The BJP has long faced accusations of stoking anti-Muslim sentiment in India and pursuing policies that discriminate against Muslims and other religious minorities. In March, India objected to the creation of a United Nations-recognised international day to combat Islamophobia that was coordinated by Pakistan under the leadership of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. But, still there was no largescale condemnation of India for doing so. Now, the situation has turned. And the Arabian Gulf is furious at this Hindutva demagoguery.
Parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor opines that over the last seven years in India, the persecution of Muslims has been gradually normalised, and Indians have become increasingly inured to it.
He wrote there has also been a dramatic increase in lynchings of Muslims, especially for the “offence” of transporting or consuming beef (the cow is considered holy in Hinduism). Most states have enacted laws prohibiting the slaughter of cows, and both police and self-appointed mobs are enforcing them with greater zeal than judgment. “Cow vigilantes” have been known to beat Muslims, forcing them to chant Hindu religious slogans. Such hate crimes are committed with impunity.
As disturbing as these trends are, they should not be surprising, given that senior political figures express their bigotry openly.
Tharoor also referred to the mental makeup of the top politicians of the country, referring to what Modi once declared that anti-government protesters could be identified by their clothes – that is, by traditional Muslim attire or the skull cap. And prior to the 2019 general election, BJP President Amit Shah called Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants “termites” and pledged that a BJP government would “pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.” Islamophobic sentiment is stoked further via social media, often in BJP-curated WhatsApp groups, where the sins – both real and imagined – of past Muslim invaders and rulers are blamed on the entire community.
Tharoor felt that whereas previous governments sought to temper communal passions, promote harmony, and provide official support (including tax incentives) for efforts to promote India’s pluralism and diversity, the BJP unapologetically embraces an intolerant majoritarian Hindutva ideology. Those close to the ruling establishment routinely excoriate the Muslim minority – and previous governments’ alleged appeasement of it – as a threat to India’s Hindu identity.
Tharoor further says that under BJP rule, campaigns have been launched against interfaith romance (with Muslim men being accused of waging “love jihad” to entrap Hindu women), religious conversion (despite it being permitted by India’s constitution), and Muslim practices of marriage, divorce, and alimony (which are viewed as incompatible with women’s rights). A popular apparel firm was browbeaten into withdrawing an advertising campaign deemed by zealots to be inserting Muslim elements into the Hindu festival of Diwali. A Muslim religious gathering was deemed a COVID-19 super-spreader event, even as the far larger Hindu Kumbh Mela festival was allowed – even encouraged – to proceed.
Tharoor says that what dismays liberals like him is how thin the veneer of India’s constitutional secularism has turned out to be. In just seven years of BJP rule, the cultural pluralism and Hindu-Muslim amity that India has touted for decades have been annihilated.
There was a time when government officials would point proudly to Muslims in prominent positions as evidence of India’s ability to overcome the bitter legacy of Partition with Pakistan. Today, Muslims are dramatically underrepresented in the police forces and elite central administrative services, and they are overrepresented in the prisons. Sentiments that would have been deemed impolite to express a generation ago are declaimed from political platforms. The police often enable, rather than stop, the torment of Muslims.
Under BJP rule, the segregation and disempowerment of Muslims – the division of Indian society into “us” and “them” – is being gradually normalised, and Indians are becoming desensitised to the routine expression and practice of anti-Muslim bigotry. A Muslim who points this out will be told to “go to Pakistan.” Hindus like me are derided as “anti-national.” I have been called that myself. In 2015, speaking in parliament, I repeated a friend’s observation: in BJP-ruled India, it is safer to be a cow than a Muslim. Sadly, that rings even truer today, Tharoor wrote.
Dr Nitasha Kaul, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London says that Islamophobia in India works to enable violence, subjugate, and intimidate Muslims as a threat to the nation. In her paper Islamophobia in India, she wrote that the Hindutva project of the Indian nation, especially in its post 2014 extremist avatar under the helm of PM Modi and his associates, is transforming India into a culturally Hindu nation within a hierarchically ordered Hindu-ness with upper caste affluent Hindu males at the peak. In this new image, Muslims do not derive their rights and access to justice as equal, free individuals in a constitutionally guaranteed relation with the state, but from compliance with Hindu majoritarian norms. Those who challenge the diktats of Hindutva are labelled anti-national, Pakistani or Western agents. Depending upon the context and the vulnerability of the challengers, they can be killed, raped, physically attacked, maligned, harassed, bullied, or divested of any institutional or other power they may have.
