At a time when it is crucial for India to win over international opinion in its favour, it is imperative for the govt. to rein in the online trolls

Both India and Pakistan showed no hesitation in announcing a ceasefire, but who will broker peace for the war raging within the country? As a nation, we seem to have lost our inner compass, and people are willing to start trolling at the drop of a hat. Post Pahalgam, the largest number of trolls were directed at Indian Muslims, spurred on by increasing dollops of communal rhetoric that have been let loose across our TV channels. It is almost as though there is a concerted campaign to equate Indian Muslims with Pakistanis, who, like our western neighbour, seem to have become our permanent enemy.

This anti-Muslim sentiment seems to have become so ingrained in our social consciousness that Madhya Pradesh’s Tribal Welfare Minister Vijay Shah did not blink an eyelid when he described brave heart Colonel Sofiya Qureshi as a `terrorist’s sister’. Shah, in his scurrilous speech, went on to claim that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had sent “a sister from their (the terrorists') community” in an Indian Air Force aircraft to avenge the victims”. How could a man holding a constitutional post for the last decade not realise that Qureshi’s briefing was at the behest of the government?

The BJP should have immediately given him marching orders. Instead, it was two feisty judges, Justices Atul Shridharan and Anuradha Shukla from the Jabalpur High Court, who ordered the police to register an FIR against Shah for speaking the `language of the gutter’. A rap from the Supreme Court should chasten him further.

Equally mystifying is the trolling of foreign secretary Vikram Misri, who became the victim of vicious trolling on social media for having announced a........

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