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View from the margins: How a Mumbai realtor is helping NRC-scared Muslims in India rectify their documents
With the Citizenship Amendment Act implemented, will the National Register of Citizens be next?
Neerad Pandharipande Published April 16, 2024 Updated a day ago
It was nearly 11pm when Sajeed Sheikh walked into the community centre he runs in the suburb of Jogeshwari in northwestern Mumbai, but the room was bustling with activity.
Sheikh, with the help of volunteers, began arranging for foodgrain to be distributed among poor families in the neighbourhood during Ramazan, a month of prayer, charity and fasting. Instructions about the logistics flew thick and fast, but so did anxious questions — about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the contentious law that had been implemented just two days earlier.
Queries ranged from the practical to the conceptual. Will all of India be made to apply for inclusion in the National Register of Citizens (NRC)? What documents could be needed for it? Was the CAA in keeping with India’s commitment to secularism?
With the Lok Sabha elections around the corner, and given the distinct possibility that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may return to power, the volunteers in Jogeshwari are not the only ones who fear that the Act, in conjunction with a nationwide NRC, could be used to harass and disenfranchise Muslims. There are many.
The NRC is meant to be a record of all bona fide Indian citizens, which could be used to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. The CAA provides a fast track to naturalisation to refugees from six religious communities — except Muslims — who fled Bangladesh, Afghanistan or Pakistan.
When the NRC was updated in Assam a few years ago, it had unleashed a Kafkaesque nightmare. Around 32 million people had to provide identity documents to prove that their roots were firmly in the state. Over 1.9m people who ostensibly could not do so were left out of the register. Many of them struggled to find jobs. Hundreds were packed off to detention camps after being declared foreigners.
It is possible that the nightmare may be repeated across India. In the past, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has explicitly linked the CAA with the NRC and laid out the design behind the two. “First the CAB [Citizenship Amendment Bill] will come,” he pronounced. “All refugees will get citizenship. Then [the] NRC will come. This is why refugees should not worry, but infiltrators should. Understand the chronology.”
Document correction
Given this backdrop, Sheikh — a real estate agent by profession — has for the last six months been helping people from his neighbourhood ensure that their identity documents are free from discrepancies.
“If the government implements a nationwide National Register of Citizens exercise, it is the poor who will suffer the most,” he said. “We want to be prepared for any eventuality.”
Sheikh’s volunteer group, the Modern Youth Association, has partnered with several local mosques to spread the word about the assistance it is offering. He says he plans to next set up a centre where people can get help.
“I needed to get the spelling of my name corrected on my Aadhaar and PAN [Permanent Account Number] cards,” said Qureshi, a Jogeshwari resident who wanted to be identified only by her last name. “Earlier this month, I contacted Sajeed. He guided me on collecting supporting documents, and then got the changes done online.”
An hour away from Jogeshwari, in the Nagpada area of South Mumbai, lawyer Nadeem Siddiqui is providing neighbours the same assistance as Sheikh: rectifying identity documents before the possible implementation of a nationwide NRC.
“People may not actually be forced out of the country [through the NRC], but they may still face harassment in the form of them being made to run around for documents,” Siddiqui said. Getting rid of errors in official paperwork is a way to avoid such a scenario.“
Anti-CAA protests
For Sheikh, the CAA is part of a larger design to disempower Indian Muslims. “The government’s intention is to marginalise Muslims by whichever means possible, whether by implementing the National Register of Citizens or by arresting them in false cases,” he said.
Many human rights organisations feel the same way as Sheikh. In the past 10 years, since the BJP came to power in Delhi, they say, Muslims have been singled out for persecution. Under Narendra Modi, the community has faced mob violence, discriminatory laws, vilification on the streets, demonisation on TV screens, and trumped-up cases.
The CAA, if combined with the NRC, may be the final straw.
The Union government pushed the CAA through the Parliament in 2019, facilitating naturalisation of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Jains who escaped to India from religious persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before Dec 31, 2014. The law met with nationwide pushback, with critics calling it a dilution of the nation’s secular identity — never before had there been a religious test for citizenship in the history of independent India.
Protests erupted everywhere. In 2019 and 2020, Sheikh and many from his neighbourhood had participated in those protests. They agitated in Jogeshwari, at the August Kranti Maidan in Tardeo, and for one night even went to Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, where hundreds of Muslim women were holding a sit-in protest. “Normally, protests erupt in a spurt of anger and then dissipate,” he said. “The police know that. But women are not so easily swayed by emotion. In Shaheen Bagh, women led protests with hosh [awareness] rather than josh [passion].”
Whiplashed by the pushback, the Union government argued that the CAA does not discriminate against Muslims — it is instead a helping hand for the persecuted minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
But that does not explain why the Muslim communities persecuted in these countries — the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan and the Hazaras in Afghanistan — have been left out. Or why the law does not include Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the Rohingyas and Tamils respectively face persecution.
Despite the criticisms, on March 11 of this year, the Union government went ahead with the law, notifying the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2024, which would enable the law’s implementation.
“If persecuted Hindus want to come to India, they are welcome,” Sheikh said. “All that Muslims are saying is, don’t snatch our homes in the process. If you try to do that, we will certainly raise our voices.”
Battling prejudice
Sheikh accused the BJP-led government in Delhi of sowing distrust and fear in people’s minds. “The new generation has not seen the kind of destruction that riots cause, and so, they don’t understand right from wrong,” he said. “They hold all kinds of hateful views about Muslims.”
Sheikh’s job as a real estate agent gives him a vivid view of the deepening prejudices against his community. “My work involves finding properties for people in areas such as Andheri and Lokhandwala,” he said. “Many times, clients discuss all the details of a property with me on the phone. But as soon as they learn I am Muslim, their approach towards me changes and they cut me off completely.”
With the 2024 Lok Sabha elections approaching, 52-year-old Sheikh has a word of advice for the BJP. “I want to say to the government: if you want to make this country a sone ki chidiya — a beacon of prosperity — Muslims will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you. But instead, you are doubting our loyalty.” He added: “Muslims have given sacrifices for this country against the British colonial rule, just as Hindus have. But today, our sacrifices are being disregarded, and we are facing hostility and discrimination.”
Sheikh added: “If the government’s intentions on the National Register of Citizens had been right, it would have been clear on whether it would implement such a measure across the country, and what the exact modalities would be. But it is not doing so.”
Despite the ill omens, Siddiqui sees an upside: “Because of all the talk about the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, people are at least getting their documents in order. The question of any further protests will only arise if the authorities start asking people for their papers. For now, the future is bright.”
This article was first published in Scroll.in and has been reproduced with permission.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1826993/view- ... -in-india-
Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ Who Would Take India’s Wealth
The direct language used against the country’s largest minority was a contrast to the image Prime Minister Narendra Modi presents on the world stage.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India at a rally in Bengaluru on Saturday, a day before a speech in which he attacked Muslims.Credit...Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday called Muslims “infiltrators” who would take India’s wealth if his opponents gained power — unusually direct and divisive language from a leader who normally lets others do the dirtiest work of polarizing Hindus against Muslims.
Mr. Modi, addressing voters in the state of Rajasthan, referred to a remark once made by Manmohan Singh, his predecessor from the opposition Indian National Congress Party. Mr. Singh, Mr. Modi claimed, had “said that Muslims have the first right to the wealth of the nation. This means they will distribute this wealth to those who have more children, to infiltrators.”
Mr. Modi aimed his emotional appeal at women, addressing “my mothers and sisters” to say that his Congress opponents would take their gold and give it to Muslims.
Video https://nyti.ms/4b7DMUy
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/0:56
Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ in Speech During India Elections
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was criticized by the opposition for remarks he made during a speech to voters in Rajasthan State.
I’m sorry, this is a very disgraceful speech made by the prime minister. But, you know, the fact is that people realize that when he says the Congress Party is going to take all your wealth and give it to the Muslims, that this is just a nakedly communal appeal which normally any civilized election commission would disallow and warn the candidate for speaking like this.
Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ in Speech During India Elections
0:57
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was criticized by the opposition for remarks he made during a speech to voters in Rajasthan State.CreditCredit...ANI via Reuters
Implications like these — that Muslims have too many babies, that they are coming for Hindus’ wives and daughters, that their nationality as Indian is itself in doubt — are often made by representatives of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
Mr. Modi’s use of such language himself, as he campaigns for a third term in office, raised alarm that it could inflame right-wing vigilantes who target Muslims, and brought up questions about what had prompted his shift in communication style. Usually, Mr. Modi avoids even using the word “Muslims,” coyly finding ways to refer indirectly to India’s largest minority group, of 200 million people.
Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of the Congress party, called Mr. Modi’s remarks “hate speech.” Asaduddin Owaisi, who represents the only national party for Muslims, lamented how “common Hindus are made to fear Muslims while their wealth is being used to enrich others.”
Tom Vadakkan, a spokesman for the B.J.P., said that Mr. Modi’s speech was being misinterpreted. “This is not about our compatriots, the Muslims,” he said. Mr. Modi was talking only about “infiltrators,” according to Mr. Vadakkan.
The prime minister’s fiery oration, delivered in 100-degree heat in the town of Banswara in arid Rajasthan, marked a contrast to the image he presents in international contexts.
During a visit to the White House in June, Mr. Modi said there was “no question of discrimination” in India. When he played host to the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi three months later, he chose the theme “the world is one family”(in Sanskrit, the primary liturgical language of orthodox Hinduism).
He put his own face on soft-power outreach programs like World Yoga Day, broadcast to Times Square, using it to present a Hindu-centric India as a benign “teacher to the world.”
Image
Several people sit on a wide set of stairs in Times Square. Behind them is a towering digital billboard displaying a Hindu deity and the image of a sprawling temple.
Imagery of the Hindu deity Ram and a rendering of the future temple in Ayodhya, India, were displayed in Times Square in New York in 2020.Credit...Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
Campaigns that divide Hindus and Muslims can be useful in animating the hard-right Hindu base of Mr. Modi’s otherwise broad-based electorate, especially in places like Banswara, where Hindus outnumber Muslims by three to one.
With his remarks, Mr. Modi may have been trying to close a divide that has opened among Hindus in Rajasthan over whether to support the B.J.P., with one prominent group holding protests over comments made by a party official.
But the prime minister’s speech was also clearly intended for a wider audience; he shared a clip on his official social media channels.
The B.J.P. remains the favorite to win another parliamentary majority when six weeks of voting concludes on June 1 and ballots are counted three days later. Mr. Kharge, the Congress party president, called Mr. Modi’s speech — perhaps hopefully — a sign of desperation, adding that opposition candidates must be faring well in the early stages of balloting.
Neerja Chowdhury, a columnist and the author of “How Prime Ministers Decide,” echoed Mr. Kharge, saying that, in her view, “voters are expressing their dissatisfaction much more openly this time.” The B.J.P. is capable of a swift course correction, she added, because “they get feedback very quickly.”
Rahul Gandhi, the public face of the Congress party, said that Mr. Modi’s comments had been intended as a diversion from subjects that trouble ordinary voters, like joblessness and inflation.
That the prime minister alluded to religion at all in his speech drew complaints that he may have violated India’s election rules.
Candidates are supposed to be barred from asking for votes in the name of religion or caste. But B.J.P. leaders regularly invoke Hindu deities during campaign rallies. The country’s Election Commission, which enforces the rules, has taken little action against the party, even as it has moved against members of other parties in similar cases.
Uddhav Thackeray, a former ally of Mr. Modi’s who is now running against the B.J.P., declared that he would now ignore an Election Commission order to remove the word “Hindu” from his own party’s campaign song.
The basis for Mr. Modi’s attack was a 22-second excerpt from a statement that Mr. Singh, a Sikh economist who was the prime minister before Mr. Modi, made in 2006. Mr. Singh had been listing many of the traditionally disadvantaged groups in India, including lower-caste Hindus and tribal populations, and “in particular the Muslim community,” and said that all should share equitably in the nation’s wealth.
Since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, Muslims haven’t had a proportional share of India’s steady economic and social development. None of the 430 candidates the B.J.P. is fielding in the current election is Muslim.
Mr. Singh’s speech from 2006 seems old now, but it was made just four years after riots in the state of Gujarat under the watch of Mr. Modi. Hindus and Muslims hacked and burned one another and at least 1,000 died, most of them Muslims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India at a rally in Bengaluru on Saturday, a day before a speech in which he attacked Muslims.Credit...Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday called Muslims “infiltrators” who would take India’s wealth if his opponents gained power — unusually direct and divisive language from a leader who normally lets others do the dirtiest work of polarizing Hindus against Muslims.
Mr. Modi, addressing voters in the state of Rajasthan, referred to a remark once made by Manmohan Singh, his predecessor from the opposition Indian National Congress Party. Mr. Singh, Mr. Modi claimed, had “said that Muslims have the first right to the wealth of the nation. This means they will distribute this wealth to those who have more children, to infiltrators.”
