By; Abu Raied

Islamophobia takes route to India and further gets Indianized with the added fuel of communalism, sectarianism and misogynist fervor. Hence, the plights of Indian Muslims are graver so much so, that the term Islamophobia seems too conservative to host them. The perils of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes in India have already passed the test of undermining the basic human rights, otherization of Muslims and doubting their citizenship and now, under a very tacit approval of ongoing regime the right winger extremists come to the extent to give an open call for Rohingya-like genocide and their exodus from Indian soil.

In a very recent gathering held at Haridwar in Uttarakhand under the name of “Dharma Sansad’ or ‘Religious Parliament’ a large folk of right-wing activists, Hindu religious monks and hardline Hindutva organisations rose in union to pave the way for an impending genocidal violence against Muslims.

Swami Prabodhanand Giri, president of the Hindu Raksha Sena, a right-wing organization from Uttarakhand invokes in such a way that “like in Myanmar the police, the politicians, the army and every individual Hindu must take up arms and we will have to conduct cleanliness drive (safai abhiyan). This is the only solution we are left with”

“Even If 100 of us pledge and are prepared to kill 2 million (Muslims), then we will be victorious ... Be prepared to kill and be ready to go to jail, “said PoojaS adhvi Annapurna aka Pooja Shakun Pandey, the mahamandleshwar of the Niranjani Akhara.

Notwithstanding, the voices raised from across globe urging for strong actions against the agents involved in such activities, a very little has been done so far, the inaction and tardy attitude of the regime creates the ecosystem for normalization of such happenings like the lynching of Muslims and marginalized ones became a neo-normal in India, one could hardly have a news flesh of this everyday phenomenon.

In an unsaid complicit with government, the Hindu majoritarianism hatches up a pattern of dehumanizing the Muslims and then brings it into the public which further taken up by the pet mainstream media and highly trained cyber gangs to give it legitimacy and propagation through several mediums and platforms including the most effective of them the “WhatsApp university”.  

With the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP)- known for its roots in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right wing-Hindu group- accession to power in 2014, the series of events and policies against Muslims unfolded in the same fashion.  

This process starts with the routine portrayals of Islam as a religion of hatred, violence and Muslims as the executive agents of these teachings in the different forms of Jihad like ‘love-jihad’, ‘economic jihad’, ‘population jihad’, ‘corona jihad’, ‘bio jihad’, and ‘media jihad’ etc. Every now and then they come up with new term coupled with Jihad to exploit populist fears. Islamophobia prevails in many ways in everyday life of Muslims in India, their names, belongings, symbols, culture, language or anything having association with them are under severe attack.

The added misogyny to Islamophobia which recently surfaced in an incident where some prominent and outspoken Muslim women have been sold in a fake online auction which followed a similar incident held online July 2021. These incidents are quite enough to damage their emotional and mental well-being.

To name a few, right from implementing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam that created havoc by pushing almost two million people on the brink of statelessness, curtailing the semi-autonomous status of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu & Kashmir by abrogating the article 370, the enactment of the communally divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that selectively excludes Muslims from its ambit to the discriminatory laws against Muslims enacted by the politically dominant Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led governments in the states such as The Haryana Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act, 2015, The Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 2017, Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2019, Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020 have left Muslims on the verge of sinking.

Muslims in India are, in fact, facing the existential dilemma as rightly expressed by bunch of thought leaders and activists that the exponential increase in dogwhistle attacks on Muslims may potentially lead to an impending genocide of Muslims in India.

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All the opinions expressed here are those of the authors and don’t necessarily express Al-Mujtama views