close
Thursday March 28, 2024

The forgotten lockdown

By Moin Ul Haque
June 14, 2020

The entire world is in the grip of the coronavirus. Lockdowns, curfews, social distancing are being employed to contain the pandemic.

The deserted streets and shopping centres around the world have an eerie resemblance to a recent situation in a region existing on this same planet. The eight million people of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOK) had to suffer the ignominy of comparable restrictions not because of a biological genome, but from a virus of hate, systematically manufactured in the laboratory of the RSS – the ideological water head of the BJP.

IOK has been under curfew and lockdown for more than eight months. This is being enforced brutally by nearly 900,000 of the Indian military, making the region the most militarized zone in the world. The people are caged, children cannot go to school, the sick to hospitals, or the dead to a proper burial. These draconian restrictions are not to contain a viral pandemic, but to suppress the will of a people who simply want the protection of their fundamental rights and fulfilment of promises made to them.

This Virus of Hate being spread in India through a carefully crafted plan targeting minorities, especially the 200 million Indian Muslims, has slowly but surely led to the death of humanity in a country which once took pride in its diversity and secular traditions.

The country started its slide towards religious intolerance and communal violence immediately after the BJP came into power in 2014. Public lynching of innocent Muslim citizens by RSS goons and supporters became a norm. Sadly, the BJP leadership encouraged this crowd vigilantism by themselves preaching hate and violence against Muslims.

The BJP and RSS’ Hindutva agenda is no more a secret. For them, India is only for Hindus, and the remaining Indian Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are second-class citizens who must embrace Hindu culture and values in order to earn the right to live in India. According to celebrated Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the RSS compares the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany believing that Muslims have no place in Hindu India. She notes that BJP leaders in their speeches repeatedly cast Muslims as “treacherous permanent outsiders”, whose only place is either the “graveyard or Pakistan”. French scholar Christophe Jafferlot notes that “Hindu nationalists see themselves as the true sons of soil, whereas they view Muslims and Christians as products of bloody foreign invasions”.

After the BJP won election in 2014, ‘saffronisation’ of Indian history and cultural practices started with a renewed vigour. Roads named after Mughal kings have been renamed, while Muslim rulers have been demonized. Even the iconic Taj Mahal was not spared when the UP government excluded it from its Tourism Booklet issued in 2017.

The BJP’s first term in government was more ostensibly focussed on its economic agenda and forging international partnerships, but under the close watch of Prime Minister Modi and his cohorts the grounds were also prepared in a sustained manner for the party’s Hindu-First agenda and ‘remaking of India into an authoritarian, Hindu nationalist state’. To achieve this, the BJP systematically gained control of key government institutions.

Samanth Subramanian writing in the Guardian last year termed it as the most serious crisis of India’s 72 years of existence. He noted that India’s “courts, much of its media, its investigative agencies, its election commission – have been pressured to fall in line with Modi’s policies”. The nexus between ultra-nationalist Indian media and BJP, in particular, has reached dangerous proportions.

It is also being feared that Hindutva ideology would ultimately lead to the undoing of the Indian constitution. Thus, the decades old RSS scheme for creating a Hindu nation was being achieved in a methodical manner by infecting the minds of the majority with a virus of hate and through constant vilification of the minority communities. The majority of Indian Hindus played along wilfully. Others had no choice but to keep silent as anyone with a dissenting voice would be dubbed as a traitor and anti-national.

For some this psychotic behaviour may seem an aberration in a diverse country like India, yet there was a method in this RSS madness, making this hateful pathogen seep deep into the power corridors and the city.

The sweeping victory in the 2019 election further energized Modi and his supporters. With a no-holds-barred approach, the Hindutva plan was placed on a fast track mode. The first step was the illegal bifurcation of the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir on 5th August last year. To impose its will, the Indian government moved over 100,000 additional troops to the Kashmir valley, cutting the telephone lines and the internet, imposing curfew, and jailing political leaders. This unprecedented lockdown continues to this day, sadly pushing the innocent Kashmiris back to the dark ages.

Next on the agenda was the pending court’s decision about the fate of the decades-old case of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The Indian Supreme Court in November last year in its ‘bizarre’ verdict, while terming the 1992 demolition of mosque as unlawful, handed over the property for the building of a temple to the same forces responsible for the destruction in the first place. The ugly mob justice was thus ironically sanctified by the highest court of the country.

The third stage of the Hindutva plan was the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which allowed religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to acquire Indian citizenship except Muslims. The bill’s anti-Muslim slant was too obvious. It was immediately criticized as anti-constitutional and was seen as part of the BJP’s agenda to marginalise Muslims.

Despite the country-wide protests against the new law which was also joined by liberal segments of society, the BJP leadership did not budge. Instead they were now more vocal and open in their bias towards Muslims. BJP parliamentarian Subramanian Swamy in a media interview unashamedly termed Muslims as troublemakers and claimed that they did not deserve equal rights.

And then it happened. A lesson was given to these ‘troublemakers’. For three days in February this year, Muslim houses, businesses and worship places in north-east New Delhi were burnt and destroyed by frenzied Hindu mobs, dozens of Muslims were killed brutally while police watched silently and even facilitated the rioters. New York Times writing about Delhi Police complicity noted that this was “the inevitable result of Hindu extremism that has flourished under the government of Narendra Modi”. The nature of the New Delhi violence was hauntingly evocative of Gujarat pogrom of 2002, when over 1,000 Muslims were butchered by extremist Hindus. It was no coincidence that Modi was the chief minister of the state at that time.

Shahzaman Haque, the director of the Urdu Department at INALCO Paris, in his article about Delhi massacre wrote: “Delhi’s orchestrated pogrom against Muslim community is a glimpse of the potential genocide which is lurking in our society”. Being an Indian Muslim himself, his personal pain over their fate being ‘turning from second-class citizens to full pariahs’ could be felt throughout the article.

Now, when the world is facing an unprecedented health crisis, Modi and his Hindutva supporters have found a new way to vilify Muslims by portraying them as alleged spreaders of the coronavirus. Dedicated trolls of social media spread fake news while Islamophobic hashtags like ‘CoronaJihad’ and ‘BioJihad’ have created fresh grounds for anti-Muslim propaganda.

The BJP government sadly but not surprisingly chose to fight the coronavirus pandemic by unleashing their own signature Virus of Hate. The BJP’s nationalist agenda with all its communal colouring and selective approach is in full bloom. Today everybody is talking about the social distress and economic downturns brought about by a few weeks of lockdowns to control the coronavirus, yet the untold miseries caused by a months-old lockdown in Jammu and Kashmir have been regrettably forgotten.

Sadly, the international community with its own narrow considerations has been a silent spectator. Unless the conscience of humanity is awakened, the Indian religious minorities, especially the 200 million Muslims, will continue to face the impending existential threat.

Let there be some sanity. Major powers that champion democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms must play their due role and demonstrate responsibility in calling out these excesses in India.

The writer is Pakistan’s ambassador to France.