Is BJP to blame for reports of India's rising Islamophobia?

 

 Left homeless for protesting against hate speech in India.
That's what dozens of people whose houses have been demolished say is happening to them.
Most are Muslims.

But the demolitions took place as emotions were running high across India.
In the past week, people rallied in several cities, protesting against offensive comments that two members of the governing BJP made about the Prophet Muhammad.
Anti-Muslim violence has been growing since 2014 - the year Narendra Modi became prime minister.
What does growing religious intolerance mean for the future of India?

 

How Anti-Muslim Propaganda Is Spilling into India’s Film Industry

 

The Bollywood produced film The Kashmir Files opened in cinemas throughout India and the rest of the world on Friday. It tells a story about the exodus of Hindus – the Pandits – from Indian administered Kashmir during the early 1990s.

The script could have easily been written and directed by Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or its political wing – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kashmiri Muslims are portrayed as bloodthirsty killers and rapists, while Kashmiri Hindus are cast as hapless and defenceless pacifists, who refuse to take up arms against so-called “jihadists”, a pejorative term used to cloak local opposition to Indian rule in Islamic extremism. Expectedly, the Indian Government’s eternal bogeyman – Pakistan – lurks sinisterly in the background.

In a climatic point in the film, the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto screams: “We will never allow Kashmir to become an integral part of India,” among calls for jihad from local religious leaders, therefore echoing the current Indian Government and its supporters, who have long accused Kashmiri Muslims of being puppets of Pakistan.

Kashmiri Hindu women and children are shown to be shot mercilessly in the head from point blank range, as radicalised Muslims roam the streets of Srinagar in search of their next victim. Historical facts be damned. This is the telling of a Pandit “genocide”, according to the film’s producers, who blend Hindu nationalist tropes with garden variety Islamophobia and straight up falsehoods.

For starters, there’s virtually no evidence that a Hindu genocide occurred in Kashmir during the 1990s.

Even the Indian Government reported that fewer than 220 Pandits were killed in Kashmir during the period spanning 1989 to 2004, a number that was contradicted by Srinagar district police headquarters in 2021, when it reported 89 Pandits had been killed during the past 31 years.

If this meets the definition of genocide, then so does the killing of 1,800 Muslims in Assam in 1983, the mass murder of 2,000 Muslims during the violence that swept Gujarat in 2002, and the Delhi Riots in 2020, which left 51 Muslims hacked, burned, and shot to death. But none of these mass atrocities were called a genocide, a term that has been reserved by Hindu nationalists crimes committed by “Islamic extremism”.

More to the point – if 89 to 219 dead Kashmiri Hindus equates to genocide, then what name do you give to the killing of at least 50,000 but potentially 100,000 Kashmiri Muslims by Indian occupation forces since 1989? And what name do you give to their nearly 10,000 unmarked graves?

Were you to count the number of inconvenient truths omitted from the screenplay, you’d not only run out of fingers and toes, but also marbles and loose change. The producers do not want the audience to know that the exodus of Pandits took place under Jammu & Kashmir Governor Jagmohan Malhotra, who was appointed by the central Government, which was supported by BJP.

For this reason, Kashmiri Muslims insist that the exodus was a “concentrated effort” by Jagmohan Malhotra to first “clear the Pandits from the valley, before turning the guns on their vulnerable selves,” writes Vijaylakshmi Nadar in a recent op-ed for the Indian Observer.

In mythologising the tumultuous political events that swept the valley during the early 1990s, The Kashmir Files not only advances Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda by further polarising the electorate, but also legitimises the persecution of innocent Kashmiri Muslims at the hands of Indian occupation soldiers.

It’s impossible to ignore that the movie is being released two years after the Government stripped Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status, while imposing draconian lockdowns, curfews, mass arrests and communication blackouts. And at the same time BJP leaders vow to make Muslims second-class citizens, while some Hindu nationalist leaders call for a Muslim genocide.

Worryingly, the movie is being screened for free in many Indian cities, which will only whip up further hatred towards Muslims and drive a great number of Hindus towards BJP’s ultra-nationalist agenda, one that posits Islam and Pakistan to be a threat to the country’s Hindu majority.

To this end, The Kashmir Files accords with the imagination of the Indian Government’s unofficial Ministry of Propaganda, with Islam, Muslims, and Pakistan making a fearsome presence in every scene.

In India, we have a ruling party that not only draws its ideological inspiration from the Nazi Party, but also serves up propaganda to promote Hindu nationalism, the political ambitions of BJP, while demonising political opponents and Muslims.

Indeed, the Indian Government has helped pay for the film to be promoted in the United States. It knows that if it can get American audiences to see Hindus as victims of radical Islamic terrorists, then it can silence US opposition to its Hindu settler-colonial enterprise in Kashmir.

Modi has carefully studied how pro-Israel groups have undermined political support for the Palestinians in falsely framing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation as the product of Islamic extremism, not secular resistance to colonial rule.

The Kashmir Files does exactly that to Kashmir’s Muslim majority population.

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Hindutva Chauvinism Needs to be Censured

 

Chauvinism remains the greatest threat to pluralism and often triggers genocide. When a chauvinist group is in power, it poses a mortal threat to others not just within its own confined spaces but also outside. In our time, Modi and the Sangh Parivar have become a threat to all the non-Hindus everywhere. It is no accident that Muslim and Christian minorities in India are the worst sufferers in the hands of Hindutvadi fascists, while the BJP government and its party leaders incite extermination campaigns.

