Secularists, don't feel elated

There's a wave of elation sweeping among many Indians at the way Gulf anger has forced the Central government to eat crow and disown its own favoured, hate-spewing spokespersons.

The elation is understandable. Whatever Indians were doing to resist their country's steady march towards becoming a Hindu Rashtra was not enough. The transformation from a secular country to one where the majority imposed its will with brute force on minorities continued unabated, as independent institutions that had earlier taken on the State for infringing human rights and the Constitution now simply waffled or gave in. Opposition parties were only able to halt this march in states ruled by them.

So, if the same government that's leading this transformation has had to, in an official international statement, swear by India's diversity and affirm its respect for all religions, some amount of satisfaction is natural, even if everybody knows that these pious sentiments are only being expressed because of the sweet smell of money.

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However, is this episode something that should make secularists feel elated? Not really.

Every one of the Islamic countries now summoning our ambassadors to express disapproval of the way Prophet Muhammed had been denigrated by the Indian ruling party's members has honoured the Indian prime minister with their highest civilian awards. And these honours were conferred on him at a time when Indians were being hounded by his supporters primarily for being followers of Prophet Muhammad.

Consider this timeline.

In April 2016, Saudi Arabia, the most overtly Islamic of all Islamic countries, conferred its highest civilian honour on Narendra Modi.

This was just a fortnight after 32-year-old cattle trader Mazlum Ansari and his friend's son, 12-year-old Imtiaz, were lynched and then hung from a tree in Jharkhand while on their way to sell cattle at a cattle fair.

This incident was reminiscent of the way Blacks used to be lynched in the US. But no less gruesome had been the four lynchings of Muslims that had preceded this one within a short span of six months. The first had taken place in September 2015 in Uttar Pradesh, where 50-year-old Akhlaq, father of an Indian Air Force corporal, was lynched in his own home. Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Rajasthan were the sites of the other three lynchings – comprising a wide arc across north India where Muslims were no longer safe.

The trigger for these lynchings was two-fold, and both reasons were related to Narendra Modi's ascension as PM in May 2014.

The primary reason was the beef ban put in place or made more stringent in all BJP-ruled states after Modi became PM; the second was the empowerment of Hindu vigilantes that happened soon after. By December 2018, Hindus calling themselves go-rakshaks felt emboldened enough to lynch a police inspector in UP who was trying to rein them in.

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When inspector Subodh Singh was lynched, India had already become Lynchistan, a name given by Indians themselves to describe a place where lynch mobs acted with impunity, enjoying the open support of the police and ruling party members. The Supreme Court had, by then, ordered states to appoint special officers to prevent such lynchings and asked the Centre to enact a law making lynching a separate offence with stringent punishments.

Yet, as if completely unaware of all this, between April 2016 and April 2019, Afghanistan, the UAE, Bahrain, the Maldives and of all places, Palestine, had conferred their highest civilian awards on PM Modi. He had also been given grand ceremonial welcomes in Qatar and Iran, and would have been given one in Kuwait in January, had Omicron not foiled his trip.

Obviously, the targeted killings of Muslims only because of their diet didn't move the governments of these Islamic countries. But an insulting reference to Prophet Muhammed on TV by the ruling party's official spokesperson angered them enough to admonish India about the "insult to the world's 2 billion Muslims". What about the daily humiliations that India's 204 million Muslims and their religion were being subjected to on prime time by anchors on mainstream TV channels? What about the recent attacks on their faith: the shaming of hijab-wearing students and teachers by a BJP government and the hoisting of saffron flags atop mosques by BJP supporters?

That remained an "internal matter", of no concern to the world's Islamic powers.

But in fact, it is our internal matter. We must acknowledge that the way our minorities are treated remains our responsibility, especially when the majority community is an overwhelming 78 per cent. The way foreign governments react to our openly Hindutva government won't change the daily lives of our minorities. Only our consistent opposition will.

(Jyoti Punwani is a journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.