An arrest has been made in the widely-discussed case from Mysore, in which a library owned by Muslim man had been destroyed in a fire.
One Syed Nasir, 35, has been arrested by the Mysuru Police for carelessly throwing a matchstick after lighting a beedi, which started a fire near a library set up by 62-year-old Syed Ishaq, reports The Hindu. Addressing a press conference, City Police Commissioner Chandragupta said the accused, Syed Nasir, who stayed close to the library, returned home on April 8 night in a drunken state, but left the house later in the night after a fight with his mother and brothers. He purchased beedis and a matchbox from a provision store situated behind the library.
Showing visuals captured from the CCTV camera, the Commissioner said Syed Nasir had lit a beedi around 10.15 p.m. and threw the burning matchstick on the furniture and cushions kept in the open outside a sofa repair shop adjacent to the library. Within a minute after he left the spot to return home, a small fire broke out from the old furniture that had been kept for repairs adjacent to the library, but two locals rushed to the spot and put out the fire.
However, the fire had not been put out completely as flames began to rise from the inflammable material like coir that was kept outside the sofa repair shop around 2.15 a.m. on April 9. Soon, the raging fire enveloped the books kept in the adjacent library and destroyed them.
Ishaq, who owned the library, had lodged a complaint with the Udayagiri police on April 9 alleging that miscreants had burnt his library of more than 11,000 books including Kannada versions of Bhagavad Gita, Bible and Quran. He had accused the miscreants of targeting his library because of their intolerance towards Kannada language that he was propagating through his library.
But the incident had been picked up by all left-leaning news outlets, who’d focussed on how a Muslim man’s library with 3,000 Bhagavad Gitas had been burned.
These outlets had focussed on the presence of the Bhagavad Gitas in the library, while not mentioning in the headline that the library also contained copies of the Quran and the Bible. Congress leaders like Lavanya Ballal had gone has far as to allege that the burning was a work of ‘Hindutva stooges’.
But with CCTV evidence showing that the cigarette was thrown by one Syed Nasir, one would wonder if secular leftists will pursue this issue with as much vigor as they’d done so far. The whole incident might still be a case of religious intolerance — but it’s just not in the way that secular leftists would have hoped.