Mr. Modi aimed his emotional appeal at women, addressing “my mothers and sisters” to say that his Congress opponents would take their gold and give it to Muslims.
Video https://nyti.ms/4b7DMUy
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/0:56
Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ in Speech During India Elections
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was criticized by the opposition for remarks he made during a speech to voters in Rajasthan State.
I’m sorry, this is a very disgraceful speech made by the prime minister. But, you know, the fact is that people realize that when he says the Congress Party is going to take all your wealth and give it to the Muslims, that this is just a nakedly communal appeal which normally any civilized election commission would disallow and warn the candidate for speaking like this.
Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ in Speech During India Elections
0:57
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was criticized by the opposition for remarks he made during a speech to voters in Rajasthan State.CreditCredit...ANI via Reuters
Implications like these — that Muslims have too many babies, that they are coming for Hindus’ wives and daughters, that their nationality as Indian is itself in doubt — are often made by representatives of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
Mr. Modi’s use of such language himself, as he campaigns for a third term in office, raised alarm that it could inflame right-wing vigilantes who target Muslims, and brought up questions about what had prompted his shift in communication style. Usually, Mr. Modi avoids even using the word “Muslims,” coyly finding ways to refer indirectly to India’s largest minority group, of 200 million people.
Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of the Congress party, called Mr. Modi’s remarks “hate speech.” Asaduddin Owaisi, who represents the only national party for Muslims, lamented how “common Hindus are made to fear Muslims while their wealth is being used to enrich others.”
Tom Vadakkan, a spokesman for the B.J.P., said that Mr. Modi’s speech was being misinterpreted. “This is not about our compatriots, the Muslims,” he said. Mr. Modi was talking only about “infiltrators,” according to Mr. Vadakkan.
The prime minister’s fiery oration, delivered in 100-degree heat in the town of Banswara in arid Rajasthan, marked a contrast to the image he presents in international contexts.
During a visit to the White House in June, Mr. Modi said there was “no question of discrimination” in India. When he played host to the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi three months later, he chose the theme “the world is one family”(in Sanskrit, the primary liturgical language of orthodox Hinduism).
He put his own face on soft-power outreach programs like World Yoga Day, broadcast to Times Square, using it to present a Hindu-centric India as a benign “teacher to the world.”
Image
Several people sit on a wide set of stairs in Times Square. Behind them is a towering digital billboard displaying a Hindu deity and the image of a sprawling temple.
Imagery of the Hindu deity Ram and a rendering of the future temple in Ayodhya, India, were displayed in Times Square in New York in 2020.Credit...Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
Campaigns that divide Hindus and Muslims can be useful in animating the hard-right Hindu base of Mr. Modi’s otherwise broad-based electorate, especially in places like Banswara, where Hindus outnumber Muslims by three to one.
With his remarks, Mr. Modi may have been trying to close a divide that has opened among Hindus in Rajasthan over whether to support the B.J.P., with one prominent group holding protests over comments made by a party official.
But the prime minister’s speech was also clearly intended for a wider audience; he shared a clip on his official social media channels.
The B.J.P. remains the favorite to win another parliamentary majority when six weeks of voting concludes on June 1 and ballots are counted three days later. Mr. Kharge, the Congress party president, called Mr. Modi’s speech — perhaps hopefully — a sign of desperation, adding that opposition candidates must be faring well in the early stages of balloting.
Neerja Chowdhury, a columnist and the author of “How Prime Ministers Decide,” echoed Mr. Kharge, saying that, in her view, “voters are expressing their dissatisfaction much more openly this time.” The B.J.P. is capable of a swift course correction, she added, because “they get feedback very quickly.”
Rahul Gandhi, the public face of the Congress party, said that Mr. Modi’s comments had been intended as a diversion from subjects that trouble ordinary voters, like joblessness and inflation.
That the prime minister alluded to religion at all in his speech drew complaints that he may have violated India’s election rules.
Candidates are supposed to be barred from asking for votes in the name of religion or caste. But B.J.P. leaders regularly invoke Hindu deities during campaign rallies. The country’s Election Commission, which enforces the rules, has taken little action against the party, even as it has moved against members of other parties in similar cases.
Uddhav Thackeray, a former ally of Mr. Modi’s who is now running against the B.J.P., declared that he would now ignore an Election Commission order to remove the word “Hindu” from his own party’s campaign song.
The basis for Mr. Modi’s attack was a 22-second excerpt from a statement that Mr. Singh, a Sikh economist who was the prime minister before Mr. Modi, made in 2006. Mr. Singh had been listing many of the traditionally disadvantaged groups in India, including lower-caste Hindus and tribal populations, and “in particular the Muslim community,” and said that all should share equitably in the nation’s wealth.
Since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, Muslims haven’t had a proportional share of India’s steady economic and social development. None of the 430 candidates the B.J.P. is fielding in the current election is Muslim.
Mr. Singh’s speech from 2006 seems old now, but it was made just four years after riots in the state of Gujarat under the watch of Mr. Modi. Hindus and Muslims hacked and burned one another and at least 1,000 died, most of them Muslims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
India BJP’s election videos targeting Muslims and opposition spark outrage
Reuters Published May 6, 2024 Updated about 11 hours ago
Animated videos shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party targeting the opposition Congress and the Muslim community have evoked complaints and outrage, as the political climate in India heats up midway through its six-week long election.
The videos, shared by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on social media platforms Instagram and X over the last ten days, depict the Congress giving disproportionate benefits to India’s minority Muslim community, at the cost of certain disadvantaged tribal and Hindu caste groups.
The Congress, in a complaint to the poll watchdog Election Commission, said on Sunday that the video was shared “clearly with an intention to wantonly provocate rioting and promote enmity between different religions”.
A set of guidelines mutually adopted by political parties for how they should conduct themselves during the election period prohibits them from creating “mutual hatred” between caste, religious or linguistic groups.
Manipulated videos on social media have also become a contentious issue in this election, such as fake videos showing top Bollywood stars criticising the prime minister.
On Monday, the commission warned parties against the misuse of AI tools to create deep fakes and told them not to publish and circulate such videos. It also said parties had been directed to remove such content within three hours of it being brought to their notice.
Modi, the face of the Hindu-nationalist BJP, seeking a rare third consecutive term, had focused his campaign largely on his government’s performance on economic growth and welfare benefits.
But he changed tack after the first phase of voting on April 19 and his campaign speeches have since become more polarising on religious lines, accusing Congress of planning to redistribute the wealth of the majority Hindus among minority Muslims, who he called “infiltrators” who have “more children”.
The videos shared by the BJP over the last ten days, one of which has since been taken down, illustrated the same message.
A 17-second video shared by a state unit of BJP on May 4, with over 8.5 million views, shows a character resembling Congress leader Rahul Gandhi feeding “funds” to a bird in a skullcap, which eventually pushes out from their common nest three other birds representing other disadvantaged groups.
The Congress has filed a police complaint against BJP leaders for the video, BJP’s head of information and technology Amit Malviya said on X.
“The Congress should in fact thank the BJP for taking their manifesto to the people in a manner that even they couldnt,” he wrote.
The video has elicited outrage. Nitasha Kaul, a politics professor at London’s Westminster University said on X that the video was a “straightforward 1930s Germany style cartoon”.
Congress, in its election manifesto, has promised to tackle India’s economic inequality by conducting a socio-economic caste census and extending affirmative action. It said it will ensure that minorities receive “their fair share” of education, economic and healthcare opportunities.
An Election Commission spokesperson, the BJP’s Malviya and Congress spokespersons did not respond to requests seeking comment.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1831862/india ... rk-outrage
Reuters Published May 6, 2024 Updated about 11 hours ago
Animated videos shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party targeting the opposition Congress and the Muslim community have evoked complaints and outrage, as the political climate in India heats up midway through its six-week long election.
The videos, shared by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on social media platforms Instagram and X over the last ten days, depict the Congress giving disproportionate benefits to India’s minority Muslim community, at the cost of certain disadvantaged tribal and Hindu caste groups.
The Congress, in a complaint to the poll watchdog Election Commission, said on Sunday that the video was shared “clearly with an intention to wantonly provocate rioting and promote enmity between different religions”.
A set of guidelines mutually adopted by political parties for how they should conduct themselves during the election period prohibits them from creating “mutual hatred” between caste, religious or linguistic groups.
Manipulated videos on social media have also become a contentious issue in this election, such as fake videos showing top Bollywood stars criticising the prime minister.
On Monday, the commission warned parties against the misuse of AI tools to create deep fakes and told them not to publish and circulate such videos. It also said parties had been directed to remove such content within three hours of it being brought to their notice.
Modi, the face of the Hindu-nationalist BJP, seeking a rare third consecutive term, had focused his campaign largely on his government’s performance on economic growth and welfare benefits.
But he changed tack after the first phase of voting on April 19 and his campaign speeches have since become more polarising on religious lines, accusing Congress of planning to redistribute the wealth of the majority Hindus among minority Muslims, who he called “infiltrators” who have “more children”.
The videos shared by the BJP over the last ten days, one of which has since been taken down, illustrated the same message.
A 17-second video shared by a state unit of BJP on May 4, with over 8.5 million views, shows a character resembling Congress leader Rahul Gandhi feeding “funds” to a bird in a skullcap, which eventually pushes out from their common nest three other birds representing other disadvantaged groups.
The Congress has filed a police complaint against BJP leaders for the video, BJP’s head of information and technology Amit Malviya said on X.
“The Congress should in fact thank the BJP for taking their manifesto to the people in a manner that even they couldnt,” he wrote.
The video has elicited outrage. Nitasha Kaul, a politics professor at London’s Westminster University said on X that the video was a “straightforward 1930s Germany style cartoon”.
Congress, in its election manifesto, has promised to tackle India’s economic inequality by conducting a socio-economic caste census and extending affirmative action. It said it will ensure that minorities receive “their fair share” of education, economic and healthcare opportunities.
An Election Commission spokesperson, the BJP’s Malviya and Congress spokespersons did not respond to requests seeking comment.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1831862/india ... rk-outrage
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Strangers in Their Own Land: Being Muslim in Modi’s India
Families grapple with anguish and isolation as they try to raise their children in a country that increasingly questions their very identity.
Ziya Us Salam, an associate editor of The Hindu, praying at home with Shan Mohammad, a hafiz who visits to teach one of Mr. Salam’s daughters the Quran, in Noida, India. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
It is a lonely feeling to know that your country’s leaders do not want you. To be vilified because you are a Muslim in what is now a largely Hindu-first India.
It colors everything. Friends, dear for decades, change. Neighbors hold back from neighborly gestures — no longer joining in celebrations, or knocking to inquire in moments of pain.
“It is a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, a writer who lives on the outskirts of Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.
When he was a film critic for one of India’s main newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, filled his time with cinema, art, music. Workdays ended with riding on the back of an older friend’s motorcycle to a favorite food stall for long chats. His wife, a fellow journalist, wrote about life, food and fashion.
Now, Mr. Salam’s routine is reduced to office and home, his thoughts occupied by heavier concerns. The constant ethnic profiling because he is “visibly Muslim” — by the bank teller, by the parking lot attendant, by fellow passengers on the train — is wearying, he said. Family conversations are darker, with both parents focused on raising their daughters in a country that increasingly questions or even tries to erase the markers of Muslims’ identity — how they dress, what they eat, even their Indianness altogether.
Image
A young woman and an older man sit on a sofa against a bright yellow wall.
Mr. Salam and his daughter Mariam, a graduate student, at home. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
One of the daughters, an impressive student-athlete, struggled so much that she needed counseling and missed months of school. The family often debates whether to stay in their mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood in Noida, just outside Delhi. Mariam, their oldest daughter, who is a graduate student, leans toward compromise, anything to make life bearable. She wants to move.
Anywhere but a Muslim area might be difficult. Real estate agents often ask outright if families are Muslim; landlords are reluctant to rent to them.
“I have started taking it in stride,” Mariam said.
“I refuse to,” Mr. Salam shot back. He is old enough to remember when coexistence was largely the norm in an enormously diverse India, and he does not want to add to the country’s increasing segregation.
But he is also pragmatic. He wishes Mariam would move abroad, at least while the country is like this.
More on India
//A Master of Nostalgia: The filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films are known for splendor, grandiosity and obsessive attention to light and detail. Will that translate to smaller screens?
//Bengaluru’s Water Crisis: The Silicon Valley of South Asia did not properly adapt as its soaring population strained traditional water sources. Now the city has a nature issue that software cannot solve. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/worl ... nks_recirc
//The Brutality of Sugar: A New York Times investigation into the sugar-cane industry in the Indian state of Maharashtra found workers ensnared by debt and pushed into child marriages and unnecessary hysterectomies. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/worl ... nks_recirc
//General Elections: India is holding its multiphase general elections from April 19 to June 1, in a vote that will determine the political direction of the world’s most populous nation for the next five years. Here is what to know.
