Living in Non-Muslim Country - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

 

How Muslims Survive in the Land Of Pork!! Halal Viet Street Food!!

Found this so interesting. 

A Message to The Ulama and Da'īs of India | Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi

The Making of Lynchistan: Inside India's Deadly 'Gau Raksha' Network

 

Fasting in America's ONLY Muslim Town (Ramadan)

 

I found this fascinating. Drew is a wonderful ally of the Muslim community.

All That Remains

‘Shown their place’: Muslim livelihoods under attack in India

New Delhi, India – Not everyone in India is excited about the upcoming festive season in October and November.

For Afzal, a mutton seller in Greater Noida – a suburb in Uttar Pradesh state neighbouring capital New Delhi – who did not wish to give his real name for fear of reprisal, it would mean a loss of business for nearly 10 days.


“We have nowhere to complain. The police and the municipality officials side with such groups,” adds Afzal, with some trepidation.

Afzal has been fortunate: though he has been targeted, he has not faced any physical violence. Many others have not been so lucky.

On September 23, two Muslim men in Mathura, a temple town in Uttar Pradesh, were badly beaten up for carrying meat. Earlier this month, the government decided to make a large part of the city alcohol- and meat-free.

About a month ago, in Indore city of Madhya Pradesh state, also governed by the BJP, a Muslim bangle-seller, Tasleem Ali, was beaten up because he was selling his wares in a “Hindu locality” allegedly under an assumed Hindu name.

Within a week or so, in Ujjain city in the same state, a Muslim scrap dealer was forced to shout “Jai Shri Ram” (Victory be to Lord Ram), a war cry used by Hindu supremacist groups.

Similar incidents were reported in Uttar Pradesh as well in the same month.

The owner of a horse carriage in Lucknow was forced to chant “Death to Pakistan” on the basis of a fake claim that he had hoisted a Pakistani flag on his carriage.

Then again, in Mathura, a Muslim eatery owner was forced to change its name from “Shrinath Dosa” to “American Dosa Corner” because right-wing groups objected to him using the name of a Hindu god.

All these incidents were recorded in a series of disturbing videos that went viral. The common thread in the videos is that they showcase Muslim vendors and small traders being assaulted because of their religious identity.

Also, the assaulters in all such cases are alleged members of Hindu right-wing groups, who feel emboldened under Modi’s government and exercise significant impunity.

Such incidents are being seen as part of a larger attack on the livelihoods of Muslims, many of whom are self-employed or are engaged in low-paying jobs.

Nearly 46 percent of Muslims are self-employed in urban India, the largest as compared with any other community, according to data from the government’s National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), 2013.

The report adds that Muslims are the poorest among all religious groups in India and are concentrated in low-paying jobs in the informal sector.

Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, in their book People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos, have documented a gradual “de-skilling of Muslim workforce” due to globalisation, which has forced them into low-paying jobs.

If these frequent incidents of attacks on Muslim livelihoods are seen “in consonance with some policy measures which the BJP government has taken in different states in the last few years, then it is a worrying trend indeed,” Abdul Waheed, professor of sociology at the Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, told Al Jazeera.

In 2017, when the BJP government came to power in the northern state, one of its first moves was to shut down slaughterhouses and meat shops. The ostensible reason was that such places were not following legal regulations.

However, till date, no related regulation has been enacted. “The absence of any regulation in this regard makes it clear that the intention behind such a move was to destabilise Muslim businesses,” Manoj Singh, journalist and researcher in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur city, who has been tracking the rise of the BJP in the state, told Al Jazeera.

In March this year, the city council in Gurugram in Haryana state – also governed by the BJP – decided to close all meat shops and ban all restaurants from serving non-vegetarian food on Tuesdays to respect “Hindu sentiments”.

Such measures are likely to affect Muslims adversely. “This is a clear attack on Muslim livelihoods since, traditionally, it is primarily Muslims who are engaged in the meat and poultry business in India,” says Waheed.

Singh argues that such incidents belie the Uttar Pradesh government’s claim that it is interested in the development of all. “We do not see members of such vigilante groups arrested which only means that they have the tacit support of the government.”
Shalabh Mani Tripathy, BJP’s spokesman and media adviser to Uttar Pradesh chief minister, counters such claims.

“The state government is popular even among Muslims because of its various schemes. A narrative is being built by vested interests that the government is anti-Muslim which is not true,” Tripathy told Al Jazeera.

“Some of these videos and incidents have turned out to be fake. Others are being probed; therefore, it will be premature to comment on them. Let me assure you that no one is above the law in the state.”

Economic marginalisation
It is well-documented that Muslim properties have been targeted during various communal riots in India. But focused attacks on small traders and hawkers seem to be a new trend.

As the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in India last year, Muslim fruit-sellers were targeted and scapegoated for allegedly spreading the virus. Posters were put up in several villages announcing that Muslim vendors were not welcome in those areas.
The National Hawker Federation, an association of street vendors across 28 states in India, issued a statement in April 2020, condemning the profiling and harassment of Muslim vendors.

“These attacks are sure to make the economic situation of Muslim hawkers more precarious,” Waheed told Al Jazeera.

“It is an effort to create terror and insecurity in the minds of Muslims and restrict their free movement. Now an average Muslim trader will have to think twice before venturing into a Hindu locality. Such restrictions will only mean that their businesses will suffer.”

It appears that such attacks are happening due to an ideological motivation to hit Muslims economically by driving them out of their professions, so that they are forced to convert eventually.

In January 2021, at a Hindu panchayat (mass gathering) in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut, anti-Muslim preacher Swami Anand Swaroop said the Hindus “should decide that they will not buy anything from Muslims”.

“If you destroy them socially, politically and economically, they will begin converting to Hinduism from Islam,” he told a crowd of hundreds.

Journalist Singh links the current spate of attacks against Muslims to the upcoming state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, in which the BJP is seeking to retain power.

“The BJP government has been speaking against Muslims since it came to power, but just speaking against them is not enough to win the hearts of their Hindu supporters in the politically charged state,” he said.

“The Muslim community has to be brought to its knees by economically marginalising them even further. This is being done in order to send a signal to the Hindu electorate that Muslims are being shown their place.” 

