Hindutva violence in India and the world’s silence
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From December 17 to 19, India grappled with some of the darkest days in its history of communal violence. At a conference held in Haridwar, 150 miles north of New Delhi, an open call to kill Muslims was made by Pooja Shakun Pandey, a leader of Hindu Mahasabha, a militant organization, who asked the participants to be ready to kill and go to jail. She said: “If 100 of us are ready to kill two million of them (Muslims) then we will win.” To give a graphic depiction to this call, one of the Hindu seers from the podium instructed his followers to mimic the crackdown against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as a model. The Dharma Sansad (Hindu convention) was attended by some leaders of the ruling elite. In a similar move, Swami Parmatmanand, one of India’s leading religious scholars, encouraged his listeners at a rally, held in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district on October 1, 2021, to kill converted Christians. The hateful speech was also delivered in the presence of influential BJP leaders.
It is not so much the violence against minorities than the eerie silence of those who matter on the political, social, and philosophical spectrum that makes peace-loving Indians jittery about the future of their country. The blanket silence of the ruling party, the indifference of the opposition, the inertia of police, the absence of serious concern from rights activists, and the apathy of the world have emboldened the struggle of the right-wing Hindu ideologues to convert India from a multicultural and pluralistic country into a Hindu state. The struggle called Hindutva has been pushed full throttle since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come to power in 2014 and then re-elected with a larger majority in May 2019.
Modi faced no opposition in the “Summit for Democracy,” hosted last month by President Joe Biden, where he painted himself as the champion of free speech, the rule of law, and secular and pluralistic ethos.
Durdana Najam
By definition, Hindutva refers to a political ideology that aims to create an ethnic Hindu state in India. Several organizations, cutting through different disciplines, work simultaneously to implement the ideology. In the political domain, it is the BJP. At the religious and paramilitary level, it is the Rashtriya Sawayamsewak Sangh (RSS). In the social and global realm, it is Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and as an extremist group (foot soldiers), it is the Bajrang Dal. These organizations have fed the Hindutva struggle with academic political, and religious dishonesty. They have altered history to trivialise Muslims' role and legitimise Hindu nationalist ideology. They have enacted laws that go against India’s secular constitution. They lynch Muslims for eating beef to protect cows. They forcefully convert Christians to Hinduism under the special project called ‘Ghar Wapsi’, which literally means bringing all those people back into the folds of Hinduism who had left their religion.
The beginning of the Hindutva project was the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 followed by mass violence against Muslims across India. In 2005, Narendra Modi as the Chief Minister was barred from setting foot on US soil because of his inaction on the systematic and organized killing of thousands of Muslims in 2002 in Gujarat.
Today the minorities of India have no sympathiser in the international community. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the State Department, after listing India twice consecutively as the Country of Particular Concern for Religious Freedom, to include India to its ‘red list’ of countries for engaging in "systematic, on-going and egregious" violations of religious freedom. The US government ignored the recommendation. Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and the International Federation for Human Rights wrote a letter to the meeting of European Union (EU) Foreign Ministers held in Slovenia in September expressing concern over the organization’s failure to ‘effectively engage’ India on human rights issues. No action was taken. Modi faced no opposition in the “Summit for Democracy,” hosted last month by President Joe Biden, where he painted himself as the champion of free speech, the rule of law, and secular and pluralistic ethos. On the other hand, Pakistan has been increasingly warned to stop the misuse of the blasphemy law, lest the European Union scrapes Pakistan’s G Plus status.
No doubt Pakistan has had its issue of dealing with religious fanaticism culminating in the murder of Punjab’s governor in 2011 and not to speak of the recent barbaric killing of a Sri Lankan citizen in Sialkot, Pakistan, on the false charges of blasphemy. However, the state of Pakistan has never created an organized cult to purge the country of non-Muslims as is happening in India. The Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Interfaith Harmony and Religious Affairs, Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, has taken several steps lately to remove religious and faith-based misunderstandings and anomalies against minorities in Pakistan.
The silence of the international community is perhaps best explained by the US and other influential countries' economic interest in India.
— Durdana Najam is an oped writer based in Lahore. She writes on security and policy issues.
Twitter: @durdananajam