Sacrality is invested in the idea of India as a Hindu land, even as violence is used against minorities and dissidents. Islamophobia in India works to enable violence, subjugate, and intimidate Muslims as a threat to the nation, in several different registers – Indian Muslims as suspect citizens; Kashmiri Muslims as emphatically problematic always besides already terrorist Muslims; Muslim refugees, such as Rohingyas, as “invasive pests”; and the collective neighbouring Muslim nation-state of Pakistan as “an existential enemy”. There is a powerful link between representational tropes and violence in each of these cases.
Dr Kaul is of the view that Indian Muslims have been subject to widespread discrimination and violence. They are often represented as “unclean”, “over populating”, “backward”, “unpatriotic”, “scheming”, “invaders”, “outsiders.” Evidence of this is not hard to find. As Muslims generally eat meat, the purity of vegetarian Hindus is understood to be defiled by them. The “beef ban” was enacted early in the Modi tenure. Since then, there have been numerous cases of violence against Muslims on the suspicion of possessing or eating beef, or transporting cattle intended for slaughter. The phenomenon of lynching minorities, and especially Muslims, became truly mainstreamed in recent years (cases such as Akhlaq or Pehlu Khan have come to be known after the names of their victims). There is a predictable pattern in these cases – organised right-wing Hindu vigilantes gather and kill Muslim Indians and the court cases against the perpetrators come to nothing as the suspects are exonerated on specious grounds.
In multiple instances, self-confessed Hindutva hate speech ideologues or instigators of violence are actually garlanded by their supporters when they are released from prison. Muslims are subject to violence if they refuse to chant Hindu slogans such as “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Ram, the Hindu God) in order to verify their patriotism. On the very day that Modi was elected in 2014, a Hindu mob killed a Muslim man in Pune because of his skull cap (a Muslim symbol). An extremist BJP politician, who shared a platform with a Hindu pride and masculinity, advocated and suggested that Hindus exhume the graves of Muslim women and rape them, became the Chief Minister of India’s electoral bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh. After 2014, perpetrators of well-evidenced gory violence against Muslims in the Gujarat genocide who had been convicted and sentenced to long prison terms have been given bail by the pliant courts (for instance, BabuBajrangi in 2019, Maya Kodnani in 2018).
Hindutva organisations exhort Hindu women to have more babies so that the overpopulating Muslims do not take over the country. There are campaigns such as “Bahu Lao, BetiBachao” (bring a daughter-in-law, save a daughter) that work towards ensuring Hindu women do not marry Muslim men. Muslim men are portrayed as rapacious, lascivious, devious, and scheming so that instances of marriage between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman are seen as the practice of “Love Jihad” (Jihad through the means of love) where a Muslim man intentionally corrupts the purity of Hindu women, and this results in such couples being intimidated, attacked or even killed. In a thoroughly patriarchal society like India, legal focus selectively targets the regressive and gendered practices of Muslim community as a way of confirming their backwardness. When India is imagined as a feminine spatial geo-body (“Mother India”), Muslims are represented as foreign to that body and hence deserving to be domesticated at best, and expelled or exterminated at worst.
The ideology of violent nationalism has captured the state and has conspicuous support among the public. It is ever more the case that apparatus of the state such as the police and judiciary more often than not act to support the Islamophobic anti-Muslim violence through delays in hearing cases or problematic judgements. After August 2019, the Supreme Court refused to hear the petition relating to the communications blockade in the Kashmir region for several months, thus collectively punishing Kashmiri Muslims and denying them access to necessary means of life and livelihood. In November 2019, the final Ayodhya verdict on the Babri Masjid gave the contested site to Hindus, citing a 1024 page-long anonymous Supreme Court judgement that unprecedentedly did not name the judge who wrote it. In September 2020, a special court acquitted all the BJP leaders for their role in the demolition of Babri Masjid by Hindu rioters.
