by Rabia Javed 17 August 2022
Samuel Huntington’s ideas may have seemed far-fetched to some in 1992 when he predicted future wars to be “not between countries, but between cultures.” In today’s India, Prime Minister Modi has legitimized more militant groups, and targeted attacks against religious minorities. The targeting of religious minorities and Muslims is not restricted to Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu Kashmir (IIOJK) but covers the entire population of Indian Muslims living across the India. Perpetrators of hate crimes against Muslims are often protected with impunity, and in some cases even tacitly or directly encouraged and glorified.
The communal riot is a depressingly familiar feature of India’s political and social life. The contemporary Indian internal situation is worsening day by day because of intolerance and extremism. The Hindu ideology has transformed by BJP into vicious discourses of anti-Muslim platitudes as evident from the recent Citizenship Act bill. The aim of Hindutva is to create Hindu political dominance over minorities through all kind of violent means while reducing demographic aspects of minorities to citizens of sub-servient classes. Consistent and violent pattern of activities of Hindutva terrorism includes the bomb blast of Samjhauta express; the anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat 2002; thousands of deaths during anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984; vicious assaults on lower caste Dalits; the brutal death of India’s own leader, Mahatma Gandhi; brutalism by BJP using WhatsApp group for killing Muslims in Bhagirathi Vihar and the BJP-run state government of Karnataka banned hijabs in schools, a motion the state court upheld in March 2022.
Religious intolerance under Mr. Modi has gone unchallenged long enough. The petty vindictiveness and fascism continues; even bulldozers have been used to raze houses in majority-Muslim neighborhoods, as Muslims took to the streets across India over derogatory remarks made by members of ruling Hindu nationalist party about Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him). Several, people have been harassed or picked up for criticising the BJP leaders. Hate crimes against Indian Muslims and other religious minorities number in the hundreds each year, as local and state BJP officials consistently engage in hate speeches. Amid all this, Mr Modi and the national BJP govt have been quiet all along.
As outrage and protests against the derogatory remarks by BJP leader against Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) spread across the India, condemnation also started pouring in from across the Islamic world. Several Muslim nations demanded an apology from the Indian government. The condemnation from at least 20 majority-Muslim countries against the remarks by BJP leaders has alarmed Indian government. Interestingly, many of them have been supporters of India.
U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while releasing the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report on human rights abuses named India as a country with deteriorating religious freedoms, The White House has been silent as this recent controversy unfolded. Hindutva radicalisation has also gone unchallenged within so called educated Hindu civil society, thus giving the impression that anti-Muslim violence enjoys widespread acceptance among common Hindus.
Yasmeen Serhan, a staff writer at The Atlantic. wrote in one of his opinions that not only Muslims but Indian Christians face similar hostility. Attacks on Christians have been rising steadily since 2014, surprisingly year 2021 was the most violent year on record for violence against all minorities: The United Christian Forum, an ecumenical organization based in Delhi, reported a tally of more than 500 violent incidents—an 80 percent increase over the previous year. A human-rights lawyer who works on minority-rights and religious-freedom cases, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about their work, told Yasmeen Sehran that most of these incidents originate with Hindu-nationalist mobs, which descend on religious gatherings at churches and in homes to accuse those involved of proselytizing unsuspecting Hindus, in violation of the country’s anti-conversion laws. In the violence that ensues, pastors have been beaten, churches vandalized, and religious schools attacked.
The world is neglecting the roaring danger of Hindu extremism. India, which once boasted of being secular, is rapidly descending into a fanatic and extremist state. The rise of extremism and terrorism in India by Hindu triumphalist and the culture of hate that BJP has consciously cultivated and promoted in its cynical pursuit of power must not go unseen in isolation. The world needs to take cognisance of the rising religious intolerance in India keeping in mind the recent BJP leaders’ blasphemous remarks about Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him). If unchecked now, it will fuel further religious polarization and alienation of minorities in India with implications for the region.