After several incidents of mob lynching in the name of religion and Hinduism in the past few days, prominent faces of various film industries wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Filmmakers and actors such as Adoor Gopal Krishnan, Mani Ratnam, Anurag Kashyap, Aparna Sen, Konkona Sensharma, Soumita Chatterjee and others, on the 23rd of July, expressed their concern over the cases of lynching.
Approximately 49 celebrities signed the letter with a regret that ‘Jai Shree Ram’ is now a way to kill people. The letter states, “Ram is sacred for the majority community, stop defiling the name of Ram.”
Talking about the number of lynching cases witnessed in the Country, the letter read, “The lynching of Muslims, Dalits and other minorities must be stopped immediately. We were shocked to learn from the NCRB that there have been no less than 840 instances of atrocities against Dalits in the year 2016, and a definite decline in the percentage of convictions.”
Highlighting the increase in the number of crimes in the name of religion, the celebrities said, between October 2018 and January 2019, approximately 254 religion based hate crimes were reported.
In those 254 cases, 91 people were murdered and 579 injured, out of which, 62 % of the people were Muslims and 2 % were Christians.
In the letter, celebrities like Binayak Sen, Anjan Dutta and Gautam Ghosh asked the PM, “You have criticised such lynchings in Parliament Mr. Prime Minister, but that is not enough! What action has actually been taken against the perpetrators?”
The celebrities concluded the letter with a statement—people who do not agree with the Government should not be labelled as ‘urban Naxal’ or ‘anti national,’ as we live in a democratic society.
Tathagata Roy, the Governor of Meghalaya, criticised the celebrities who raised their voice against mob lynching.
Roy said, “I have nothing against their holding such a view and petitioning the Prime Minister. All I ask is, have they said the same thing about ‘Allahu Akbar’? I’m sure they haven’t; and that is proof of their hypocrisy, their malafide intentions, their #DespicableDoubleStandards.”
The open letter to the Prime Minister was written after multiple incidents of mob lynching took place in India, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in the name of religion.
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