Islamophobic Remarks :
The Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is closely affiliated with political analyst Kanchan Gupta. He was appointed Senior Adviser to the Government of India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in June 2021.
He held positions with reputable journalistic organizations like The Telegraph, The Statesman, and The Pioneer. He left up full-time journalism in 1995 to concentrate on a career in politics. He began supporting L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, two far-right Hindu politicians, in their political endeavors.
He defended the Hindu fundamentalist leadership responsible for the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in an interview with Newslaundry conducted in 2012.
In the interview, he acknowledged using Hitler quotes and advocating “violent measures” to inflame anti-Muslim feelings during the anti-Babri Masjid rallies in the 1990s. He added that he feels piety for the Muslim ladies wearing burqas because of their “subjugation.” He simply grinned when the interviewer questioned him in response about Hindu ladies who hide their faces.
The Gujarat anti-muslim pogrom of 2002 was hardly the worst rioting India had ever seen, Gupta claimed, downplaying its ferocity.
He added parallels to numerous previous communal clashes and stated that the number of dead was substantially larger in several other similar cases, saying that the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 was not particularly noteworthy because “not every Muslim in India had been killed.”
Following the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the Atal Bihari Vajpai-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government dispatched Gupta to the Middle East to appease the furious Muslim nations.
He mocked and denigrated Muslim journalist Rana Ayyub in a piece he published in February 2022 in the Hindu far-right news publication Swarajya, calling her a “soapbox polemicist, a charlatan who intentionally controverts reality on an industrial scale to stitch a cloak of Muslim insecurity and Muslim persecution in India.”
During the India Today East Conclave 2022, he stated: “Bengal has a history of advancing Hindutva theory. In the years 1995–1996 the Supreme Court even agreed with that concept. Hindutva promotes cultural identity and civilizational identity. It becomes cultural nationalism when you add nationalism to it. Bengal is a prime illustration of cultural nationalism.
Gupta called the BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s involvement in the Gujarat pogrom “a hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage, disguised as a ‘documentary.” The I&B Ministry ordered Twitter to remove more than 50 tweets including links to the several YouTube videos of the first episode of the BBC program.
The ‘love jihad’ anti-Muslim conspiracy notion has been actively promoted by Gupta. He even changed the name of the conspiracy theory to “ishq jihad,” stating that this would better place it in a desi (indigenous) context. He is able to use derogatory terms like “Islamic terror” and “radical Islam” with ease.
He frequently uses false material and fake news to push far-right Hindu ideology. His Twitter is rife with anti-Muslim and Islamophobic invective.