Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part One)

By A. Faizur Rahman

(With Permission from the author to publish this chapter ‘Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy’ from the Book 'Politics of Hate -Religious Majoritarianism in South Asia' Edited by Farahnaz Ispahani - Published by HarperCollins Publishers India.)

25 May 2-23

THE ‘RIGHTWARD SHIFT’ IN INDIAN politics that catapulted the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, to power in May 2014 has been a cause of concern for many. Some fear that Prime Minister Modi, through his successful promotion of Hindutva ideology, is poised to remake India into a Russian-style ‘managed democracy’—one retaining all the trappings of democracy while operating as a de facto autocracy.

 

There are about 200 million Muslims in India, compared with more than 965 million Hindus [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

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Others are worried that the long-cherished idea of India as a benign, inclusive state is collapsing and giving way to a less pluralistic, less inclusive and less tolerant country where patriotism becomes indistinguishable from chauvinism, and democracy metamorphoses into one-man rule.

Amplifying this sense of disquietude, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its 2020 Annual Report released on 28 April 2020, exhorted the American government to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) ‘for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA)’.

One of the main reasons cited for this drastic recommendation was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s alleged pledge to exact ‘revenge’ on anti-CAA protestors and his statement that they should be fed ‘bullets not biryani’. The report also claimed that throughout 2019, ‘government action—including the CAA, continued enforcement of cow slaughter and anti-conversion laws, and the November Supreme Court ruling on the Babri Masjid site—created a culture of impunity for nationwide campaigns of harassment and violence against religious minorities’.

But the most serious imputation was the finding that mob lynching of persons suspected of cow slaughter or of consuming beef continued, that it occurred mostly in BJP-ruled states and that the lynch mobs ‘often took on overtly Hindu nationalist tones’.6 As evidence, the report cited the June 2019 mob attack in Jharkhand on Tabrez Ansari, a Muslim, who was forced to chant the Hindu slogan ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Hail Lord Ram) before being beaten to death.7 Earlier, a survey had made the shocking revelation that every third Indian policeperson thinks it is natural ‘to a large extent’ or ‘somewhat’ for a mob to punish culprits when there is a case of cow slaughter.

The Indian government was quick to reject the USCIRF report, calling it ‘biased and tendentious’.9 However, a news analysis published in The Hindu quoted Nirupama Menon Rao, former Indian ambassador to the US, as stating that the report could not be ignored outright because ‘there is a reputational issue involved, for India, as the world’s largest democracy that draws strength from the protection of diversity’.10 Similar views were echoed by  a constitutional law scholar who argued that while the government was right at the diplomatic level to reject the report, the criticism ought to be seen as an opportunity to reflect on the state of freedom of religion in India.11 Meanwhile, in its 2021 Annual Report, the USCIRF again asked the US government to designate India as a CPC and ‘condemn ongoing religious freedom violations and support religious organizations and human rights groups being targeted for their advocacy of religious freedom’.

It cannot be denied that in the recent past, Muslims in India have been demonized, abused, suspected and some even lynched with impunity in the name of religion.13 Such acts of intimidation and mindless violence rose sharply after it came to light that several participants in the Tablighi Jamaat’s Delhi conference, held in March 2020, had tested positive for COVID-19.

Local newspapers carried horrifying accounts of how Muslims were mercilessly assaulted on suspicion of intentionally spreading the coronavirus. The brutalities included people putting up posters banning the entry of Muslims into towns and villages and the circulation of anti-Muslim videos.16 One of the most brazen expressions of hate was encapsulated in a video which showed the principal of a medical college allegedly calling the Tablighis ‘terrorists’ who deserved to be ‘locked up in dungeons’ rather than treated in hospitals. Among the international publications that reported these crimes prominently were The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post20 and Time. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) also voiced its ‘deep concern’ on the growing Islamophobia in India and urged the Indian government to take steps to protect Muslim minorities, who were being negatively profiled and facing discrimination and violence amid the COVID-19 crisis.

