File photo. Tolga Akmen—AFP
Indian columnist Jawed Naqvi, writing in Dawn, says: “There was a time when India would offer beautifully produced Taj Mahal and Meenakshi temple coffee-table books from its treasure of secular memorabilia to share with distinguished visitors. That was its home policy woven into foreign policy. It’s how India was and still is seen by many foreigners, as a miraculously working democracy with an enviable multicultural heritage. However, today’s India offers copies of the Geeta, the sacred Hindu text, which was in any case always loved as Gandhi’s inspiration for willpower and courage. A copy of the Geeta would be placed in hotel drawers, sometimes separately, at others together with Gideon’s Bible.”
There is nothing wrong in using religion as a part of a country’s culture, and Geeta is one book that should appeal to any secular person and any broad-minded religious person, too. But what the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under Prime Minister Narendra is doing to other religions in India twists the meaning of the Geeta policy for the world. It goes as far back as seven years ago when something amiss was noted: the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) indicted India in its 2015 report on religious discrimination, while the European Union also put it on a list of “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom.
Since the late 1990s, India has seen a Hinduization that is clearly aimed against non-Hindus generally and Muslims particularly. Tragically the Indian majority does not seem to mind this “Hinduization” going against Delhi’s secular constitution just as Pakistan’s Islamization has the backing of its Muslim majority. But the difference of the two developments is the crudity with which the BJP is acting.
When BJP focused its religious prejudice on India’s Muslim minority in relation to the spread of coronavirus, the world took note. In a series of posts on Twitter, the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC-IPHRC) urged the Indian government to take urgent action to protect the rights of Muslims in its state: “We condemn the unrelenting vicious Islamophobic campaign in India maligning Muslims for the spread of COVID-19, as well as their negative profiling in media subjecting them to discrimination and violence with impunity.”
The impact of BJP’s rule has been to embolden extremists and create a culture where religious chauvinism can flourish. Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch says: “More than riots, Muslims fear the pinpricks: it is the Muslim vegetable vendor who is suddenly beaten up, it is when Muslim families say they are worried about taking lunch boxes because they don’t know when they’re going to be accused of carrying beef.” Nirupama Subramanian, writing in The News stated: “Each incident of violence against a Muslim, and the normalization of such violence, has chipped away at the idea of India. Each has gone viral in Kashmir. Every Kashmiri boy and girl stores videos of Muslims being beaten across India on their mobile phones. India’s casual daily violence against minorities is a self-fulfilling prophesy for Kashmiris.”