How the recent riots in Delhi are killing two words as well: ‘Genocide’ and ‘pogrom’

This is how the United Nations defines ‘genocide’:

 Genocide

mass noun

genocide/ˈdʒɛnəsʌɪd/

Origin:

1940s from Greek genos ‘race’ +  -cide.

 One of five punishable acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

iii. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

1. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
2. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 Large sections of mainstream media worldwide, Islamist agenda-pushers and many self-proclaimed liberals, however, have their own convenient definitions. And they have now descended on Delhi’s communal riots.

For days now, they have been trending the hashtag #DelhiGenocide, trying to portray the communal clashes as a one-sided slaughter of Muslims. ‘Influencers’ including journalists and activists also started bandying about words like ‘pogrom’, ratcheting up outrage against India and selling their narrative of majoritarianism of the BJP government.

More from India

Supreme Court clears Vantara elephant project, rejects PIL: Top 5 things to know Focus back to India-US trade deal: Trump’s negotiators landing in New Delhi tonight

[caption id=“attachment_8086181” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Security personnel conduct flag march in Delhi on Tuesday. PTI[/caption]

Pogrom, like genocide, means “an organised massacre of a particular ethnic group”.

The truth — as is evident from the list of the dead so far — is that the Delhi riots are far from a genocide or pogrom. Of the 28 names confirmed among 39 killed till now, 9 to 10 or 35 percent are of Hindus. This, in a city with just about 13 percent Muslim population.

Which genocide or pogrom has so many of so-called ‘perpetrators’ killed by supposed ‘victims’?

How many Nazis did Jews kill during Holocaust?

How many Hutus were killed in retaliation of the rape and massacre of nearly a million Tutsis in the 1994 Rwandan genocide?

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

News18 SheShakti 2025: Voices of cinema, sport and music redefine nation-building

Women leaders at News18 SheShakti 2025 redefine what it means to build a nation

How many Muslims like Kashmiri Pandits kill while being murdered and driven away from their home during the 1990s ethnic cleansing?

The answer is: None, or almost none.

But a cornered and politically shrinking Left, through its disproportionate influence on media and academia worldwide, weaponises every losing debate with words like fascist, Nazi, genocide, pogrom and suchlike.

In college debates judged by Left’s own professors, it works just fine. However, this flagrant misuse corrodes the immensity of these words, till the quirk of evolution turns the dreaded pterodactyls into chatty sparrows.

When you start calling every strong-willed leader who you don’t like a ‘Nazi’, the word gradually stops to conjure in the public mind the gas chambers of Nuremberg. When you call every communal clash with a tilted power balance ‘genocide’, people stop hearing the heart-tearing cries from Bangladeshi homes ravaged by the Pakistani Army and Islamist militias of 1971.

The other unintentional fallout of such overstatements and bias is it makes ordinary people — hard to fool them in a digitally connected world — very, very angry. The rise of Narendra Modi is a shining test case. While 790 Muslims died in the 2002 Gujarat riots, more than 250 Hindus also lost their lives, 59 of them in the Godhra train burning which triggered in violence. But the media and liberal intelligentsia kept projecting it as a genocide, not realising that it was angering Hindus not just in Gujarat but everywhere.

The Congress-Left ecosystem should have learnt its lesson. It clearly hasn’t.

Those who think that terms like genocide and roping in foreign media will scare the Modi government are naïve. Relentless bashing by foreign media and even some western governments has only nourished this regime and its protagonists. Such targeting has made them what they are today.

The Delhi riots are monstrous and shameful enough for critics to grill the BJP government on how it allowed this to happen, demand accountability and ensure action. Hollowing out extremely loaded words like ‘genocide’ achieves exactly the opposite.