Mr. Salam clings to the hope that India is in a passing phase.
Image
A girl with a scarf over her head sits on a bed in front of a book, holding her fingers over her eyes.
Juveria Ziya, another daughter of Ziya Us Salam, memorizing a religious text at home in Noida.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, is playing a long game.
His rise to national power in 2014, on a promise of rapid development, swept a decades-old Hindu nationalist movement from the margins of Indian politics firmly to the center. He has since chipped away at the secular framework and robust democracy that had long held India together despite its sometimes explosive religious and caste divisions.
Right-wing organizations began using the enormous power around Mr. Modi as a shield to try to reshape Indian society. Their members provoked sectarian clashes as the government looked away, with officials showing up later to raze Muslim homes and round up Muslim men. Emboldened vigilante groups lynched Muslims they accused of smuggling beef (cows are sacred to many Hindus). Top leaders in Mr. Modi’s party openly celebrated Hindus who committed crimes against Muslims.
On large sections of broadcast media, but particularly on social media, bigotry coursed unchecked. WhatsApp groups spread conspiracy theories about Muslim men luring Hindu women for religious conversion, or even about Muslims spitting in restaurant food. While Mr. Modi and his party officials reject claims of discrimination by pointing to welfare programs that cover Indians equally, Mr. Modi himself is now repeating anti-Muslim tropes in the election that ends early next month. He has targeted India’s 200 million Muslims more directly than ever, calling them “infiltrators” and insinuating that they have too many children.
Image
Two adults and two children — a man and a woman, two young girls — sit in a room next to a bookshelf.
Mr. Salam, and his wife, Uzma Ausaf, at home in Noida with two of their daughters: Juveria Ziya and Mish’al. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
This creeping Islamophobia is now the dominant theme of Mr. Salam’s writings. Cinema and music, life’s pleasures, feel smaller now. In one book, he chronicled the lynchings of Muslim men. In a recent follow-up, he described how India’s Muslims feel “orphaned” in their homeland.
Image
A man in bluejeans and bare feet half-reclines on a bed, a laptop on his knee, while a woman in a head scarf presents a tray with some food and drink
Mr. Salam working at his home in Noida last year.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
“If I don’t pick up issues of import, and limit my energies to cinema and literature, then I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he said. “What would I tell my kids tomorrow — when my grandchildren ask me what were you doing when there was an existential crisis?”
As a child, Mr. Salam lived on a mixed street of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in Delhi. When the afternoon sun would grow hot, the children would move their games under the trees in the yard of a Hindu temple. The priest would come with water for all.
“I was like any other kid for him,” Mr. Salam recalled.
Those memories are one reason Mr. Salam maintains a stubborn optimism that India can restore its secular fabric. Another is that Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism, while sweeping large parts of the country, has been resisted by several states in the country’s more prosperous south.
Family conversations among Muslims there are very different: about college degrees, job promotions, life plans — the usual aspirations.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, often-bickering political parties are united in protecting secularism and in focusing on economic well-being. Its chief minister, M.K. Stalin, is a declared atheist.
Image
A man stands under a portico, looking at a newspaper.
Jan Mohammad, a businessman, with the morning newspaper at his house in Chennai.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Jan Mohammed, who lives with his family of five in Chennai, the state capital, said neighbors joined in each other’s religious celebrations. In rural areas, there is a tradition: When one community finishes building a place of worship, villagers of other faiths arrive with gifts of fruits, vegetables and flowers and stay for a meal.
“More than accommodation, there is understanding,” Mr. Mohammed said.
His family is full of overachievers — the norm in their educated state. Mr. Mohammed, with a master’s degree, is in the construction business. His wife, Rukhsana, who has an economics degree, started an online clothing business after the children grew up. One daughter, Maimoona Bushra, has two master’s degrees and now teaches at a local college as she prepares for her wedding. The youngest, Hafsa Lubna, has a master’s in commerce and within two years went from an intern at a local company to a manager of 20.
Two of the daughters had planned to continue on to Ph.D’s. The only worry was that potential grooms would be intimidated.
“The proposals go down,” Ms. Rukhsana joked.
Image
Two women wearing head scarves and dresses reaching their ankles walk on a beach.
Maimoona Bushra and Hafsa Lubna, two daughters of Jan Mohammed, walking at the beach in Chennai. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
A thousand miles north, in Delhi, Mr. Salam’s family lives in what feels like another country. A place where prejudice has become so routine that even a friendship of 26 years can be sundered as a result.
Mr. Salam had nicknamed a former editor “human mountain” for his large stature. When they rode on the editor’s motorcycle after work in the Delhi winter, he shielded Mr. Salam from the wind.
They were together often; when his friend got his driver’s license, Mr. Salam was there with him.
“I would go to my prayer every day, and he would go to the temple every day,” Mr. Salam said. “And I used to respect him for that.”
A few years ago, things began to change. The WhatsApp messages came first.
The editor started forwarding to Mr. Salam some staples of anti-Muslim misinformation: for example, that Muslims will rule India in 20 years because their women give birth every year and their men are allowed four wives.
“Initially, I said, ‘Why do you want to get into all this?’ I thought he was just an old man who was getting all these and forwarding,” Mr. Salam said. “I give him the benefit of doubt.”
Video
How Modi Demonizes India’s Muslims
3:06
With India’s election in full swing, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party are using animated videos to attack Muslims.
The breaking point came two years ago, when Yogi Adityanath, a Modi protégé, was re-elected as the leader of Uttar Pradesh, the populous state adjoining Delhi where the Salam family lives. Mr. Adityanath, more overtly belligerent than Mr. Modi toward Muslims, governs in the saffron robe of a Hindu monk, frequently greeting large crowds of Hindu pilgrims with flowers, while cracking down on public displays of Muslim faith.
On the day of the vote counting, the friend kept calling Mr. Salam, rejoicing at Mr. Adityanath’s lead. Just days earlier, the friend had been complaining about rising unemployment and his son’s struggle to find a job during Mr. Adityanath’s first term.
“I said, ‘You have been so happy since morning, what do you gain?’” he recalled asking the friend.
“Yogi ended namaz,” the friend responded, referring to Muslim prayer on Fridays that often spills into the streets.
“That was the day I said goodbye,” Mr. Salam said, “and he hasn’t come back into my life after that.”
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. More about Mujib Mashal
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Hari Kuma
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/worl ... india.html
Families grapple with anguish and isolation as they try to raise their children in a country that increasingly questions their very identity.
Ziya Us Salam, an associate editor of The Hindu, praying at home with Shan Mohammad, a hafiz who visits to teach one of Mr. Salam’s daughters the Quran, in Noida, India. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
It is a lonely feeling to know that your country’s leaders do not want you. To be vilified because you are a Muslim in what is now a largely Hindu-first India.
It colors everything. Friends, dear for decades, change. Neighbors hold back from neighborly gestures — no longer joining in celebrations, or knocking to inquire in moments of pain.
“It is a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, a writer who lives on the outskirts of Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.
When he was a film critic for one of India’s main newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, filled his time with cinema, art, music. Workdays ended with riding on the back of an older friend’s motorcycle to a favorite food stall for long chats. His wife, a fellow journalist, wrote about life, food and fashion.
Now, Mr. Salam’s routine is reduced to office and home, his thoughts occupied by heavier concerns. The constant ethnic profiling because he is “visibly Muslim” — by the bank teller, by the parking lot attendant, by fellow passengers on the train — is wearying, he said. Family conversations are darker, with both parents focused on raising their daughters in a country that increasingly questions or even tries to erase the markers of Muslims’ identity — how they dress, what they eat, even their Indianness altogether.
Image
A young woman and an older man sit on a sofa against a bright yellow wall.
Mr. Salam and his daughter Mariam, a graduate student, at home. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
One of the daughters, an impressive student-athlete, struggled so much that she needed counseling and missed months of school. The family often debates whether to stay in their mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood in Noida, just outside Delhi. Mariam, their oldest daughter, who is a graduate student, leans toward compromise, anything to make life bearable. She wants to move.
Anywhere but a Muslim area might be difficult. Real estate agents often ask outright if families are Muslim; landlords are reluctant to rent to them.
“I have started taking it in stride,” Mariam said.
“I refuse to,” Mr. Salam shot back. He is old enough to remember when coexistence was largely the norm in an enormously diverse India, and he does not want to add to the country’s increasing segregation.
But he is also pragmatic. He wishes Mariam would move abroad, at least while the country is like this.
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Mr. Salam clings to the hope that India is in a passing phase.
Image
A girl with a scarf over her head sits on a bed in front of a book, holding her fingers over her eyes.
Juveria Ziya, another daughter of Ziya Us Salam, memorizing a religious text at home in Noida.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, is playing a long game.
His rise to national power in 2014, on a promise of rapid development, swept a decades-old Hindu nationalist movement from the margins of Indian politics firmly to the center. He has since chipped away at the secular framework and robust democracy that had long held India together despite its sometimes explosive religious and caste divisions.
Right-wing organizations began using the enormous power around Mr. Modi as a shield to try to reshape Indian society. Their members provoked sectarian clashes as the government looked away, with officials showing up later to raze Muslim homes and round up Muslim men. Emboldened vigilante groups lynched Muslims they accused of smuggling beef (cows are sacred to many Hindus). Top leaders in Mr. Modi’s party openly celebrated Hindus who committed crimes against Muslims.
On large sections of broadcast media, but particularly on social media, bigotry coursed unchecked. WhatsApp groups spread conspiracy theories about Muslim men luring Hindu women for religious conversion, or even about Muslims spitting in restaurant food. While Mr. Modi and his party officials reject claims of discrimination by pointing to welfare programs that cover Indians equally, Mr. Modi himself is now repeating anti-Muslim tropes in the election that ends early next month. He has targeted India’s 200 million Muslims more directly than ever, calling them “infiltrators” and insinuating that they have too many children.
Image
Two adults and two children — a man and a woman, two young girls — sit in a room next to a bookshelf.
Mr. Salam, and his wife, Uzma Ausaf, at home in Noida with two of their daughters: Juveria Ziya and Mish’al. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
This creeping Islamophobia is now the dominant theme of Mr. Salam’s writings. Cinema and music, life’s pleasures, feel smaller now. In one book, he chronicled the lynchings of Muslim men. In a recent follow-up, he described how India’s Muslims feel “orphaned” in their homeland.
Image
A man in bluejeans and bare feet half-reclines on a bed, a laptop on his knee, while a woman in a head scarf presents a tray with some food and drink
Mr. Salam working at his home in Noida last year.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
“If I don’t pick up issues of import, and limit my energies to cinema and literature, then I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he said. “What would I tell my kids tomorrow — when my grandchildren ask me what were you doing when there was an existential crisis?”
As a child, Mr. Salam lived on a mixed street of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in Delhi. When the afternoon sun would grow hot, the children would move their games under the trees in the yard of a Hindu temple. The priest would come with water for all.
“I was like any other kid for him,” Mr. Salam recalled.
Those memories are one reason Mr. Salam maintains a stubborn optimism that India can restore its secular fabric. Another is that Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism, while sweeping large parts of the country, has been resisted by several states in the country’s more prosperous south.
Family conversations among Muslims there are very different: about college degrees, job promotions, life plans — the usual aspirations.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, often-bickering political parties are united in protecting secularism and in focusing on economic well-being. Its chief minister, M.K. Stalin, is a declared atheist.
Image
A man stands under a portico, looking at a newspaper.
Jan Mohammad, a businessman, with the morning newspaper at his house in Chennai.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Jan Mohammed, who lives with his family of five in Chennai, the state capital, said neighbors joined in each other’s religious celebrations. In rural areas, there is a tradition: When one community finishes building a place of worship, villagers of other faiths arrive with gifts of fruits, vegetables and flowers and stay for a meal.
“More than accommodation, there is understanding,” Mr. Mohammed said.
His family is full of overachievers — the norm in their educated state. Mr. Mohammed, with a master’s degree, is in the construction business. His wife, Rukhsana, who has an economics degree, started an online clothing business after the children grew up. One daughter, Maimoona Bushra, has two master’s degrees and now teaches at a local college as she prepares for her wedding. The youngest, Hafsa Lubna, has a master’s in commerce and within two years went from an intern at a local company to a manager of 20.
Two of the daughters had planned to continue on to Ph.D’s. The only worry was that potential grooms would be intimidated.
“The proposals go down,” Ms. Rukhsana joked.
Image
Two women wearing head scarves and dresses reaching their ankles walk on a beach.