Genocide is a process and not an end result. It goes through several stages. As I have noted elsewhere nearly a decade ago, “Genocide requires preparation and planning. It begins in the minds of men and needs mass mobilization to commit the horror against the targeted group. The perpetrators or the executioners must not only feel secure but also must be self-motivated and zealous to commit their horrendous crimes. Oftentimes, the task of preparing the mind is left to ideologues and chauvinist intellectuals who sell the poison tablet of intolerance against the targeted group. Without political leadership the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in harm. However, once set in motion, typically with a few encouraging and enabling words, they, both – the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and their societies’ ordinary members – give themselves, body and soul, to death. They do so easily, effortlessly.”

And this is what we are witnessing today in places like India and Myanmar.

Last month, a Dharma Sansad (Hindu convention) was attended by members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party. The 3-day summit, perhaps more properly should be called a hate-fest, was held from December 17 to 19, 2021 in northern India's Haridwar city where multiple speakers, all dressed in saffron garb, the traditional dress for the Hindu priests, made calls for genocide of minorities, especially the country's 200 million Muslims. A part of the event was livestreamed on social media. The videos of some of the speeches have also gone viral.

Hindutva leader Yati Narsinghanand, the notorious priest of Dasna Devi temple in Ghaziabad who was recently anointed 'Mahamandaleshwar' of the Juna Akhara,  told the gathering as the crowd cheered, "Economic boycott won't work. Hindu groups need to update themselves [with better weapons]. Swords look good on stage only. This battle against Muslims will be won by those with better weapons."

Another speaker Sadhvi Annapurna, general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha [Hindu Grand Assembly], called for the mass murder of Muslims, according to the English news website The Wire. "Nothing is possible without weapons. If you want to eliminate their population then kill them. Be ready to kill and be ready to go to jail. Even if 100 of us are ready to kill 20 lakhs (i.e., 2 million) of them [Muslims], then we will be victorious, and go to jail," Annapurna said.

Dharamdas Maharaj from Bihar said: "If I was present in the parliament when PM Manmohan Singh said that minorities have first right over national resources, I would've followed Nathuram Godse (who killed MK Gandhi), I'd have shot him six times in the chest with a revolver."

Anand Swaroop Maharaj,  who heads the Sambhavi Dhaam, asked Hindus to boycott Muslim vendors. He said that the decision of the Dharm Sansad was the "word of God" and that the government would have to listen to it.  He said: "If the governments do not listen to our demand (of establishment of a Hindu Rashtra through violence against minorities), we will wage a war far scarier than the 1857 revolt."

Sagar Sindhuraj Maharaj emphasized, “I keep repeating again and again that instead of buying Rs 5000 mobile buy Rs 1 lakh (or 100,000) rupee weapon. You should at least have sticks and swords.”

Another Hindu seer, Prabodhanand Giri, who runs an organization called Hindu Raksha Sena in Haridwar, invoked the crackdown against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as a model for what can be done to drive Muslims away, a monstrous event that has been covered in the media.  He associates himself with the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, whose picture is featured on his Facebook page. Speaking to the NDTV News the following day, he said that he stood by what he said, and asserted that he was not afraid of the police.

It is reported that around the same time as the Haridwar Summit, a gathering of Hindu Yuva Vahini, an organization founded by Yogi Adityanath, met in Delhi to take an oath. Raising their hands, the hundreds of members chanted, "We make a resolution until our last breath: We will make India a Hindu nation, and keep it a Hindu-only nation. We will fight and die if required, we will kill as well." Importantly, the oath was administered by none other than Suresh Chavhanke, the editor-in-chief of the right-wing news channel, Sudarshan News, who was involved in hate speech over TV controversy last year. He then tweeted a video of the oath to his half a million followers. One of the bail conditions generally is that one should not repeat the offence.

There is little doubt that the fascist ideology of Hindutva has hijacked Hinduism.

As we all know, the genocide against the Jews and Roma gypsies did not start with the gas-chambers; it started with hate speech against those targeted minorities. For decades, the Hindutvadi fascists have prepared their base too well to perpetrate violence and savagery of all kinds against the loathed minority Muslims. Consequently, not a single day goes in today’s India without a Muslim being lynched somewhere in this country. They are reminded that there is no place for them in India, and that if they wanted to live they should settle in the neighboring Muslim countries. 

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Bulli Bai: India’s Muslim women again listed on app for ‘auction’

 

On January 1, Quratulain Rehbar, a journalist from Indian-administered Kashmir, woke up to see herself listed for an “online auction”. Her photograph was sourced without her permission and uploaded on an app for “sale”.

She was not alone.

Photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, including prominent actress Shabana Azmi, wife of a sitting judge of Delhi High Court, multiple journalists, activists and politicians were displayed on the app for auction as “Bulli Bai” of the day.

Even Fatima Nafees, 65-year-old mother of disappeared student Najeeb Ahmed, and Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai were not spared by the perpetrators behind the app.

After last July’s “Sulli Deals“, in which nearly 80 Muslim women were put up “for sale”, “Bulli Bai” was the second such attempt in less than a year.

“Both ‘Bulli’ and ‘Sulli’ are derogatory words used for Muslim women in local slang. However, this time the Punjabi language was used in the ‘Bulli Bai’ interface along with English,” journalist Mohammad Zubair, who works for fact-checking website AltNews, told Al Jazeera.

Rehbar, who had previously reported on the “Sulli Deals” auction in July last year, told Al Jazeera she was shocked to see her photograph on the app.

“When I saw my photograph, my throat got heavy, I had goosebumps on my arms and I was numb. It was shocking and humiliating,” she said.

While there was no real sale involved, the online application – created on Microsoft-owned open software development site GitHub – was, according to Rehbar, intended “to degrade and humiliate vocal Muslim women”.

The app was taken down on Saturday, with victims saying the interface of the GitHub extension on “Bulli Bai” was strikingly similar to the one used by “Sulli Deals”.

