Being Muslim in Modi's far-right India

Safa Ahmed

The mob that stormed the American capitol on January 6 was, as Stephen Colbert described it, “a black hole of whiteness”. To that I say - well, almost.

The day after the Capitol Building was ransacked by domestic terrorists, I saw a picture circulating Instagram: the Indian flag, held up by a man named Vincent Xavier Palanthigal, waving proudly in the midst of the Trump signs, the MAGA hats, and the haze of red, white, and blue. It was the only non-American flag being flaunted at the protest.

Indian social media exhibited a collective cringe. Some laughed at the foolishness of the brown man from Kerala who decided to stand with white supremacists. Others expressed their disgust, including Indian Parliament member Varun Gandhi in a tweet: “Why is there an Indian flag there??? This is one fight we definitely don’t need to participate in…”

There is just one problem with these statements, though: Varun Gandhi has no right to complain. Neither does Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tweeted a condemnation of the violence at the capitol, wringing his hands over the importance of respecting democracy. But I saw all this as nothing short of ironic, because in many ways, India today is not so different from the United States. Mob violence and vigilante justice? Divisive rhetoric and demonization of a minority? India has been doing it for decades.

So when I see the condemnations, I have to laugh. Because those words are about as empty as a bottle of spray tan after Trump has finished with it.

My family is both very Indian and very Muslim. It’s not an extraordinary combination of identities - Muslims have been in India since the rule of the Mughal Empire, and a staggering two hundred million of us remained even after the bloody Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Nonetheless, but according to Modi, a friend and ally of Trump, those two identities cannot coexist.

Of course, this is not something he says directly, much like the way Trump doesn’t have to say “I support white supremacists” for everyone to know it. But his track record speaks volumes. Since Modi was elected in 2014, he and his political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which Varun Gandhi is a representative, have built themselves a platform based on nationalism rather than public service. In that vein, Modi has chosen to direct attention away from the country’s true problems - including casteism, an epidemic of rape, and a failing economy - and instead create a scapegoat.

He chose Muslims.

The atrocities committed between 2019 and 2020 against Muslims, and against Indian democracy as whole, are too many to number in this article alone, but I’ll list some of the worst of them. Kashmir, a disputed territory that is the only Muslim-majority region in India, was put under military occupation last year. The Citizenship Amendment Act was passed in 2019, a discriminatory bill that effectively excluded Muslims as being worthy of fast-tracked citizenship documentation (unlike other Indian minority groups). The majority of the 53 people killed in the subsequent Delhi riots were Muslim, some of them as young as teenagers.

Peaceful student and female-led protests were met with tear gas and police batons. Mosques have been burned down. Muslim-owned shops and homes have been destroyed. There are photographs of Muslim men being beaten - some of them to death - while their attackers taunt them, demanding that they chant “Jai Sri Ram” (meaning “glory to Lord Ram”) or sing the national anthem.

“Shoot the traitors to the nation!” is the chant of choice for these mobs, some prowling in groups of 50 people or more, armed with metal rods and cricket bats. They parrot these slogans straight from elected lawmakers.

“If [the protestors] won’t understand words, they’ll understand bullets,” declared Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

“Pakistani hooligans have captured the streets of Delhi,” warned Kapil Mishra, another BJP politician.

In other words: India is for Hindus. Maybe Jains and Christians. Maybe Sikhs (if they behave). But Muslims are not worthy of calling themselves Indian.

Anti-Muslim violence in India precedes Modi, of course. India and Pakistan never healed from the damage of British colonialism, which led to the Partition of 1947. With the split of the border came a split in a culture that had once accepted religious pluralism as a given, and 2 million people - both Muslims and Hindus - paid the price with their lives. The legacy of Partition is one of creating an “other.” It’s unsurprising that 74 years later, BJP supporters have begun to demand that India should be a Hindu republic, where other identities are shunted to the side and even pressured to renounce their faith.

This extremist form of Hinduism, also known as Hindutva, is the “MAGA” of India, and Modi thrives off of it. While it’s not an entirely new phenomenon - Hindutva was formed almost a century ago, modeled off the fascism of Mussolini - its 4 million devoted volunteers have grown more violent by the day.

For Indian Muslims - like myself, and my friends Zak, Tamanna, and Rahim - watching this unfold is terrifying.

All four of us are Indian Muslims living in the West. Rahim is a Punjabi law student who grew up in California. Tamanna is Tamil, a creative, whose Instagram page is full of poetry. Zak is Hyderabadi, and is low-key a little bit famous on TikTok. Just by looking at them, they’re indiscernible from other people of Indian heritage. They love the biryani and spicy curries. They speak their parents’ native languages, be it Hindi or Punjabi or Hyderabadi Urdu (there are over 120 recognised languages spoken in India). On special occasions, they wear traditional sherwanis and salwars. Through these things, each of them have forged their own connection to their homeland.

Look at them, and the BJP’s assertion that “Muslims aren’t Indian” falls apart. It’s the same for the two hundred million others. Being Indian is all most of us have ever known, as much a part of us as the blood in our veins and the pigment of our skin.