Maimoona Bushra and Hafsa Lubna, two daughters of Jan Mohammed, walking at the beach in Chennai. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
A thousand miles north, in Delhi, Mr. Salam’s family lives in what feels like another country. A place where prejudice has become so routine that even a friendship of 26 years can be sundered as a result.
Mr. Salam had nicknamed a former editor “human mountain” for his large stature. When they rode on the editor’s motorcycle after work in the Delhi winter, he shielded Mr. Salam from the wind.
They were together often; when his friend got his driver’s license, Mr. Salam was there with him.
“I would go to my prayer every day, and he would go to the temple every day,” Mr. Salam said. “And I used to respect him for that.”
A few years ago, things began to change. The WhatsApp messages came first.
The editor started forwarding to Mr. Salam some staples of anti-Muslim misinformation: for example, that Muslims will rule India in 20 years because their women give birth every year and their men are allowed four wives.
“Initially, I said, ‘Why do you want to get into all this?’ I thought he was just an old man who was getting all these and forwarding,” Mr. Salam said. “I give him the benefit of doubt.”
Video
How Modi Demonizes India’s Muslims
3:06
With India’s election in full swing, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party are using animated videos to attack Muslims.
The breaking point came two years ago, when Yogi Adityanath, a Modi protégé, was re-elected as the leader of Uttar Pradesh, the populous state adjoining Delhi where the Salam family lives. Mr. Adityanath, more overtly belligerent than Mr. Modi toward Muslims, governs in the saffron robe of a Hindu monk, frequently greeting large crowds of Hindu pilgrims with flowers, while cracking down on public displays of Muslim faith.
On the day of the vote counting, the friend kept calling Mr. Salam, rejoicing at Mr. Adityanath’s lead. Just days earlier, the friend had been complaining about rising unemployment and his son’s struggle to find a job during Mr. Adityanath’s first term.
“I said, ‘You have been so happy since morning, what do you gain?’” he recalled asking the friend.
“Yogi ended namaz,” the friend responded, referring to Muslim prayer on Fridays that often spills into the streets.
“That was the day I said goodbye,” Mr. Salam said, “and he hasn’t come back into my life after that.”
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. More about Mujib Mashal
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Hari Kuma
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/worl ... india.html
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
THE MUSLIM QUESTION IN INDIAN ELECTIONS
Is Modi going down the route of demonising hapless Indian Muslims simply a cynical and racist ploy to cultivate Hindutva electoral vote? Or are there also more deep-rooted and systemic issues in India that its ruling elite are keen to cover up?
Nomaan Majid Published May 26, 2024 Updated about 22 hours ago
The Muslim question has become central to the Indian elections again. The 2019 Indian election campaign focused on the enemy of India from without. In 2024, it is the enemy of India from within.
In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS) was proudly stating, “Hum ghus ke maarein gey [We will infiltrate and kill].” In 2024, they are characterising the Indian Muslim as a “ghus paitheeya [infiltrator].” The irony is lost in the hubris.
Narendra Modi claims that his main rival party, the Indian National Congress, has a Muslim bias — that it has given in the past, and intends to give in the future, if it wins, resources to Muslims from the reservations that Dr Ambedkar — the architect of the Indian constitution — “gave to dalits, backward classes and adivasis” in the Indian constitution. In doing so, the Congress, according to this claim, has gone against the constitution, in which these reservations were not given to Muslims.
By this act of redistribution, the Congress would illegally empower Muslims and, in so doing, disenfranchise Hindus. Mr Modi has also tried to link his allegation against the Congress, in a muddled way, to its commitment for a caste census. While almost everything contained in this claim is inaccurate, some of its ingredients are, in fact, the critical ones to call out.
Dr Ambedkar did not think that a dalit could be a Hindu — he refused to be Hindu himself. His (drafted) constitution gave reservation to dalits and adivasis only. The decision on the treatment of other economically “backward” groups, the majority of whom were low-caste Hindus, was relegated to committees by Jawaharlal Nehru, ostensibly for secular nationalist reasons.
In the ongoing elections in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP have once again gone down the route of demonising hapless Indian Muslims. Is this simply a cynical and racist ploy to cultivate the Hindutva electoral vote? Or are there also more deep-rooted and systemic issues in India that its ruling elite are keen to cover up?
Decades later, this led to the Mandal Commission recommendations on Other Backward Classes (OBC). This happened under a Janata Dal government in 1990. The ‘C’ of OBC stands for classes and not castes. OBC eligibility for education and employment benefits is based on the economic and social status of the recipient and religion is not a criterion for inclusion or exclusion. But in the case of Hindus, it was indeed poor low-caste Hindus, whose lists were taken from pre-Partition censuses and used for identification.
So Muslims are not only a part of OBCs, but 60 per cent of the Muslim population in 2022 were OBC. Muslims are of course 14pc of India. The question of reservation for dalits and adivasis and other “backward classes” being “redirected” towards Muslims is technically impossible. Behind this fantastically misleading narrative of claims against the Congress’ intent, there are deeper currents that need to be understood.
It is these undercurrents that I shall examine in this essay. The first is about the process by which the Indian Muslim has been demonised. The second concerns the larger Indian economic growth and inequality context, in which this demonisation plays a role.
For this, we need to see Muslims as one group, amongst a few, that face discrimination, and how the BJP-RSS focus on alleged resource diversion to Muslims helps the election conversation stay clear of the subject of a distribution failure.
The third concerns empirically situating the Indian Muslims relative to other social groups so that the demonisation is contextualised.
DEMONISING THE MUSLIM
The Indian Muslim in the BJP-RSS narrative is an outsider. The attributes of this “intruder” Muslim are not only asserted by the BJP-RSS leadership in speeches, but have been realised through purposive acts of violence frequently perpetrated against them.
The desecration of Muslim places of worship is common. The Citizens Amendment Act of 2019 was drafted to instil fear into Muslims who have lived in India from time immemorial. Cow protection vigilantism and lynchings of Muslims take place regularly. Physical violence against those engaged in Hindu-Muslim relationships, as in the so-called ‘love-jihad’ movement, is a popular spectacle. And all this without even mentioning the Gujarat massacre and the issue of Jammu and Kashmir.
The vision of the BJP-RSS is a “purification” of India. This cleansing requires, to paraphrase the eminent Indian historian Ram Guha, restricting the social and political space for the Indian Muslim. The demon in this narrative is the Muslim man, who is presented as a lascivious creature, an iconoclast, a slayer of holy cows, a devourer of Hindu women, and who is also compulsively copulating with his multiple Muslim wives to increase the numbers of his race.
The importance of this characterisation of the Indian Muslim does not lie in its content — which is racist — but in the fact that it is an axiomatically held view. The hatred for Muslims by the BJP and its supporters is a thing of great value in itself.
For the Indian population that prided itself on India’s constitution and its secular institutions, this is a tragic rupture with the past. Eyebrows are raised at “hate speech” and tolerant members of civil society are deeply disturbed, but the show goes on. Much of the mainstream Indian media, which is censored and self-censors, seems to have no trouble with it.
India has a well-respected tradition in applied social science research that critically comments on government policy, and India’s intellectual community has historically spoken out bravely for social justice. But state meddling in universities has put restrictions here as well.
While information exists for us to say something concrete about the status of Indian Muslims, few seem to be able to discuss where the Indian Muslims are really placed in society. It is the social media platforms that carry clearer voices of dissent in India today.
We hear from progressive voices in India that the BJP is wrong and that its rhetoric is bad for secular India. But we seldom get to know details of this error, except perhaps an acknowledgment that the Muslims are poor.
The vision of the BJP-RSS is a “purification” of India. The demon in this narrative is the Muslim man, who is presented as a lascivious creature, an iconoclast, a slayer of holy cows, a devourer of Hindu women, and who is also compulsively copulating with his multiple Muslim wives to increase the numbers of his race.
Even if the systematic violence against Muslims and their “othering” was somehow not a threat to Indian secularism, surely the subject still needs to be examined in more detail on its own. Otherwise, it is like saying that violence against the Palestinians is to be condemned primarily because it is bad for Israeli democracy.
From the time of Independence, the Muslim in India has been excluded, sometimes passively, at other times, actively. Maybe, after Partition, this was to be expected. In a caste-based society, discrimination is not a major issue, but that is hardly a consolation for the Muslim community. This means that one serious casualty of what passes as a “debate” on the Muslim question in India, is the Indian Muslim. Everyone has a view about Muslims, but no one knows or tries to know too much about them.
There are two questions that emerge. The first is how is this narrative sustained? The answer is that a part of it is propaganda, the other part is silence. The propaganda part is the repetition of these views so that the public takes them for granted. The silence part has something to do with the absence of facts on the Indian Muslim that are in public view.
The second question is whether this hate narrative is just what it is, or whether it additionally serves another political function? This is a critical question, but it requires one to take a larger view of India.
GROWING INEQUALITY
According to World Bank data, India’s per capita growth since 2000, despite the negative growth year of 2020-21, has averaged 4.7 percent. The distribution of gains from this significant growth has been very unequal, and improvements on employment and livelihoods very slow.
India is one of the most unequal countries in the world today. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics estimates that, for the top 10 percent population, the share of net personal wealth in India rose from 57 percent in 2002 to 65 percent in 2021.
So the wealthiest 10 percent of India own 65 percent of her wealth. In fact, the wealthiest one percent own 33 percent of India’s wealth. The top 10 percent population’s income share also rose from 40.9 percent in 2000 to 57.1 percent in 2021. The best jobs, formal jobs, have hardly increased in incidence in 22 years. I estimate that such jobs, as a percentage of all employment, were 7.5 percent in 2000 and 9.5 percent in 2022.
In short, there is a failure of distribution at the heart of India’s growth success. This is why employment and livelihoods are core voter concerns in this election. This matter is linked to the issue of the caste census and it is important to understand how that is so.
A caste census, if it takes place, will identify several hundreds of zaats (jatis in India) and will be of academic value. However, if one’s concern is to examine identity-based discrimination in India today, meaningful aggregations — as opposed to open-ended disaggregations of castes — are required. One not only needs to identify the discriminated but also the discriminators.
Discrimination between thousands of jatis is secondary. The empirical analysis of caste discrimination can, therefore, only look at some version of the broad four-caste system. To suggest otherwise, is missing the woods for the trees.
The dominant discrimination in India is likely to be found between the top three Hindu castes on the one hand, and low castes and excluded religious and social groups on the other. To be clear, inequality does not always imply discrimination but, in a situation like India, caste-led discrimination is very likely to support and sustain a good part of economic inequality.
While promises of redistribution are at the core of this election, it should be clear that it is not redistribution between poor groups that Modi talks about, nor is it about delineating hundreds of low-caste poor Hindu groups, as the Congress promises. Modi’s allegation against the Congress is an attempt to transfer the anger about India’s distributional collapse — emanating from groups that he identifies as Hindu — into an increased hatred for Muslims.
For a non-Indian audience, the understanding of the division of caste, religious and social groups has also been made more difficult by official enumeration.
Data collection on Hindu castes in India stopped at the time of Partition. The 1951 population census is devoid of any mention of real Hindu castes. After Partition, the people of India were officially divided between religions. Two groups who were assigned a religious status by a Presidential Constitutional Order in 1950 were given reservation benefits. The dalits or untouchables were named “Scheduled Castes”, and the adivasis or tribal people were named “Scheduled Tribes.”
Three quarters of the Indian population today are already supported under some kind of reservation-based system. My estimates for 2022 suggest that the tribals in India are 9.8 percent of India’s total population. The dalits are 19.8 percent of India’s population. Tribals and dalits are not Hindu castes as such. They are excluded groups. And there is a history. As early as the 1920s, these groups became the target of conversions by political groups to increase headcounts. These groups are, at best, new converts to religions.
The OBC or Other Backward Classes were around 45.8 percent of India in 2022 and, as noted, got their right to state support only in 1990. Low-caste Hindus, who are the majority of OBCs, are poor people who waited for 43 years to get support. Hindu OBCs are the largest group among Hindus and constitute 45 percent of Hindus as well. They have moderately but steadily improved their position. This is a success of affirmative action policies.
The population that is left is a general group who are not covered by any state support system. These were 24.4 percent of the entire Indian population in 2022. Of Hindus, they comprise 22 percent, and are called Forward Castes (FC). They include most members of the top three caste groups (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya) as well as some persons from the fourth or lower caste group (Shudra), who are not poor enough to be counted in Hindu OBCs.
While it is not possible to break the FC group down from most Indian nationally representative surveys, it is critical to recognise that not all persons from the top three castes are well to do, while a majority from the lower fourth caste are unlikely to be very rich.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) is a representative national survey and, oddly, it has asked a question on caste within the Forward Caste group. The 2005 NFHS has been analysed by N K Bharti at the Paris School of Economics in 2018.
