Gold smuggling, money laundering

The media are busy demonising Mahmudabad. Soon, his actual words will vanish into the dense fog of propaganda, replaced by the image of a devious, cunning, scheming Muslim etched into the collective Hindu imagination.Mahmudabad has appeared before the SIT. Meanwhile, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP, has announced plans for a public demonstration against him. It is asking Ashoka University to sack him because he has written “antinational posts”. The mouth organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent body of the ruling BJP and ABVP, has also joined the chorus asking for action against Mahmudabad.

We see the same playbook unfolding – the one used to vilify scholars like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, turning them into enemy figures within the BJP ecosystem with the help of the media, police and judiciary.One can only hope that the police officers remain steadfast, unaffected by judicial remarks or shrill propaganda and read Mahmudabad’s plain lines with constitutional eyes. His words – crafted by a Muslim mind – call for empathy, understanding, justice, equality and dignity.The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Test your knowledge of Palestine's geography in this interactive map game.How well do you know Palestine?

Drop a pin where you think each Palestinian city is located and see how close you get.

After each guess, you'll receive a score out of 10 based on your accuracy, along with information about the city’s history, culture and the impact of the 1948 Nakba.Hamze Attar, a Luxembourg-based defence analyst, told Al Jazeera these tactics are not new in Palestinian territory, having first been deployed by the British during their mandate over historic Palestine, which preceded Israel’s foundation in 1948.

“It’s part of the “counterinsurgency” strategy,” he said. “Bigger roads [mean] easy access to forces – bigger roads, less congested battle management; bigger roads, less ability for fighters to escape from house to house.”Displacing the displaced

About 75,000 Palestinians live in the Jenin, Nur Shams, Far’a and Tulkarem refugee camps. They were either displaced themselves or descended from those displaced during the Nakba (which means “catastrophe”) when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by Zionist forces fromas part of the creation of Israel.