CW: This article contains references to violence against Muslim people and ethnic minorities.
A Railway Protection Force (RPF) officer attacked three Muslim men on a passenger train earlier this month. His behaviour was justified by the authorities on the basis that his mental illness incited a frenzy of killings. However, this isn’t a one-off for Muslims in India, it’s a culmination of violence entrenched in the fabric of the Hindu-Nationalist state that is India.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) ideologue is Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Party aspires to build a Hindu nation encompassing not just the present boundaries of India, but also Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. RSS, BJP, and their allies like Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), have campaigned against Muslims even before India got its independence from the British in 1947.
Until the early 1990s these groups were isolated extremists, who didn’t have much influence. That changed when the BJP came to power. The BJP’s campaign was successful, not because they promised progressive policies, but because they promised to build a nation free of Muslims.
Now that the BJP is comfortably in power at a state and federal level, they have started state-sponsored terrorist activities against minorities — especially Muslims. In April 2023, there were 37 documented crimes against Muslims in India, with likely more undocumented. 90 per cent of the hate crimes against Muslims in India in the 2010s happened after 26 May 2014, when Modi and BJP took charge. (https://muslimmirror.com/eng/monthly-database-hate-crime-against-muslims-in-india-april-2023/)
The RPF officer, after he lynched the Muslim passengers, also chanted in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh’s hardline conservative chief minister, Yogi Adityanath. He was also recorded on video saying “If you want to live and vote in Hindustan [India], I am telling you, it’s only Modi and Yogi.”
India is home to the third largest number of Muslims in the world. Islam is the second-largest religion in the world. If this can happen to Muslims in India, no other linguistic, cultural, religious, or ethnic minority group can escape the human rights abuses and stronghold of the Hindu nationalist state. Today, the Indian state headed by the BJP is a threat to its very own people.
Being Muslim in India is a religious struggle and a deeply casteist one. Dalit Muslims and Christians are currently struggling in the country to fight to be added to the Schedule Caste list. Currently, lower caste non-Hindu minorities are criticising the lack of affirmative action policies for other religions, making the religion-neutral policy of caste reservations a Hindutva policy. Casteism has been reduced to simply a Hindu experience, disregarding the fact that a lot of lower caste Muslims converted to escape the tyranny of casteism.
Obviously, Muslims are not invariably lower caste, but the Brahmanical ideas of caste have permeated Indian society on several levels. While caste isn’t inherently present in Muslim and Christian religious scriptures, many lower-caste Hindus broadly converted to these religions to escape the suffocating structures of Hinduism. However, social stratification based on socio-economic status has manifested in the form of “Syedism” in the country, with lower-caste/dalit converts such as “Aljafs” and “Arzals” being typically outcasts from their communities.
India faces slow genocide every day, with Muslim people’s sovereignty ignored, communities scattered, women’s hijabs and bodies disrespected, and children arrested every day on an unprecedented basis. To be Muslim in a morbidly Hindu society is to be hyper visible and invisible at the same time, resisting BJP’s genocide everyday through our existence.