The NFHS data for the FCs can be divided between the upper castes (Brahmins and Kaysts, Rajputs who are Kshatriya, and Banyas who are Vaishya) who are well to do and are 56 percent of FCs. Then we have the rest of the FCs, which include other castes that are not part of OBCs or dalits or tribals. This group is 44 percent of the FCs. With this split we can rewrite the distribution of the Hindu population in India in 2022.
We have important numbers, which are 12.2 percent of all Hindus and 10.4 percent of all India. This is the share of upper caste persons who are at the top of the FCs. Not all members of the upper castes are at the top of FCs, but those who are at the top of FCs are mostly from the upper castes.
It is odd that, while the issue of high and rising inequality in India is globally recognised, few are interested in the upper castes of India. Anyone who has lived in contemporary India or is conversant enough with it to recognise the distinction between the dalits, tribals and low-caste Hindus, will know that the upper caste question is avoided like a family secret.
This is the main caste source of discrimination, and it contributes to an ecosystem that sustains a good part of Indian inequality.
Caste was officially written out of enumeration after the Partition of India, but that does not mean that discrimination associated with caste also evaporated. If a caste census takes place today, a caste identifier will become part of employment and income expenditure surveys. Once this happens, policy benefits assessments, and the analysis of governance structures in both public and private sectors, will get associated with extreme upper caste dominance.
It is the failure of distribution which is at the heart of India’s growth success story. The Muslim intruder narrative is not only an expression of the ruling party’s view of the Muslim, but it is also an attempt to displace the anger of the Indian voter away from the miraculous collapse of distribution embedded in India’s growth miracle.
THE MUSLIM IN INDIAN SOCIETY
Let us return to the matter of propaganda and silence against the Muslim. The silence part has to do with the absence of publicly visible information on the Indian Muslim. It is important to cursorily see where the Muslims are placed in Indian society today.
Unlike the Jewish population in pre-war Nazi Germany, who were in good numbers both middle class and educated, the Muslims of India are significantly a depressed minority of over 200 million. India is a society in which identity-based discrimination is not exclusive to Muslims but is practised against other groups as well. These are not just religious groups but, as we saw, importantly, dalits and the tribal people of India as well. The broad aim here is to show where the Muslims are placed.
The poverty rate amongst Muslims is almost the same as dalits today. It is highest amongst tribal people, who mostly belong to communities that live in relative isolation. Muslims are also the poorest amongst the OBCs. Consumption poverty amongst the Muslim OBCs is 33.5 percent, while it is 26.6 percent amongst Hindu OBCs, the fourth low caste group.
Two decades ago, Muslims were in a similar position to this group. The Hindu Forward Castes, around 57 percent of whom are well-to-do upper-caste Hindus, have the lowest incidence of poverty, at 12.6 percent. As far as education is concerned, Muslims have high shares of illiterates and low shares of graduates in their working age populations. Muslims are comparable to dalits and are far behind the Hindu OBCs, the fourth caste group.
If we look at the best jobs that are formal regular jobs, the situation is even more dire, and Muslims are comparable only to tribals. They have been left behind in good jobs by both the dalits and the fourth caste group of Hindu OBCs.
India’s Muslim “intruder” is actually very poor, lagging in education and has been left behind in decent jobs. This is the person whose places of worship are subject to casual demolition, whose very citizenship is subject to surreal procedures of validation, and who is terrorised by thugs on a regular basis.
This basic profile contextualises the unfortunate narrative presented by the Indian prime minister, in which he tries to pit dalits against Muslims. The fact of the matter is, dalits and Muslims have never been closer in terms of their plight and ought to be political allies.
The BJP-RSS dream of Bharat’s purification entails the caging of Muslims. For this purpose, it has tried to appeal to a vision of a high-growth Hindu India, which shifts the responsibility of limited progress for the depressed sections of society on to the imagined benefits that will accrue to Muslims, through a Congress conspiracy.
Few would believe this. Their hope, of course, is that, like the external enemy of 2019, the vitriol against the “intruder” citizen will do the campaign trick and the hatred for Muslims will raise public temperatures sufficiently to triumph over reason.
The BJP-RSS is probably the richest political party in the world today and, given its alliance with big capital, which is the basis of extremely high Indian inequality, to call it ‘Billionaire Raj’ is correct. The wealth and income gap between the top one percent, or even 10 percent of India, and the rest is very large and rising. The distribution issue is thus real, and there is a link between economic inequality and the culture of caste-led discrimination that sustains it.
The reality, sadly, may also be that a large part of India’s Hindu population, which is suffering the consequences of distribution failure itself, may be ambivalent about Muslims. It may be willing to go along with Modi’s fantastic stories that vilify the largest and possibly the most depressed religious minority in the world.
If this happens, darker times will descend, not only in India, but in many countries of the region. If it does not, a glint at the end of the tunnel will appear that will be a godsend, not only for Indians but for all South Asians.
The writer is an independent researcher, who worked for the International Labour Organisation from 1995 to 2022 as a Senior Employment Specialist.
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 26th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1835700
Is Modi going down the route of demonising hapless Indian Muslims simply a cynical and racist ploy to cultivate Hindutva electoral vote? Or are there also more deep-rooted and systemic issues in India that its ruling elite are keen to cover up?
Nomaan Majid Published May 26, 2024 Updated about 22 hours ago
The Muslim question has become central to the Indian elections again. The 2019 Indian election campaign focused on the enemy of India from without. In 2024, it is the enemy of India from within.
In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS) was proudly stating, “Hum ghus ke maarein gey [We will infiltrate and kill].” In 2024, they are characterising the Indian Muslim as a “ghus paitheeya [infiltrator].” The irony is lost in the hubris.
Narendra Modi claims that his main rival party, the Indian National Congress, has a Muslim bias — that it has given in the past, and intends to give in the future, if it wins, resources to Muslims from the reservations that Dr Ambedkar — the architect of the Indian constitution — “gave to dalits, backward classes and adivasis” in the Indian constitution. In doing so, the Congress, according to this claim, has gone against the constitution, in which these reservations were not given to Muslims.
By this act of redistribution, the Congress would illegally empower Muslims and, in so doing, disenfranchise Hindus. Mr Modi has also tried to link his allegation against the Congress, in a muddled way, to its commitment for a caste census. While almost everything contained in this claim is inaccurate, some of its ingredients are, in fact, the critical ones to call out.
Dr Ambedkar did not think that a dalit could be a Hindu — he refused to be Hindu himself. His (drafted) constitution gave reservation to dalits and adivasis only. The decision on the treatment of other economically “backward” groups, the majority of whom were low-caste Hindus, was relegated to committees by Jawaharlal Nehru, ostensibly for secular nationalist reasons.
In the ongoing elections in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP have once again gone down the route of demonising hapless Indian Muslims. Is this simply a cynical and racist ploy to cultivate the Hindutva electoral vote? Or are there also more deep-rooted and systemic issues in India that its ruling elite are keen to cover up?
Decades later, this led to the Mandal Commission recommendations on Other Backward Classes (OBC). This happened under a Janata Dal government in 1990. The ‘C’ of OBC stands for classes and not castes. OBC eligibility for education and employment benefits is based on the economic and social status of the recipient and religion is not a criterion for inclusion or exclusion. But in the case of Hindus, it was indeed poor low-caste Hindus, whose lists were taken from pre-Partition censuses and used for identification.
So Muslims are not only a part of OBCs, but 60 per cent of the Muslim population in 2022 were OBC. Muslims are of course 14pc of India. The question of reservation for dalits and adivasis and other “backward classes” being “redirected” towards Muslims is technically impossible. Behind this fantastically misleading narrative of claims against the Congress’ intent, there are deeper currents that need to be understood.
It is these undercurrents that I shall examine in this essay. The first is about the process by which the Indian Muslim has been demonised. The second concerns the larger Indian economic growth and inequality context, in which this demonisation plays a role.
For this, we need to see Muslims as one group, amongst a few, that face discrimination, and how the BJP-RSS focus on alleged resource diversion to Muslims helps the election conversation stay clear of the subject of a distribution failure.
The third concerns empirically situating the Indian Muslims relative to other social groups so that the demonisation is contextualised.
DEMONISING THE MUSLIM
The Indian Muslim in the BJP-RSS narrative is an outsider. The attributes of this “intruder” Muslim are not only asserted by the BJP-RSS leadership in speeches, but have been realised through purposive acts of violence frequently perpetrated against them.
The desecration of Muslim places of worship is common. The Citizens Amendment Act of 2019 was drafted to instil fear into Muslims who have lived in India from time immemorial. Cow protection vigilantism and lynchings of Muslims take place regularly. Physical violence against those engaged in Hindu-Muslim relationships, as in the so-called ‘love-jihad’ movement, is a popular spectacle. And all this without even mentioning the Gujarat massacre and the issue of Jammu and Kashmir.
The vision of the BJP-RSS is a “purification” of India. This cleansing requires, to paraphrase the eminent Indian historian Ram Guha, restricting the social and political space for the Indian Muslim. The demon in this narrative is the Muslim man, who is presented as a lascivious creature, an iconoclast, a slayer of holy cows, a devourer of Hindu women, and who is also compulsively copulating with his multiple Muslim wives to increase the numbers of his race.
The importance of this characterisation of the Indian Muslim does not lie in its content — which is racist — but in the fact that it is an axiomatically held view. The hatred for Muslims by the BJP and its supporters is a thing of great value in itself.
For the Indian population that prided itself on India’s constitution and its secular institutions, this is a tragic rupture with the past. Eyebrows are raised at “hate speech” and tolerant members of civil society are deeply disturbed, but the show goes on. Much of the mainstream Indian media, which is censored and self-censors, seems to have no trouble with it.
India has a well-respected tradition in applied social science research that critically comments on government policy, and India’s intellectual community has historically spoken out bravely for social justice. But state meddling in universities has put restrictions here as well.
While information exists for us to say something concrete about the status of Indian Muslims, few seem to be able to discuss where the Indian Muslims are really placed in society. It is the social media platforms that carry clearer voices of dissent in India today.
We hear from progressive voices in India that the BJP is wrong and that its rhetoric is bad for secular India. But we seldom get to know details of this error, except perhaps an acknowledgment that the Muslims are poor.
The vision of the BJP-RSS is a “purification” of India. The demon in this narrative is the Muslim man, who is presented as a lascivious creature, an iconoclast, a slayer of holy cows, a devourer of Hindu women, and who is also compulsively copulating with his multiple Muslim wives to increase the numbers of his race.
Even if the systematic violence against Muslims and their “othering” was somehow not a threat to Indian secularism, surely the subject still needs to be examined in more detail on its own. Otherwise, it is like saying that violence against the Palestinians is to be condemned primarily because it is bad for Israeli democracy.
From the time of Independence, the Muslim in India has been excluded, sometimes passively, at other times, actively. Maybe, after Partition, this was to be expected. In a caste-based society, discrimination is not a major issue, but that is hardly a consolation for the Muslim community. This means that one serious casualty of what passes as a “debate” on the Muslim question in India, is the Indian Muslim. Everyone has a view about Muslims, but no one knows or tries to know too much about them.
There are two questions that emerge. The first is how is this narrative sustained? The answer is that a part of it is propaganda, the other part is silence. The propaganda part is the repetition of these views so that the public takes them for granted. The silence part has something to do with the absence of facts on the Indian Muslim that are in public view.
The second question is whether this hate narrative is just what it is, or whether it additionally serves another political function? This is a critical question, but it requires one to take a larger view of India.
GROWING INEQUALITY
According to World Bank data, India’s per capita growth since 2000, despite the negative growth year of 2020-21, has averaged 4.7 percent. The distribution of gains from this significant growth has been very unequal, and improvements on employment and livelihoods very slow.
India is one of the most unequal countries in the world today. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics estimates that, for the top 10 percent population, the share of net personal wealth in India rose from 57 percent in 2002 to 65 percent in 2021.
So the wealthiest 10 percent of India own 65 percent of her wealth. In fact, the wealthiest one percent own 33 percent of India’s wealth. The top 10 percent population’s income share also rose from 40.9 percent in 2000 to 57.1 percent in 2021. The best jobs, formal jobs, have hardly increased in incidence in 22 years. I estimate that such jobs, as a percentage of all employment, were 7.5 percent in 2000 and 9.5 percent in 2022.
In short, there is a failure of distribution at the heart of India’s growth success. This is why employment and livelihoods are core voter concerns in this election. This matter is linked to the issue of the caste census and it is important to understand how that is so.
A caste census, if it takes place, will identify several hundreds of zaats (jatis in India) and will be of academic value. However, if one’s concern is to examine identity-based discrimination in India today, meaningful aggregations — as opposed to open-ended disaggregations of castes — are required. One not only needs to identify the discriminated but also the discriminators.
