taiba’! Such slander is incitement to violence.   

The JNU Administration recently sought to punish JNU students including Umar Khalid for “anti-national” activities on 9 February 2016 in JNU– sparking an-other round of vicious and gleeful gloating by several media channels which are a willing part of the Government’s propaganda machinery. The Delhi High Court reprimanded the JNU Administration and prevented any JNU student from being punished. In Court, it was shown that even a Magisterial Enquiry into the incident failed to show any evidence of guilt of any JNU student, and that the Delhi Police, for want of any evidence, has failed to file a chargesheet against any of the JNU students in the past two years.  

It is this climate of relentless hate-speech and fake news that has resulted in the shocking incident where a gunman could attack Umar Khalid in broad daylight in front of Delhi’s Constitution Club, and make his escape unhindered in spite of the ‘tight security cover’ and ‘terror alert’ in the Indian capital just days be-fore Independence Day.   

The ruling BJP’s New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi, while paying lip service to the cause of justice and saying the perpetrators would be identified and punished, has indulged in victim blaming, claiming the attack on Umar is “sensationalism” and “drama”. Meanwhile, the BJP IT Cell army on social media is claiming the incident was ‘staged’ while also celebrating the attack and calling for Umar and others like him to be killed.

In the same way, Twitter handles backed by the PM and Cabinet Ministers cel-ebrated the assassination of Gauri Lankesh.