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One Year After Mass Protests, India’s Muslims Still Live in Fear

 

One year on, the anti-CAA movement has receded into the background, its anniversary barely remembered: Delhi police stopped a candlelight march led by students on Dec. 15. In March, the mass protests were cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, but it is hard to say how long they would have survived anyway, given the movement’s vilification by BJP leaders, hostilities from Delhi residents over blocked roads, and the lack of support from India’s so-called secular parties.

The movement has suffered from its own limitations. It failed to engage a larger cross-section of society, building bridges with other distressed communities such as farmers and Dalits, and to counter the BJP’s messaging that it was stirred by Pakistan. The arrests of the anti-CAA movement’s leaders, as well as others who have decried the BJP’s virulent Hindu nationalism, mark the decline of India’s inclusive and consensus-building democratic ethos. Indian Muslims remain in the same precarious situation they found themselves in 2019: living in fear of becoming second-class citizens.

The anti-CAA movement challenged not only the BJP’s Hindu majoritarianism but also the Modi government’s authoritarianism, apparent in its moves to ram through laws such as the CAA or its sudden announcement in 2016 that it would replace certain Indian rupee notes with new ones, causing chaos and lasting economic damage. Using the language of the 1949 constitution, the movement was a tribute to the idea of an India built on secularism and pluralism, an appeal for practicing tolerance.

But it’s clear that the anti-CAA protests did not resonate much beyond an urban, liberal segment of Indian society. Much of the media and the Hindu middle class—the country’s largest demographic—remain solidly behind the prime minister and his politics. Even so, the large numbers of people who joined the movement served as a rude awakening for a leadership confident that it had stamped out dissent. The protests, coupled with a shift in international perceptions, seemed to push Modi’s government to take a step back and soften its tone.

The mothership of the anti-CAA movement was in Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim-majority neighborhood in Delhi. Muslim women led a sit-in there for three months, joined by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. “I sat for 101 days, but no one [from the government] came to meet or speak with us,” said Bilkis Bano, 82, one of the most famous faces of the sit-in. “What could we do when no one came to speak with us?”

Even before the full onset of the pandemic, the anti-CAA movement came to a halt after religious violence ravaged parts of Delhi in February, killing 53 people, mostly Muslims. The students and activists who led the anti-CAA protests—mostly young women and men—were blamed. A Delhi Police investigation, which critics have called biased, concluded that the protests were part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Modi government. In two separate bail hearings for jailed activists, the judges said the terrorism charges were seemingly “targeted” and “vindictive.”

Despite a few political setbacks, the BJP’s brand of Hindu nationalism is gaining strength in the Modi government’s second term.

The arrests of anti-CAA activists and students reflect a narrative that pins blame for the riots on the protesters, and by extension the Muslim community. Delhi police have called activist Umar Khalid, 33—one of the most vocal critics of the Modi government—the “mastermind” behind the Delhi riots. “He has been targeted because he refused to be silenced,” Banojyotsna Lahiri, his partner, said.

Despite a few political setbacks in state elections, the BJP’s brand of Hindu nationalism is gaining strength in the Modi government’s second term. In addition to the passage of the CAA, it has stripped Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir of its constitutional autonomy and prompted fears of demographic change in the region. And in November 2019, after decades of litigation, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of building a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by Hindu extremists in 1992.

The CAA grants citizenship to non-Muslim minority groups from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The Modi government maintains that the law won’t affect Indian Muslims. But some fear that coupled with the National Population Register, a data collection exercise, and a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) aimed at identifying those living in the country without the proper documents, the CAA will be used to target Muslims who can’t produce documents and strip them of the right to call India home.

One year after the Indian parliament passed the CAA, the Modi government says it is still drafting the rules to enforce it, and the Supreme Court has yet to hear more than 140 petitions challenging its constitutional validity. Home Minister Amit Shah, who has described undocumented immigrants as “termites,” backtracked on the plan for a nationwide citizens’ register last year, after 11 states not governed by the BJP refused to implement it. But while the government may have put the NRC on hold, it has not ruled out implementing data collection, which some argue is a surreptitious way of reintroducing the NRC.

The stripping of Kashmir’s protected status, the passage of the CAA, and the subsequent crackdown on anti-CAA students at two predominantly Muslim universities have offended Islamic countries that are friendly to India. Iran, Turkey, and Malaysia condemned the Delhi riots in February. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has called on Modi to ensure protection for Muslims and Islamic holy places in India. And after a year of lobbying, Pakistan managed to get the organization to pass a strong statement on Kashmir.

India’s CAA push has even put off friendly Bangladesh, which has refused to accept the return of any Indian residents left out of the NRC. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has called the CAA unnecessary, and three of her ministers canceled trips to India amid the protests. The Modi government will likely tread forward carefully, given that Islamophobia in India has become somewhat of a liability—and could be a thorny issue with U.S. President-elect Joe Biden.

With state elections due next year in both Assam and Bengal, the BJP is now letting the CAA issue simmer.

The issue is already playing out in Assam state, home to many Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims who have immigrated from Bangladesh over many years. The state government prepared a list of citizens in August 2019. But the BJP suffered a setback: Of the 1.9 million people found to be living in Assam without documents, over 500,000 were Hindus who would effectively have to claim they fled religious persecution in a neighboring country to gain their citizenship. BJP leaders have said that Hindus left out of the NRC would be covered under the CAA, and Shah said last year that the NRC would be repeated in Assam. This month, the Assam government said that the list it had declared final in 2019 was not final after all.

With state elections due next year in both Assam and Bengal, the BJP is now letting the CAA issue simmer. In Assam, the BJP’s attempt to make the NRC a Hindu-Muslim issue—rather than one tied to local differences in language and ethnicity—hasn’t quite worked. Winning Bengal, which also has a sizable population of immigrants from Bangladesh, would be a milestone for the Hindu right wing. There, the BJP has tapped into Hindu conservatism dormant among upper-caste communities and worked hard to polarize the base of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who took power after three decades of Communist Party rule in 2011.

“The BJP is in a legal bind when it comes to Assam. But wherever there is some space in the communal game, they are playing it,” said Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, the author of Assam: The Accord, The Discord.