Discrimination between thousands of jatis is secondary. The empirical analysis of caste discrimination can, therefore, only look at some version of the broad four-caste system. To suggest otherwise, is missing the woods for the trees.
The dominant discrimination in India is likely to be found between the top three Hindu castes on the one hand, and low castes and excluded religious and social groups on the other. To be clear, inequality does not always imply discrimination but, in a situation like India, caste-led discrimination is very likely to support and sustain a good part of economic inequality.
While promises of redistribution are at the core of this election, it should be clear that it is not redistribution between poor groups that Modi talks about, nor is it about delineating hundreds of low-caste poor Hindu groups, as the Congress promises. Modi’s allegation against the Congress is an attempt to transfer the anger about India’s distributional collapse — emanating from groups that he identifies as Hindu — into an increased hatred for Muslims.
For a non-Indian audience, the understanding of the division of caste, religious and social groups has also been made more difficult by official enumeration.
Data collection on Hindu castes in India stopped at the time of Partition. The 1951 population census is devoid of any mention of real Hindu castes. After Partition, the people of India were officially divided between religions. Two groups who were assigned a religious status by a Presidential Constitutional Order in 1950 were given reservation benefits. The dalits or untouchables were named “Scheduled Castes”, and the adivasis or tribal people were named “Scheduled Tribes.”
Three quarters of the Indian population today are already supported under some kind of reservation-based system. My estimates for 2022 suggest that the tribals in India are 9.8 percent of India’s total population. The dalits are 19.8 percent of India’s population. Tribals and dalits are not Hindu castes as such. They are excluded groups. And there is a history. As early as the 1920s, these groups became the target of conversions by political groups to increase headcounts. These groups are, at best, new converts to religions.
The OBC or Other Backward Classes were around 45.8 percent of India in 2022 and, as noted, got their right to state support only in 1990. Low-caste Hindus, who are the majority of OBCs, are poor people who waited for 43 years to get support. Hindu OBCs are the largest group among Hindus and constitute 45 percent of Hindus as well. They have moderately but steadily improved their position. This is a success of affirmative action policies.
The population that is left is a general group who are not covered by any state support system. These were 24.4 percent of the entire Indian population in 2022. Of Hindus, they comprise 22 percent, and are called Forward Castes (FC). They include most members of the top three caste groups (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya) as well as some persons from the fourth or lower caste group (Shudra), who are not poor enough to be counted in Hindu OBCs.
While it is not possible to break the FC group down from most Indian nationally representative surveys, it is critical to recognise that not all persons from the top three castes are well to do, while a majority from the lower fourth caste are unlikely to be very rich.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) is a representative national survey and, oddly, it has asked a question on caste within the Forward Caste group. The 2005 NFHS has been analysed by N K Bharti at the Paris School of Economics in 2018.
The NFHS data for the FCs can be divided between the upper castes (Brahmins and Kaysts, Rajputs who are Kshatriya, and Banyas who are Vaishya) who are well to do and are 56 percent of FCs. Then we have the rest of the FCs, which include other castes that are not part of OBCs or dalits or tribals. This group is 44 percent of the FCs. With this split we can rewrite the distribution of the Hindu population in India in 2022.
We have important numbers, which are 12.2 percent of all Hindus and 10.4 percent of all India. This is the share of upper caste persons who are at the top of the FCs. Not all members of the upper castes are at the top of FCs, but those who are at the top of FCs are mostly from the upper castes.
It is odd that, while the issue of high and rising inequality in India is globally recognised, few are interested in the upper castes of India. Anyone who has lived in contemporary India or is conversant enough with it to recognise the distinction between the dalits, tribals and low-caste Hindus, will know that the upper caste question is avoided like a family secret.
This is the main caste source of discrimination, and it contributes to an ecosystem that sustains a good part of Indian inequality.
Caste was officially written out of enumeration after the Partition of India, but that does not mean that discrimination associated with caste also evaporated. If a caste census takes place today, a caste identifier will become part of employment and income expenditure surveys. Once this happens, policy benefits assessments, and the analysis of governance structures in both public and private sectors, will get associated with extreme upper caste dominance.
It is the failure of distribution which is at the heart of India’s growth success story. The Muslim intruder narrative is not only an expression of the ruling party’s view of the Muslim, but it is also an attempt to displace the anger of the Indian voter away from the miraculous collapse of distribution embedded in India’s growth miracle.
THE MUSLIM IN INDIAN SOCIETY
Let us return to the matter of propaganda and silence against the Muslim. The silence part has to do with the absence of publicly visible information on the Indian Muslim. It is important to cursorily see where the Muslims are placed in Indian society today.
Unlike the Jewish population in pre-war Nazi Germany, who were in good numbers both middle class and educated, the Muslims of India are significantly a depressed minority of over 200 million. India is a society in which identity-based discrimination is not exclusive to Muslims but is practised against other groups as well. These are not just religious groups but, as we saw, importantly, dalits and the tribal people of India as well. The broad aim here is to show where the Muslims are placed.
The poverty rate amongst Muslims is almost the same as dalits today. It is highest amongst tribal people, who mostly belong to communities that live in relative isolation. Muslims are also the poorest amongst the OBCs. Consumption poverty amongst the Muslim OBCs is 33.5 percent, while it is 26.6 percent amongst Hindu OBCs, the fourth low caste group.
Two decades ago, Muslims were in a similar position to this group. The Hindu Forward Castes, around 57 percent of whom are well-to-do upper-caste Hindus, have the lowest incidence of poverty, at 12.6 percent. As far as education is concerned, Muslims have high shares of illiterates and low shares of graduates in their working age populations. Muslims are comparable to dalits and are far behind the Hindu OBCs, the fourth caste group.
If we look at the best jobs that are formal regular jobs, the situation is even more dire, and Muslims are comparable only to tribals. They have been left behind in good jobs by both the dalits and the fourth caste group of Hindu OBCs.
India’s Muslim “intruder” is actually very poor, lagging in education and has been left behind in decent jobs. This is the person whose places of worship are subject to casual demolition, whose very citizenship is subject to surreal procedures of validation, and who is terrorised by thugs on a regular basis.
This basic profile contextualises the unfortunate narrative presented by the Indian prime minister, in which he tries to pit dalits against Muslims. The fact of the matter is, dalits and Muslims have never been closer in terms of their plight and ought to be political allies.
The BJP-RSS dream of Bharat’s purification entails the caging of Muslims. For this purpose, it has tried to appeal to a vision of a high-growth Hindu India, which shifts the responsibility of limited progress for the depressed sections of society on to the imagined benefits that will accrue to Muslims, through a Congress conspiracy.
Few would believe this. Their hope, of course, is that, like the external enemy of 2019, the vitriol against the “intruder” citizen will do the campaign trick and the hatred for Muslims will raise public temperatures sufficiently to triumph over reason.
The BJP-RSS is probably the richest political party in the world today and, given its alliance with big capital, which is the basis of extremely high Indian inequality, to call it ‘Billionaire Raj’ is correct. The wealth and income gap between the top one percent, or even 10 percent of India, and the rest is very large and rising. The distribution issue is thus real, and there is a link between economic inequality and the culture of caste-led discrimination that sustains it.
The reality, sadly, may also be that a large part of India’s Hindu population, which is suffering the consequences of distribution failure itself, may be ambivalent about Muslims. It may be willing to go along with Modi’s fantastic stories that vilify the largest and possibly the most depressed religious minority in the world.
If this happens, darker times will descend, not only in India, but in many countries of the region. If it does not, a glint at the end of the tunnel will appear that will be a godsend, not only for Indians but for all South Asians.
The writer is an independent researcher, who worked for the International Labour Organisation from 1995 to 2022 as a Senior Employment Specialist.
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 26th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1835700
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
India awaits an existential verdict
Jawed Naqvi Published June 4, 2024 Updated about an hour ago
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
RESULTS for the Indian elections will be announced today. The needlessly tortuous contest for 543 Lok Sabha seats in extremely punishing weather saw at least a dozen poll officials killed by heatstroke. That the voters still came out should be a testament to their faith in democracy.
The campaign had the prime minister ever more viciously targeting the Muslim community, describing them as infiltrators who posed a demographic threat to 80 per cent of Hindus. His office published spurious data in the middle of the elections to shore up the lie. He accused Muslims of eyeing Hindu women’s mangalsutras, and every Hindu’s jobs and even buffaloes. He described the Congress manifesto as a Muslim League document. And since Muslims were infiltrators in his view and their population would sooner than later reduce Hindus to a minority, as per his claim, a larger and more dire message could be gleaned: that they were a threat that needed to be vacated at once.
The imagery of the accusation seemed lifted from the Nazi toolkit for spawning a racist ideology. Having said his hate-filled piece, Prime Minister Modi swore to his handpicked TV interviewers that he had never targeted Muslims, for if he did, he wouldn’t be worthy of leading the country. Mr Modi’s legendary about-turns and doublespeak are too numerous to list.
He threatened the opposition with dire consequences for criticising his policies, the rawest nerve for him being the persistent charge about his crony capitalist friends, a key opposition theme in the campaign. He didn’t spell out how he would deal with the opposition, but did menacingly gnash his teeth to warn the young opponent in Bihar, the 34-year-old Tejaswi Yadav, that he faces jail after the polls.
Will India find its soul again as was envisaged by the founding fathers?
In the meantime, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s three-week bail period ended on Sunday, and he is back in prison. The chief minister of Jharkhand resigned after being arrested before the polls, and he too is in jail, as are far too many left and liberal intellectuals of India. They are languishing in prison cells across the country with little hope of their so-called terror trials starting anytime soon. Unreported and invisible to the media, the farmers are continuing to sit in protest in Punjab to press for the prime minister’s unfulfilled promises to be met.
Mr Modi donned a range of attires, contrasting with Rahul Gandhi’s plain white shirt. Their competition was amusing. After Rahul jumped into the Arabian Sea from a fishing boat, Mr Modi sat in meditation in a shallow sea — with his eyes closed in silence and his security providing a tube for him to breathe normally — but not without an underwater camera transmitting the event. Rahul had a wrestling outing with some of the leading wrestlers in the field, and then got his beard trimmed by a street corner barber in Rae Bareli. Mr Modi responded by announcing himself as an avatar of a divine deity, and therefore not to be confused with ordinary human beings.
Having said his bit, he went off to meditate once more, saffron-clad like Swami Vivekananda, to the southern-most tip of India, where the seer had sat in contemplation in 1893. TV paraphernalia was in attendance. Mr Modi has never allowed it to miss his attention-seeking antics in the 10 years he has ruled India as a wilful and whimsical autocrat.
An existential question has been asked about today’s coming verdict: would India find its soul again, as was envisaged by the founding fathers who gave it an enviable constitution, or would it wither into oblivion and be recast into an ideologically driven state inspired by the divisive doctrine of Hindutva?
Everyone agrees that India won’t be the same after June 4. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets a thumping majority, as exit polls claim against the more tempered estimates of the opposition, it could very much signal the final assault on Gandhi’s and Nehru’s and, above all, Ambedkar’s idea of India. And the assault would come from a more strident right-wing Hindu nationalist dispensation.
I deliberately mentioned Ambedkar, the Dalit member of the constituent assembly who headed the panel that drafted the constitution, the globally venerated book that is increasingly reviled by Hindutva advocates but which Rahul Gandhi flaunted at every election rally. When Mahatma Gandhi asked Ambedkar to join the temple entry movement to allow Dalits into Hindu temples from where they were banished by the Brahmin priesthood, he flatly turned down the offer. It was for Hindus to decide how they wished to project their truth, Ambedkar said. But he would rather have his Dalit people get education and find good jobs, instead of wasting their energies on temple visits.
The constitution Ambedkar helped frame nudged Indians to seek his scientific spirit. Mr Modi’s methods contravene the enshrined quest by playing on ignorance and superstition of large swathes of the masses that the Congress had failed to address, leave alone weed out, in its decades-long rule.
Rahul was focused on the rights of and justice for the exploited masses, above all women. Let’s focus also on the duties for citizens mandated in the constitution, which Mr Modi mocks. “It shall be the duty of every citizen to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture.” There’s a particular focus presciently on safeguarding the environment, whereby citizens must “protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers, wildlife, and to have compassion for creatures”. But perhaps, dearest to Ambedkar and Nehru was the quest “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”. And how Indians under Modi should “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities; [and] renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women”.
India awaits an existential verdict with plenty of hope but with a lurking fear too.
Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1837683/india ... al-verdict
Jawed Naqvi Published June 4, 2024 Updated about an hour ago
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
RESULTS for the Indian elections will be announced today. The needlessly tortuous contest for 543 Lok Sabha seats in extremely punishing weather saw at least a dozen poll officials killed by heatstroke. That the voters still came out should be a testament to their faith in democracy.