In early 2020, protests against the December 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) were in full swing because the CAA changes would discriminate against only Muslim (but not Hindu or other religious) refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the granting of Indian citizenship. The NRC exercise would be a massive bureaucratic endeavour to verify citizenship that would disproportionately affect the most marginalised in terms of their ability to produce all the documents required. These changes would simultaneously create a religious basis for citizenship to exclude Muslims, and also result in the creation of enforced statelessness on a scale of millions across the country. The construction of detention camps for those deemed non-citizens commenced in 2020, and the future is grim.
In February 2020, shortly after the visit of Brazil’s Bolsonaro and when President Trump visited India to hold rallies with PM Modi in Gujarat, the anti-CAA/NRC protests, especially on university campuses, were met with severe violence. The capital city of Delhi saw targeted violence against Muslim neighbourhoods, particularly those that have voted against the ruling Modi-led BJP in state elections. BJP leaders had used the slogan “Deshkegaddaron ko, golimaarosaalon ko” (translated loosely as: “these traitors to the nation, shoot those bastards”). At this time, video evidence emerged to show police brutality against Muslim protesters. In one horrific video, men of the Delhi police in uniform can be seen prodding injured Muslim protesters who lie dying on the ground; they are asked to sing a patriotic song and taunted with the word “Azaadi,” or freedom. In spite of all the documented evidence, Muslim students are still being targeted for punishment.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Somdeep Sen opined in 2022 that, “Of course, since Modi became prime minister in 2014, Islamophobia has become a matter of state policy. This was evident in 2019, when the Modi-led government pursued the Hindu nationalist “dream” of returning exiled Hindus to the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir by revoking Article 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution that granted it special status. Speaking to a gathering of prominent Kashmiri Hindus in the United States, the Indian consul-general in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty described this measure to be an attempt to “protect Hindu culture in Kashmir”. He added, “The Kashmiri culture, is the Indian culture, it is the Hindu culture.”
Also in 2019, the Modi government enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that grants a fast track to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. In conjunction with a proposed National Register of Citizens, this was seen as an attempt to introduce a “religious test for Indian citizenship” that would effectively exclude Muslims. The introduction of the CAA resulted in large-scale protests that would be brutally suppressed by the government.
Equally, every day, Indian Muslims find themselves under attack and living in fear, as lynchings and hate speech are all but commonplace in the country. For instance, in India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, now led by hardline Hindu monk-turned-BJP politician Yogi Adityanath, a Muslim man was killed by a Hindu mob in March 2019 when he tried to prevent them from destroying an Islamic religious structure. In 2015 a 52-year-old Muslim man was also lynched by a Hindu mob because it was suspected that he was storing beef in his home. This lynching was part of the so-called “cow vigilante” mission – a violent campaign led by BJP cadres against the consumption of beef and cattle trade. According to Human Rights Watch, 36 Muslims (and 44 people in all) were killed in such attacks between May 2015 and December 2018.
This culture of intimidation continues today as Hindu supremacist groups routinely force Muslim meat vendors to close shop during Hindu festivals. In 2021, in the city of Indore in Madhya Pradesh, a Muslim bangle seller was badly beaten up for trading in a Hindu locality. In Ujjain city – also in Madhya Pradesh – a Muslim scrap dealer was reportedly forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram” (Victory to Lord Ram), a Hindu nationalist war cry.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world may have come to a standstill. But Islamophobic attacks and misinformation campaigns continued in India, as there were widespread efforts to blame Muslims for the outbreak of the coronavirus. These efforts began when a group of Muslim missionaries who were infected with COVID-19 unknowingly attended a large gathering in Delhi in March 2020, which subsequently led to a spread of the virus to communities across the country. Later images from Pakistan were being shared on social media as evidence of Muslims violating the lockdown. This led to hospitals refusing to admit Muslim patients unless they produced a negative COVID-19 test.
(to be continued)