Do Muslims matter in Modi’s India?
By Habib Siddiqui
Since
sweeping to power for the second time in May of 2019, Narendra Modi and his BJP
government have delivered within six months what they have been promising to
their chauvinistic Hindutvadi supporters. Kashmir’s special status as a state
is gone with Article 370. The site for the historic Babri Masjid is now cleared
for building a Hindu temple – the Ram Mandir.
On the
negative side: Modi has failed in delivering the economic miracles that matter
to most ordinary citizens. Unemployment, according to CMIE (Center for Monitoring Indian Economy), is
at an all-time high in decades, reaching 8.50
percent in October 2019 from a record low of 3.53 percent in December of 2011.
[Note: Unemployment Rate in India
averaged 5.16 percent from 1983 until 2019.] India’s third-quarter GDP came
down to only 4.55%, the lowest in the last six years and a half. Export demand for Indian goods and services shrank for the
first time since March 2016. But who cares!
Modi’s
popularity has been on a meteoric trajectory until, of course, the latest anti-government
protests that have flared up in many major cities against his highly
discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and its evil twin – the National
Register of Citizens (NRC). Since December 2018, the BJP has lost power in five
states: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
As of Saturday
(December 28, 2019), since December 11, at least twenty-seven civilians – almost
all Muslims who were all unarmed (including
bystanders) – have been killed by the trigger-happy Indian police with
thousands of people arrested for protesting against Modi’s bigoted policies that have
stabbed the Indian constitution. Activists have
pointed out that while protests against the citizenship law have happened
across the country, protesters have been killed only in states governed by the
BJP.
Most of
the deaths (19) have occurred in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP),
where 20% of the state’s 200 million people are Muslim. The state government is
controlled by the BJP. Its chief minister is Yogi Adityanath, a
Hindu monk (revered by many devotees as a reincarnation of Hindu gods) and a supremacist
who in 2005 was involved in a 'purification drive' that involved the conversion
of about 1,800 Christians to Hinduism in the town of Etah in UP. He said that he wouldn't stop until he turns Uttar
Pradesh and India into a Hindu state. After being elected the chief minister, he has changed the names of many
Muslim-sounding names in UP
to Hindu-sounding names. He even plans to change the name of Agra, where Taj Mahal,
is located.
In 2011, the documentary film Saffron War – Radicalization of Hinduism accused Adityanath of promoting communal disharmony in Uttar
Pradesh through hate speeches.
In an undated video that surfaced on YouTube during August 2014,
Adityanath was seen saying, during a public speech at Azamgarh, referring to the religious conversions due to inter-religious
marriages, "wo
agar 1 (ek) Hindu baalikaa ko le jaayenge to kam se kam 100 Muslim baalikaaon
ko... ["if they [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we will take 100 Muslims girls]."
In the same video, he continues by
saying, "if they kill one Hindu,
there will be 100 that we" and pauses, as the gathered crowd shouts: "kill". "We will return whatever they do 100
folds, with interest," he was heard
saying. In February 2015, while speaking at the Vishwa Hindu Patrishad’s
‘Virat Hindu Sammelan’, Adityanath commented: "If given a chance, we will install statues of Goddess Gauri, Ganesh and Nandi " — Hindu deities — "in
every mosque."
As the chief minister of UP, Yogi has proven his evil intent.
He has polarized the state along the religious line and is now behaving like a serial
killer who is on the loose. It is no wonder why the police in UP feel empowered
to behave like the Brown Shirts (SS) and the Gestapo of Hitler’s Germany. They
have been criticized for using excessive force against peaceful protesting Muslims.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said Indian police have used "unnecessary, deadly force" in controlling the protests. Even Priyanka
Gandhi, the Congress Party leader, was not spared and was manhandled by the cops in UP during her recent trip. If this be the behavior
towards the leader of opposition, what chances do ordinary Muslims have in
being treated fairly in Modi and Yogi’s India? Nothing!