The campaign had the prime minister ever more viciously targeting the Muslim community, describing them as infiltrators who posed a demographic threat to 80 per cent of Hindus. His office published spurious data in the middle of the elections to shore up the lie. He accused Muslims of eyeing Hindu women’s mangalsutras, and every Hindu’s jobs and even buffaloes. He described the Congress manifesto as a Muslim League document. And since Muslims were infiltrators in his view and their population would sooner than later reduce Hindus to a minority, as per his claim, a larger and more dire message could be gleaned: that they were a threat that needed to be vacated at once.
The imagery of the accusation seemed lifted from the Nazi toolkit for spawning a racist ideology. Having said his hate-filled piece, Prime Minister Modi swore to his handpicked TV interviewers that he had never targeted Muslims, for if he did, he wouldn’t be worthy of leading the country. Mr Modi’s legendary about-turns and doublespeak are too numerous to list.
He threatened the opposition with dire consequences for criticising his policies, the rawest nerve for him being the persistent charge about his crony capitalist friends, a key opposition theme in the campaign. He didn’t spell out how he would deal with the opposition, but did menacingly gnash his teeth to warn the young opponent in Bihar, the 34-year-old Tejaswi Yadav, that he faces jail after the polls.
Will India find its soul again as was envisaged by the founding fathers?
In the meantime, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s three-week bail period ended on Sunday, and he is back in prison. The chief minister of Jharkhand resigned after being arrested before the polls, and he too is in jail, as are far too many left and liberal intellectuals of India. They are languishing in prison cells across the country with little hope of their so-called terror trials starting anytime soon. Unreported and invisible to the media, the farmers are continuing to sit in protest in Punjab to press for the prime minister’s unfulfilled promises to be met.
Mr Modi donned a range of attires, contrasting with Rahul Gandhi’s plain white shirt. Their competition was amusing. After Rahul jumped into the Arabian Sea from a fishing boat, Mr Modi sat in meditation in a shallow sea — with his eyes closed in silence and his security providing a tube for him to breathe normally — but not without an underwater camera transmitting the event. Rahul had a wrestling outing with some of the leading wrestlers in the field, and then got his beard trimmed by a street corner barber in Rae Bareli. Mr Modi responded by announcing himself as an avatar of a divine deity, and therefore not to be confused with ordinary human beings.
Having said his bit, he went off to meditate once more, saffron-clad like Swami Vivekananda, to the southern-most tip of India, where the seer had sat in contemplation in 1893. TV paraphernalia was in attendance. Mr Modi has never allowed it to miss his attention-seeking antics in the 10 years he has ruled India as a wilful and whimsical autocrat.
An existential question has been asked about today’s coming verdict: would India find its soul again, as was envisaged by the founding fathers who gave it an enviable constitution, or would it wither into oblivion and be recast into an ideologically driven state inspired by the divisive doctrine of Hindutva?
Everyone agrees that India won’t be the same after June 4. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets a thumping majority, as exit polls claim against the more tempered estimates of the opposition, it could very much signal the final assault on Gandhi’s and Nehru’s and, above all, Ambedkar’s idea of India. And the assault would come from a more strident right-wing Hindu nationalist dispensation.
I deliberately mentioned Ambedkar, the Dalit member of the constituent assembly who headed the panel that drafted the constitution, the globally venerated book that is increasingly reviled by Hindutva advocates but which Rahul Gandhi flaunted at every election rally. When Mahatma Gandhi asked Ambedkar to join the temple entry movement to allow Dalits into Hindu temples from where they were banished by the Brahmin priesthood, he flatly turned down the offer. It was for Hindus to decide how they wished to project their truth, Ambedkar said. But he would rather have his Dalit people get education and find good jobs, instead of wasting their energies on temple visits.
The constitution Ambedkar helped frame nudged Indians to seek his scientific spirit. Mr Modi’s methods contravene the enshrined quest by playing on ignorance and superstition of large swathes of the masses that the Congress had failed to address, leave alone weed out, in its decades-long rule.
Rahul was focused on the rights of and justice for the exploited masses, above all women. Let’s focus also on the duties for citizens mandated in the constitution, which Mr Modi mocks. “It shall be the duty of every citizen to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture.” There’s a particular focus presciently on safeguarding the environment, whereby citizens must “protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers, wildlife, and to have compassion for creatures”. But perhaps, dearest to Ambedkar and Nehru was the quest “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”. And how Indians under Modi should “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities; [and] renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women”.
India awaits an existential verdict with plenty of hope but with a lurking fear too.
Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1837683/india ... al-verdict
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
5 Jun, 2024 13:10
Bharatiya Janata Party allies are demanding their pound of flesh after the party fell short of a majority, with some wanting Narendra Modi out
By Swati Chaturvedi, an independent journalist based in New Delhi
Modi in limbo: With no majority, the Indian PM is at the mercy of his coalition partners.
Make no mistake, “strong leader” Narendra Modi made himself the centrepiece of the 2024 Lok Sabha (parliamentary lower house) election. Modi was the medium and Modi was the message, complete with a “Modi guarantee” for voters in the most presidential-style elections that India has ever seen.
And the little guy – the voter – cut the prime minister down to size in the biggest reversal of his political career. He had parachuted into the Gujarat chief minister’s office in 2001, and has never since lost an election, neither in Gujarat nor, before this, as the two-term prime minister.
Modi wanted to equal the three terms with a single-party majority achieved by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but has fallen short. Nehru remains his intellectual nemesis. In 2014, Modi promised hope on the back of the “acche din” (good days) he would bring. In 2019, it was national security on the ballot after the Pulwama massacre – a terrorist attack in Kashmir in February 2019, in which 40 Indian paramilitary personnel died after a blast hit their convoy. New Delhi retaliated with a Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force on February 26 targeting an alleged training camp of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.
This time around, Modi gave more than 80 scripted interviews which revealed his insight into how he considered himself to be infallible and nearly “divine,” or a “non-biological creation,” as he described it.
He held 206 public meetings, with his rhetoric focusing on majoritarian issues: mutton (a dish associated with the Muslim’s Eid holiday); Muslim interlopers or ‘ghuspetias’ (infiltrators, in colorful vernacular); and ‘mujra’ (a dance associated with Muslim courtesans). He also openly spoke of how the opposition was conspiring to rob Hindus of their ‘mangalsutra’ (the wedding necklace) and their buffalos, to give to, you guessed it, the Muslims.
The new parliament will have 26 Muslim MPs, but Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took pride in fielding just one (Abdul Salam, in Kerala’s Malappuram).
Now, as Modi scrambles to remain as prime minister, his very style of being confrontational and extremely aggressive with his allies is proving to be a tough sell. The BJP needs to retain as allies the chief minister of Bihar state, Nitish Kumar, a veteran political somersaulter whose Janata Dal (United) (JDU) party took the most seats in heavily populated Bihar, and Chandrababu Naidu, whose Telugu Desam Party (TDP) swept the state election in south India’s Andhra Prades.
Naidu is a recent and reluctant ally as Modi’s BJP had broken his TDP in 2019, and allegedly threatened him with action by enforcement agencies, as has happened with other political leaders.
Election outcome won’t alter India’s foreign policy – experts
Read more Election outcome won’t alter India’s foreign policy – experts
Now, the kingmakers Kumar and Naidu are proving difficult and are asking for the moon, including goodies like the Lok Sabha speaker’s post and the finance ministry. Kumar is indicating that he would like to be deputy prime minister in return for backing Modi.
Ideally, they would like a government without Modi and his chief lieutenant Amit Shah. They want a model similar to when the first BJP prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, ran a successful coalition government in 1998.
So how did it all go so wrong? Modi wanted to ensure success in Maharashtra, the state with the second highest number of Lok Sabha seats (48); and so is believed to have broken the constituent ruling parties using the brute power of investigative agencies. The Maharashtra voters punished him by giving the lion’s share of the seats to the INDIA (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance) bloc.
The biggest reality check was provided in Uttar Pradesh (UP), country’s most populous state whose 80 Lok Sabha seats have an outsized influence on capturing power in Delhi. UP had powered Modi into government twice, but this time around the UP voters humbled him.
Modi’s margin of victory in his own constituency, the holy town of Varanasi, fell to its lowest, at 152,000. His ministers from UP – Smriti Irani, Ajay Singh Teni and Sanjeev Balyan – all lost prestigious seats.
Despite the grand Ram temple consecration – a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, built on the land where a mosque once stood, the BJP also lost the Faizabad constituency, where the temple is located.
Killer heatwaves are ravaging India – and things are about to get worse
Read more Killer heatwaves are ravaging India – and things are about to get worse
Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress and Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi party, a regional UP heavyweight, were allies in the INDIA alliance. They campaigned over the lack of jobs and the BJP’s open determination to change the constitution – the BJP is widely believed to be planning to replace affirmative action for Dalits, India’s most marginalized community, which has faced considerable discrimination in the past and still does so in many spheres of social life. This struck a chord with voters.
Modi’s attacks on opposition leaders and critics, who faced investigation by the economic intelligence agency and revenue department in the run up to the election, was overkill and raised eyebrows given the corruption allegations leveled against some of the leaders that were allowed to join the BJP. Gandhi’s charges of cronyism stuck, and the opaque electoral bond scheme – introduced by the BJP government in 2017 but struck down by the Supreme Court two months before the election – seemed to be a ruling party extortion racket.
Modi even got his tame party president J P Nadda to repudiate the pater familias of the right-wing ecosystem, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or the ‘Sangh Parivar’, saying the BJP did not need the RSS. The boots on the ground for every BJP victory had been provided by RSS workers who simply didn’t step out after being rejected in this manner.
There are two key takeaways. Firstly, the opposition, which is essential for a democracy, is back in India. Modi can no longer get away with not answering a single question in parliament as he has done for the past ten years. His plans for ‘one nation, one election’ have been checked, as has his agenda.
Modi once boasted in Parliament: “Ek akela sab peh bhari” (one alone can best them all). After the voters' reality check he moved swiftly, and basically gave key allies a blank cheque for portfolio demand in return for letters of support. After that in the allies' bag, Modi is now the NDA choice as leader with a swift swearing-in on June 8.
The last NDA government led by BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee had to deal with Naidu coming weekly with a wish list. A coalition government is amenable to allies and accountable to Parliament. We shall see an NDA 3.0 after the departing Modi 2.0
https://www.rt.com/india/598784-modi-in ... -election/
Bharatiya Janata Party allies are demanding their pound of flesh after the party fell short of a majority, with some wanting Narendra Modi out
By Swati Chaturvedi, an independent journalist based in New Delhi
Modi in limbo: With no majority, the Indian PM is at the mercy of his coalition partners.
Make no mistake, “strong leader” Narendra Modi made himself the centrepiece of the 2024 Lok Sabha (parliamentary lower house) election. Modi was the medium and Modi was the message, complete with a “Modi guarantee” for voters in the most presidential-style elections that India has ever seen.
And the little guy – the voter – cut the prime minister down to size in the biggest reversal of his political career. He had parachuted into the Gujarat chief minister’s office in 2001, and has never since lost an election, neither in Gujarat nor, before this, as the two-term prime minister.
Modi wanted to equal the three terms with a single-party majority achieved by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but has fallen short. Nehru remains his intellectual nemesis. In 2014, Modi promised hope on the back of the “acche din” (good days) he would bring. In 2019, it was national security on the ballot after the Pulwama massacre – a terrorist attack in Kashmir in February 2019, in which 40 Indian paramilitary personnel died after a blast hit their convoy. New Delhi retaliated with a Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force on February 26 targeting an alleged training camp of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.
This time around, Modi gave more than 80 scripted interviews which revealed his insight into how he considered himself to be infallible and nearly “divine,” or a “non-biological creation,” as he described it.
He held 206 public meetings, with his rhetoric focusing on majoritarian issues: mutton (a dish associated with the Muslim’s Eid holiday); Muslim interlopers or ‘ghuspetias’ (infiltrators, in colorful vernacular); and ‘mujra’ (a dance associated with Muslim courtesans). He also openly spoke of how the opposition was conspiring to rob Hindus of their ‘mangalsutra’ (the wedding necklace) and their buffalos, to give to, you guessed it, the Muslims.
The new parliament will have 26 Muslim MPs, but Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took pride in fielding just one (Abdul Salam, in Kerala’s Malappuram).
Now, as Modi scrambles to remain as prime minister, his very style of being confrontational and extremely aggressive with his allies is proving to be a tough sell. The BJP needs to retain as allies the chief minister of Bihar state, Nitish Kumar, a veteran political somersaulter whose Janata Dal (United) (JDU) party took the most seats in heavily populated Bihar, and Chandrababu Naidu, whose Telugu Desam Party (TDP) swept the state election in south India’s Andhra Prades.
