Farhan Mujahid Chak, an Associate Professor of Political Science, at the Gulf Studies Graduate Programme, Qatar University, in his chapter India, Islamophobia, and the Hindutva playbook in the book The rise of global Islamophobia in the War on Terror, on Islamophobia in India wrote that, “Nowhere in the world has Islamophobia as dangerously manifested as it has in India today. Well-known academic and Islamophobia specialist Khaled Beydoun has categorically described India as the “epicentre of global Islamophobia.” This is not just because of the frequency of Islamophobic attacks – a daily occurrence now – or the depth of depravity when listening to the demonising language or even the level of violence perpetrated against Muslims. Beyond that, the gravity of Islamophobia in India is twofold: first, the unabashed institutional support for Islamophobia in the highest political offices in the country documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and second is no recourse for Indian Muslims to appeal to the judiciary, police or any other legal authorities for meaningful protection.
“Today, it’s open season on Muslims in India. With such hubris, there isn’t even the pretence of abiding by the rule of law or acknowledging the rights of minorities. It is a rabid, unadulterated, hate mongering that demonstrates in the most obscene of ways. This includes well-documented, blatant prejudice and discrimination against Muslims and other minorities that has stripped citizenship from millions of people and demagoguery that threatens to lynch Muslims in broad daylight – with police watching. In a twisted way, there seems to be a sense of amusement, even glee, at the rising levels of hate speech and violence directed toward Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Sikhs and other minorities,” opines Farhan.
Farhan further says that to understand the origins of Islamophobia in India, it’s important to consider its direct link to the Hindutva social imaginary, a poisonous social imaginary that paints a misleading, false, monolithic image of India and then positions Muslims as its nemesis. Unless this imaginary is challenged, Islamophobia and violence will continue to rise. Already, that demonising narrative is being used to justify acts of violence such as “cow vigilantism,” also known as “gaurakshaks,” which has led to lynching of Muslims on the dubious, perverse rationale that they are secretly killing cows. Ironically, a country where cows are sacred is among the largest beef exporters in the world, in addition to “gharwapsi” – forced conversion campaign. India is encouraging Muslims to convert to Hinduism under the threat of violence. All in all, there is a carefully orchestrated strategy with clear political support to demonise Islam and Muslims to rationalise crimes against them in India.
Ashraf Kunnummal is of the view that the comparative lack of studies on Islamophobia in Muslim-minority contexts in the global South, such as India, does not imply that there is no Islamophobia in those contexts. Though there are efforts to claim certain phenomena, movements, events, discourse, and acts as Islamophobic in India, there has been less of an effort to explain why this is so, whether from a comparative perspective or in its specific context. There exists a methodological dilemma regarding how one can approach Islamophobia in the Indian context, where Muslims are a minority with varieties of social, political, and religious experiences at different scales, without undermining its global, national, urban, community, body, and emotional aspects.
Militant Hindu nationalist groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have propagated the most visible form of Islamophobia in the context of India, for the last hundred years. A pre-planned effort to psychologically influence the ‘innocent masses’ is the major premise of this particular approach to Islamophobia. However, Islamophobia is not limited to the politics of certain visible agents and their conscious efforts to build Islamophobic narratives that further divide the Indian society and alienate Muslim minorities. And it is important to understand the psychic investment of the masses in desiring Islamophobia through active participation in it. While studying these visible agents, one should not forget the problem that the structure of Islamophobia in India is related to and lies in modern discourses of politics, community, caste, gender, nationalism, state, religion, and economy that create the radicalisation of Muslims.
Historical Background of Islamophobia in India
However, before delving into the realities of Islamophobia in today’s India, we’ll have to delve into its past too and understand how deep are the fissures in the Indian society, which have contributed to the increased Islamophobia, which earlier used to be described as pure ‘discrimination’ on religious grounds.
Lindsay Maizland, Editor – Asia, in her analysis for the Washington-based, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), India’s Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalised Population, gives a detailed background of this earlier history of Hindu-Muslim relations in India.
Maizland says that India is home to some two hundred million Muslims, one of the world’s largest Muslim populations but a minority in the predominantly Hindu country. Since India’s independence, Muslims have faced systematic discrimination, prejudice, and violence, despite constitutional protections.
She says that anti-Muslim sentiments have heightened under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since elected to power in 2014. Since Modi’s re-election in 2019, the government has pushed controversial policies that critics say explicitly ignore Muslims’ rights and are intended to disenfranchise millions of Muslims. Under Modi, violence against Muslims has become more common. The moves have sparked protests in India and drawn international condemnation.