By Saturday evening, dozens of other Muslim women began posting their shock and outrage on social media after seeing their photographs and details on the app.

Among them was Ismat Ara, a journalist in the capital, New Delhi.

Ara filed a complaint on Saturday with the Delhi Police against “unknown people” for harassing and insulting Muslim women on social media “using doctored pictures in unacceptable and lewd context”.

Based on her complaint, a first information report (FIR) was registered by Delhi Police’s Cyber Crime Unit on Sunday, invoking various sections of the Indian Penal Code that pertain to promoting enmity on grounds of religion, threatening national integration and sexual harassment of women.

Following another complaint by Sidrah, whose photo also appeared on the app, a police case was also registered in India’s financial capital Mumbai against various Twitter handles and the “Bulli Bai” app developers.

However, Ara said she is not hopeful regarding the police investigation, her fears stemming from the fact that the probe in “Sulli Deals” has seen no arrests made even after six months.

Fatima Zohra Khan, a lawyer based in Mumbai whose name figured in both “Sulli” and “Bulli Bai” deals, had also filed a complaint with Mumbai police last year.

“We got no response from Twitter, GitHub and Go-Daddy [web hosting company] despite Mumbai Police themselves requesting them to reveal data. These websites refuse to share information unless a court warrant is produced,” she told Al Jazeera.

Police officials in New Delhi and Mumbai did not respond to Al Jazeera’s queries on the latest “auction”.

“It is sad to see how these hate-mongers are licensed to target Muslim women without any fear. This is not the first time such an auction has taken place,” said Ara.

“The women who have been targeted are vocal women who raise issues of Muslims on social media. It is a clear conspiracy to shut these Muslim women because we challenge the Hindu right-wing online against their hate crimes,” she added.

During the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr last year, a YouTube channel named “Liberal Doge”, shared pictures of Pakistani women in a sexualised video, titled “Eid Special”. It was removed by the company after outrage.

Weeks after the incident, Muslim women were “auctioned” on Twitter under the “Sulli Deals”.

Several Indian parliamentarians have raised the matter with the government, including Priyanka Chaturvedi, based in the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai.

After her tweet calling out India’s IT minister to take “stern action” against “misogynistic and communal targeting of women”, the minister said GitHub had blocked the user responsible for hosting the site and the “police authorities are coordinating further action”.

 “Police complaints were registered during the time of ‘Sulli deals’. However, no action was taken. That is the reason why these people feel emboldened,” Chaturvedi told Al Jazeera.

Rehbar said it was “particularly alarming” for Muslim women who are “fighting patriarchy and restrictions” on one hand and “facing such harassment” on the other.

“Often women are asked to remove their pictures from social media and hide. After such attempts to harass Muslim women, it will be difficult for many women to take a stand.”

Rana Ayyub, a Mumbai-based columnist with The Washington Post, told Al Jazeera people are “hailing targeted harassment of women without being identified by law”.

“Bulli Bai takes hate crimes in India to another dangerous level where Muslim women are being virtually violated and made a free-for-all for a bigoted mob,” she said.

“These auctions of women from the minority communities display the moral degradation of India and its constitutional values.”

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It Was Already Dangerous to Be Muslim in India. Then Came the Coronavirus

The Islamophobic hashtags began circulating shortly after the news broke in late March.

Indian authorities had linked dozens of cases of COVID-19 to a Muslim missionary group that held its annual conference in Delhi in early March, and health officials were racing to track down anyone who had contact with the participants. Coronavirus fears and religious tension were already at a fever pitch in India, and it didn’t take long for the two forces to intermingle. Videos falsely claiming to show members of the missionary group spitting on police and others quickly went viral on social media, exacerbating an already dangerous atmosphere for Muslims. “Islamophobia has been transposed onto the coronavirus issue,” says Amir Ali, an assistant professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Since March 28, tweets with the hashtag #CoronaJihad have appeared nearly 300,000 times and potentially seen by 165 million people on Twitter, according to data shared with TIME by Equality Labs, a digital human rights group. Equality Labs activists say that many of the posts are in clear violation of Twitter’s rules on hate speech and coronavirus, but have yet to be taken down. “We are committed to protect and serve the public conversation as we navigate this unprecedented global public healthcare crisis,” reads a statement Twitter provided to TIME. “We continue to remain vigilant.”


Coming just weeks after religious pogroms conducted by Hindu nationalists left 36 Muslims dead in Delhi, the surge in hateful tweets demonstrates how anxieties over the coronavirus have merged with longstanding Islamophobia in India, at a time when the Muslim minority — 200 million people in a nation of 1.3 billion — feels increasingly targeted by the ruling Hindu nationalists. “One of the key features of anti-Muslim sentiment in India for quite a long time has been the idea that Muslims themselves are a kind of infection in the body politic,” says Arjun Appadurai, a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University who studies Indian politics. “So there’s a kind of affinity between this long-standing image and the new anxieties surrounding coronavirus.”

One of the most popular false #CoronaJihad tweets claims to show a Muslim man from the Delhi congregation intentionally coughing on somebody. The tweet referred to Muslims as “such vile minded people” and listed hashtags including #CoronaJihad and #TablighiJamatVirus, a reference to the religious group that met in Delhi. But the video featured in the viral tweet was actually filmed in Thailand, not India, and there is no proof that the man was a member of the Delhi congregation. Nevertheless, the tweet was still online as of April 3, with more than 4,200 retweets and 503 replies. Another video shared on both Facebook and Twitter purporting to show Muslims intentionally sneezing on each other was debunked by the fact-checking organization AltNews.