Naidu is a recent and reluctant ally as Modi’s BJP had broken his TDP in 2019, and allegedly threatened him with action by enforcement agencies, as has happened with other political leaders.
Election outcome won’t alter India’s foreign policy – experts
Read more Election outcome won’t alter India’s foreign policy – experts
Now, the kingmakers Kumar and Naidu are proving difficult and are asking for the moon, including goodies like the Lok Sabha speaker’s post and the finance ministry. Kumar is indicating that he would like to be deputy prime minister in return for backing Modi.
Ideally, they would like a government without Modi and his chief lieutenant Amit Shah. They want a model similar to when the first BJP prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, ran a successful coalition government in 1998.
So how did it all go so wrong? Modi wanted to ensure success in Maharashtra, the state with the second highest number of Lok Sabha seats (48); and so is believed to have broken the constituent ruling parties using the brute power of investigative agencies. The Maharashtra voters punished him by giving the lion’s share of the seats to the INDIA (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance) bloc.
The biggest reality check was provided in Uttar Pradesh (UP), country’s most populous state whose 80 Lok Sabha seats have an outsized influence on capturing power in Delhi. UP had powered Modi into government twice, but this time around the UP voters humbled him.
Modi’s margin of victory in his own constituency, the holy town of Varanasi, fell to its lowest, at 152,000. His ministers from UP – Smriti Irani, Ajay Singh Teni and Sanjeev Balyan – all lost prestigious seats.
Despite the grand Ram temple consecration – a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, built on the land where a mosque once stood, the BJP also lost the Faizabad constituency, where the temple is located.
Killer heatwaves are ravaging India – and things are about to get worse
Read more Killer heatwaves are ravaging India – and things are about to get worse
Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress and Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi party, a regional UP heavyweight, were allies in the INDIA alliance. They campaigned over the lack of jobs and the BJP’s open determination to change the constitution – the BJP is widely believed to be planning to replace affirmative action for Dalits, India’s most marginalized community, which has faced considerable discrimination in the past and still does so in many spheres of social life. This struck a chord with voters.
Modi’s attacks on opposition leaders and critics, who faced investigation by the economic intelligence agency and revenue department in the run up to the election, was overkill and raised eyebrows given the corruption allegations leveled against some of the leaders that were allowed to join the BJP. Gandhi’s charges of cronyism stuck, and the opaque electoral bond scheme – introduced by the BJP government in 2017 but struck down by the Supreme Court two months before the election – seemed to be a ruling party extortion racket.
Modi even got his tame party president J P Nadda to repudiate the pater familias of the right-wing ecosystem, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or the ‘Sangh Parivar’, saying the BJP did not need the RSS. The boots on the ground for every BJP victory had been provided by RSS workers who simply didn’t step out after being rejected in this manner.
There are two key takeaways. Firstly, the opposition, which is essential for a democracy, is back in India. Modi can no longer get away with not answering a single question in parliament as he has done for the past ten years. His plans for ‘one nation, one election’ have been checked, as has his agenda.
Modi once boasted in Parliament: “Ek akela sab peh bhari” (one alone can best them all). After the voters' reality check he moved swiftly, and basically gave key allies a blank cheque for portfolio demand in return for letters of support. After that in the allies' bag, Modi is now the NDA choice as leader with a swift swearing-in on June 8.
The last NDA government led by BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee had to deal with Naidu coming weekly with a wish list. A coalition government is amenable to allies and accountable to Parliament. We shall see an NDA 3.0 after the departing Modi 2.0
https://www.rt.com/india/598784-modi-in ... -election/
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
‘Cow Vigilantes’ Have India’s Muslims on Edge
An unexpectedly narrow victory at the polls for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-first agenda has not cooled simmering sectarian tensions, as some had hoped.
Capturing a stray cow in Ayodhya, India, in January. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter.Credit...Money Sharma/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A recent series of attacks by Hindus on Muslims in India have highlighted how sectarian violence remains a serious problem, even as the country seeks to define itself on the world stage as a robust democracy with equal rights for all.
Despite a close election victory in June by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that many interpreted as a rebuff, there have been numerous instances of such violence, according to India-focused human rights organizations and a New York Times tally of local news reports. At least a dozen involve so-called cow vigilantism — violence related to the slaughter or smuggling of cows, or the suspicion of such acts.
In August, a group of Hindu men beat up a 72-year-old Muslim man because they believed he was carrying beef in his bag. Also that month, a group that describes themselves as cow protectors fatally shot a 19-year-old Hindu student because they thought he was a Muslim smuggling cows, according to his family.
The cow issue is deeply divisive because it pits the religious beliefs of one group against the diet of another. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter, as well as the sale or smuggling of beef. But beef is consumed by many Muslims.
Religious violence is not rare in India, where more than one billion Hindus, around 200 million Muslims, 30 million Christians, 25 million Sikhs and other religious minorities coexist, sometimes uneasily.
Under Mr. Modi, who has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2014, Muslims have increasingly become a target for hard-line Hindu groups affiliated with his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Hundreds of instances of religious violence, including lynching, beating and abuse, occur every year, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Attacks are so common that they have almost lost their capacity to shock, said Harsh Mander, a human rights and peace activist.
Particularly, he said, violence against Muslims. “First it is normalized, second it is legitimized and third it is valorized,” Mr. Mander said. “So it is not only normal to do it, but it is good to do it.”
Cow vigilantism is a subset of religious violence, where squads of “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors) act as a de facto police force. Laws on cattle slaughter are set by states, but Mr. Modi has made cow protection a cornerstone of his national political strategy, emboldening a movement with deep roots in Indian history. He seldom comments publicly on vigilante violence.
Image
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, in a bright blue vest and orange-and-black head covering, waves amid a crowd of people dressed in white.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India meeting school children in New Delhi last month.Credit...Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
From 2019 until just before India started going to the polls in April, more than a fifth of reported attacks by Hindus on Muslims were related to cow vigilantism, the largest single category, according to an analysis by ACLED, an independent nonprofit that monitors crises and analyzes data.
Such episodes are unlikely to become less frequent in Mr. Modi’s third term, despite the narrower-than-projected victory for his party in the election, said Muhammad Akram, a researcher who coauthored a 2021 paper on cow vigilantism.
“Despite expectations that a politically weakened Modi might lead to a reduction in anti-Muslim violence rhetoric, there have been over a dozen incidents of vigilante violence during this term alone,” Mr. Akram said.
In what the victim’s family called a case of mistaken identity, Aryan Mishra, 19, was shot in the state of Haryana after a car chase on Aug. 24. The police arrested five men, one of whom was well known locally as a cow vigilante.
Siyanand Mishra, the victim’s father, told reporters this week that his son did not know the perpetrators, who assumed that his son was a cow smuggler. “We are not fighting with anybody,” he added, explaining that his family was from a top Hindu caste.
One of India’s largest Hindu supremacist groups, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, distanced itself from the recent attacks. “We condemn all sorts of violence and the tendency to take law into one’s hands,” said Alok Kumar, international president of the group. Mr. Kumar said his group trains workers to intervene only if cows are being smuggled and to report such cases to the police.
Mr. Kumar said it was important that Hindus abide by the same laws governing all Indian citizens. He said that the recent instances of violence were more a coincidence than a trend.
On Aug. 28, Haji Ashraf Ali Syed Husain, a 72-year-old Muslim man, boarded a train in Maharashtra State. Mr. Husain said he was traveling to visit his daughter when a crowd of young men began taunting him after identifying him as a Muslim by his beard and skullcap, and accused him of carrying beef in his bag. (According to his son, it was the meat of buffalo, which is generally allowed.)
“I asked them, ‘Who are you to ask?’” Mr. Husain told reporters. With that, the men — who were on their way to take qualifying exams to become police constables — began hitting him. He suffered from multiple injuries, including to the eyes, head and chest.
Four men have been charged with serious crimes including severe beating and looting, said Archana Dusane, a senior police officer investigating the case.
Often, the violence is caught on camera and widely circulated via social media, as in Mr. Husain’s case. “You are creating evidence of a crime under Indian law,” said Mr. Mander, the activist, adding that it was “performative” violence. “It means that you are sure that you will not be punished.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
An unexpectedly narrow victory at the polls for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-first agenda has not cooled simmering sectarian tensions, as some had hoped.
Capturing a stray cow in Ayodhya, India, in January. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter.Credit...Money Sharma/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A recent series of attacks by Hindus on Muslims in India have highlighted how sectarian violence remains a serious problem, even as the country seeks to define itself on the world stage as a robust democracy with equal rights for all.
Despite a close election victory in June by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that many interpreted as a rebuff, there have been numerous instances of such violence, according to India-focused human rights organizations and a New York Times tally of local news reports. At least a dozen involve so-called cow vigilantism — violence related to the slaughter or smuggling of cows, or the suspicion of such acts.
In August, a group of Hindu men beat up a 72-year-old Muslim man because they believed he was carrying beef in his bag. Also that month, a group that describes themselves as cow protectors fatally shot a 19-year-old Hindu student because they thought he was a Muslim smuggling cows, according to his family.
The cow issue is deeply divisive because it pits the religious beliefs of one group against the diet of another. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter, as well as the sale or smuggling of beef. But beef is consumed by many Muslims.
Religious violence is not rare in India, where more than one billion Hindus, around 200 million Muslims, 30 million Christians, 25 million Sikhs and other religious minorities coexist, sometimes uneasily.
Under Mr. Modi, who has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2014, Muslims have increasingly become a target for hard-line Hindu groups affiliated with his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Hundreds of instances of religious violence, including lynching, beating and abuse, occur every year, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Attacks are so common that they have almost lost their capacity to shock, said Harsh Mander, a human rights and peace activist.
Particularly, he said, violence against Muslims. “First it is normalized, second it is legitimized and third it is valorized,” Mr. Mander said. “So it is not only normal to do it, but it is good to do it.”
Cow vigilantism is a subset of religious violence, where squads of “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors) act as a de facto police force. Laws on cattle slaughter are set by states, but Mr. Modi has made cow protection a cornerstone of his national political strategy, emboldening a movement with deep roots in Indian history. He seldom comments publicly on vigilante violence.
Image
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, in a bright blue vest and orange-and-black head covering, waves amid a crowd of people dressed in white.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India meeting school children in New Delhi last month.Credit...Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
From 2019 until just before India started going to the polls in April, more than a fifth of reported attacks by Hindus on Muslims were related to cow vigilantism, the largest single category, according to an analysis by ACLED, an independent nonprofit that monitors crises and analyzes data.
Such episodes are unlikely to become less frequent in Mr. Modi’s third term, despite the narrower-than-projected victory for his party in the election, said Muhammad Akram, a researcher who coauthored a 2021 paper on cow vigilantism.
“Despite expectations that a politically weakened Modi might lead to a reduction in anti-Muslim violence rhetoric, there have been over a dozen incidents of vigilante violence during this term alone,” Mr. Akram said.
In what the victim’s family called a case of mistaken identity, Aryan Mishra, 19, was shot in the state of Haryana after a car chase on Aug. 24. The police arrested five men, one of whom was well known locally as a cow vigilante.
Siyanand Mishra, the victim’s father, told reporters this week that his son did not know the perpetrators, who assumed that his son was a cow smuggler. “We are not fighting with anybody,” he added, explaining that his family was from a top Hindu caste.
One of India’s largest Hindu supremacist groups, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, distanced itself from the recent attacks. “We condemn all sorts of violence and the tendency to take law into one’s hands,” said Alok Kumar, international president of the group. Mr. Kumar said his group trains workers to intervene only if cows are being smuggled and to report such cases to the police.
Mr. Kumar said it was important that Hindus abide by the same laws governing all Indian citizens. He said that the recent instances of violence were more a coincidence than a trend.
On Aug. 28, Haji Ashraf Ali Syed Husain, a 72-year-old Muslim man, boarded a train in Maharashtra State. Mr. Husain said he was traveling to visit his daughter when a crowd of young men began taunting him after identifying him as a Muslim by his beard and skullcap, and accused him of carrying beef in his bag. (According to his son, it was the meat of buffalo, which is generally allowed.)
“I asked them, ‘Who are you to ask?’” Mr. Husain told reporters. With that, the men — who were on their way to take qualifying exams to become police constables — began hitting him. He suffered from multiple injuries, including to the eyes, head and chest.
Four men have been charged with serious crimes including severe beating and looting, said Archana Dusane, a senior police officer investigating the case.
Often, the violence is caught on camera and widely circulated via social media, as in Mr. Husain’s case. “You are creating evidence of a crime under Indian law,” said Mr. Mander, the activist, adding that it was “performative” violence. “It means that you are sure that you will not be punished.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3