The ‘Muslim’ scare

Modi’s ascension to power in 2014 had caused dismay in India and elsewhere owing to his track record as an extremist with few scruples. His promises to promote Hindutva as a state doctrine led to fears about the fate of India’s 200 million-strong Muslim population.

Those fears have been heightened by the BJP’s big victory in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and the appointment of Yogi Adityanath as its chief minister. Furthermore, the party did not give a single ticket to Muslims despite their 20 percent share of the electorate.

These developments signal the beginning of harder times for the Muslims of India as seen in the hardening of the saffron brigade’s tone with regard to them. The official position on beef consumption and the unofficial slaughterhouses in the UP and other BJP-governed states has also become harsher. Tempers flared up in Modi’s home state of Gujarat where a mob of 5,000 Hindus attacked a Muslim village.

If Yogi and his camp followers pursue their hostile attitude towards Muslims too far, it will lead to the worsening of communal tensions and bloodshed. Their intolerance could lead to militancy among the Muslim youth. India can hardly afford to open yet another front in the midst of unrest and insurgency in so many parts of the country.

The last Muslim ruler of India was removed by the British more than 150 years ago. Yet Hindutva’s flag-bearers are keeping the fear of the Muslims alive as a vote-catcher alongside slogans laced with nationalism. Highly exaggerated fears of a rising Muslim population and of the conversions of Hindu girls through ‘love jihads’ have helped the BJP mobilise the voters.

Muslims represent 14 percent of India’s population as compared to 80 percent Hindus. The number of Hindu girls converting to Islam is negligible. The Hindutva brigade claims that the Muslim population will grow rapidly. As a result, they are urging Muslims and other minorities to embrace Hinduism. All sorts of measures are being taken to prevent the consumption and trade of beef.

However, India is not alone in witnessing the rise of anti-Muslim election campaigns as we see parallels in the US and some European countries with sizeable Muslim communities.

The European extreme right groups have openly called for stopping Muslim immigration and even threatened to send them back. The Alt-Right Movement in the US has a whole agenda of discouraging further Muslim migration. While the European electorate is not fatally attracted to the hate campaign –as witnessed in the recent elections in the Netherlands – the alt-right have managed to get their candidate Donald Trump elected as president of the world’s greatest democracy.

A newly emerging fear of Islam has gripped many countries. The argument goes that the Muslim population is growing in the US and many parts of Europe. Forecasts are being publicised to show how Muslims will be a majority in Europe and North America in 50 to 100 years.

In a video released in 2008 – and re-circulated this year on social media – a group of hate-mongers highlighted that the Western culture is irreversibly losing to Islam due to their falling birth rates while the Muslim population in the West is growing at a steady pace. Details of the declining fertility rates among Western women are provided in the video.

These highly exaggerated scenarios suggest that at the present rate of growth of its Muslim population, France will become an ‘Islamic republic’ in 40 years. Furthermore, in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, half of the population would consist of Muslims in a timeframe of between 15 and 20 years. By 2025, one of every three newly-born children in Europe will be Muslim.

It has been claimed that the Muslim population of the US, which once stood at 100,000, has already increased to nine million and is growing fast due to immigration. The projection of the Muslim population – rising first to one-fourth and eventually to half of the entire population of Europe and North America – is a pure fabrication. It serves as a wake-up call to the Christians to not only prevent the massive conversion of people to Islam but also curb the conversion of churches into mosques.

Donald Trump has called for an end to further Muslim immigration to the US and has even cracked down on non-immigrant visas for Muslims in violation of the US constitution. Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ has been checkmated by the judiciary. But this cannot prevent the administration from exercising unwritten restrictions on the entry of Muslims to the US.

These alarmist projections of the Muslim population have been recently disproved by the Pew Research Centre. On the one hand, their findings confirm that Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. There are over 1.6 billion Muslims in the world – which is 23 percent of the global population. At the existing trend, the Muslims will outnumber Christians by the end of this century. India will have more than 300 million Muslims by 2050, making it a country with the largest Muslim community in the world. But they will not exceed one-fifth of the Indian population.

According to the Pew Research Centre, the current Muslim population of the US is estimated at 3.3 million – about one percent of the total. This percentage is expected to rise to two percent by 2050. Their share of the European population is expected to grow to 10 percent by 2050. These estimates show that the figures about the phenomenal rise of the Muslim population in the West are highly exaggerated. But this provides little comfort for Muslim minorities facing the wrath of Yogi and Co.

Email: saeed.saeedk@gmail.com