Another tweet, which had around 2,000 retweets before it was removed for violating Twitter’s rules, featured a cartoon of a caricatured Muslim man labeled “Corona Jihad” trying to push a Hindu off a cliff. “Corona jihad is this new idea that Muslims are weaponizing the coronavirus to target Hindus,” says Thenmozhi Soundarajan, executive director of Equality Labs. The tweet has since been removed for violating Twitter’s rules, but several other cartoons linking Muslims to the coronavirus, shared by the same account with more than 15,000 followers, were still online as of April 3.

In India, where the politically dominant Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increasingly launched dogwhistle attacks on Muslims since being reelected with a massive majority in April last year, the coronavirus is just “one more opportunity to cast the Muslim as the other, as dangerous,” says Ali, the professor.


“People are talking about ‘bio jihad’ and ‘corona jihad,’” Ali says. “These are just the latest in a series of different forms of ‘jihad’ that the media has talked about, that have been spread on social media, and that people are gleefully accepting.” Population jihad, for example, is a common trope in Hindu nationalist messaging, claiming that Muslims are trying to turn India into a Muslim nation by reproducing at a faster rate than Hindus. Love jihad is the idea that Muslim men are tricking Hindu women into romantic relationships in order to convert them to Islam. “Corona jihad is the most outrageous one so far, because people are really being infected and dying,” Ali says.

Social media companies have struggled with hate speech for years, embroiling the platforms in a difficult tangle in which freedom of speech runs up against the companies’ responsibility to protect minorities. In the world’s first social media pandemic, hate speech related to the virus is spreading online almost as fast as the virus itself. But recent history demonstrates that inaction on the platforms’ part can allow hate speech to turn into violence. Myanmar’s 2017 genocide perpetrated by Buddhist nationalists against Rohingya Muslims was preceded by a campaign of dehumanizing hate speech on Facebook. Equality Labs’ Soundarajan says social media companies cannot feign ignorance on the issue because her group and others are flagging troublesome content. “They’re aware of it,” says Soundarajan. “Whether they allow it to go viral is now their own responsibility.” (Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.)

Although this pandemic is uncharted territory when it comes to predicting the impact of virus-related hate speech, public health officials have warned against stigmatizing minority groups. Because COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, some — including the U.S. President — have called it the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” a name that appears to be linked to an uptick in global violence against Asians. In February, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the then-unnamed coronavirus would henceforth be known officially as COVID-19 — a name which purposely did not include a reference to China. “Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the time.

Some are working to prevent fears over the virus from becoming entangled with religious divisions. Sam Brownback, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, is calling on governments to push back “aggressively” against the rising incidents of “blaming of religious minorities for the COVID virus,” including the rise in usage of #CoronaJihad and other hashtags trending in India. “The governments really should put this down, and say very clearly that this is not the source of the Coronavirus,” he said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday. “We know where this virus originated. We know it’s a pandemic the whole world is being subjected to. It’s not something from religious minorities. But unfortunately we are seeing that sort of blame game getting started up in different places around the world.”

In India, activists fear the stigmatization of Muslims could exacerbate the coronavirus crisis. “Launching a witch hunt against the attendees of the Nizamuddin congregation will be counterproductive from the public health point of view,” said several Indian intellectuals in an open letter published Thursday, referring to the area of Delhi where the conference was held. “The attendees should be identified without criminalizing them and put into quarantine as per norms.” The virus, they said, does not care about religious or national differences. “The solution will not come through the pursuit of divisive agendas but through scientific endeavors and human solidarity.”

A final irony of the Tablighi Jamaat controversy — which escalated on April 3 when the Indian government announced some members of the group would be charged under India’s National Security Act for violating quarantine — is that it was just one of myriad religious groups that continued to meet after India unexpectedly announced its coronavirus lockdown, yet it has drawn the vast majority of attention.

“They are no different from any other people in India and around the world who have pushed the envelope in terms of good sense,” Appadurai says of the Tablighi Jamaat congregation. “But of course, India is a very dangerous place for Muslims even apart from the coronavirus. It was asking for just the kind of thing that has now happened.”

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Interview: Killing in the Name of Cows

Vigilante groups in India are beating up and sometimes killing people they suspect of slaughtering cows. They have, among other violent acts, assaulted Muslim men and women in train stations, stripped and beaten Dalits, force-fed cow dung and urine to two men, and raped two women and killed two men for allegedly eating beef at home. Research consultant Jayshree Bajoria speaks to Philippa Stewart about the violence blighting the country.

Can you tell me what’s happening in India and why people are being attacked over cows?

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and groups affiliated with it have been whipping up Hindu nationalism for votes. Since many Hindus consider cows to be sacred, these groups decry the slaughter of cattle for beef or leather.  Most states in India already have laws that protect cows, but this political campaign is centered on claims that not enough is being done to protect cows.

Not only have some BJP leaders repeatedly called for cow protection and banning the consumption of beef, in some states we’ve seen BJP officials voicing support for these so-called cow protection groups.

This kind of political support has enabled these vigilante groups to attack cattle traders and people they suspect of slaughtering cows and sometimes bulls or buffaloes. They believe, sometimes rightly, that they will not be held accountable for these violent crimes.

These groups killed atleast 44 people between May 2015 to December 2018, 36 of them Muslims. Muslims and Dalits (formerly “untouchables”) are frequent targets of the violence because many of them run butcher shops, and Dalits have traditionally skinned the carcasses for commercial purposes such as leather. I met one distraught father who watched his young son being beaten to death. He said he was helpless, because he was outnumbered. If he had tried to save his son, he would have been killed too.

So, is it only minority religions and people who eat beef who are affected?

Absolutely not. These laws and the violence by these groups are harming the rural economy at a time when India has its highest unemployment rate in 45 years.

Before these tougher policies and the violence, even Hindu farmers would sell off old or unproductive cattle because they couldn’t afford to keep them. Now they just abandon them. This has led to a huge increase in the numbers of stray cattle across the country. It has become a serious issue: they pose a traffic hazard in towns and cities; in villages, they get into people’s farms and destroy crops.