In the anti-CAA movement, progressive forces couched their pleas to uphold the rights and freedoms of minority groups as a call to defend the constitution. They now recognize the BJP government’s unwillingness to even pay lip service to India’s constitutional values—and the not-so-silent majority’s antagonism toward these calls.

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Destruction of Islamic architecture in China

 

The reserachers using satellite imagery, have estimated that approximately 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang (65% of the total) have been destroyed or damaged as a result of government policies, mostly since 2017. An estimated 8,500 have been demolished outright. A further 30% of important Islamic sacred sites (shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage routes, including many protected under Chinese law) have been demolished across Xinjiang, mostly since 2017, and an additional 28% have been damaged or altered in some way.

The report outlines the deliberate erasure of tangible elements of indigenous Uyghur and Islamic culture in Xinjiang appears to be a centrally driven yet locally implemented policy, the ultimate aim of which is the ‘sinicisation of indigenous cultures, and ultimately, the complete ‘transformation’ of the Uyghur community’s thoughts and behaviour.

The report also lists media and non-government organisation reports, which have unearthed individual examples of the deliberate destruction of mosques and culturally significant sites in recent years. The reserachers found out that such destruction is likely to be more widespread than reported, and that an estimated one in three mosques in Xinjiang has been demolished, mostly since 2017.

Interpreting the datasets acquired through satellite images, the reserachers concluded that this equates to roughly 8,450 mosques (±4%) destroyed across Xinjiang, and a further estimated 7,550 mosques (±3.95%) have been damaged or ‘rectified’ to remove Islamic-style architecture and symbols. Cultural destruction often masquerades as restoration or renovation work in Xinjiang.

The report says that mosques across Xinjiang were rebuilt following the Cultural Revolution, and some were significantly renovated between 2012 and 2016, including by the construction of Arab- and Islamic-style domes and minarets. However, immediately after, beginning in 2016, government authorities embarked on a systematic campaign to ‘rectify’ and in many cases outright demolish mosques.

Besides mosques, Chinese Government authorities have also desecrated important sacred shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage sites. The report provides photographic evidence of how mosques have been redesigned or decreased in size and the same techniques have been applied to cemeteries and other religious places in Xinjiang.

Although other religious minorities weren’t the focus of the report, still the reserachers checked several Christian churches and Buddhist temples across Xinjiang and found that none of those sampled had been damaged or destroyed. 

Link

India: How a Muslim doctor was incarcerated for raising his voice

Dr Kafeel Khan told Al Jazeera he was physically tortured while in captivity, which included him being stripped of his clothes and beaten and deprived of food for days.

"It was very hard for the whole family. My 65-year-old mother was forced to visit the courts during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic," he said.

Dr Khan was arrested in January for a speech made a month earlier that authorities in Uttar Pradesh (UP), governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), deemed incendiary. He was later charged under the National Security Act (NSA), which stipulates that a person can be held without charge for a year.

His speech focused on major issues facing the country of 1.4 billion people such as malnutrition, lack of health facilities and unemployment crisis.

They really wanted to break me this time.

But Khan's criticism of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which bans Muslims from neighbouring South Asian countries from gaining Indian nationality, seemed to have earned him the government's ire.

The passing of the law in December sparked nationwide protests led mostly by Muslims - India’s largest minority, numbering nearly 200 million.

Yogi Adityanath, who is UP's chief minister and known for his anti-Muslim statements, ordered a crackdown against anti-CAA protests in the northern state. More than two dozens Muslims were killed in police action that was condemned by Amnesty International India.

"Who will speak up in this time of atrocities, if we are also quiet, who will raise their voice?" Khan had said during the speech in front of students of Aligarh Muslim University, located around 125km from the capital, New Delhi.

Critics and family members say the 38-year-old paediatrician was targeted because he chose to speak up against the law, which the United Nations dubbed "fundamentally discriminatory".

The UP police department in its complaint accused Dr Khan of "sowing seeds of discord towards other religious communities".
But the Allahabad High Court on Tuesday disagreed with the police, saying "a complete reading of the speech also nowhere threatens peace and tranquility of the city of Aligarh [located in UP]".

Dr Khan is rising as a prominent Muslim face in India, which the government doesn't want ... they don't want an educated Muslim person raising his voice, about their rights or equality.

"The address gives a call for national integrity and unity among the citizens. The speech also deprecates any kind of violence," the 42-page judgement read as it ordered the immediate release of Khan.

Dr Khan said that after he was slapped with the NSA, his family became "untouchable" as people avoided contact with them in their home city of Gorakhpur in UP. "Lawyers would not take my case," he said.

His activism has also brought troubles to his family. His brother Adeel Khan said his business has been targeted since Kafeel Khan was arrested in 2017. Another brother survived a gun attack.

The 38-year-old doctor's release on Tuesday ends his third stint in prison [Courtesy family of Dr Kafeel Khan]
Harjit Singh Bhatti, a doctor based in New Delhi, has been one of Khan's most vocal supporters. He said that Khan has been presumably targeted because of his religion.

"Dr Khan is rising as a prominent Muslim face in India, which the government doesn't want ... they don't want an educated Muslim person raising his voice, about their rights or equality," Bhatti told Al Jazeera.

Dr Khan has spent nearly 500 days in prison in the last three years, as his case has become a symbol of state repression on dissent.

And he is not the only one. Several activists behind the peaceful anti-CAA protests are still behind bars for opposing the government's alleged anti-minority policies.

The address gives a call for national integrity and unity among the citizens.

Rights groups have condemned their continued incarceration as the coronavirus virus pandemic poses a threat to their life in India's crowded prisons. On Monday, India overtook Brazil to become the second-worst country hit by COVID-19 with over 4.2 million cases.

The 38-year-old doctor's release on Tuesday ends his third stint in prison.

His ordeal with the BJP-led UP government began in September 2017, when he was arrested in the wake of the deaths of 70 children due to lack of oxygen supply at Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur, Khan's hometown.

Then a junior doctor in the paediatrics department, Dr Khan was hailed as a hero for securing a supply of oxygen tanks for the hospital ward from his personal money.

However, according to Dr Khan, the incident did not go down well, with Adityanath chastising Khan for his efforts upon meeting him days after the incident.

Khan was arrested with eight others for the deaths of the minors, and jailed for seven months.

