Sultan M Hali
INDIAN Muslims have never been safe since the partition in 1947. In fact, once the partition of India was announced, Hindu mobs started massacring Muslims to force them to flee to Pakistan. After Pakistan gained independence and it was clear which territories are part of the new homeland for Muslims, a mass exodus of refugees started. Muslims refugees headed for the “promised land” were massacred, while their women were raped by extremist Hindus and Sikhs. In independent India, hate crimes were sporadic, till in 2014, the Butcher of Gujarat, Narendra Modi came to power. Since then, no Indian Muslim is safe whether in Kashmir or elsewhere. On 5 August 2019, India-occupied Kashmir (IoK) was annexed to Indian Union and the whole of Kashmir has been in a state of lockdown. Draconian citizenship laws were introduced to deny citizenship to Muslims.
The ethnic cleansing of Indian Muslims and the organized butchery has not gone unnoticed in the west. While the US and European Union are taking cognizance of hate crimes against Muslims, conscientious observers like CJ Werleman, columnist for Middle East Eye, host of Channel “The Rage” and activist against Islamophobia are carefully chronicling the trend of Indian tyranny against Muslims. The columnist observes that hate crimes against Muslims in India have exploded since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, with religious-based hate crimes surging nearly 30% in the 2014 to 2017 period, and then doubling since his landslide re-election in 2019, culminating with the murder of more than 50 Muslims over the course of six bloody days in New Delhi during February 23–29, 2020.
“The situation in India is approaching genocidal,” says Arundhati Roy, the award winning Indian novelist. Werleman says that the purpose of the exercise is to track and document all hate crimes carried out against India’s 200 million Muslims, with the objective of catching all data regarding date, location, motive, victim, perpetrator and subsequent legal action, which will then be later populated into a searchable and analytical database, and then made available as a resource tool for journalists, academics and human rights activists. According to Amnesty International India: “For India to be committed towards ending hate crimes — where people are targeted because of their identity stemming from race, religion, caste and gender amongst others, it is essential for the country’s penal laws to first recognize the bias behind the commission of such crimes and document occurrence of such incidents — both of which remain conspicuously absent currently.” The database being created by Werleman is meticulous. His list commences from June 2014, when Modi came to power and is updated every day, correct till August 2020.
Narendra Modi’s butchery became discernible in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat and under his stewardship, over 2000 Muslims of Gujarat were massacred. That is how he earned the dubious title of “Butcher of Gujarat”. Western democracies had banned his entry into their countries, refusing to grant him visa. Google had placed him in the list of “Top-Ten Terrorists of the World”. Things changed when Modi got elected as Prime Minister. The world embraced him and welcomed him since they perceived India as a market for the product and investment. The same democracies and even the UN and Human Rights organizations that had shunned him, found him adorable but the bonhomie did not last long. Modi’s true visage was soon exposed. On 8 July 2016 he had popular Kashmiri youth leader Burhan Wani brutally killed which unleashed a massive uprising in IOK, where young unarmed boys came out into the streets to protest Burhan Wani’s cruel slaughter. The hapless youth were showered with pellet guns, which killed over 500 but also permanently blinded 3,600 of them.
The carnage continued till Modi was re-elected in 2019. Since August 2019, as mentioned above, IOK has been in a state of lockdown. The Kashmiris are not allowed to venture outside for food, employment or even offering prayers. Shoot at sight policy is adopted. To make matters worse, the onset of COVID-19 further pushed the Kashmiris indoors thus the “double lockdown”. Indian government has been in a state of lockdown in the rest of the country too but it tried to scapegoat Muslims. The Tablighi Jamaat was blamed for spreading the virus. Their bank accounts were frozen and their missionary offices were sealed. Poor handling of COVID-19 has resulted in a massive spike in casualties due to the pandemic. India is likely to become the country with the highest number of cases yet there is no respite. Indian economy is in doldrums because of bad governance. Its financial institutions are facing bankruptcy and economic meltdown is imminent.
To divert the attention of its masses, Modi’s extremist government is celebrating 5 August, the date of the Indian annexation of IoK by observing the Ram Mandir Bhoomi-Poojan at the site where a Ram Temple is set to be constructed in Ayodhya. Readers may recall that in 1992, the BJP and RSS Karsevaks had demolished the Babri Masjid, fallaciously claiming that it was built on the site of a Hindu temple which was the birthplace of their deity Ram. Indian judiciary tried the case and under Modi’s coercion, found it fit for the Hindus to rebuild a new Ram Temple. Indian hate crimes against Muslims continue unabated.
—The writer is retired PAF Group Captain and a TV talk show host.
