Majoritarian ideas of India

Minority-baiting has become the new normal

With public calls for violence, attempts to proscribe their practices, and calls to ban them from temple fairs, the campaign against Muslims is being ratcheted up to dangerous levels. The recent brazen violation of bail terms by Yati Narsinghanand, the head priest of the Ghaziabad’s Dasna Devi temple, at a “Hindu Mahapanchayat” at Burari in north Delhi is a case in point. The priest, who had been arrested for hate speech in December last year and released on bail in February, felt no constraint in a repeat performance with crude inflammatory rhetoric about dangers to Hindus if a Muslim became prime minister of India. For this second offence, the police merely filed a first information report; the priest himself remains free. Notably, he was delivering this diatribe at an event organised by people who had also been arrested for hate speech before, had not received police permission to hold the Mahapanchayat, but decided to go ahead with it anyway, an indication of their confidence in breaking the law with impunity.

Taken together with the intimidation to Muslims in Gurugram for performing Friday prayers in government-designated areas, the gratuitous restrictions on Muslim students wearing the hijab in Udupi, demands to ban halal and Muslim traders from temple fairs in Karnataka all point to a concerted programme of Muslim-baiting by majoritarian civil society. Though these latest assaults may be viewed as part of a continuum that began when the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, the concerning fact now is the loud silence from political parties and civil society. Perhaps the vicious trolling of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw for requesting the Karnataka chief minister to heal a religious divide caused by calls to ban Muslim traders has acted as a deterrent to other conscientious objectors. But the fact that no political leader is willing to speak up against these atrocities and risk being viewed as sympathetic to the minority community speaks volumes for the fractured and intimidated nature of Indian society under the extremist pressure of a religious nationalist dispensation.

So far only one member of Parliament, a sadhvi, has been made to face the consequences of publicly insulting Muslims by apologising in Parliament. Since then, oblique insults to the community by senior saffron leaders, especially during election campaigns, have attracted no censure from the Election Commission. The trial for the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq by a mob in Dadri village on suspicion of eating beef started a full five years later in a “fast track” court even as local leaders that led the lynching have been feted. The serial lynching of cattle traders by Hindu vigilantes has also mostly gone largely unpunished. A Delhi leader remains at large though his hate speech unambiguously sparked the Delhi riots in 2020. Taken together with the routine destruction of churches and disruption of services during Christmas by freelance hooligans “protecting” their version of Indian culture, India is witnessing the progressive normalisation of minority-baiting. There are enough examples in recent world history to demonstrate the dangers of a country going down this path.