He was arrested again a year later for 45 days, after authorities claimed he had barged into a hospital in the Bahraich district in UP, leading to an alleged ruckus.

The doctor claims he went to the hospital to enquire about the deaths of children at the hospital from encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. Thousands of children have died in Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Bihar state due to episodic outbreaks of encephalitis since the 1970s.

In 2018, an investigating team looking into the BRD hospital tragedy exonerated the paediatrician of any criminal wrongdoing. Khan has sought an apology from the Adityanath-led government and the reinstatement of his job.

But instead, the government ordered another inquiry into the children's death case.

Dr Bhatti, who is also the President of Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum, said Khan has been made a "scapegoat".

"Khan has been continuously made a scapegoat for the BRD tragedy, despite being a junior doctor at the hospital," Bhatti told Al Jazeera.

Bhatti has been an outspoken critic of the Modi government's coronavirus pandemic policy, as the country has emerged as the epicentre of the virus in Asia.

Khan, who has moved to western Rajasthan state since his release, says he feared for his life inside the jail. "For the first four to five days of my incarceration, I did not receive any food. I wore the same clothes ... I was not able to take a bath or brush my teeth."

"To go to the toilet there was a queue of 30 minutes," he said, adding that he had to share the barrack with some 150 people while it actually had the capacity to hold 40.

"They really wanted to break me this time," he told Al Jazeera.

The paediatrician said at times he would bite on his sleeves to distract himself from the excruciating hunger he experienced. "I was in so much pain I could have eaten grass," he said.

He said that jail authorities asked him to stop talking about the BRD hospital tragedy, and also demanded that he stop criticising CAA and a proposed citizenship register, which critics fear will likely be used to disenfranchise Muslims.

Despite the immense hardships, Khan revealed that his fellow prisoners, who were aware of his heroics during the BRD episode, would help him with food and other requests during his incarceration.

Khan has temporarily moved to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan state, where he has been reunited with his family, including his two children, wife and brother.

He said his most pressing concern is to demand the UP government revoke his suspension from his previous post at the BRD hospital so that he could resume his work.

"For the past three years," he said, "I have written 25 letters to the UP government to either revoke my suspension or terminate me, so that I can go work somewhere else."

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British Muslims held for two months in India claim religious persecution

Eight British Muslims detained in India for more than two months face criminal charges after getting caught up in a court case in which thousands of foreign Muslims are accused of violating the coronavirus lockdown.

The men allege they are victims of religious persecution by the Indian government, which is led by the rightwing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), known for its anti-Muslim agenda. According to a petition filed to Delhi high court on 20 May, their treatment is “tantamount to illegal detention”.

More than 2,500 foreign Muslims, from 35 different countries, are being charged in the case. Last week, the Indian government agreed to release and deport detained foreign Muslims but only if they accepted guilt for visa violations and “wilfully” disobeying lockdown orders.

“We haven’t done anything wrong. We don’t deserve to be treated like this,” said Shamsul, 39, an optometrist from Lancashire who had travelled to Delhi in March to attend an Islamic gathering.

Speaking by phone from the Delhi centre where he is being held, Shamsul added: “When you are locked away like an animal inside a room and you get treated like a piece of dirt, it mentally just breaks you completely.”

The UK Foreign Office has been accused by the men and their families of abandoning its own citizens to prejudice at the hands of the Indian government and of “caring more about diplomatic relations than the appalling human rights violations”.

In a statement, the FCO said: “We are supporting a group of British people detained in India. We are in close contact with prison officials and the Indian authorities to secure consular access for those who remain in detention.”

Most of the detained British citizens had travelled to India to visit the headquarters of a Muslim organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, located in the Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin. They attended a gathering between 10 and 15 March, alongside thousands of Indians and other foreigners.

The day after the gathering ended a notice was issued limiting events in Delhi to 50 people to restrict the spread of Covid-19. Just over a week later, all international flights were grounded and a strict nationwide lockdown was imposed with four hours’ notice. More than a thousand visitors, both Indian and foreign, found themselves stranded in Tablighi Jamaat’s headquarters.

Documents show that Tablighi Jamaat had been given permission to hold the event. Other religious gatherings were still taking place around the country at the same time, including a Hindu religious ceremony in Madhya Pradesh on 20 March attended by 800 people, from where multiple coronavirus cases later emerged.

However, Tablighi Jamaat became embroiled in controversy after it emerged that dozens of attendees at the gathering had contracted coronavirus and then travelled back to towns and villages across India, or stayed in the Nizamuddin headquarters without following physical distancing.

Across India, a public campaign of hate began to build. Driven in part by anti-Muslim sentiment, Tablighi Jamaat was singled out and accused by Delhi police, BJP politicians and the media of not only conspiring to violate lockdown but also encouraging its Muslim congregation to fight “corona jihad” and purposefully spread the virus, something Tablighi Jamaat vigorously denies. Tablighi Jamaat’s leaders were arrested and face charges of culpable homicide and manslaughter for their alleged role in spreading coronavirus.

On 31 March, about 950 foreigners – including at least four British citizens – who were stuck in the Nizamuddin building were rounded up by police. They were told they were being taken into standard coronavirus quarantine.

Shamsul was among those detained. A lifelong follower of Tablighi Jamaat, he was making his first trip to India.

“After lockdown was announced in India I tried to get home but there weren’t any flights and the embassy was no help,” said Shamsul. “So I just stayed in Nizamuddin and when the police took us into quarantine I wasn’t worried. We all presumed it was normal procedure. We didn’t know we would never be allowed to leave.”

According to Shamsul, for the first 50 days the men were locked in their small rooms, shared between three people, for 24 hours a day. He said water regularly cut out for two days at a time, they were given no soap or toilet paper and were fed the same meal of rice and lentils every day, twice a day. He said their passports were taken from them, and then their mobile phones, under the guise of sanitation. When the phones were returned a week later, photos and messages had reportedly been deleted and sim cards were missing.

According to Shamsul’s accounts, and the court petition, the detainees were tested twice for coronavirus, and after the second test were all proved to be negative, but still were not released.

The detainees have since been shifted to more relaxed quarantine centres but remain locked up, and say they still do not have their passports.

