Heart of darkness
FROM being the poster child of secular democracy with diverse ethnicities and religions, India has now sunk to the heart of darkness with the fundamentalist and fascist anti-Muslim policies of Narendra Modi.
The treatment being meted out to the more than two hundred million Muslims in India is nothing short of genocide.
What is worse is the deafening silence of the flag bearers of human rights in the West, particularly the USA.
During a US Congressional briefing in February this year, Dr.Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, warned that Muslims in India face the threat of imminent genocide, likening the situation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi to those experienced on the eve of genocide in Rwanda and Myanmar.
Despite Stanton’s reputation as the world’s most esteemed scholar of genocide, having accurately predicted the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Biden Administration remains silent towards the persecution of Muslims in India.
India’s Muslims, the country’s largest minority group, are becoming an increasingly marginalized population, struggling to prove their loyalty to India as its rightful citizens.
Although India’s Muslim communities have faced decades of discrimination in employment and education and encountered barriers to achieving wealth and political power, faced systematic hate, prejudice and violence, despite constitutional protections but nothing compares to the Hindu nationalist BJP’s government blatant moves to permanently sideline, brutalize and terrorize them.
The lack of access to health-care and basic services and deliberate efforts to deny access to justice is institutionalized under Modi.
Indian Muslims today are disproportionately the victim of communal violence, particularly after the Citizenship Amendment Act which allows fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from other countries.
Additionally, other controversial policies have been pushed by the government that explicitly ignore the rights of the Muslims and are effectively intended to disenfranchise millions of Muslims.
During the fight for independence from British colonialism, Congress Party fought for an India that accepted all citizens and faiths as equal.
Gandhi envisioned a secular state free from discrimination. Nehru believed that secularism was essential to building a peaceful society and saw those trying to divide India along religious lines, especially Hindu groups, as the greatest threat to the newly established country.
To cater to these anti minority sentiments prevalent in some sections of the Hindus in the Congress, the word “Secular” was deliberately added to the preamble of the Indian Constitution in 1976.
Before Modi became PM, poverty, insufficient economic growth and corruption were seen by the Indians as the main problems to be tackled, but after Modi’s state-led and motivated campaign for revival of Hindutva converting India into a Hindu State, most citizens have been made to believe that their chief concern was Muslims.
Modi came to power on the promise to enhance economic growth and create employment for all, as the economy continued to worsen, and unemployment and poverty rose uncontrollably the BJP has increasingly fallen back on supremacist politics to deflect attention and evade responsibility.
With the rise of Modi, historical underlying resentment for non-Hindus in the hearts of some marginalized Hindu elements has mixed with the politics of Hindu nationalism in a dangerous brew of xenophobia and patriotism.
To keep winning elections, it needs to keep polarizing Hindu voters against Muslims, and spinning ever more outrageous campaigns to demonize Muslims.
Babri Masjid-1992, Gujarat riots-2002, Muzaffarnagar riots-2013,Samjhauta Express and many other violent anti-Muslim incidents can be traced back to the hatred and the Hindutva philosophy of the BJP fundamentalists.
No level of Indian society has escaped the pernicious influence of the Hindutva ideology.
Today Hindu mob attacks against the Muslims have become a common assurance forcing India’s Supreme Court to warn that this hate phenomenon could become the “new normal.
” What is happening in India against the Muslims has been described by some human rights organizations as “religious apartheid.”
Some NGOs in India have bravely conducted surveys and have concluded that since the coming into power of the fascist government of Modi, demonstrated that majority of Hindu police officers harbour anti-Muslim bias, making them less likely to intervene to stop crimes against Muslims.
Cases of widespread impunity are the vogue for those who attack Muslims; courts and government bodies increasingly overturn convictions or force the victims to withdraw cases that accused Hindus of involvement in violence against Muslims.
One of the most common forms of anti-Muslim violence is vigilante groups attacking people rumored to slaughter cows for beef.
Scores of people, mostly Muslims, have been killed by the cow protection groups. Muslims feel under siege and are beginning to feel that if you are a Muslim, you are liable to be attacked anywhere, anytime” Hate speech and misinformation spread online have also encouraged violence against Muslims.
Although some foreign governments and international bodies have condemned the BJP’s discrimination of Muslims, citing actions in Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act as particular concerns but nothing significant and powerful enough like a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the reports of deliberate massacre of the Muslims has been undertaken by the international community that would force the Modi government to review its anti-Muslim policies.
Some pressure is being exerted by the OIC but unfortunately the OIC resolutions are without the requisite force and teeth to make any significant difference to the policies of Modi.
The recent public pronouncements and ban on commodities made in India by some Arab and Gulf states is an encouraging development.
However, to make a real difference far more joint effort by the Muslim Ummah is necessary.
There is no doubt that the secular republic that Gandhi imagined is fading away and being hollowed out frantically by the Modi revival of Hindutva.
Modi’s ministers and legislators freely call on people to shoot “traitors” and are promoted rather than penalized for their actions.
Modi himself partly owes his fan following and ascent to his lack of remorse over the 2002 massacre in Gujarat under his watch as the Chief Minister.
The world must realize, particularly the big Western powers, that are wooing India for strategic and economic reasons, that the longer Hindu nationalists’ blatant disregard for the rights of the Muslims is tolerated, the greater the negative change will be to Muslims’ status and the harder it will be to reverse such changes.
—The writer is former Ambassador, based in Islamabad.
