The recent tweet by Barkha Dutt, where she proudly endorses the equivalence of Kumbh deaths due to government negligence to Bakri Eid, is just one example
By Rushda Siddiqui New Delhi
What is interesting about the issue of Secular Islamophobia in India, is the manner in which it has been identified and marked by students and activists who are in their late teens or early twenties. Islamophobia is rampant in India. It is taught in schools and carefully nurtured in political and popular discourses. On political platforms it has tendency to be blood thirsty, on social platforms it leads to varied kinds of social distancing by stigmatizing and marginalizing.
With a strong diaspora and global presence, some predict that India’s brand of Islamophobia will become a global problem in times to come. Assessing the magnitude of the problem has not been easy, as a result, finding solutions to it too will be difficult and complex.
The Islamophobia being talked about is not the guile the mainstream media routinely and vomits on prime time. This is the creeping narratives that are finding footholds and gaining acceptance on social media platforms. From Twitter to Facebook, to internet news portals, these narratives are marked by false information, false equivalences and discourses that are subtle, but unabashedly Islamophobic.
The recent tweet by Barkha Dutt, where she proudly endorses the equivalence of Kumbh deaths due to government negligence to Bakri Eid, is just one example. It is a perfect example of the shifting narratives that showcase blatant hatred for everything Muslims and the practices of Muslims (https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1406188646407888898). The other example would be India Today’s article that justified the statements on population control by Muslims by the CM of Assam (https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/why-himanta-biswa-sarma-wants-assam-s-muslims-to-adopt-birth-control-1814260-2021-06-13).
These are just examples to highlight the fact that in India, secular media and narrative is conveniently masked. For every four tweets against misgovernance by Modi or any other BJP CM, there is a fifth that revels in Muslim bashing. Everything bad or objectionable in India needs a Muslim equation or parallel.
Equate Kumbh with the Tabligh, equate Modi’s ambition of building with those of Mughal emperors (even if it is Shah Jahan and not Aurangzeb), equate demonitization with Tughlak, draw parallels between lynching by Hindutva forces with imaginary persecution of Hindus under the Mughals.
The list of analogies drawn, would be endless. It has taken over a century to build the image of the monster, and it will take volumes to cover the entire gamut of chronicles of hate.
There are two main reasons we need to understand regarding why it is important to highlight the issue. The first is the speed at which the language is percolating in everyday life of the country. When neutral people with no political leanings, find such language to be normal and acceptable, we have a problem at hand. We, In India, need to be particularly concerned. History has been extremely unkind to those who succumbed to silences at the outset.
So, we have a rich history of caste marginalization. The social distances created by disparaging castes has been so strong that they have percolated the mindsets of the adherents of Abrahamic religions. We will not divert our energies to elaborating how the caste question plays amongst Muslims in India.
Here all we need to remember is the warning that scholars like Edward Saeed gave to us. His work is a warning about subtle shifts in narratives demonizing communities and laying the foundations horrors like colonialism, racism, genocide and the holocaust. He has warned, with evidence, that overlooking subtle shifts in descriptions about social groups, will lead to history being written by the strong.
The subaltern movements need to deconstruct these, and the Muslim movements need to understand the hidden bigotry, to counter it. For the militarily strong Europeans, if the Jews were Shylocks and inhuman in amassing wealth, the Muslims were savage and uncivilized. If the world needed to be ethnically cleansed of Jews, it also needed to tame the Muslims.
The second is the potential genocide that the now no longer fringe narratives, will justify. As the Indian diaspora expands, it will take its brand of understanding Muslims and Islam to remote corners of the world. The fomentation given by this population to right wing or neo-Nazi movements in different parts of the world, will have an impact on Muslims and marginalized communities across the globe. Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard are tips of the iceberg.
The pushing out of Muslims from academia, the discrimination that Muslims will experience in workplaces in different parts of the world from media to medicine, the creation of international lobbies that will buy political leaders who will brush human rights abuse reports under the carpet as was done with the USCRIF reports, are some of the developments that we are beginning to see in different parts of the world.
Here we need to understand why does Islamophobia, that emanates from India, need special attention. The answer lies in the roots of its origin and the vehicle of its spread. Founded in British India, the hatred against Muslims found two kinds of platforms to broadcast its message.
The first lay in the political, where a section of ideologues began with an innocuous movement to take out processions through Muslim dominated areas as an exercise to display and flaunt dominant identity, and grew to seeking the banning of beef as food by Muslims. These were moves to create and highlight flaws in a religion, by targeting adherents and practices.
The second is more important. It lay in using the education systems to create cadres of Muslim hating populations. At the time of Independence, the parallel school system was more widespread than the government educational institutions.
When the NEP draft of 2019 was released, it was estimated that the school system run by alleged Hindu philanthropists is nearly as larger, if not larger than the secular school system founded by successive state governments from the 1950s. On paper, a barely 50% literate population or a 13% population with graduation and access to higher education, seems innocuous.
In reality, it is controlling popular media and extending its tentacles on other platforms. In the 1990s, the popular slogan was: in the age of the internet, ignorance is by choice. Two decades after the turn of the millennium, that very medium is gradually being taken over by right wingers to spread hate, bigotry, misogyny and violence. The famous bot accounts created by the BJP IT cell are just one example of how there is a structured school of ideologues who can infest various platforms with hate and justifications of violence.
It is not that there is no resistance to this spread of bigotry. The push back has been hard, particularly from those educated in secular education or abroad. Socialists, centrists, caste activists, feminist movements are some of the more prominent saviours of democracy and honesty. This article is not about their laudable contributions, but about the responses of Muslims.
It is the educated Muslims who are failing, not just the community, but those who are trying to safeguard their interests. There is a large section of our population that believes in glorifying our past heroes and reformers. With an access to the internet, there is a very conscious effort to build a narrative about the glories of a pre-British India. There are debates and voluble talks about how Muslims are an integral part of India. The Shaheen Bagh movement gave them the job of trying to enact the role of being custodians of the Constitution. These are however, diversionary tactics.
This is where the understanding of the dimensions of the war being waged on us need to be understood. Identify with the marginalized and the oppressed. Call out the bigotry and hate. Warn the leftists of the Islamophobes in secular clothing. The last job can be done best by Muslims and no one else. Learn from Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. Understand that the war being waged is multipronged and extremely evolved. History of the religion will not give solutions, only inspirations. The solution lies in understanding the game and playing it. Copying the enemy or bowing down to loud rhetoric should not be an option.
We need to understand that our leadership can no longer come from Muslims who belong to traditional schools of thought. Sir Sayed, Hakim Ajmal, Zakir Hussain and many others foresaw the problem. Their solution was expanding knowledge bases. Following the Islamic call for learning, they wanted the smallest, the weakest and the most vulnerable in the community to learn.
Learning about the enemy, learning from the enemy and then learning to take on the enemy is a line we all need to follow.
A simple solution lies in calling out secular bigotry and strengthening human rights groups that fight for equality and justice. Call out every time some one says: you voted for mandir-masjid. Let them know that the vote was never for a masjid, it was always for a mandir as the masjid had been demolished.
Call out every time there is program to assess how Muslims voted; call out every time a false equivalence is drawn. Let history not remember us as a less than mediocre people, who could not identify and call out their own exclusion and marginalization. It is time to look carefully and imbibe what time is trying to teach us. We do not need to be foolhardy, but we do not need to be sitting ducks either.
(The writer is a social science researcher and executive member of the National Federation of Indian Women, New Delhi. Views are personal)
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