“Jahan rahega, wahin raushni lutayega
Kisi ‘chiragh’ ka apna makaan nahi hota”
In the dusty lanes of Kotdwar in Uttarakhand, a 70 year old shopkeeper with Parkinson’s disease became the unlikely epicenter of a mob’s fury. For nearly three decades, his small, weathered store had stood as a fixture in the town, its name a quiet testament to lives intertwined across communities. But one tense afternoon, a crowd encircled him, baying for a rename not out of urban renewal or market whim, but in the name of some imagined grievance over that very name.
The old man sat trembling, his frail frame no match for the cacophony. Parkinson’s had already robbed him of steadiness now this orchestrated outrage sought to strip him of dignity too. It was a scene all too familiar in today’s India, where the trivial becomes a flashpoint for majoritarian muscle flexing, and the vulnerable are the first to pay.
Then, from the fringes, a local gym owner named Deepak Kumar stepped forward. He did not come armed with slogans or megaphones. He simply asked the crowd why harass an old man over a name that had endured for decades.
The mob pivoted, as mobs do, their ire now fixed on the interloper. Who are you to interfere, voices thundered.
He stood firm. My name, he replied. My name is Mohammad Deepak.
In that single, unadorned sentence, the air shifted. Here was no grandstanding activist, no viral provocateur just a man laying bare his full identity, a Muslim name and a Hindu surname woven together as they are in the lived reality of millions. It was a refusal to let identity be weaponized, a quiet insistence that humanity trumps hatred.
The clip exploded online, as these moments do in our hyper connected age. Predictably, backlash followed threats, crowds at his doorstep, even a police case slapped on him. Yet Deepak did not retreat. Before anything else, he later said, I am a human being. What we need is love, not hatred.
This is courage not the roaring kind scripted for television debates, but the kind that emerges when someone vulnerable is cornered, and silence would betray us all. In Kotdwar, it exposed the rot at the heart of our communal politics the ease with which ordinary lives are upended by those peddling division for clout or ideology. A shop’s name, a man’s health, a neighbor’s intervention trifles turned into battlegrounds because we have forgotten that Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb is not folklore, it is flesh and blood.
India’s founders envisioned a republic where faith was personal, not a license for intimidation. Yet here we are, two decades into the twenty first century, witnessing the steady erosion of that compact. Mobs rename streets, bully businesses, and police file cases against the peacemakers. When will we ask who benefits from this endless cycle of suspicion. Not the trembling shopkeeper, nor the gym owner risking all for a principle.
Deepak Kumar, Mohammad Deepak, reminds us that resistance begins with naming ourselves truthfully, without apology. In a nation pulling apart at the seams, his stand is a call to rediscover the love he speaks of not as sentiment, but as the defiant glue holding us together.
Sometimes, courage does not roar. It simply refuses to stay silent.
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