Muslims have experienced discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing. Many encounter barriers to achieving political power and wealth, and lack access to healthcare and basic services. Moreover, they often struggle to secure justice after suffering discrimination, despite constitutional protections.
Over the last two decades, the representation of Muslims in Parliament has stagnated: after the 2019 elections, Muslims held just 5 percent of seats. That’s partly due to the rise of the BJP, which by mid-2022 had no Muslim members of its party in Parliament.
Meanwhile, a 2019 report by India-based non-governmental organisation Common Cause found that half of police surveyed showed anti-Muslim bias, making them less likely to intervene to stop crimes against Muslims. Analysts have also noted widespread impunity for those who attack Muslims. In recent years, courts and government bodies have sometimes overturned convictions or withdrawn cases that accused Hindus of involvement in violence against Muslims. States have increasingly passed laws restricting Muslims’ religious freedoms, including anti-conversion laws and bans on wearing headscarves in school.
In addition, authorities have turned to extrajudicial means to punish Muslims, through practice, which its critics call “bulldozer justice”. In 2022, authorities in several states destroyed people’s homes, alleging that the demolished buildings lacked proper permits. However, critics said they primarily targeted Muslims, some of whom had recently participated in protests. In response, India’s Supreme Court said that demolitions “cannot be retaliatory,” though the practice has continued.
Recent controversial actions taken with regard to Muslims
In December 2019, the parliament passed and Modi signed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows for the fast tracking of citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Critics say the law is discriminatory because it excludes Muslims and applies religious criteria for the first time to the question of citizenship. The Modi government argues that the law is designed to provide protection for vulnerable religious minorities who faced persecution in these three Muslim-majority countries.
“The longer Hindu nationalists are in power, the greater the change will be to Muslims’ status and the harder it will be to reverse such changes”, says Ashutosh Varshney, an expert on Indian inter-communal conflict at Brown University, USA.
At the same time, the BJP promised in its 2019 election manifesto to complete a National Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC was created in the 1950s for the unique case of the state of Assam to determine whether residents were Indian citizens or migrants from what is now neighbouring Bangladesh. In 2019, the Assam government updated its register, which excluded nearly two million people. If implemented nationwide, all Indians would be required to prove their citizenship. Critics say this process could render many Muslims stateless because they lack necessary documents and are not eligible for fast-tracked citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Modi has meanwhile diminished the political standing of what was India’s only Muslim-majority state: Jammu and Kashmir. In August 2019, the government split the state, which lies in the mountainous border region in dispute with Pakistan, into two territories and stripped away its special constitutional autonomy. Since then, Indian authorities have cracked down on the rights of people in the region, oftentimes under the guise of maintaining security. They shut down the Internet eighty-five times in 2021, harassed and arrested journalists, and detained prominent political figures and activists. Armed groups have killed dozens of civilians since the division, despite government claims that the security situation had improved.
What have been the recent largest outbursts of violence?
Babri Masjid, 1992
Disputes over the mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya have turned deadly in recent decades. Hindus claim a general from the Muslim Mughal Empire built the mosque on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram during the sixteenth century. In 1992, Hindu militants destroyed the mosque. An estimated three thousand people, most of them Muslim, died in ensuing riots – the deadliest religious clashes since partition. In 2020, Modi set the cornerstone for a new Hindu temple on the site after the Supreme Court approved its construction.
Gujarat Riots, 2002
Nationwide clashes broke out after a train of Hindu pilgrims traveling from Ayodhya through the western state of Gujarat caught fire, killing dozens of people. Blaming Muslims for starting the fire, Hindu mobs throughout Gujarat killed hundreds of Muslims, raped Muslim women, and destroyed Muslim businesses and places of worship. Opposition politicians, human rights groups, and U.S. lawmakers criticized Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, and the BJP for not doing enough to prevent the violence and in some cases encouraging it. An Indian government investigation said the train fire was an accident, but conflicting reports have said it was arson.