 The courts, on their part, highlighted how the psychological impact of this enervating onslaught could go beyond traumatizing its direct victims and have a demoralizing effect on all Muslims in India. Quashing a case filed against Tablighi Jamaat members under the Disaster Management Act of 2005 and Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court (through Justice T.V. Nalawade) noted that:

It can be said that due to the present action taken, fear was created in the minds of those Muslims. This action indirectly gave warning to Indian Muslims that action in any form and for any thing can be taken against Muslims. It was indicated that even for keeping contact with Muslims of other countries, action will be taken against them. Thus, there is smell of malice to the action taken against these foreigners and Muslim for their alleged activities. The circumstances like malice is important consideration when relief is claimed of quashing of F.I.R. and the case itself.

Earlier, in the Tehseen Poonawalla v Union of India & Others case [(2018) 9 SCC 501], a three-Judge bench of Justices Dipak Misra, A.M. Khanwilkar, and D.Y. Chandrachud had recognized the psychological impact of persecutory bullying. While asking the Parliament ‘to create a separate offence for [mob] lynching and provide adequate punishment for the same’ the bench asked state governments to prepare ‘a lynching/mob violence victim compensation scheme in the light of the provisions of Section 357A of CrPC’ giving due regard to the nature of not just bodily injury, but ‘psychological injury and loss of earnings including loss of opportunities of employment and education and expenses incurred on account of legal and medical expenses.’

 The Supreme Court was also forced was forced to restrain television channel Sudarshan News from broadcasting a programme which had promised to expose the ‘UPSC jihad conspiracy’25 to infiltrate the Indian bureaucracy. Suresh Chavhanke, the editor of the channel, had also allegedly claimed that India was meant to be a Hindu Rashtra right from Independence.26 A three-judge bench of the apex court did not mince words when it said that the purpose of the programme was ‘to vilify the Muslim community’ and to bring it ‘into public hatred and disrepute’.

In this context, a report released in March 2022 by the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS)—the highest decision-making body of the RSS—stated: ‘There appears to be elaborate plans by a particular community to enter the government machinery. Behind all this, it seems that a deep conspiracy with a long-term goal is working. On the strength of numbers, preparations are being made to adopt any route to get their points convinced.’ One wonders which particular Indian community the ABPS was warning about. It would appear, however, that even hard-hitting judicial pronouncements did not have the desired impact. Three states— Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh—in the name of preventing religious conversion for the sake of marriage, passed tough anti-conversion laws to address the myth of ‘love- jihad’, an unsubstantiated Muslim complot to convert Hindu women to Islam after luring them into marriage. A former judge of the Supreme Court of India dubbed these laws as ill-conceived and unconstitutional for vilifying interfaith marriages and placing unreasonable obstacles on consenting adults in exercising their personal choice of a partner.

Another independent commentator described this suspicious attitude as an attempt to misrepresent the Quranic concept of ‘jihad’ by inventing hyphenated terms such as love jihad, corona jihad and  UPSC jihad to project Muslims as some kind of conspirators actively scheming against India’s Hindu majority.

An interesting finding of a major (June 2021) Pew Research Centre survey of religion across India is that 80 per cent of Indian Muslims believe it is very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion, and 76 per cent say it is very important to stop Muslim men from doing so. This would not have been the case if the community was indeed conspiring, as alleged, to increase its numbers through interfaith marriage. As for religious conversion, the survey found that it has ‘a minimal impact on the size of religious groups’, and that Hindus gain as many people as they lose through ‘religious switching’.

These findings, however, had little impact on Islamophobes. In December 2021, calls for the massacre of Indian Muslims were made from a Dharam Sansad (religious parliament) held in the north Indian city of Haridwar. Annapurna Maa, a saffron-clad ‘religious’ lady, said that she would ‘pick up arms to protect Sanatan Dharma if any demon tries to become a threat to Hindutva’. She warned that the situation in India is alarming, and therefore ‘I am willing to sacrifice myself to ensure a Muslim prime minister does not take over in 2029. We need to increase our population over them. If needed, we can kill them. We will be considered winners even if 20 lakh [two million] of their population is killed.’