More than a thousand people have been arrested in UP where the government has sealed assets belonging
to the protesters. This act of confiscation of properties reminds us about what
the Government of Israel has been doing to Palestinian activists inside the
Occupied Territories and what the Nazis had done against the Jews of Hitler’s
Germany. Such resemblances in the evil methods employed by the Nazi fascists
and Hindutvadi fascists should not surprise anyone!
Mindful of damage control, UP’s BJP administration has banned mobile Internet services in many parts of the state including its capital city of Lucknow. The news report from the BBC, aired on Friday, December 27, 2019, however, was enough to incriminate Yogi’s police force. It showed videos of police beating up elderly Muslim men mercilessly for no reason at all except that they are Muslims. Homes and properties belonging to Muslim have been vandalized and robbed by the very police that are supposed to be protecting life and property of people. Residents said police broke several security cameras in the area before the violence began. Muslim women in UP were seen crying and asking, “Is it a crime to be born in India?”
A video
circulating in the social media shows Akhilesh Narayan Singh, a police officer
in Meerut district where five Muslims have been killed by police, telling a
group of Muslims to ‘go to
Pakistan’. The government officials in the state are also guilty of
extortion of money.
"There is terror over there [Uttar Pradesh] ... people in Muslim colonies are staying up all night to guard their houses. They are terrified of a police raid or a communal attack," Kavita Krishnan, a member of a fact-finding team that visited the state, told reporters.
The Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Congress and Rashtriya Lok Dal have demanded a judicial inquiry and compensation for families of all 19 people who died during the protests in UP. However, Yogi and his cabinet ministers continue to deny any liability for those deaths. UP’s power minister and cabinet spokesman Shrikant Sharma was heard saying, “There should be no sympathy for rioters and the opposition should not paint them in any religion.”
It is
obvious that in Modi’s India Muslims don’t matter any longer.
The Modi
cabinet, in its sixth year now, has only one Muslim: Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, in
charge of minority affairs. None of the key constitutional positions,
President, Vice-President, Speaker of Lok Sabha, heads of armed forces,
security and intelligence agencies, Election Commission or the judiciary,
feature any Muslims. That is not all in Modi’s India. There isn’t a single
state with a Muslim chief minister and the one that might have needed to have
one, Jammu and Kashmir, isn’t even a state any more. None of the secretaries in
the key ministries is a Muslim, nor any important regulator. While one in every
seven Indian is a Muslim by faith, the percentage of Muslims in government
sector is less than 2 percent. Among India’s 37 states and union territories, there
are just two Muslim governors: Najma Heptullah (Manipur) and Arif Mohammed Khan
(Kerala). The latest Lok Sabha had only 27 Muslim MPs.
For too
long, Modi and his Hindutvadi ilk have been drawing a very damning picture
about the status of minority Hindus in the neighboring Muslim countries. His
NRC, implemented in the state of Assam, and the CAA are being touted as responses
to the so-called marginalization of the Hindu minorities in places like
Bangladesh. Nothing could be further from the truth than this false claim,
spread by the Hindutvadis to polarize Hindus against Muslims. A look at the
list of high-ranking government officials – in all the branches of the
government in Bangladesh – is sufficient to reveal that while Hindus in Bangladesh
represent less than 10% of the population their share in the public sector is several folds their share in the
population.
As to the
disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims, Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, ThePrint,
recently notes, “You’ve seen this model
elsewhere. The large Muslim minority in Israel is the only Arabic population
anywhere to have a free and equal vote, safety, economic and social
opportunity. But the political office they can rise to, a place in the
governance structure, is limited. It’s a republic, but a Zionist republic. The
new deal for Muslims in India also seems to be a similar one. Except, India was
never imagined or designed to be a Hindu republic. That is where this argument
fails.”