Farmers have started locking stray cattle in empty schools, government buildings, whatever they can find, and many state governments have had to put millions of dollars into building more cow shelters.

Can you talk more about how political rhetoric has enabled this violence?

These vigilante groups doubtlessly feel that the authorities are on their side because there have been comments and actions, largely from elected BJP officials, aimed at showing Hindu nationalists that the government takes cow protection seriously. In some cases, BJP leaders have even publicly justified the attacks.

For example, in December 2018 in Uttar Pradesh, a police officer who tried to confront a Hindu mob was shot and killed. The response from the BJP chief minister immediately after this attack was to call it an “accident.” He also warned that “illegal slaughtering, and not just cow slaughter is banned in the entire state,” which seemed to some to be condoning the violence.

The police said they were going to focus on the people who killed the cows, which led to the mob attack and the murders. The exact quote was: “The cow killers are our top priority, the murder and the rioting are on the back burner for now.”

In most cases that we investigated, we found the police either stalled investigations, or in some cases were even complicit in the cover-up of murder. In quite a few instances police filed cases under cow protection laws against the victims or their families and associates. Sometimes witnesses decide not to testify after this.

A case that sticks in my mind is the story of Akbar Khan, a 28-year-old man. In July last year he and an associate, Aslam, were returning from Rajasthan after buying two cows when they were attacked. Aslam managed to flee but saw the men brutally beating Akbar.

Later it was revealed that police took three hours to take Akbar to the hospital, which was only 20 minutes away. He was alive when the police picked him up and was dead on arrival at the hospital. The man who tipped the police off was a member of a local ‘cow protection’ group. He told the media the police stopped to drink tea before taking Akbar to the hospital and were arranging for someone to look after the cows while he was lying injured in their car.

In Gujarat you can get life in prison for killing a cow, which is the same punishment as killing a man or woman.

There was widespread condemnation of the incident, and one policeman was suspended, and four others were transferred. Three people were arrested for the attack, but a BJP lawmaker demanded their release and called for Aslam’s arrest under cow protection laws.

Is it typical that the people committing the violence don’t get punished?
There have been only two cases, both in Jharkhand state, where people have been tried and convicted for serious crimes related to cow violence. In the first case a man named Alimuddin Ansari was killed and a fast-track court convicted 11 people and sentenced them to life. They appealed their case and the court released them on bail pending a final verdict. The first thing they did was go to the house of a BJP leader, a minister in the central government. He welcomed them, placed garlands around their necks, and told the media he had legally assisted them. He said they were relieved they would get a fresh trial.

The second case is that of the 12-year-old boy I mentioned earlier. The vigilantes killed him and a man and then hanged their bodies from a tree. His father and the other man’s brother were eyewitnesses. In December a court convicted eight men of the killings.

Lawyers say that one reason both these cases led to convictions was the strong eyewitness testimony. The witnesses stood their ground and testified.

Besides the threat of violence, what kinds of punishment do people in the beef and leather industry face?
 
In Gujarat you can get life in prison for killing a cow, which is the same punishment as killing a man or woman.

In several BJP-ruled states, the government expanded existing laws protecting cows, and in many cases increased the punishments.

Then in January, there was a deeply troubling development when the Uttar Pradesh government applied the National Security Act against three men arrested for cow slaughter in December. The newly formed Congress Party government in Madhya Pradesh did the same thing in February.

The National Security Act is designed to stop someone from committing a serious crime against national security in the future. You can be held without charge for up to a year. The justification for using this repressive law was that it would prevent people from killing more cows.

So, the police are stalling investigations into murders, or even covering them up. At the same time, they are filing cases against victims of cow vigilantes.

Who is trying to address this rising violence? 
 
There are many groups in India that are working to support victims of cow vigilantes, especially to provide legal aid. There are also some groups working on documenting these crimes better, to bring them to the public’s attention. Unfortunately, the government does not collect data on these specific crimes. So civil society groups and the media have taken on that responsibility.

What more needs to be done, especially by the government?
India’s Supreme Court has already issued directives about what needs to be done to address these mob killings. It said the state governments should assign a senior police officer in each district to prevent the violence and ensure there is prompt prosecution, and that victims and witnesses are safeguarded.

There’s a pending law on communal violence – that is, violence committed across ethnic or religious lines – that should be passed after ensuring that it is compliant with international human rights standards.

Most of all, the government needs to make it known that those involved in vigilante violence will be fully prosecuted and that government officials and political party leaders will no longer protect them.

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Why Lynchings Have Become A Substitute For Communal Riots

Indeed, lynching has replaced the age-old communal riot as a means of polarization. Lynching comes without the burden of guilt that used to accompany riots. It is more effective, lethal and sinister. It strikes at the very identity of the community. It is far more demoralizing than the traditional communal violence, but serves the same purpose as riots did in the years gone by: to engender a climate of distrust and fear. 

On one side are Hindus who begin to look at any Muslim, particularly those with conspicuous manifestation of being one, with distrust. In their mind, all Muslims are beefeaters. And, maybe, even cow slaughterers. Nothing wrong with that if you are in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and vast stretches of the Northeast, but often a fatal flaw in north and west India. To those Hindus denied the benefit of education and economic cushion, a Muslim is one who deliberately provokes Hindus by eating beef. They do not know the reality or the history of beef eating in their own religion. For such a misled vigilante, the Muslim is the ‘other’ who must be shown his place. For him, a Muslim is what the latest video, real or fake, on WhatsApp shows him to be. Also, a Muslim is to be tackled, again, in the way those hooligans do in the lynching videos. That brings us to Muslims. With each lynching incident, the community slips deeper into fear, and into its own shell. And a community which is often told to join the mainstream slips further away.

