WAQAR AHMED
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has called for a complete ban on Tablighi Jamaat and its Nizamuddin Markaz besides freezing its bank accounts and closure of all its offices for spike in COVID19 cases across India. According to details, authorities shut its doors – with about 2,500 worshippers still inside. Authorities only started screening people staying at the Markaz from March 26, a day after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a nationwide lockdown to control the pandemic. On March 22, the gates of the Markaz, which also acts as a dormitory for hundreds of preachers from around the world, were shut after the city-state government in Delhi announced curbs on movement of people. Authorities in the Delhi government have accused the Tablighi Jamaat of ignoring their order, which barred the assembly of more than 50 people. But it has been generally observed that actually India is not testing enough people, with an average of 93 tests per million people. The B.J.P. controlled national government has passed several laws in recent years that have made life more difficult for religious minorities. The ostensible purpose of the measures is to shield Hindus and protect them from Islam or aggressive Christian preaching. The Bajrang Dal also cited these laws as a justification for attacks against Muslims and Christians. For the international community, the dominant narrative of India under Modi has been a story of economic success, not an account of religious violence and repression. The violence has marked a milestone after six years of governance by Hindu nationalists, who are now more politically dominant than ever before. Hindus have always considered Muslims as invaders of a basically Hindu India. In August, Modi put Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, on lockdown and stripped it of its semi-autonomous status. His government is planning to construct a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992. And his Home Minister, Amit Shah, is pushing forward plans to deport “infiltrators” from India with the help of a mass population registration program. Coronavirus fears and religious tension are already at its peak in India, and it didn’t take long for the two forces to intermingle. Videos falsely claiming to show members of the missionary group spitting on police and others quickly went viral on social media, exacerbating an already dangerous atmosphere for Muslims. Coming just weeks after religious pogroms conducted by Hindu nationalists left 36 Muslims dead in Delhi, the surge in hateful tweets demonstrates how anxieties over the coronavirus have merged with longstanding Islamophobia in India, at a time when the Muslim minority — 200 million people in a nation of 1.3 billion — feels increasingly targeted by the ruling Hindu nationalists. One of the most popular false Corona Jihad tweets claims to show a Muslim man from the Delhi congregation intentionally coughing on somebody. The tweet referred to Muslims as savage people and named them as “Corona Jihad” and “Tablighi Jamat Virus”, a reference to the religious group that met in Delhi. But the video featured in the viral tweet was actually filmed in Thailand, not India, and there is no proof that the man was a member of the Delhi congregation. Nevertheless, the tweet was still online as of April 3, with more than 4,200 re-tweets and 503 replies. Another video shared on both Facebook and Twitter purporting to show Muslims intentionally sneezing on each other was also debunked as false. Another tweet, which had around 2,000 re-tweets before it was removed for violating Twitter’s rules, featured a cartoon of a caricatured Muslim man labeled “Corona Jihad” trying to push a Hindu off a cliff. “Corona jihad is this new idea that Muslims are using the coronavirus to target Hindus. The tweet has since been removed for violating Twitter’s rules, but several other cartoons linking Muslims to the coronavirus with more than 15,000 followers, were still online as of today. The politically dominant Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using coronavirus as just “one more opportunity to malign the Muslim as dangerous. Hindus are falsely spreading the idea of ‘bio jihad’ and ‘corona jihad,’”. “These are just the latest in a series of different forms of ‘jihad’ that the Indian media has talked about, that have been spread on social media, and that people are readily accepting.” Population jihad, for example, is a common slogan in Hindu nationalist messaging, claiming that Muslims are trying to turn India into a Muslim nation by reproducing at a faster rate than Hindus. Love jihad is the idea that Muslim men are tricking Hindu women into romantic relationships in order to convert them to Islam. The trend we see across India is that a lot of the violence perpetrated against Muslims these days is actually perpetrated by subsidiaries of the Hindu nationalist movement. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is going backwards on every front: Its economy is in a free-fall (with growth at a six-year low and unemployment at a 45-year high); its polity is becoming authoritarian; and its dominant religion, Hinduism, is growing intolerant. It has to be realized that coronavirus cases are not specific to any community. However, extremist government of BJP in India is especially targeting Muslims to fulfill its evil designs. The government of India should put this trend down aggressively, and declare very clearly that this is not the source of the Coronavirus. We know where this virus originated. We know it’s a pandemic the whole world is being subjected to. It’s not something from religious minorities. But unfortunately we are seeing that sort of blame game getting started up in India against the religious minorities.