At the same time in late March, at least four other British citizens who had been sheltering in mosques and buildings due to lockdown restrictions in other areas of India were arrested. Some had attended the Tablighi Jamaat gathering but had travelled out of Delhi before lockdown. Others were tourists.

Four remain detained, including Mohsin, a British citizen who is being held in a jail in Ranchi, Jharkhand, and another man, Thalha Siddique, from Bradford, who had not attended the Delhi Tabhlighi Jamaat gathering and is being incarcerated in Bhopal jail.

In a recent update given to his family by an FCO caseworker, who was denied permission to see Siddique in person, it was confirmed Siddique had twice tested negative for coronavirus. Siddique asked for the message to be passed to his family in the UK that “he loves them and misses them a lot”.

The men were held for over 50 days with no charges. It was only after a court petition was filed on 20 May, challenging the government for keeping 1,000 foreigners in “illegal detention”, that charge sheets were filed. In court, Delhi police denied the foreigners were even in custody. The case has since been expanded to blanket-charge more than 2,500 foreign Muslims.

“It’s targeting one religious group,” said Ashima Mandla, a lawyer representing the accused foreigners collectively. “Why were they held for two months with no charge, even after they tested negative for coronavirus? It is quite clear that was illegal detention and a clear violation of the constitution and the fabric of liberty.”

The next court date is 25 June. The accused have been charged with disobeying lockdown orders and violating their tourist visas by carrying out religious missionary work, even though no missionary preaching occurred at the Tablighi Jamaat gathering. However, a few days ago, the government added “indulging in Tablighi activities” as a specific tourist visa violation.

The Foreign Office has been accused of negligence by those detained and their families, who say they have had barely any contact from the British embassy except assertions that it cannot interfere in Indian legal matters. They say that letters sent to the office of the foreign secretary and minister for Asia have been ignored.

The wife of another British citizen from London who attended the Tablighi Jamaat event and is being detained in Delhi spoke of her anger and frustration.

“How is it that British citizens have been locked up for two months and the government say there is nothing they can do?” she said. “I find it so upsetting that the Indian government is using this pandemic to target and exploit Muslim people.”

“I can hardly bear it,” she added. “My daughter keeps asking ‘when will dad be coming home’?”

Link

'We are not safe': India's Muslims tell of wave of police brutality

“The maulana told the policemen gently that none from the seminary took part in any protest rally and pleaded for them not to vandalise the Qur’an centre in the madrasa,” said a neighbour who witnessed the police attack but did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “It was then that the policemen and Rapid Action Force personnel [a branch of the police that deals with crowd control] pounced on him.”

The police then rounded up Hussaini and 35 of his students, 15 of whom were under 18 and mostly orphans, and took them to a nearby police barracks. Here the cleric was, witnesses allege, stripped of his clothes, beaten and a rod shoved up his anus, causing rectal bleeding, while the students were allegedly tortured with bamboo rods and made to shout Hindu nationalist slogans Jai Shri Ram” [Hail Lord Ram] and “Har Har Mahadev” [Save us Lord Shiva].

“The maulana had been beaten up very badly and was left without a single cloth on his body and when he was released we found him in very bad shape,” said Salman Saeed, a local Congress leader who came to pick up Hussaini and several students from Civil Lines Barracks. “He was badly wounded and bloodied, with many bruises across his body. He could not stand up on his legs and was bare-bodied. We were shocked to see the maulana in that condition. He is bed-ridden now.”

While Hussaini and all his underage students were released at 2am that night, 12 adults students and the madrasa cook remain behind bars and have been charged with taking part in violence, despite never partaking in a protest.

The young students were not the only underage Muslim prisoners in Muzaffarnagar police barracks that night. Upon seeing the commotion in the streets, 14-year-old Mohammad Sadiq, who worked as a mason’s assistant, set out to find his 11-year-old brother. Cars and motorcycles had been set alight and as protesters were fleeing around him, he too began to run. It was then that a dozen police pounced on him, hitting his legs with batons to make him fall to the ground and then unleashing a torrent of blows, he said.

“The police said to me, ‘if you tell us the names of 100 Muslims involved in the riots we will stop beating you’,” recounted Sadiq, as he lay bed-bound and weak from his injuries in his one-room family shack. “I kept telling them I had nothing to do with the riots, that I did not know anything but they kept beating me. The policemen told me to shout ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and I told them I would not so they put an iron rod into the flames of the car that was on fire and then held it against my hands to burn me.”

“Then some of the police officers tried to pick me up and put me in the flames of the car on fire,” Sadiq said, “but two of them said ‘no, let’s just take him to the police station’.”

Sadiq was kept in police detention for the next four days. Stripped to his underwear, he said he was tortured. For two days he was given no food or water and no medical treatment for his badly bleeding wounds. When he was finally released his condition was so bad his mother, Rehana Begum, fainted when she came to collect him.

“His father is dead so he was the only earning member of this house but he has been beaten so badly across the knees he can not walk and can not work now so what will happen to us?” she said, her head in her hands.

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Why India’s Muslims Are in Grave Danger

India has been jolted by the deadliest communal violence in New Delhi in decades. The fighting began on Sunday, Feb. 23—just before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in the country for meetings with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—and quickly escalated into mass riots, with Hindu mobs targeting Muslim homes in the city’s northeast. At least 45 people were killed—mostly Muslims.

Ashutosh Varshney, a Brown University professor and author of the prize-winning Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, believes last week’s riots in Delhi bear some of the hallmarks of an organized pogrom. India has been there before: In 2002, in Gujarat, when Modi was the state’s chief minister, more than 1,000 people were killed in religious riots. Most were Muslims. While Modi was later cleared of wrongdoing by the country’s judiciary, critics say that he could have done much more to prevent the attacks. And in 1984, again in Delhi, an estimated 3,000 Sikhs were targeted and killed after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In both cases, experts say, riots could not have been conducted without some complicity on the part of the police.

Varshney believes last week’s deadly clashes could be repeated in other parts of the country—and that Muslims are particularly vulnerable. Here is a transcript of Foreign Policy’s interview with Varshney, lightly edited for clarity.

Ravi Agrawal: There’s been a bit of debate about whether the violence in Delhi last week should be defined as a riot or as something more serious—a pogrom. Can you explain the difference?