Muslim traders in Ghansali town of Uttarakhand’s Tehri Garhwal district said on Wednesday they are wary of opening their shops, two days after a man from their community was beaten up by a mob when he was found with a minor Hindu girl, sparking calls for their ouster.

Around the same time came another media report wherein young men and women in Delhi revealed that they call up their parents and grandparents not to offer namaz (prayer) on a train for the fear of being identified. This in a country where it was not unusual for people to make space for Muslim travellers to offer namaz as a train halted at the railway station, or even on the train itself. Writing in The Wire, Apoorvanand stated,

A friend narrated his experience of offering namaz at the railway platform while waiting for his train. On earlier occasions, it had always been normal for him and others to pray in public. But this time, he was extra alert. A shout, a loud voice made him strain his ears. Was it for him? We who used to make space for namazis in train, in our homes, offices, and even offer a prayer mat to them have gone silent. Goondas have become our voice. This silence will drown India if we allow it to spread.

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Modi’s India is a living nightmare for Muslims: #RanaAyyub

At the crack of dawn on Dec. 5, 1992 , my mother found a poster on the door of our apartment in Mumbai (then Bombay). The poster had an image of the Babri Mosque, painted in black with men holding swords standing in a circle around the monument. It read “Chalo Ayodhya 6 December” (let’s march to Ayodhya on Dec. 6). The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque built by Mughal emperor Babur in Ayodhya, a town 960 miles from Mumbai, had been a disputed structure for years; some Hindu leaders alleged that it was built over the birthplace of Lord Ram. In the 1990s, right-wing Hindu leaders and members of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party started a polarizing movement, and ultimately called on Hindus all over the country to converge in Ayodhya on Dec. 6 to demolish the mosque.

Hindu nationalists responded to that call and climbed on top of the mosque brandishing swords. The grand mosque, a symbol of faith for India’s largest minority, was razed to the ground. Overnight the patriarch of our family, who was feted as a progressive writer and a government school teacher, was reduced to being merely a “Muslim.” Provocative speeches by leaders of the BJP and other right-wing groups fueled a whirlwind of carnage: More than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed around country; Mumbai alone witnessed 500 murders.
By Rana Ayyub December 6 at 9:45 AM
Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and author of “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Coverup.”

At the crack of dawn on Dec. 5, 1992 , my mother found a poster on the door of our apartment in Mumbai (then Bombay). The poster had an image of the Babri Mosque, painted in black with men holding swords standing in a circle around the monument. It read “Chalo Ayodhya 6 December” (let’s march to Ayodhya on Dec. 6). The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque built by Mughal emperor Babur in Ayodhya, a town 960 miles from Mumbai, had been a disputed structure for years; some Hindu leaders alleged that it was built over the birthplace of Lord Ram. In the 1990s, right-wing Hindu leaders and members of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party started a polarizing movement, and ultimately called on Hindus all over the country to converge in Ayodhya on Dec. 6 to demolish the mosque.

Hindu nationalists responded to that call and climbed on top of the mosque brandishing swords. The grand mosque, a symbol of faith for India’s largest minority, was razed to the ground. Overnight the patriarch of our family, who was feted as a progressive writer and a government school teacher, was reduced to being merely a “Muslim.” Provocative speeches by leaders of the BJP and other right-wing groups fueled a whirlwind of carnage: More than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed around country; Mumbai alone witnessed 500 murders.


It was then that we, the sole Muslim occupants of a Hindu residential colony, began to feel that we didn’t belong. We moved to a Muslim-dominated pocket of Mumbai -- India’s most cosmopolitan city.

BJP and its leaders who led the campaign for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya were voted to power in the general election that followed.

Twenty-six years later, as India marks the anniversary of the demolition of the mosque, Indian Muslims continue to live their worst nightmare as they wake up each morning to humiliating and threatening discourse by legislators and members of the ruling party.

Anti-Muslim hate crimes are not just encouraged but also rewarded by those in power. According to a report on hate crimes released by Fact Checker, 76 percent of victims of hate crimes in India over the past 10 years have been Muslims. Ninety percent of these attacks have occurred since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was voted into power in 2014.

By labeling Muslims as “beef eaters” and expanding bans on the consumption of beef by putting in place new rules to curtail cow slaughter that disadvantage Muslim and lower-caste Hindus, the Hindu nationalist BJP is encouraging young Hindu men to become so-called cow vigilantes, who brandish their patriotism and faith by physically attacking Muslims. Even a rumor that a Muslim family ate beef for dinner, or a Muslim man ferried a cow to a slaughterhouse, can prove fatal in the hinterlands today.

When Muslims are not being lynched for bovine-related reasons, they are attacked for marrying Hindu girls, for sporting a beard, or for wearing a skullcap or other symbols of religious identity. They are berated on popular, state-favored news channels for being ungrateful betrayers and traitors who have no love for the national flag.

Attacks on Indian Muslims are also a part of a wider campaign to undermine the community and its rich history. The Taj Mahal is an iconic 17th-century mausoleum, built by another Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, but it is frequently disparaged in remarks by Modi’s deputies. Yogi Adityanath, Modi’s choice as chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has stated that the Taj Mahal isn’t sufficiently Indian — code for belonging to India’s Islamic past. “Foreign dignitaries visiting the country used to be gifted replicas of the Taj Mahal and other minarets, which did not reflect Indian culture,” he said at a rally in the state of Bihar last year. “Now, [Hindu] holy books such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana are offered as gifts.” In the past six months, names of iconic cities and railway stations such as Allahabad and Mughal Sarai named after Muslim figures have been changed to reflect Hindu culture.