In Rahim’s eyes, Hindutva is a hypocritical ideology - beginning with the fact that Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a staunch believer in it.

“Everyone talks about Gandhi as the founding father of this country. Now the ideology [that killed him] is being used as the symbol for what India should be,” he says. “India wasn't founded on religion. It wasn’t a Hindu republic - it was India.”

I wonder if they would count Rahim as a traitor. The last time he visited India, he still went by his birth name: Ram. He and his Hindu family were on their way to visit a temple in Mumbai, but Rahim remembers being captivated by the sight of the nearby Haji Ali mosque. With its elegant white domes, its precarious perch on an islet in the middle of the bay, and its crowd of worshippers at prayer time, Haji Ali is a relic of ancient India’s long-ruling Muslim sultanate.

“There’s not really much protection from the waves,” Rahim says, describing the way the seawater would crash against the rocks of the islet. “But people were still going for the prayer. It didn’t faze them.”

Within a few years of his visit, Rahim would convert from Hinduism to Islam, and national appreciation for India’s mosques would crumble even further under Modi’s rule. Last year, the Prime Minister ordered the construction of a temple on the site that had once housed the Babri Masjid, which was violently demolished in 1992. The Ashok Nagar mosque in Delhi, among other houses of worship, was torched in response to the CAA protests. Two mosques in BJP-controlled Madhya Pradesh were surrounded by mobs, vandalized, and used to conduct Hindu religious services. In all cases, the police stood by as “mute spectators,” and few arrests were made - if any.

Go back to Pakistan if you don’t like it, is what Hindutva supporters like posting on social media. Mughals were colonisers. Muslims were terrorists then, and they are terrorists now.

“From what I’ve been told, Hindu nationalism didn’t start out this way,” Zak tells me. “It was never meant to bring down any religion, i.e. Islam. It was just [meant] to unite Hindus as a whole, similar to the Muslim nationalism movement that led to Pakistan.”

He is supportive of Hindu unity, but he makes clear that modern Hindu nationalism has devolved into Hindu supremacy, “where they want to eradicate Muslims and Islam - and I can’t morally support that at all.”

This is not the India in which Tamanna remembers growing up. She is young - still just 13 - but she has internalised the idea of tolerance the way few others have. Her father is Muslim, and her mother is Hindu, and neither parent has ever put down the other’s faith.

“I grew up in this house learning to respect other religions, because I saw my mom and my dad respecting each other,” she says.

Her parents’ story is reminiscent of countless other Muslim-Hindu couples in India, whose marriages have recently been deemed illegal in some Indian states. Just last month, several BJP lawmakers declared that any Muslim man who marries a consenting Hindu woman is engaging in “Love Jihad” - thereby taking Hindu women away from Hindu men.

Tamanna finds this ridiculous.

“Everyone in my school [in Chennai] knew that Muslims aren’t bad; they’re just given a bad rep by everyone else,” she says. The problem is, however, that no one seems willing to speak up about it.

“I try to talk about it,” Zak says, “but with a lot of Hindu Indians, you see a lot of the same narrative pushed forth - that Muslims are colonisers, that we’re brutal people.”

“My cousin’s Hindu friends know Muslims aren’t bad,” Tamanna adds, “but they don’t want to do anything to stop the discrimination.”

It is disheartening for her to watch.

“I’ve heard of so much terrible violence - like pregnant women being hit just because they’re wearing a hijab,” she says, “and I honestly feel like I’m doing nothing, just sitting here...”

Zak, whose extended family lives in Hyderabad, feels the same way.

“I’m worried that a riot could happen, and my family could be caught up in that,” he says. “Or that they’re going to be hurt by the government, or denied opportunities because they’re Muslim.”

“I fear that one day they’ll misunderstand us so badly that they’ll wage war against us,” Tamanna adds. “We’re easily disregarded. We’re easily put to the side. We’re considered insignificant and unwanted.”

“My biggest fear is not being proud to be Indian anymore,” Rahim admits. “I take great pride in being Indian, and having other people try to take that from you really sucks.”

But no matter what propaganda the BJP uses, they will not take away Zak’s love for Charminar, or his memories of booming dhol drums and laughing family members at his cousin’s Hyderabadi wedding, or his love for Bajirao Mastani and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. They can’t change the fact that the sweltering streets of Chennai, the stories from the Bhagvad Geeta, and the verses of the Quran are all part of Tamanna, no matter what. They can’t make Rahim walk away from his love of his motherland, his family, or his faith. They can’t erase my memories of riding a scooter through heavy traffic with my cousin and trying to count the stars from the roof of my grandmother’s home in Bangalore.

Which brings me back to the flag waving in front of the Capitol. The beautiful tricolor of orange, white, and green, with Gandhi’s spinning wheel in the middle. I’m not surprised it showed up in the thick of a racist, sexist, Islamophobic mob. India these days stands for nothing less.

But I hope it will serve as a wake-up call for our allies. And I hope that we can reclaim that flag, and the true unity it should stand for.

People-2jfa9 February 2021Comment