Muzaffarnagar Riots, 2013
In towns near the city of Muzaffarnagar, more than sixty people were killed in clashes that broke out between Hindus and Muslims after two Hindu men died in an altercation with Muslim men. An estimated fifty thousand people, most of them Muslim, fled the violence; many lived in relief camps for months, and some never returned home.
Anti-Muslim Mobs
Hindu mob attacks have become so common in recent years that India’s Supreme Court warned that they could become the “new normal.” One of the most common forms of anti-Muslim violence are vigilante groups attacking people rumoured to trade or kill cows, which many Hindus believe are sacred. These so-called cow protection groups, according to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, have killed at least forty-four people, most of them Muslims. Muslim men have also been attacked after being accused of “love jihad,” a term used by Hindu groups to describe Muslim men allegedly trying to seduce and marry Hindu women to convert them. Hundreds of Muslim men have been arrested for violating anti-conversion laws that several BJP-led states passed in an effort to prevent love jihad.
New Delhi Violence, 2020
Violence broke out as Muslims and others protested the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in New Delhi. Around fifty people were killed, most of them Muslim, in the capital city’s worst communal violence in decades. Some BJP politicians helped incite the violence, and police reportedly did not intervene to stop Hindu mobs from attacking Muslims. A 2021 Human Rights Watch report found that authorities had not investigated police complicity, while they had charged more than a dozen protesters.
Protests over Islamophobic Rhetoric, 2022
In May, two BJP officials made profane comments about Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, leading to deadly protests across India and condemnation from Muslim-majority countries. The BJP suspended the officials. The following month, two Muslim men killed a Hindu man who supported one of the BJP officials in an attack they filmed and shared online.
“The idea was that if you were a Muslim, you were liable to be attacked anywhere, anytime.”, says Ghazala Jamil, Assistant Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Critics also say that BJP officials have ignored recent violence against Muslims. “During Modi’s first five-year term, there were continuous attacks on Muslim individuals, which kind of made the community feel under siege,” says Ghazala Jamil, “The idea was that if you were a Muslim, you were liable to be attacked anywhere, anytime.” Hate speech and misinformation spread online have also encouraged violence against Muslims.
Experts note that although anti-Muslim sentiment is rising among Hindus, not all Hindus and not all people who voted for the BJP are anti-Muslim. Both Muslims and Hindus, including activists, legal scholars, and students, have fought against the BJP’s moves to undermine India’s secularism. For example, after the Citizenship Amendment Act was passed, chief ministers of several states said they would not implement the law and nearly two thousand academics and professionals signed a statement condemning it for violating the spirit of the constitution.
How is the World Responding to the Rising Discrimination in India?
Many foreign governments and international bodies have condemned the BJP’s discrimination of Muslims, citing actions in Kashmir, the Citizenship Amendment Act, and anti-Muslim rhetoric as particular concerns.
The UN human rights office described the Citizenship Amendment Act as “fundamentally discriminatory.” Iran, Kuwait, and Qatar were among the Muslim-majority countries that lodged formal complaints against India in 2022 over public officials’ Islamophobic remarks. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57-member states, called on India to curb the “growing spate of hatred and defamation of Islam” and “systematic practices against Indian Muslims.”
Successive US administrations have been reluctant to publicly call out India’s abuses as they have boosted ties with the country. For example, when President Donald Trump visited India in February 2020, he praised Modi’s commitment to religious freedom and said nothing about the outbreak of violence in Delhi. The Joe Biden administration has reportedly voiced concerns in private, while expanding cooperation with India including through the so-called Quad-regional security agreement. Meanwhile, in its 2020 report, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent government agency, classified India as a “country of particular concern” – its lowest rating – for the first time since 2004. The latest reports have maintained that designation and urged the US government to sanction Indian officials responsible for abuses. Some members of Congress have also expressed concerns about it.