In early August 2021, an eight-year-old Hindu boy accused of blasphemy was held in protective police custody in Pakistan. When the boy was released on bail, a mob attacked a local Hindu temple, damaging idols, and burning down the main door, Farahnaz Ispahani writes in the introduction to Politics of Hate, an interesting anthology on religious extremism and identity politics in the subcontinent with contributions from a wide range of people with their ear to the ground, including Husain Haqqani, Maya Mirchandani, Niranjan Sahoo and A. Faizur Rahman.
While factually correct about the detention of the Hindu boy in Pakistan and the aftermath, it conveys an incomplete picture. Ispahani rightly informs about the child’s arrest and the violence that followed his release, what she holds back is that more than 90 people were arrested for the attack, an FIR was registered under terrorism, and the country’s Supreme Court pulled up the authorities for their failure to stop the attack. Restoration work of the temple was completed by the local authorities inside a week. “The government has completed the restoration work of the temple and handed it over to the local Hindu community,” The Hindu reported on August 10, 2021.
At a Shobha Yatra in Jammu. | Photo Credit: ANI
Contrast this with what happened in India on March 30, 2023 where a mosque and a dargah were vandalised in Vadodara during a Shobha Yatra organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Four days after the attack, an FIR mentioned 45 Muslims by name and address and no Hindu was identified. It was eerily similar to what happened in north-east Delhi in February 2020 when 19 places of Muslim worship were either burnt down or damaged during the communal violence. The mosques were repaired by Muslim bodies themselves.
A violent script
It is not to say that the pain of the Hindu minority of Pakistan was in any way less than that experienced by the Muslim minority in India. Hate violence does take place in many societies. What distinguishes a society is the promptness with which violence is controlled, the guilty punished and the victims compensated.
Pakistani Ahmadis pray at the Garhi Shahu mosque in Lahore. The bullet-ridden structure says how the community has been facing persecution and discrimination in the Islamic country for decades. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The minorities have not had it good in the subcontinent. For instance, the Ahmadis in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Constitution, as Ispahani writes, does not even regard them as Muslims. Interestingly, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act passed in 2019 in India, expedited the granting of citizenship to non-Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh but excluded Muslims. India included Ahmadis among Muslims and denied them any privilege under CAA. The Ahmadis lost both ways, which is often the fate of a minority.
Activists protesting against the attacks by cow vigilante groups in Jaipur. | Photo Credit: Rohit Jain Paras
India, however, has seen much better days than what we have experienced of late. We have countless instances of temples and mosques sharing a wall and a water tap. It is all beginning to change, as Sahoo writes in his essay, ‘Hindu Majoritarianism and Unmaking the Idea of India’, “Majoritarian violence orchestrated by vigilante mobs is creating deep anxiety and insecurity among minorities and groups that are opposed to the Hindu right’s ideology... it is eating away the social capital... In some instances, vigilante groups are allowed (by state silence) to determine what people should think, write, eat, drink and wear.” Quoting dataportal IndiaSpend, he points out that 97% of cow-related violence reported between 2010 and 2017 has taken place since the BJP government assumed power in May 2014. On the one side, Muslims have been targeted by cow vigilante groups following unsubstantiated allegations of cow slaughter, on the other hand, mosques and madrasas have been targeted during many Shobha Yatras in recent years. In lynching cases, FIRs have often been filed against the dead victims; in mosques attacks, Muslims have been named, as in Vadodara.
Further, as Sahoo points out, the government is moving away from Muslims. Today, there is not a single Muslim MP in the ruling party and the Bharatiya Janata Party is known to be averse to giving tickets to Muslim candidates, as we are seeing in the Karnataka Assembly elections.
A protester holds a placard during a demonstration against anti-Muslim violence in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The road ahead
Not without reason, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in April 2020 exhorted the American government to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern “for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedoms violation.” Though India was predictably quick to rubbish the report, as A. Faizur Rahman argues in his chapter, ‘Muslimophobia in India’, the report could not be ignored as there was a “reputational issue” involved with India being the world’s largest democracy drawing strength from its diversity. It had zero impact, however, on Hindutva proponents who held a Dharm Sansad in December 2021 where Hindus were asked to be ready to “pick up arms to protect Sanatan Dharma.” Rahman provides a deeper analysis of Muslimophobia, arguing that the main reason for it was not Islam but a sense of political insecurity born out of exaggerated fears of a Muslim demographic threat.
Students take part in a demonstration against Islamophobia in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Not all is lost. In 2019, a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies across 26 States revealed that nearly 75% Hindus were for an India that includes all religions. Taking hope from this, Rahman gives a blueprint for better days, writing persuasively, “There must be a nationwide effort to inform the Hindu masses that Muslims do not pose a demographic threat. Misinformation prevails regarding Muslim rule in India.” According to Rahman, it is important to clear this disinformation. He urges Muslims to go the extra yard, condemn any atrocities on minorities in the neighbourhood, particularly Pakistan.
Mirchandani throws light on the Tablighi Jamaat volunteers, and how a hate-driven media made them easy scapegoats for the spread of COVID-19. “They were painted as Muslims who deliberately plotted to spread a disease in Hindu-majority India,” she writes.
Ispahani’s book is unsettling, brave and timely. It asks uneasy questions by drawing attention to the reality of minority-bashing in the subcontinent.
Politics of Hate; Edited by Farahnaz Ispahani, HarperCollins, ₹599.
ziya.salam@thehindu.co.in
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