Ashutosh Varshney: Pogroms are a special class of riots when it’s no longer simply a clash between two mobs or groups. Instead, the police are siding with one group either by looking away or by abetting and sometimes even directly participating in the violence. The key difference between riots and pogroms lies in the behavior of the state—through its police. The term was born in tsarist Russia when pogroms were launched against Jews.

RA: Given what we know now, how would you classify the violence in Delhi?

AV: On the first day and night—Sunday, Feb. 23—we saw two mobs going at each other. There were deaths on both sides. But on the second and third day, the partisanship of the police became clear. A mosque, a Muslim shrine, and Muslim homes and shops were attacked. The police did not respond to calls for help. Logs suggest a high volume of those calls came from predominantly Muslim parts of northeast Delhi. But the police failed to show up. Hindu mobs then attacked with abandon.

The second part is more direct participation. There are videos, in particular one which shows young Muslim men being hit by a Hindu mob. And the cops are asking the fallen and beaten Muslim men to sing the national anthem—as they’re being hit. That is quite egregious.

But the more significant evidence thus far is of the police simply looking away and not responding to Muslim pleas for help as homes, places of worship, and commercial enterprises were attacked with impunity.

RA: The fact that all of this happened in New Delhi, the capital city of India, is significant.

AV: Delhi has a unique structure for police operations. In every other part of India, the police report to the state government, and not to the central government, because law and order is defined as a state subject by India’s constitution. But Delhi’s police reports to the central government, not to the state government—technically, Delhi is not a full-fledged state. The fact that the central government is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would therefore make Modi’s government responsible for law and order in Delhi. And the minister of home affairs, Amit Shah, would be the final authority to which Delhi’s police force would report. So the responsibility for the failure to maintain law and order also lies at his door.

RA: Some of the perpetrators of the attacks were heard shouting “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Victory to Lord Ram.” Can you explain the significance of that chant?

AV: “Jai Shri Ram,” theologically speaking, is a celebration of Lord Ram, the Hindu deity known for compassion and considered to be the embodiment of the highest morality and ethics. But in recent Hindu nationalist ideological campaigns, Jai Shri Ram has been weaponized to express muscularity, masculinity, and coercion—as opposed to kindness and compassion. So, the meaning of Jai Shri Ram has been transformed into a battle cry for the establishment of a Hindu nationalist polity, presided over by a Hindu nationalist state.

RA: Given that you describe last week’s events in Delhi as bearing the hallmarks of the beginning of a pogrom, how severe is the danger of other, similar outbreaks of violence across the country?

AV: The most vulnerable Muslim populations are in BJP-ruled states, because the role of the police is critical—and the police comes under the state government. If BJP governments in various states of India push the police against the Muslims, then only the bravest police officers would resist, because the authority structure is very clear. The danger to Muslim minorities in BJP-ruled states is grave. Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with a population of 200 million, seems particularly vulnerable. Muslims comprise about 18 percent of the population there, and they are spread out all over the state. There was a big riot in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, for example, and the police were nowhere to be seen. UP is also ruled by a politician, Yogi Adityanath, whose anti-Muslim prejudice and fervor is well-known and has been openly displayed.

RA: What can civil society and the media do to prevent outbreaks of violence?

AV: Civil society can be quite important in creating bulwarks of resistance and peace, but that is not something it can do instantly. The creation of inter-religious networks between Hindus and Muslims takes a few years, if not more. The probability of integrated communities coming apart is much lower than the probability of segregated communities coming apart.

A more immediate issue always is how to minimize the extent or the intensity of violence. And that’s where the media plays a key role. By reporting courageously; by condemning what it finds unacceptable and sees as clear violations of norms, rules, and laws; and by creating a narrative of critique, the media can slow down or reduce the intensity of violence.

Sometimes the police intervene, too—even without political approval. Legally and constitutionally, the police can step in during moments of crisis. However, those police officers, administrators, and bureaucrats seem fewer in number today than was the case earlier. They are not entirely absent: I repeatedly came across in my research examples of police officers and administrators who would simply apply the law and not follow a political script. But a large number of police officers and bureaucrats do not have the courage to stand up to political authorities.

RA: Journalists in India are under threat, meanwhile. One photographer told the Washington Post a mob threatened to remove his pants to check whether he was circumcised—essentially to determine if he was Muslim. How much of this has to do with messaging from the government?

AV: The ideology of the government has created a ground-level situation where instructions do not have to come from the top. So-called agents devise their own strategies and think that by acting in a bigoted manner, by attacking Muslims, they could rise in the political hierarchy. So the incentive structure that gets created from the top begins to acquire a logic of its own and activates storm troopers and lower-level functionaries on the ground who try to interpret what the party bosses might appreciate or be pleased by.

RA: Prime Minister Modi’s second term began last May, after he won a landslide national election. While signs of the current muscular, chauvinistic brand of Hinduism were there in his first term as well—as we saw in several incidents of lynchings of Muslims, for example—there’s been a marked acceleration in the ruling BJP’s push for its social agenda. Why is that the case?

AV: Ahead of Modi’s first term in 2014, the political campaign had very few Hindu nationalist themes. I couldn’t count more than two speeches. You can say there were dog whistles and some displays of bigotry in the functioning of the midlevel politicians, but it wasn’t a dominant narrative.

In the campaign ahead of Modi’s second term, in 2019, the platform was more directly about the Hindu nationalist reconstruction of India. It can be claimed that given that the BJP’s vote share increased by 7 percentage points, India’s elections have authorized a more ideological and cultural push of the Hindu nationalist variety. But it’s also clear from the election data that the mandate was a complicated one. The vote in favor of Modi was not necessarily one of simply pushing a social and cultural agenda. National security was also an issue. Welfare programs had gained popularity: The BJP’s programs for sanitation and cooking gas were popular. To see the May 2019 election as a vote for an ideological restructuring of India would be to place an excessive interpretation on the wishes of the electorate. But that’s what happens in politics. The BJP seems sufficiently emboldened to use the legislative route to start restructuring the polity. And the Citizenship Amendment Act that passed on Dec. 11—leading to the current spate of protests—was the culmination of that.

