June 8, 2022

Since 2014, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began ruling India, there have been rising physical attacks on Muslims and destruction of their homes and other property. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say the attacks are organized by activists of the BJP and the secretive, militant Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which is said to control the BJP and numerous affiliated organizations.

Muslims, who number more than 200 million, make up about 14% of India’s 1.4 billion population. So far, there have been little, if any, criticism of the anti-Muslim violence in India by the governments of Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and other Persian Gulf countries. That changed last week after BJP national spokesperson Nupur Sharma and the Delhi spokesperson Naveen Kumar Jindal made remarks against Prophet Mohammed in a televised debate and on social media, respectively.

The controversial remarks by the BJP spokespersons “follow increasing violence targeting India's Muslim minority carried out by Hindu nationalists who have been emboldened by Modi's regular silence about such attacks since he was first elected in 2014,” NPR reported.

Governments of the Persian Gulf countries as well as of Indonesia, Egypt, Malaysia, Iran, Iraq and other Muslim countries sought action against the BJP spokespersons and some also asked for an apology from Modi’s government. In a tweet, the Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has 57 member countries, “strongly condemned & denounced the recent denigration of Prophet Muhammad by an official of #india’s ruling party. These cases of defamation are part of a growing spate of hatred & defamation of #Islam in #India.”

India categorically rejects the OIC Secretariat's "unwarranted and narrow-minded comments," a spokesperson for the country’s External Affairs Ministry stated. Yet, he added that the BJP had suspended Sharma and expelled Jindal.

This is one of the rare times that the BJP has taken disciplinary action against its members for their extremist views on Islam and Muslims. The response is not surprising considering India’s economic dependence on the Persian Gulf countries.  

The Gulf countries employ nearly nine million Indian migrant workers, whose remittances financially support their families as well as serve as a major source of hard foreign currency for India. About 90% of India’s crude oil and half of its natural gas needs are imported from the Gulf countries. The countries are also major trading partners and investors in India, especially in crucial infrastructure projects. In February, for instance, the UAE signed a pact with India to boost bilateral trade to $100 billion over the next five years.

The attacks on Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities in India has also been noted by the U.S. government. “We’ve seen rising attacks on people and places of worship,” in India, Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State said in a statement while releasing the 2021 International Religious Freedom Report in Washington DC last week. The report offers a review of the state of religious freedom in nearly 200 countries and territories around the world. 

Some officials in India are ignoring or even supporting rising attacks on people and places of worship in the country, Rashad Hussain noted. He leads the U.S. State Department's efforts to monitor religious freedom around the world.

Due to the remarks against Prophet Mohammed, there is a boycott of Indian goods underway in Qatar, Kuwait and some other Persian Gulf countries. India's embassies in those countries released a statement saying the views expressed about the Prophet Muhammad and Islam were not those of the Indian government and were made by "fringe elements."

In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist wrote, “The kinds of views the BJP wants to characterize as ‘fringe’ are, in fact, the language of the ruling party and state, spoken each night on the country’s leading news channels.”

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