Humayun Kabir :
NARENDRA Modi, a member of India’s Other Backward Class, defined as a socioeconomically disadvantaged caste, swept to power in 2014 by winning 336 seats together with his BJP alliance partners. Modi, who became well known for presiding over the 2002 anti-Muslim riots as chief minister of Gujarat, was installed as the prime minister. Both nationally and internationally, Modi’s success was seen as that of a charismatic leader who became popular due to his agenda for development, but ideologically, his party was committed to the promotion of Hindutva (the primacy of Hindu religious values), which threatened to undermine the accommodation of other religious minorities, in particular nearly 200 million Muslims. Two Islamophobic narratives in Modi’s political discourse have been mapped out in this writing. These are the erasers of Indian Muslim histories in Modi’s economic development agenda and the characterisation of Hinduism as having a taming effect on Islam in India.
With Modi assuming power, far-right populism started making inroads in India’s secular democratic culture, causing tremors across the nation. In 2019, Modi’s BJP continued the same Hindutva platform, winning the national elections for the second term with even a greater margin of seats in parliament. In this essay, we will unfold, objectively and factually, the influences of Modi’s far-right populism on India’s democratic system and the patterns through which Indian minorities have been experiencing structural violence in the form of suppression and human rights violations.
Hindu nationalism dates back to colonial-era writings of Indians such as author and politician V D Savarkar in his book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Hindu nationalists believe Hindus are the true sons of the soil because their holy lands are in India, whereas Christians and Muslim holy lands are outside India. Many, if not most, see Indian Muslims as suspect foreigners, even though most are descendants of Hindus who converted to Islam over centuries. India, a country with religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, has a Muslim population that accounts for nearly 15 per cent of the total population, by far the largest minority group. Like the Hindu population, India’s Muslim communities are diverse, with differences in caste, ethnicity, language, and access to political and economic power. India’s constitution, enacted 75 years ago, however, enshrined egalitarian principles, including social equality and non-discrimination. Article 25 of the constitution grants all individuals freedom of conscience, including the right to ‘practice, profess, and propagate religion’.
It is an accepted historic fact that Modi has long been associated with extreme Hindu nationalist policies. His policy has led to a series of acts of violence and state-level killings of Muslims across the country. The government has been implicated in promoting Hindu nationalism in a variety of ways, such as through state-supported anti-conversion laws. By February 2023, twelve of India’s twenty-eight states will have passed anti-conversion laws. Furthermore, Hindu mob attacks have become quite common, despite the Indian Supreme Court warning they could become the new normal. A Human Rights Watch report indicates that at least forty-four people have been killed by the vigilantes across states. Another report in February 2020 recorded major protests against the Citizenship Act of India’s constitution, which reduced eligibility for citizenship for non-Muslims from eleven years of living and working in India to six, though it deliberately excluded Muslims from this amendment. By any standard of measurement, hard evidence projects India’s democratic values to have taken a slide over the past decade. The Democracy Index 2020 defines 23 nations as absolute democracies, 52 as defective democracies, 35 as hybrid regimes, and 57 as authoritarian governments. India, in this index, is categorised as a ‘flawed democracy’, citing the cases of protests by farmers against the farmer law as well as India’s failure to contain and cease religious minority persecution within the states. Over the past five years, international media have repeatedly labelled India as an anti-democratic state.
It may be relevant here to note that populism and democracy around the world have shown an upward trend. Populism is gaining traction in constitutionally democratic countries like Turkey, Hungary, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Russia, India, and Pakistan. We have observed that populist regimes tend to exhibit authoritarian traits by adopting a posture of enmity against opposing political parties and using charges of corruption against religion, race, and caste. To augment India’s far-right populism, the BJP has undertaken, systematically, several policy measures to strengthen Modi’s Hindutva ideology, which advocates the idea that India’s sacred motherland is exclusively for Hindus. It has undermined India’s huge minority population in the cause of preserving a pure Hindu ethnic fabric. If prevailing patterns continue, as they seem to, India will devolve into an ethnic democracy — a majoritarian state that does not recognise the rights of religious minorities, notably Muslims. With Modi’s two triumphs in elections, India has transitioned from being a secular state to a Hindu expansionist authoritarian state with marginal constitutional protection for its Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. Worse, the Modi government has also been involved in making attempts to control and censor the media while aiming to destabilise several scholarly and cultural bodies. Also, BJP policy has marginalised religious minorities from Indian citizenship and identity, resulting in an upsurge in anti-religion sentiments in India’s public discourse. The party, which is a political wing of ‘Sangh Parivar’, a grouping of Hindu extremist organisations, considers non-Hindus as foreign to India and openly and aggressively promotes the ‘Hinduisation’ of Indian culture. In addition to the BJP, a range of other Hindu nationalist groups operate in the country, including the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Shiv Sena. These groups often work together in their effort to ‘saffronise’ India through violence, intimidation, and harassment of religious minorities.
Examples abound of regular attacks on Muslims and other minorities in several states in India in the past 5 years. A serious clash in Delhi in 2020 exemplifies the nature of such violence. Groups of people protested the adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act. Some 50 people were killed, most of them Muslims, in the communal violence. The police watched in silence and let the Hindu mobs kill the Muslims in broad daylight. A 2021 Human Rights Watch report found that authorities had not investigated police complicity while they had charged more than a dozen protesters. In May 2022, two BJP officials made profane comments about Prophet Muhammad, sparking protests across India and condemnation from Muslim-majority countries. This year, Modi led the inauguration of the new Hindu temple in Ayodhya, built over the site of the Babri Mosque, which was demolished by Hindu mobs 31 years ago, under Modi’s watch. Hate speech and misinformation by BJP-led sources spread online have also encouraged violence against Muslims.
Another major element of the BJP rule is the impunity of security forces. Allegations of torture and extrajudicial killings persisted, with the National Human Rights Commission registering 147 deaths in police custody, 1,882 deaths in judicial custody, and 119 alleged extrajudicial killings in 2022. The Border Security Force frequently used excessive force along the Bangladesh border, targeting Indian residents, irregular immigrants, and cattle traders from Bangladesh. In August 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau reported 50,900 cases of crimes against Dalits in the previous year, an increase of 1.2 per cent over the previous year. Crimes against Adivasi communities increased by 6.4 per cent, with 8,802 cases over three years.
Civil society organisations too fell victim to the Modi regime’s iron hand. Authorities harassed and threatened the activities of rights groups through politically motivated prosecutions, tax raids, allegations of financial irregularities, and the use of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, the law regulating foreign funding of NGOs. Violence against women and girls continued at alarming rates, with 31,677 cases of rape in 2021 alone, an average of 86 cases daily, giving India the top place in the list for such a crime in the world.
In this short space, I have highlighted a few samples of the Modi government’s anti-people and anti-minority policies as part of his Hindutva mandate. The essence of this write-up is to make the readers aware that our neighbour India, which played a key role in helping Bangladesh successfully defeat the Pakistani occupation army, has turned into an undependable neighbour.
If the trend continues unabated with the BJP’s future activities inspired by its Hindutva mandate, there is no doubt that this political philosophy will soon turn India into an autocratic nation. And if the BJP returns to power in the current national elections, as it seems likely, it can only get worse. There will be a lot more reasons for India’s South-Asian neighbours to worry about.
Humayun Kabir ([email protected]) is a former United Nations official in New York.
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