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“I collapsed outside the jail…I could not believe that my son was taken thousands of miles away”

Srinagar, Indian-occupied Kashmir: Ateeqa Begum’s 22-year-old son, Faisal, is among the thousands who were arrested as part of a massive crackdown by the Indian government to prevent dissent after it revoked Article 370. Faisal was sent to a jail in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh without even informing the family.

This is Ateeqa’s story, in her own words:
“On the afternoon of August 6th, when a complete curfew and communication blockade was in place in Kashmir, my son Faisal Aslam Mir, 22, went out to buy medicines for me. I had insisted that the situation is not good and he should not go, but he told me that he will be back in 30 minutes. That was his last time at home.
Friends informed me they saw him being arrested by police and bundled into a police jeep. I was shaken and collapsed upon hearing this.

But I somehow knew that that he has not done anything so he will be released. I went to the police station and they told me he will be released. I went to the police station for three days continuously and they assured me that he will be released.
When they shifted him from the police station to Srinagar’s Central Jail, I went to meet him there. He cried when he saw me wearing old clothes and told me, “do not be like that.” The next time I met him I wore new clothes. I was very happy to go and meet him. I also cooked his favorite mutton and onion gravy. I went very early in the morning to the Central Jail with food and his clothes.
When I was waiting for my turn with a slip in my hand I saw a woman crying and enquired about what had happened. I learned that 20 people who were lodged in the jail have been shifted to Uttar Pradesh during dawn. I collapsed outside the jail and a friend had to pick me up. I could not believe that my son was taken thousands of miles away and booked under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA). It meant two years for him in jail.
I live alone at home now. I visit the court everyday where I have filed a petition against my son’s detention.

My son was my only support. My daughter is married and has two children. It is very difficult to fight all the battles and the worst of all is the battle against loneliness. Sometimes I lose my sanity, I go to shrines every Thursday and pray for my son’s release. That’s my only hope.
Every time I look at his photo in my kitchen I start talking to it and then I think, am I losing my mind? I know it is not only my son who is in jail, there are so many families suffering.
I am alone and it is very hard for me to manage everything. I am broken. I have cried only in these months.
This was not the first time that my son has been arrested. He was arrested before for taking active part in protests. He was booked under the PSA and tortured in jail. When he was released his health deteriorated and he suffered from psychiatric issues. Since then he had stopped taking part in protests.
He was now working as a salesman at a shop and was trying to start his own business of readymade clothes.

I would always tell him to call me several times a day as I don’t know how to operate a mobile phone. He would inform me even if he would go for a shave or haircut. I was happy that he will not be arrested again because he was not doing anything. He was not pelting stones or taking part in any demonstrations.

My son was not doing anything wrong and he was not given this chance. Isn’t this government forcing children to extremes by arresting them even when they did nothing? They did not give my son a chance to live. Isn’t it the right of our children to give them a chance to live?
They told me every day that they will release him in the evening till he was shifted to a jail in Uttar Pradesh. That is what they do to everyone. They are pushing people to the edge.
Only me and my God knows what is happening within me. I have left everything to God and pray to him only day and night.
My husband died fifteen years ago. He was a driver. He died suddenly. After my husband’s death, life has been really hard.

I forgot my husband’s tragedy now and I am only thinking about my son.
I have no purpose in life but to wait for my son’s return from jail. I will fight for him everywhere to bring him back till I am alive.”

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Hindu nationalists are transforming India into an Israel-style ethnostate

In recent weeks, police in India have been cracking down on thousands of protesters across the country. In many instances, local police are responding with brutality and deadly violence, setting out to inflict “maximum damage” on demonstrators. A video uploaded on social media shows officers in Kanpur cursing at protesters and targeting them with live fire. Another video, from the Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi, again shows policemen using live ammunition on protesters. Footage from the protests at Jamia also shows female student protesters rescuing their male colleagues from police violence.

The protests are in response to the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December. First introduced to parliament by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the law allows members of the Hindu, Jain, Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, and Christian communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to claim citizenship in India, while excluding Muslims from that clause.

While BJP members have portrayed the law to international audiences as a means of aiding minority groups from neighboring Muslim countries escape persecution, it is in fact the latest in a series of repressive steps the Indian government has taken against the country’s Muslim minority. By making religion a condition of Indian citizenship, the act has a more troubling purpose: to transform India into a Hindutva version of Israel.

Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is the political ideology followed by the BJP and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In pre-colonial times, followers of the Hindu religion never thought of themselves as a nation. As Professor Romila Thapar of Jawaharlal Nehru University argues, a national narrative of Hinduism only emerged after the writings of early 19th century British historians of India, such as James Mill, who wrote about a Muslim nation and a Hindu nation “perpetually antagonistic towards each other.”

The ideological father of today’s Hindu nationalism, however, is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. An early 20th century politician, he drew inspiration both from Nazi Germany and from the Zionist movement in advocating for India to become a Hindu ethnocratic state that treated Muslims “like negroes” in the United States of his time.

In late November, the Indian consul-general to New York City, Sandeep Chakravorty, cited Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as an example of what India is hoping to achieve in Kashmir. It is clear from the works of academics such as Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya that this view of Israel as a model for India is not only applicable in Kashmir — a territory under Indian military occupation for seven decades — but also within the “mainland” and other states.

In line with their ideological affinity to Zionism, the BJP pledged during the 2014 Indian elections to institute a policy similar to Israel’s Law of Return, which would grant Indian citizenship to Hindus from neighboring countries. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was subsequently introduced to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, in the summer of 2016.

Protests in many cities, such as Delhi, Hyderabad, and Lucknow, were expressions of solidarity with Muslim Indians. The earliest opposition to the bill, however, emerged in the state of Assam in 2016, where the Assam Gana Parishad Party criticized the BJP for seeking to compromise the identity of the indigenous Assamese people.

Although Hindus form most of Assam’s population, the question of indigenous rights in the state is a highly sensitive legacy of British colonial rule. It is widely known that the British promoted the movement of Bengali settlers to Assam, and even instituted Bengali as the official language of the courts in 1836.

The large-scale arrival of refugees from Bangladesh during its war of independence in 1971 led to violent pogroms by indigenous tribes against the refugees in the later part of the decade. Indigenous residents of other states in northeast India protested for similar reasons, most notably in Tripura.


