The failure of the judicial system and the police patronage to the criminals of 2020, is what is causing outrage this time
By Abdulhafiz Lakhani siyasat.net
New Delhi: Muslims in the capital say there is increasing fear in the community because of the “impunity enjoyed by Hindu supremacist forces” in the country.
“It is happening at the behest of RSS which wants to create an atmosphere of perpetual fear and hatred against Muslims,” Mohammad Nasir, 34, told Al Jazeera, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s ideological fountainhead.
“This is now almost like an everyday occurrence,” said Nasir, who lost an eye in an attack by a Hindu mob during last year’s violence.
Sahil Pervez, 26, who lost his father in the 2020 violence, says incidents like the one held at the Jantar Mantar have a “huge psychological bearing” on him and his family.
“We remain concerned about the safety of our family. We fear something worse happening with us. The situation has not improved since Delhi violence, it has rather worsened. How else did they dare to raise such provocative slogans?” he told here.
Violent Islamophobic sloganeering is not new to Delhi. The sloganeering and the sustained hate campaign had led to Delhi’s Pogrom of 2020, according to a Delhi based journalist, who do not want to reveal his identity.
Shipra Srivastava, media head at Upadhyay’s Unite India Movement, which he says is aimed at replacing India’s colonial laws with “indigenous laws”, told Al Jazeera the group does not have a religious agenda.
Some people tried to give it communal colour, but we dissociate ourselves from it,” she said.
Hajj House controversy.
On last Friday, two days before the Jantar Mantar event, residents and Hindu groups in New Delhi’s Dwarka neighbourhood held a “Mahapanchayat” (Grand Council) to object to the construction of a Hajj House.
The government-funded building is meant to accommodate Indian Muslims before their departure on the annual pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca.
Opponents of the plan at the meeting said the construction of the Hajj House would disturb the neighbourhood’s “brotherhood, harmony and peace” and would force Hindus to migrate by creating a “situation like Shaheen Bagh, Jafrabad and Kashmir”.
Shaheen Bagh, a mostly Muslim enclave on the outskirts of New Delhi, was the epicentre of the anti-citizenship law protests last year, led mainly by the neighbourhood’s women.
Jafrabad in northeast Delhi, another locality with a large Muslim population, witnessed some of the worst violence in last year’s religious riots.
In the Dwarka gathering as well, provocative slogans were raised against Muslims, with multiple speakers even calling for mass killings.
The All Dwarka Residents Federation (ADRF), the body that spearheaded the protest, urged the Delhi government to cancel the allocation of land for the Hajj House in the “national interest”.
Ajit Swami, ADRF president, told the building of the Hajj House would create “inconvenience for the local residents” and “any untoward incident can then lead to riots”.
“In our locality, there are very few Muslims. Now when Muslims go for Hajj, a single person is accompanied by hundreds of others. This would create inconvenience for the locality,” he said.
“Also, when they (Muslims) would come, they would eat biryani and chicken, which would lead to foul odour and disease outbreaks. In such a scenario, we will be forced to migrate.”
Swami said it was “not a communal issue but being turned into one”.
When asked about members of right-wing groups who attended his meeting, he said: “We did not call anyone to the protest. Several BJP members came on their own. We can’t stop anyone.”
The police in India’s capital, controlled by the federal home ministry, have been accused by rights groups of being complicit in last year’s violence.
Muslims in the Delhi say hate speech and provocative slogans against them are being “normalised” as there is “no real intent” by the authorities to punish the culprits.
Activist Asif Mujtaba told that the “ease and frequency” with which such gatherings are taking place show their organisers are in “connivance” with the Indian state.
Opposition parties say the violence and hatred against Muslims are not a “fringe phenomenon” and are being “actively promoted” by Modi and his most trusted aide, Home Minister Amit Shah.
“These are not incidents that have happened in isolation. We have seen individuals associated with the ruling party not only making hate speeches and anti-Muslim remarks but also resorting to violence against the marginalised Muslim community,” Kavita Krishnan of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) told here to siyasat.net
The failure of the judicial system and the police patronage to the criminals of 2020, is what is causing outrage this time. The 2020 challenge to take law in their hands was done by a “pro-CAA” group led by Kapil Mishra and the BJP officials of North West Delhi. The collusion of the police led to three SITs not naming any of them, despite their profiles and confessions doing rounds on social and digital media.
India’s approximately 200 million Muslims have long lived on the margins, with episodic religious violence forcing them to seek shelter in ghettos. Since the coming to power of Modi’s BJP in 2014, the community has become increasingly marginalised.
Experts say the silent migration of Muslims from “mixed” areas and further segregation of the community would expedite the near-total alienation.
“This, of course, is not a new phenomenon,” said Suchitra Vijayan, a New York-based lawyer and author of Midnight’s Borders, A people’s history of modern India.
“Sometimes a household, because of violence, is forced to move multiple times and it is so common amongst marginalised Muslim community in India. The community has earlier been also forced to migrate in large numbers to the Muslim-only enclaves or ghettos after violence perpetuated against them during Gujrat pogrom (2002), Nellie massacre (1983) or more recently in Delhi 2020
A 2006 report by the federal government-appointed Sachar judicial committee pointed out that “fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country.”
Violence in India between Hindus, who make up some 80% of the population, and Muslims, the country’s largest minority, punctuate the history of the world’s largest democracy. Even under India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who envisioned a secular nation where all India’s religions could live in harmony, sporadic religious violence broke out. (During the partition of British India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India in 1947, as many as two million people died.) But under Modi, the most powerful Hindu nationalist Prime Minister in Indian history, the violence has taken on a new, imbalanced, dimension.
The Hindu nationalist alliance that Modi represents avowedly sees India as a “Hindu nation,” and as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi was accused of instructing police not to prevent a pogrom in which thousands of Muslims were killed. When he was elected in 2014, there was a sharp uptick in lynchings of Muslims. Since being reelected with an even bigger majority in May 2019, his government has “moved on to larger-scale, if still localized, state-sanctioned mob violence,” says Sumantra Bose, professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. “This is a natural progression, given the nature, logic and purpose of the Modi-Shah government. (with input from Al Jazeera)
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