Areesh
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We expected this crisis to be a long interregnum of suffering, but one in which India’s demons of hate would be exiled. The ruling establishment had other plans.
The pandemic and severe lockdowns are a time of immense dislocation and dread for all Indians, as the country fights a malign mutating virus with no cure. But it is particularly a time of despair and desolation if you are an Indian Muslim.
There have been many difficult periods in the journey of Indian Muslims in free India. The hardest were the years around Partition, when bloodletting and hate against Muslims peaked, threatening many with violence and eviction from their homes and livelihoods, compelling millions to migrate to Pakistan. Each episode of communal violence brings back flashbacks of these troubling community memories of loss and pain, as do the hundreds of lynch attacks in the name of cow protection and ‘love jihad’ in recent years.
The movement for the construction of a Ram temple at the site of a medieval mosque and its razing by a fevered mob marked another peak. The years of terror attacks – when it became routine for successive governments to round up Muslim men for torture and years, even decades in prison before they were found innocent and released – have also left huge unhealed wounds.
The years since Narendra Modi was voted to power in Delhi midsummer in 2014 have been even harder. Vitriolic hate speech against Muslims by people holding the highest elected office became a routine part of social life. Large sections of the media, especially in Hindi and many Indian languages, became willing partners in this customary everyday hate-mongering. Muslims were systematically expelled from relevance and even participation in electoral politics. And intensely brutal, videotaped lynching of innocent people in numerous hate attacks around the country burned into the consciousness of India’s Muslims. The months since Modi was returned to power in 2019 witnessed constitutional and legal attacks targeting India’s Muslims, including downgrading and locking down Kashmir, criminalising triple talaq and the Ram temple judgment.
It was the nationwide popular upsurge protesting changes in citizenship laws and the proposed nationwide National Register Citizens which restored hope in the hearts of India’s Muslims, because people of all faiths, especially students, fought shoulder to shoulder, peacefully and spiritedly, against the discriminatory law.
But during the weeks that the coronavirus began penetrating India, the national capital was rocked by communal violence. Earlier, universities were assaulted and the Uttar Pradesh chief minister used his uniformed police to wreak revenge on the Muslim residents of his state. India’s Muslims, with secular Indians countrywide, were crafting strategies to resist the National Population Register.
All of this suddenly was thrust into already hazy memory, after Prime Minister Modi announced a harsh 21-day nationwide lockdown. As tens of millions of informal and self-employed workers were stranded overnight without work, food or healthcare, and without living arrangements in which social distancing is feasible, we expected this to be a long interregnum of suffering, but one in which India’s demons of hate would be exiled. That instead, the country would come together to fight the demons of hunger, unemployment and the terrifying pandemic.
Police personnel disperse daily wagers gathered along a road to receive food distributed by Delhi government during the nationwide lockdown, near Nigam Bodh ghat in New Delhi, Thursday, March 26, 2020. Photo: PTI/Manvender Vashist
The ruling establishment had other plans
But that was not to be. India’s ruling establishment had other plans. From March 13-15, an orthodox fundamentalist Muslim group called the Tablighi Jamaat held a large international gathering in their five-storey building in West Nizamuddin in Delhi called the Markaz, with many participants from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. Organising this meeting was enormously injudicious and would cost many lives. However, to place the matter in perspective, there were many religious, political and social gatherings held during this same period, and the Tablighi meeting was held with due permissions from the Union and Delhi governments. Similar gatherings of thousands in Hindu temples in Gujarat and Sikh gatherings in Punjab in the same period attracted negligible attention from the media and in official briefings.
https://thewire.in/communalism/coronavirus-anti-muslim-propaganda-india/
The pandemic and severe lockdowns are a time of immense dislocation and dread for all Indians, as the country fights a malign mutating virus with no cure. But it is particularly a time of despair and desolation if you are an Indian Muslim.
There have been many difficult periods in the journey of Indian Muslims in free India. The hardest were the years around Partition, when bloodletting and hate against Muslims peaked, threatening many with violence and eviction from their homes and livelihoods, compelling millions to migrate to Pakistan. Each episode of communal violence brings back flashbacks of these troubling community memories of loss and pain, as do the hundreds of lynch attacks in the name of cow protection and ‘love jihad’ in recent years.
The movement for the construction of a Ram temple at the site of a medieval mosque and its razing by a fevered mob marked another peak. The years of terror attacks – when it became routine for successive governments to round up Muslim men for torture and years, even decades in prison before they were found innocent and released – have also left huge unhealed wounds.
The years since Narendra Modi was voted to power in Delhi midsummer in 2014 have been even harder. Vitriolic hate speech against Muslims by people holding the highest elected office became a routine part of social life. Large sections of the media, especially in Hindi and many Indian languages, became willing partners in this customary everyday hate-mongering. Muslims were systematically expelled from relevance and even participation in electoral politics. And intensely brutal, videotaped lynching of innocent people in numerous hate attacks around the country burned into the consciousness of India’s Muslims. The months since Modi was returned to power in 2019 witnessed constitutional and legal attacks targeting India’s Muslims, including downgrading and locking down Kashmir, criminalising triple talaq and the Ram temple judgment.
It was the nationwide popular upsurge protesting changes in citizenship laws and the proposed nationwide National Register Citizens which restored hope in the hearts of India’s Muslims, because people of all faiths, especially students, fought shoulder to shoulder, peacefully and spiritedly, against the discriminatory law.
But during the weeks that the coronavirus began penetrating India, the national capital was rocked by communal violence. Earlier, universities were assaulted and the Uttar Pradesh chief minister used his uniformed police to wreak revenge on the Muslim residents of his state. India’s Muslims, with secular Indians countrywide, were crafting strategies to resist the National Population Register.
All of this suddenly was thrust into already hazy memory, after Prime Minister Modi announced a harsh 21-day nationwide lockdown. As tens of millions of informal and self-employed workers were stranded overnight without work, food or healthcare, and without living arrangements in which social distancing is feasible, we expected this to be a long interregnum of suffering, but one in which India’s demons of hate would be exiled. That instead, the country would come together to fight the demons of hunger, unemployment and the terrifying pandemic.
Police personnel disperse daily wagers gathered along a road to receive food distributed by Delhi government during the nationwide lockdown, near Nigam Bodh ghat in New Delhi, Thursday, March 26, 2020. Photo: PTI/Manvender Vashist
The ruling establishment had other plans
But that was not to be. India’s ruling establishment had other plans. From March 13-15, an orthodox fundamentalist Muslim group called the Tablighi Jamaat held a large international gathering in their five-storey building in West Nizamuddin in Delhi called the Markaz, with many participants from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. Organising this meeting was enormously injudicious and would cost many lives. However, to place the matter in perspective, there were many religious, political and social gatherings held during this same period, and the Tablighi meeting was held with due permissions from the Union and Delhi governments. Similar gatherings of thousands in Hindu temples in Gujarat and Sikh gatherings in Punjab in the same period attracted negligible attention from the media and in official briefings.
https://thewire.in/communalism/coronavirus-anti-muslim-propaganda-india/