Well,
whether we like it or not, under Modi and his Hindutvadi government, India is fast
evolving into a Hinducracy. It may
be a far cry from the visions of its founders, but there is little doubt that
it is becoming a reality now.
In many
years of my residency in the USA I have been continuously preached by some of
my old Hindu classmates from India that the emergence of Bangladesh and
Pakistan was a grand mistake, and that we would have all prospered better had
British India not been divided, and that our future lies in India. As to why my
parents – who studied in Calcutta (Kolkata) during the waning days of the British
Raj – did not opt for India but what had been rightly described by Muhammad Ali
Jinnah (the Father of the Nation of Pakistan) as the ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, I
thought they are better suited to answer the question. My father was a student
activist in those days who worked closely with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (the Premier
of undivided Bengal in 1946-47) and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (who later became the
Father of the Nation of Bangladesh). It is worth sharing here that the Baker
Hostel in Calcutta (where my father lived for four years) was the seat of
pro-Pakistan student movement in undivided Bengal.
I had the
opportunity of asking the question to my father many times – did he and his
friends who were students of Calcutta University in the mid-1940’s make the ‘grand
mistake’ in choosing Pakistan over undivided India when they campaigned for and
voted in favor of the Muslim League of Jinnah in the crucial 1945/46
election that sealed the path for and fate of Pakistan? Every time
his answer, including this November when I visited him again in Chittagong
(Chattagram), has been an emphatic ‘no’, i.e., it was not a mistake to choose
Pakistan (which ultimately gave birth to Bangladesh in the eastern wing). The
choice was a clear and right one to progressive Muslim students like him who
had survived the communal riots there. The growing Hindutvadi forces from the
militant Hindu Mahasabha Party (the precursor to today’s
BJP) had posed a greater threat to the very
existence and identity of minority Muslim community not just in places like UP,
Bihar and other parts of today’s India where they were a sizable minority but
also in Muslim-majority Bengal. [It is worth pointing out here that had religion-driven
identity been more important to Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan then Bangladesh
would not be born in 1971 with its cultural and linguistic identity.]
Subsequent history of India and its treatment
of Muslim and other religious minorities, esp. in the last four decades, have
made it abundantly clear that my father’s generation was not wrong when they
opted for a divided India. They don’t have to lament like the Muslim men and
women in UP for being born in India.
In spite of all the temptations, to its credit
neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh has elected a single chauvinist to its highest
position in power. But look at India today. It has murderous chauvinists like
Modi elected by its citizens as its Prime Minister. Not once but twice in the
last five years alone! What a shame for a country that refuses to evolve into a
modern state where minorities feel secure and protected, and diversity is
valued as a strength and not a weakness! What is more ominous is that India
today does not have one Modi, but several Modis – the likes of Yogi and Shah –
all waiting in line to take the mantle of Hinducracy to the next level, only
uglier and more murderous. It is scary, to say the least.
In 2015 Vice President of All India Hindu
Mahasabha, Sadhvi Deva Thakur said, "The population
of Muslims and Christians is growing day by day. To rein in this, Union will
have to impose emergency, and Muslims and Christians will have to be forced to
undergo sterilization so that they can't increase their numbers".
Are we surprised how the fear tactics are
employed by the promoters of Hindutva to justify discriminatory policies like
the CAA and NRC? They are for total marginalization and disenfranchisement of the
minorities.
Probably, not everything is lost. That is why
the latest anti-government protests all across India are rays of hope in the
dark alleys of Modi-Yogi-Shah’s India. They are not expressions of ‘Muslim outrage’
but are outburst of people of all faiths that are tired of Hindutvadi agenda
and its impact on the soul of India. As eminent historian, Professor Irfan
Habib said, "This struggle is about India and about the future of
democracy".
Only time would say how
serious Indians are for their future: would they allow a usurper, albeit
popularly elected twice, to hijack their democracy or restore sanity by
respecting and protecting the lives and assets of minorities that feel
threatened about their very existence today?
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