Muslims in India being dehumanised: Arundhati Roy

NEW DELHI: Arundhati Roy, an Indian human rights activist, said that the language being used by the mainstream media against the Muslims was designed to dehumanise them.

“To paint an entire community as ‘corona jihadis’ during this pandemic, when there is a pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is to create a genocidal climate,” she said.

“Over the last a couple of years, we have had so many instances of mob lynching and George Floyd-type killings – the difference in India being that Hindu vigilante mobs do the killing and the police, the legal system and the political climate help them to get away with it,” she maintained.

In an interview to a foreign media outlet, she said, “These episodes of violence and massacres against the Muslim minority in India are nothing new. Think of the pogrom that continued for months in 2002 in Gujarat, when Narendra Modi was chief minister of that state.”

Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight. Modi looked away and had never expressed regret. Quite the contrary. He has ridden to power on that legacy. He and his ministers are members of the Hindu supremacist RSS, the most powerful organisation in India whose founding ideologues were inspired by Mussolini and Italian fascism.

Hindu fascism has vernacular roots too. The caste system – a supposedly divinely ordained system of social hierarchy in which Brahmins consider themselves to be the master race – lays the foundation of fascist attitudes. But to come to the unfolding of events that set the tone of our lockdown – from the very beginning, immediately after its announcement at the end of March, the media spread the news of several cases of contagion in Nizamuddin, an area right in the centre of Delhi not far from where I live, that only a few weeks before had hosted a large conference organised by an Islamic congregation called Tablighi Jamaat, with numerous delegates from abroad.

Immediately the hashtag #CoronaJihad started to circulate on Twitter. Tablighis were branded “human bombs”. Muslims were being denied admission to hospitals and local BJP leaders and politicians were calling for Muslim fruit and vegetable sellers to be boycotted.

It was terrifyingly similar to how, during the rise of the Third Reich, Nazis began accusing Jews of being spreaders of disease, carriers of typhus. And the tone of the media – particularly channels like Zee TV and Republic TV began to sound like Radio Rwanda. These channels are especially rewarded by the Modi coterie, granted exclusive interviews by him and his terrifying home minister. The horror show is ongoing.

“Muslims are being dehumanised, ostracised economically as well as socially – if you read scholars of genocide like Robert Jay Lifton, they tell you that this is the first step, the way it all begins,” she said.