India’s slippery slope on minority rights
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It’s been more than three weeks that Indian stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui was arrested for a crime he never committed and has since been languishing in a jail in the central Indian city of Indore. A member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) complained to the police that he overheard the comedian cracking a joke that hurt Hindu sentiments. Farurqui was arrested in no time despite local police claiming there was no evidence any offensive jokes were made at all
Journalist Siddique Kappan has been behind bars for close to two months. He was picked up by the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government when he was travelling to a village in Hathras district to cover the aftermath of the alleged gang rape and death of a Dalit woman. Kappan, who is an elected member of the Kerala Union of Working Journalists, now faces sedition and terror charges.
In India, intolerance has become an everyday instance and discrimination in the name of religion is a new normal in South Asia’s biggest democracy.
It is ironic therefore, that India sparred with Pakistan over minority rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in light of all that has transpired in the country over the last six years.
Several instances and episodes illustrate how and why Muslims in India feel a sense of siege they’d never before felt in the seven decades after independence.
The crackdown last year on students and activists who participated in protests against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a legislation which if read along with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), is an exercise in identifying so-called ‘genuine’ citizens of India, creating fear among Muslim minorities that they might be declared stateless if they fail to provide documentary proof of their ancestry in India. The CAA guarantees citizenship to all religious groups from neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but excludes Muslims.
Resistance against the CAA resonated all across India early last year with Delhi becoming the epicentre where Muslims and others held sit-in protests for over three months.
The ruling BJP organized counter protests culminating in unprecedented religious violence in North East Delhi in the last week of February, claiming over 50 lives, mostly Muslims. Independent investigators, media reports and the Delhi Minority Commission in their investigations blame the Modi government for the Delhi violence and subjecting Muslims to untold misery.
Six years of Modi’s rule has created a political eco-system that makes the Indian minority feel consistently anxious and alienated in their own country. So, can India really claim the high moral ground on minority rights at the UNGA now?
Sanjay Kumar
No one from the government offered a word of sympathy or any worthwhile compensation to the victims of the violence. BJP leaders seen in videos inciting the violence, remain free.
That the government is acting partisan became clearer when many students and activists who were part of the anti-CAA protests came to be arrested with some of them framed under the draconian terror law.
By coming down heavily on Muslims, who are at the receiving end of the CAA, the government wants to send a clear message that the minority cannot have a political voice.
Anti-Muslim hate campaigns reached new heights when within weeks of declaring a nationwide lockdown on March 25, a less known Islamic seminary, the Tablighi Jamat (TJ) came to be blamed for spreading coronavirus in the entire country.
The anti-conversion laws that some of the BJP-ruled state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh brought in the last months of last year, also betray a deep-seated, divisive design to deny inter-religious interactions in society. The laws are based on the premise that inter-religious marriages are meant for conversions and that Muslim men have launched a “love jihad” against Hindu women where they lure women from the majority community and then convert them after marrying them. The move is aimed at injecting political and social alienation in the largest minority in India.
Meanwhile, Muslim majority Kashmir fears New Delhi is working on designs to alter the demography of the state by bringing in a new set of domicile laws.
Six years of Modi’s rule has created a political eco-system that makes the Indian minority feel consistently anxious and alienated in their own country.
So, can India really claim the high moral ground on minority rights at the UNGA now? The short answer is no.
– Sanjay Kumar is a New Delhi based journalist with experience of covering South Asia for more than fifteen years. He is the correspondent for Arab News in Delhi.
Twitter: @destinydefier