How did Partition influenced Islamophobia in India
While studying the historical background of Islamophobia in India, we have to trace its origin to the genesis of the Partition and even before that. Some of the animus between India’s Hindus and Muslims can be traced to the cataclysmic partition of British India in 1947, scholars say. Economically devastated after World War II, the British lacked the resources to maintain their empire and moved to leave the subcontinent. In the years before partition, the Indian National Congress party, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, pushed for independence, organising civil disobedience and mass protests against British rule. Meanwhile, the All-India Muslim League political group, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, called for a separate state for Muslims.
In 1947, a British judge hastily decided the borders for a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan (including what is today Bangladesh). The partition sparked deadly riots, gruesome communal violence, and mass migrations of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs to India. Survivors recall blood-soaked trains carrying refugees from one country to the other, towns burned to the ground, and bodies thrown in the streets. Historians estimate between two hundred thousand and two million people were killed.
Why communities that had coexisted for hundreds of years attacked each other remains unclear. Some experts fault the British and their “divide-and-rule” strategy, which provided some electoral privileges for the Muslim minority, about 25 percent of the population. Others point to tensions between Hindu and Muslim political movements, which rallied constituents along religious lines. Around thirty-five million Muslims stayed in India after partition.
Prashant Waikar, senior analyst at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, says that Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva) as an ideology is premised on otherisation. It constructs an idealised Hindu as the archetypical citizen of India. Through the superiorisation of the Hindu, Hindutva necessarily imagines an array of identities to be unworthy of belonging to its conception of India. Hindutva’s otherisation project inferiorises a number of identities: Dalits, liberals, Christians, feminists, but most of all, Muslims. Hindutva thus envisions India to have always been a Hindu nation, and perceives Islam and Muslims as an alien force which, through invasion and war, caused a seismic demographic shift to the detriment of the natural state of Hinduness in the subcontinent.
Members of Hindutva groups such as the BJP, the RSS, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have been accused of instigating violence between Hindus and Muslims, forcibly converting Muslims to Hinduism, assaulting and murdering Muslim men because they fear Muslims are attempting to increase their population by duping Hindu women into converting and marrying them (i.e. “Love Jihad”), and rallying supporters to lynch Muslims for eating beef because the cow is considered sacred in Hinduism. Beyond physical acts of violence, Hindutva engages in symbolic assaults against Muslim selfhood by attempting to anchor the history of Muslim predominance in the subcontinent as a period of unrivalled violence, characterising Muslim men as ruthless oppressors of Muslim women, and portraying Muslims as the fifth column biding their time before seizing control of India – just as they are deemed to have done 800 years ago. In this context, it is clear that Hindutva is Islamophobic by design.
Waikar, in his paper, aimed to analyse the narratives of Islamophobia in the Hindutva discourse. The concern is with demonstrating how Hindutva organises its vision of India as a Hindu nation through the otherisation of Muslims. Waikaranalysed the narratives of Islamophobia in podcasts, interviews, and speeches given by the Indian PM Modi, since he took office in 2014. A discourse analysis of 35 podcasts, interviews, and speeches was conducted. This entailed analysing the construction of chains of equivalences in the corpus, or the way in which statements are mobilised into particular ideas, and the resulting ideas into narratives. Conceptually, the article applies the notion of language-games – as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), and taken further in the context of Islamophobia by Salman Sayyid (2014).
To my knowledge, this article is the first empirical application of Sayyid’s conceptualisation of Islamophobia. Not so much as a validation of his conceptual approach, since everything is a language-game, but as a demonstration of how language-games can be approached empirically. Additionally, it does not yet appear that a discourse analysis of an Indian statesman’s political narratives has been conducted to analyse and explain how Islamophobia is articulated. Waikar aimed to address these two research gaps. Two Islamophobic narratives in Modi’s political discourse have been mapped out: (1) the erasure of Indian Muslim histories in Modi’s economic development agenda, and (2) the characterisation of Hinduism as having a taming effect on Islam in India.
Before discussing these narratives, Waikar first provided a conceptual overview of language-games, related it to Islamophobia, and then explained how Hindutva characterises the categories “Hindu” and “Muslim” as existing in an irreconcilable antagonistic relationship. He concluded by suggesting that Hindutva’s Islamophobia has permeated outside of the confines of Hindu nationalist ideas and into the Hindu mainstream, but cautioned that this claim still needs empirical validation.
[Excerpts from the author’s upcoming book, Decoding Hate In The Indian Politics, being published by the Board of Islamic Publications, New Delhi.]