Hindu Muslim tensions rise in India as Taliban takes over Afghanistan
Since coming to power in 2014, the central - and state governments - run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are re-writing history, literature and other school and college textbooks to glorify Hindu nationalism, as shown by numerous studies, including by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the militant organization which controls the BJP, also distort historical events to try and portray Muslims as violent, radical Islamists who have no loyalty to India. Recently, for instance, they are propagating a view that the Moplah Rebellion, in a Muslim region of Kerala in 1921 and whose centenary is currently being observed in the state, was an Islamist genocide of Hindus.
So, it is not a surprise that leaders of the BJP and the RSS are tracing the current Taliban violence and Sharia, or Islamic rule, in Afghanistan to Muslims in India.
The radical Islamist mindset of the Taliban was first formulated during the Moplah rebellion, Ram Madhav, an RSS leader, claimed in a speech this week. The Talibani mindset led to attacks on Hindus, in Bengal in 1946 and later in Kashmir, as well as caused the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Madhav added.
Madhav was the former national general secretary of the BJP, which rules India with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.
The Moplah rebellion was mainly a peasant uprising against British rule in India and the feudal landowners who supported the British, according to independent scholars. While the uprising turned violent and some Hindu landlords were killed, the leaders and participants in the rebellion were both Muslims as well as Hindus, Robert L. Hargrave, Jr., wrote in a 1977 research article in Modern Asian Studies, published by the Cambridge University Presa.
The previous Taliban rule in Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, before they were ousted by the American invasion to find Osama bin Laden, was barbaric: public beatings, amputations and hangings; women not allowed to work; and no education for girls.
The current Taliban regime will commit the same abuses – and already have in some cases - if they rule based on their previous interpretations of Sharia.
Apparently the BJP and RSS leaders blame the Muslims in India for Taliban’s origins, hoping to gain wider support from Hindus for protecting them from the “Indian Taliban.” But this new version of their recurring and sole political strategy, of demonizing Muslims to secure Hindu votes, could end up harming India.
India is home to around 200 million Muslims, about 14% of its 1.4 billion population. Most of them are poor, laborers and farmers with little or no access to high school and college education.
Hindu nationalist leaders constantly warn the Muslims to live as second-class citizens, with no rights, or face the consequences, as the Human Rights Watch and other civil liberties groups point out. Most Muslims face daily humiliation, many face violence and since 2015, after Modi came to power, more than fifty have been lynched by Hindu extremist mobs.
If such inhuman treatment continues, there is a serious risk that some Indian Muslims could be radicalized. So far this has not occurred in India, except in Kashmir. Pakistan, on India’s Western border, and Bangladesh, on the East, are Islamic Republics. And now so is Afghanistan, which borders Pakistan.
Terrorists, who have killed people in India, have fled to Pakistan, where they face little or no prosecution. Now terrorists may likely plan and train as well as flee back to Afghanistan, after their missions.
Given this situation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government needs to work with Western as well as the Chinese and Russian governments to try to ensure that the Taliban offers no support and operating bases for foreign terrorists - like they did before 2001.
Simultaneously, Modi should ask the BJP and RSS leaders to stop the false statements and attacks on Muslims in India. Perhaps this may be too much to expect since Modi won the 2014 and 2019 national elections promising to implement a Hindu nationalist agenda, as the BBC and other news organizations have reported.
In fact, Modi paid no tribute to Danish Siddiqui, the Pulitzer Prize winning Indian photo-journalist, after he was killed, and his body mutilated, by the Taliban in Afghanistan in July. Siddiqui, a Muslim who grew up in New Delhi, worked for Reuters in Mumbai. Writing in Foreign Policy, Anchal Vohra states that such a response is in “keeping with Modi’s record if he harbored resentment against Siddiqui for criticizing his work as prime minister..“
Earlier this year, Siddiqui’s photographs of mass cremations brought worldwide attention to the surging COVID-19 deaths in India - now officially 433,000 but well over four million, according to researchers - most of them Hindus. After Siddiqui was killed, Modi’s trolls on social media celebrated, Vohra notes, and “attributed his death to bad karma, suggesting that he deserved to be shot dead.”
(Photo: Muslims protest peacefully in Delhi in 2019 against new laws that could deprive them of their Indian citizenship.)
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