From an anthropological point of view, one wonders what enculturation process could explain the revulsion that these men and women feel for Indian Muslims. For, no ancient or modern exponent of the great Indian system of life—Sanatana Dharma—had ever philosophized about a world where hate rules in place of love.

Swami Vivekananda, the celebrated apostle of Vedanta, explained in 1898 that ‘without the help of practical Islam, the theories of Vedantism, however fine and wonderful they may be, are entirely 

valueless to the vast mass of mankind’. He proposed harmonizing the Vedas, the Bible and the Quran to teach humanity that ‘religions are but the varied expressions of the religion, which is Oneness, so that each may choose that path that suits him best’.

Muslimophobia

But how and why did things deteriorate so quickly for Muslims? On the face of it, the suddenness of these disturbing developments may appear inexplicable. But Islamophobia in India has a long history.

Muslim presence in the subcontinent dates back to around 630 CE, when Islamized Arab merchants started arriving in the coastal regions of Konkan, Gujarat and Malabar in continuation of the trade links they had had with India from pre-Islamic times. The cordiality of this business relationship was such that it resulted in not just the spread of Islamic culture in India but also in the conversion of Indians to Islam. It flourished for a long time, unaffected even by the forays of invaders such as Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030), Muhammad Ghori (1149–1206) and Muhammad bin Qasim, the Arab general of the sixth Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (674–715), who captured Sindh and Multan from Raja Dahir around 711 CE.

However, the procession of Muslim conquerors that followed Muhammad bin Qasim seriously damaged Indo-Muslim propinquity, and by the turn of the twentieth century, a deep mistrust had developed between Muslims and Hindus. The Muslims came to be seen as outsiders who had come to conquer and convert the original inhabitants of the subcontinent to Islam.

For instance, in the late 1800s, Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj tried, as Nehru put it, ‘to become a defender of everything Hindu, against what it considered as the encroachments of other faiths’. Nehru had no doubt that the Arya Samaj was a reaction to the influence of Islam and Christianity, especially the former.35 Indeed, the emergence of the Tablighi Jamaat in the mid-1920s was partly in response to the reconversion (shuddhi) movement of the Arya Samaj.

The Arya Samaj’s systematic attack on Islam intensified Hindu– Muslim antagonism and resulted in fifteen major riots between 1883 and 1891 over ‘kine slaughter’ (cow slaughter). The animosity lingered on, with the effect that in the run-up to the Partition, pan- Islamic politics surrounding the Khilafat Movement were imputed to the entire community and it was charged with harbouring extra- territorial loyalties.

Gandhi did his best to remedy the situation but failed. In a well-attended unity conference in 1925, when he lamented about how the Ali brothers—once his staunch allies in the Non- cooperation–Khilafat movement—had been unfairly accused of wanting to invite the Afghans to raid India, Arya Samaj leader Lajpat Rai’s response was that Muslim protestations about their love for India and their ‘readiness to resist foreign invasions’ were so hemmed in by ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that they left an ‘atmosphere of distrust in many Hindu minds’. This prompted Jinnah to bitterly complain against this ‘illogical and unwarranted feeling of Lalaji’ and announce that he was ‘perfectly willing and ready’ to do anything to alleviate it.

Nonetheless, in April 1925, Rai resigned from the Congress and became the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, months after conceding that anti-Muslim sentiments were the raison d’être of this movement, which imagined India as a Hindu rashtra. Rai’s Hindu tilt and his ideological antipathy to the Congress were not new. As early as 1901, he had warned the Congress against attempting ‘a chimerical and premature union of the various religious nationalities’

in India, and accused it of sacrificing Hindu interests for the ‘false ideal’ of national unity.

It is not surprising, therefore, that long before Jinnah could imagine Pakistan, it was Rai who, in 1905, spoke of ‘a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.’41 The ‘non- Muslim India’ could only have been a euphemism for a Hindu rashtra to be constituted on the principles of Hindutva.

Other Parts:

Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part One)

Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part Two)

 Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part Three)

URL:    https://newageislam.com/books-documents/muslimophobia-india-remedy-part-one/d/129847

 

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