The obliteration of India’s Islamic history and culture is also reflected in the rewriting of school textbooks in provinces ruled by the BJP. Mughal rulers such as Akbar and Shah Jahan who embellished India’s cultural legacy are being reintroduced in academia as debauched, villainous invaders who robbed India of its Hindu heritage.

Communal fault-lines are not new in the country. When India was partitioned in 1947 — leading to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan — tens of millions of Muslims chose a secular India as their homeland; they were betting on a more promising future in a country that enshrined religious equality into its constitution. But Hindu nationalists have long claimed a greater moral right over the nation and have questioned the patriotism of Indian Muslims. And the prejudice is no longer just rhetorical. It has turned into violent hatred that has spilled onto the streets of the country.

The shift in India’s attitude toward minorities is being met with resistance and response by writers, artists and activists. Even Bollywood, which usually keeps its distance from politics, is responding in small ways. A film released in August titled “Mulk” (Nation) tells the story of a Muslim family that is forced to prove its patriotism in the face of a prejudiced police force and society. The film is a work of fiction but reflects the agony of the 180 million Muslims in India.

Ever since 1947, Muslims have consciously chosen to place their destiny in the hands of a secular India, believing in the guiding principles of democracy. That faith is now being tested every day. In 2014, when Modi was elected prime minister, Muslims knew they now had a leader who carried the stigma of ruling the state of Gujarat in 2002, when nearly 800 Muslims were massacred in a planned attack by Hindu mobs. In its verdict on those riots, the Supreme Court of India described Modi’s government at the time as “modern-day Neros” who looked elsewhere when “innocent children and helpless women were burning.”

In Modi’s India today, as acts of communal violence increase, the worst fears of Indian Muslims are coming true.

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Hitler: Inspiring Hindu Nationalists to Kill Muslims.

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch released its annual review of human rights around the world. In its report, the international NGO claims India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is proactively promoting Hindu supremacy at the expense of fundamental human rights for minorities, specifically Muslims.

In 2017, there were nearly 40 attacks carried out against Muslims and other minority communities, with many of the attacks perpetrated by Hindu extremist groups affiliated with BJP. In the years 2010 to 2017, Muslims were the targets of 51% of terrorism attacks, and comprised 86% of terrorism related fatalities. Significantly, 97% of these attacks have taken place in the years since Modi’s right wing government came to power in 2014.

Mob lynching, attacks carried out by anti-Muslim vigilante groups, and gang rape now characterize the reality for India’s 130 million Muslims.

“Indian authorities have proven themselves unwilling to protect minority religious communities and other vulnerable groups from frequent attack,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “There needs to be a serious effort to prevent future attacks and to prosecute all those responsible for the violence.”

But India is doing the exact opposite of that! In fact, when Muslims report their attack to Indian authorities, the Muslim victim is often charged with inciting the violence, while his/her Hindu attacker is exonerated of all wrongdoing.

It begets the question: what the hell is going on in India, the world’s largest democracy?

India, like the rest of the planet, seemingly, is being swept up in the rise of ultranationalist fervour, opportunistically mobilized by far-right parties for easy political gain.

But what is nationalism? While the term lacks an adequate working definition, it is understood best when juxtaposed against patriotism, whereby the latter is defined as love of country, while nationalism is “love of country combined with dislike of other countries, their peoples, or their cultures,” according to Alex Nowrasteh.

Nationalist driven ideals lead towards policy that restrict immigration, harrass minority communities, and pivot around the notion of defending the country from external threats, or, rather, from “imaginary harms.”

Hindu nationalism, however, is the dislike of other countries, peoples and their cultures, but on anabolic steroids. And by performance enhancing drugs I mean the memory and uncompromisingly hideous legacy of Adolf Hitler.

“Admiration for Nazism — often reframed with a genocidal hatred for Muslims — is rampant in the Hindu nationalist camp, which has never been as mainstream as it is now,” says Shrenik Rao, the famous Indian filmmaker.

Rao’s claim is not some kind of frivolous invocation of Godwin’s Law, nor is it commentary made in the abstract. The popularity of Hitler and Nazism within Hindu nationalist culture is both measurable and observable, and in terrifyingly more ways than you might think.

Hitler’s Cross restaurant in Mumbai:

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THE FORGIVENESS SPECIAL: KAR SEVAK BALBIR SINGH WHO HELPED DEMOLISH BABRI MASJID IS NOW MOHAMMED AMIR, A MAN DETERMINED TO REBUILD 100 MOSQUES

“Brainwashing me was easy, because yeh bhavnayen (these emotions), they are deep-rooted. Back where I come from, if you did something that was not considered acceptable, even a simple thing like eating a roti with your left hand, people would ask, “Tu Mussalman hai ke?” (What is this? Are you a Muslim?) I thought that these Muslims came from outside India and had snatched our land and destroyed our temples.”

Plus, in a state like Haryana that valorises machismo, he said he wanted to do something that would effectively show his ‘mardangi.’ “When I left for Ayodhya in the first week of December, my friends told me, ‘kuch kare bina wapas na aana (Don’t come back without achieving something)’,” says Balbir who was among those being tracked by the Intelligence Bureau.

“Ayodhya was abuzz on December 5,” he recalls. “The men from VHP ruled the town and Faizabad. We stayed with thousands of other kar sevaks, heard the chatter going around. Advaniji was not important because he worshipped Jhulelal (the community god of Sindhis), and hence was not considered to be a Hindu; Uma Bharati was a drama queen. I was there with my close friend Yogender Pal. We were all impatient, we wanted to get going.”