India has always had a problematic relationship with the religious and ethnic minorities it has ruled over, who make up about 15 percent of the population — and with its Muslim minority in particular.

But the BJP’s de jure creation of tiered citizenship between Muslims and non-Muslims represents an alarming embrace of ethnocracy and apartheid.

Just as the repeal of Article 370 in August allows India to shrink Kashmir’s Muslim majority, the CAA is designed to facilitate a similar demographic change and diminish India’s Muslim population. This law is particularly dangerous when used alongside India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is the official record of India’s citizens as per the 1955 Citizenship Act. The register has not been updated in the vast majority of the country since the 1950s, yet Indian Home Minister Amit Shah declared in 2019 that it will be used to expel “each and every infiltrator in India.”

To make it onto the NRC, Indians will have to demonstrate possession of documents that prove their legal status prior to a cut-off date: March 24, 1971 in the case of Assam, for example. This poses an enormous problem to people who perhaps have not been able to hold onto such documents over the years.

In Assam, almost 2 million residents have not been able to make it onto the NRC, including about 700,000 Muslims. Although non-Muslims will be rendered stateless for a short period, the CAA will allow them to regain citizenship. Muslims, on the other hand, are excluded from this safeguard and may be forced to reside in detention centers.

The practical consequences of India’s NRC bear many similarities to Israel’s control of the population registry of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority may update its own copy of the citizenship registry, it is Israel that determines the status of Palestinians, including whether to recognize their legal documents or to decide the extent that they can freely move in and out of the occupied territories.

According to Israeli human rights non-profit B’Tselem, Israel has not updated the Palestinian population registry since 2000. The group also states that the reasons for Palestinians losing or not gaining official status by Israel include prolonged time spent abroad and absence from population censuses, among others.

In this context, Israel uses the Palestinian population registry to manipulate and engineer demographics in a way that suits Israeli settler-colonial ambitions. This is further supplemented by the arbitrary incarceration and detention of Palestinians as a form of population control.

The Indian state has employed oppressive structures and processes, ranging from state-sponsored massacres to full-blown military occupation, for virtually its entire history. However, the repeal of Article 370 and the adoption of the CAA are an escalation toward settler-colonial ambitions. It attempts to erase the association between indigenous peoples and their lands, while creating an association between non-indigenous settlers and those same lands.

It is no coincidence that these changes are occurring under the rule of Hindu nationalists and the most Israel-friendly administration in India’s history. As with Savarkar almost a century ago, the fascist dreams of Modi and other Hindu nationalists today remain inspired by the actions of Zionists.

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China's vanishing mosques - BBC News

The world’s indifference to Muslim woes

    Imagine if China had incarcerated upwards of a million Christians. Or India said it would take all refugees except Christian ones. The west would be in a state of frenzy. Since both China and India’s targets are Muslim, their cause is given short shrift. Both US president Donald Trump and UK prime minister Boris Johnson claim to champion oppressed Christians. By downplaying much larger-scale violations against Muslims, they jeopardise what remains of the west’s human rights credibility. Such passivity reinforces the global shift to religious nationalism that began in the Muslim world.

The coming year will test whether these double standards are here to stay. Because Muslims are resented more than other minorities, their plight tests whether liberal democracy means what it claims to mean. There are two reasons Muslims rank lower on the global totem pole than other groups. The first is politics. Opinion polls across the west — and beyond — show Muslims as the least trusted minority. They are thought to integrate less well and be more supportive of terrorism. People believe the Muslim reproductive rate is higher than other groups. Almost a quarter of the world’s population — roughly 1.8bn people — are Muslim.

The second is how badly most of the Muslim world treats its minorities. Whether it is Coptic Christians in Egypt, Shias in Saudi Arabia, or Sunnis in Iran, Muslim-majority countries are among the worst places in which to be a minority. Do not even think of being Jewish in an Arab country. Combine these two stereotypes and you have a world that is largely callous about the fate of Muslims where they are a minority. To put it crudely, popular opinion is telling them to taste their own medicine. The fact that Muslim countries, particularly in the Arab world, have barely raised a whisper against the plight of the Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang, or protested against India’s Hindu nationalist makeover, only underlines the loneliness of Muslim minorities. Even their own look the other way.

Both Mr Trump and Mr Johnson, among other western leaders, have done a great deal to stoke such caricatures. But there is another way of looking at it. The world’s three largest countries by population — China, India and the US — are to varying degrees now hostile to Muslims. In each case, Muslims are now at the forefront of civil rights struggles. Their chances look most hopeless in China, which is closing mosques, banning Muslim garb and enforcing a switch from Uighur to Chinese. Some call this “cultural genocide”. Most exiled Uighurs will not protest by name for fear of jeopardising relatives back home. Their fate is a barometer of how far Chinese president Xi Jinping is prepared to return China to totalitarianism.

As the world’s largest democracy, India offers greater scope for Muslims to resist. But it is a losing battle. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi wants to turn the country into a Hindu nation that elevates citizens whose faith is homegrown — Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists — as the only true Indians. Those who turn to Mecca or Rome for spiritual guidance are viewed as second class. Mr Modi did include Christians among the refugees India would accept in the recent Citizenship Amendment Act. Their exclusion would have sparked a western outcry. But he is uninterested in the fate of Myanmar’s Rohingyas, who are the world’s biggest victims of ethnic cleansing in recent years. It is worth stressing that it is Muslims who are leading the struggle to stop India’s slide into illiberal democracy.

Mr Trump is no bigger a fan of pluralism than Mr Modi — or Mr Xi for that matter. But America’s guardrails are far more robust. In Mr Trump’s first year, US courts blocked him from imposing a ban on visas from Muslim countries. He also scrapped plans to set up a database of US Muslims. But he launched his political career on the false claim that “Barack Hussein Obama” was a foreign-born Muslim. And he has reduced America’s intake of refugees to a historic low.

America no longer presents itself as a beacon. According to the Arab Barometer, there has been a rise in pro-secular sentiment — and a fall in support for Islamism — in the Muslim world over the past year. It would be a cruel irony if flickers of hope on the Arab street and beyond were to be extinguished by a world that appears to be heading in the opposite direction.




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