Modi’s Minority Policy

Indian PM’s silence over blasphemous remarks speaks volumes about his philosophy

Though the BJP has suspended its key member Nupur Sharma and expelled its Delhi unit media head Naveen Kumar Jindal, Modi’s criminal silence over the violation of Muslim sentiments, instead of healing the Indian minority community’s wounds has rubbed salt into them and have triggered a wave of grief and anger among the Indian Muslims as well as the Muslims around the world.

In fact, it has resulted in tension, pogroms and communal bloodletting in India. As a result at least two protesters died and a number of them severely injured when police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in the eastern city of Ranchi during a protest against the sacrilegious remarks by Sharma, and insensitive handling of the matter by the Modi government.

In another shocking incident in Allahabad, the police detained the mother, sister and father of student activist Afreen Fatima and surrounded her house to force her to surrender. Her house was then burnt to ashes and her father was arrested. Such ruthless moves are being very rightly considered as Narendra Modi’s plan to systematically marginalise the Muslim community.

Modi’s criminal silence over Sharma’s blasphemous and heretical talk on a television programme is enough proof of the fact that he is all set to establish the hegemony of Hindus and Hinduism in India. Unfortunately it is not just Nopur Sharma in India, but from West Bengal to Occupied Kashmir, there’s a story of hatred against Islam. Reports of Muslims killing have now become a routine.

There cannot be two opinions that Sharma’s remarks were entirely unacceptable and wantonly irresponsible.  The more Indian leaders ignore such cry from the heart of their Muslim minority, they’ll be inviting common threats to all, like Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent. The terror group has already issued threats to carry out suicide bombings to “defend the honor” of the Prophet, Peace be upon Him.

Marc Schneier, an American rabbi and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding has rightly said, “India is playing with fire on anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Indians must therefore, understand the ground realities before it’s too late.

Now even a number of Indian academics believe that the suspension of Nopur Sharma is not enough. She should in fact, be arrested. Some of them also believe that Nopur Sharma has the support of the party’s top leadership. They even say that the BJP deliberately sends its spokespersons into TV debates to make provocative statements. So the time has come to take the bull by the horns and settle a score with India collectively once for all.

According to experts from Amnesty International USA and Genocide Watch, leading global human rights watchdogs, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Islamophobic’ policies are encouraging Hindu extremists for a genocide of Muslims and are pushing India towards mass violence against and massacres of Muslims.

This is also evident from Modi’s failure to condemn and act against anti-Muslim bigotry, hate speeches by leading religious and political figures in recent weeks, specifically aimed at inciting such mass violence against Muslims, the experts said at a Congressional Briefing organized in Washington, D.C., on January, this year.

In this regard Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has rightly asked the UN not to remain silent on the sensitive issue, while the Foreign Office has also slammed the “indiscriminate and widespread” use of brute force against protesters.

The Muslim world in particular needs to speak with one voice, specially the energy-rich Middle Eastern states that India is worried about alienating. Through the OIC a strong message must be sent stating that Islamic sacred tenets must be respected, and that vicious treatment of Indian Muslims will not be tolerated.

The time has come to tell Modi in clear terms that his criminal silence is a red line, and with assertive diplomatic demarches and spontaneous public support for boycotts. Needless to add that the oil-rich Gulf States are in a position to bring Indian ruler to their knees for over eight million Indian workers in GCC countries are remitting billions of dollars to keep the Indian economy afloat. So the Gulf States are in a very strong position to cut BJP chauvinists to size.

It is a known fact that in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, there had been dozens of murderous attacks by Hindu mobs who accused their victims of cow slaughter and the BJP inevitably sided with the killers.  Then Modi’s unilateral redrawing of Kashmir’s status in 2019 also escalated levels of repression in the Muslim populated region. Tensions rose to a new height when the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, was destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992. In short, there’s a long history of Indian atrocities against Muslims.

The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has also categorised India as an “electoral autocracy.” The report blamed the BJP for assaults on civil liberties. “Evidence has been faked to justify the detention of activists and political opponents, and media suppression is blatant and routine; over the past decade hundreds of legal cases have been filed against journalists using a colonial-era sedition law,” the report adds.

What’s been happening in India is also being compared by some historians, as Israel’s apartheid policies of reducing Palestinians to precarious non-citizens. “Just as in India, Israel devolved from decades of being politically dominated by the centrist Labor Party to surrendering its democracy to ever-more ruthless and messianic extreme-right coalitions,” they argue.

They say that the BJP is just one manifestation of a populist pandemic that has infected the planet. This fever will break only when citizens wise up and choose real leaders who are genuinely committed to making lives better — not quasi-fascists who cling to power by triggering race wars, inciting genocide, and pouring fuel on the fires of hatred and intolerance.

Now Nopur Sharma has sent a report to the Delhi Police that he was receiving death threats, after which Nopur Sharma was given VVIP security on Modi’s orders. Instead arresting her if such a treatment is meted out to her one can easily come to the conclusion that what Sharma did had the full support and blessings of the Prime minister of India which still claims to be a secular state.

Even the UN’s “genocide watch report” has been reporting for three years that the massacre of Islam and Muslims in India has reached its final threshold but the whole Islamic world is silent and the world is watching. Though countries such as Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain have issued strong statements expressing outrage at Sharma’s views and Qatar and Kuwait have summoned the Indian ambassador and handed over protest notes to him, that’s not enough.

No doubt rallies against the offensive remarks are being in various Indian states, the response of the Indian state towards its own Muslim citizens exercising their fundamental right to protest has been marked by ruthlessness as the Indian state has unleashed the brute force of the law to beat them into submission.

In an editorial, The Indian Express newspaper said, “The truth is that it was no sudden eruption of bigotry. The BJP’s electoral victories since 2014, and especially after 2019, have emboldened party activists and others of the saffron brigade to an extent that they indulge in casual everyday anti-minority actions.” By saffron brigade, the paper was referring to Hindu nationalists.

Even the U.S. State Department, in its latest annual report to the Congress on international religious freedom, named India as among countries that were violators of religious freedom. It alleged that attacks on members of minority communities, including killings, assaults and intimidation took place in India throughout 2021.

In a statement released by the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) the General Secretariat has expressed its strong condemnation and denunciation of the recent insults issued by an official in the ruling party in India towards the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.

Al-Azhar Al-Sharif University in Cairo also criticised the BJP official’s behaviour calling it “a real terrorist action that helps to push the entire world to devastating crises and bloody wars.” The varsity implored the international community to “to firmly ward off such threats.” Al-Azhar established that the recent wave of political defamation of Islam was an outright call for extremism, hatred and conflict amongst religions.

But is that enough? Certainly not. Muslim countries, specially the oil rich countries can play an important and decisive role for Indian’s economy, to a great extent is dependent on the remittances from Indian diaspora working in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. They must tell Modi in a very firm and decisive tone that if the Sharma incident is not taken seriously and atrocities against Muslims are not stopped all Indian workers will be sent back to India.

Moreover, keeping in view the uncompromising attitude of Modi despite protest from Muslim countries, an urgent meeting of OIC may be called to discuss the issue at length and hammer out a unanimous decision to revisit the foreign and trade policy of Muslim countries towards India.