A few distinct shards of the following day are still embedded painfully in his memory of it. One of them is an aural one, of the rousing slogans (‘Saugandh ram ki khai hai, mandir yahin banayenge’; ‘Kalyan Singh kalyan karo, mandir ka nirmaan karo’); he remembers mocking senior police officials as he walked along with the other kar sevaks towards Babri Masjid on that cold afternoon; and then the final rush and the frenzied scramble atop the central dome.

“I was like an animal that day. Only briefly, I got scared when I saw a helicopter approach us from a distance. Then, the rallying cries from below reached my ears and I felt emboldened again and plunged my pick-axe into the dome.”

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India: Hindu man killed a Muslim worker, Burned his body and filmed it to raise money and 'Become a Hindu Hero'

The videos began circulating on December 6, the same day that a charred body was found by a passerby who informed the police. The victim was a laborer from the eastern Indian state of West Bengal who worked near the area where he was killed.

A Hindu man got his 12-year-old nephew to film him killing a Muslim laborer in India, in an attempt to raise funds for his anti-Islam camapign, according to police in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan.

The suspect, Shambulal Regar, shared his bank account details along with videos of the murder that mainly circulated on Whatsapp and received 300,000 rupees ($4,665) from more than 700 people across India.

“The accused wanted to become a Hindu hero after killing a Muslim man; his main aim was to collect money after committing the hate crime,” police officer Anand Shrivastava told Reuters.

Police have since frozen his wife's bank account as more than 500 people pledged donations to Regar's legal defense, local media reported. His supporters also staged a demonstration on Thursday. Ensuing clashes injured at least 30 demonstrators and 20 police officers, and there were 50 arrests, authorities told local media.

Regar was arrested the day after the body was found. Regar’s underaged nephew was also arrested last week as police said he was the one who shot the videos, The Indian Express reported.

In one of the videos, which have since been taken down, Regar is seen attacking the man with an iron rod and then stabbing him as he lies on the ground, local media reported. In another, he pours a liquid over the body of the man and then throwing a match on it as he rants about “jihadis.”

According to the police, the man described himself as a proud Hindu fighting against a “love jihad”—a term Hindu hardliners use to accuse Muslim men of marrying Hindu women to convert them to Islam.

The police don't believe Regar knew the victim of his hate crime, the latest in a string of attacks against India’s Muslim minority—less than 8 percent of the country’s 1.32 billion citizens—that has increasingly been the target of Hindu extremists.

Hindu vigilantes have killed at least 11 people this year whom they suspected of killing or eating cows, an animal that conservative Hindus consider sacred, according to data journalism organization IndiaSpend, and cow-related hate crimes have increased.

In one recent instance, a Muslim man was shot dead while transporting cows near the Rajasthan-Haryana border after he and his two aides were attacked by a group of people, as BBC reported in November.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who leads the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has publicly condemned the cow-related violence, but his critics say he hasn’t done enough to stop the anti-Muslim attacks.

After Hindu vigilantes take the cows from Muslim farmers, these end up in cow shelters that often sell or give the stolen cattle to Hindu farmers, a practice that has seen a steep increase in states governed by Modi’s party, according to a Reuters investigation published last month.

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The terrifying rise of nationalist villains in India

Since he assumed national office, Modi has traded open incitement against Muslims for a posture of strategic ambiguity, communicating with his Hindu followers through pregnant silences. When BJP's Hindu "cow vigilantes" (Hindus regard cows as sacred) hauled out an aged Muslim man from bed and bludgeoned him to death for allegedly eating beef, it took Modi several days to issue a lame condemnation (Yogi Adityanath, on the other hand, vociferously defended the killing and even recommended that the dead man's family be prosecuted for possessing the meat). Modi has done nothing to squelch BJP's baseless claims that Muslim men are using "love jihad" to spread their faith by deliberately seducing Hindu girls. Nor has he done a thing about his party's efforts to browbeat Muslims and Christians into converting to Hinduism in large mass public ceremonies. He did, however, declare Christmas "good governance day" when government employees would be required to work while leaving all official Hindu holidays unmolested.

In Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, Modi ran a two-pronged campaign in recent state elections, emphasizing his message of economic prosperity for all before mixed audiences while whipping up Hindu grievances before Hindu crowds. For example, he accused the deposed ruling party of buying Muslim votes by giving free handouts to Muslims but nothing to Hindus. So diabolically effective was Modi's message that the BJP won 325 out of 405 seats in the state legislature simply by unifying the Hindu vote, till now deeply divided along caste lines.

Still, the hope was that after his resounding victory, Modi would start pulling back from his divisive rhetoric. But Yogi Adityanath's appointment suggests that the mask is finally coming off, and Modi is preparing to launch a much more aggressive phase of Hindu nationalism.

Adityanath, who commands a huge Hindu following in his state, has pledged not only to build a temple where the razed mosque stood but also place statues of Hindu gods in every Muslim mosque. But that's not even the worst part. He makes no bones about his ethnic cleansing agenda and speaks openly about the need to reduce Uttar Pradesh's 40 million-strong Muslim population — about 20 percent of the total — by at least half. Nor is he shy about how he plans to accomplish this. He reminds Hindus of their duty to "take out 100 Muslim girls for every Hindu girl they take out" and kill "100 Muslims for every Hindu they kill," and taunts those who have moral qualms as "eunuchs." Such incitement, which is by no means his worst, has landed the yogi, who obscenely ran on a law-and-order agenda, in jail a few times.

Trump's calls for a Muslim ban and "extreme vetting" have emboldened men like Adityanath, who has repeatedly recommended similar steps in India — except that he doesn't have in mind wimpy measures like creating a Muslim registry or barring Muslims from only a few countries. Indeed, within a week of assuming office, he had already embarked on a campaign of anti-Muslim harassment, shutting down and burning "illegal" slaughterhouses, and throwing 650,000 predominantly Muslim men out of work.

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