Hindutva is inextricably tied to violence. The violent rhetoric espoused by Hindutva against minorities underpins its various manifestations – on the internet, in general society, within institutions, and through state action. Its objectives of furthering Hindu hegemony, converting India into a Hindu Rashtra, and propagating Hindu supremacy run concurrently with efforts aimed at the othering of minorities and effectuating their socio-economic marginalisation. Apart from the direct forms of socio-cultural and physical violence that Hindutva outfits and ideologues inflict on minorities, an insidious form of Hindutva majoritarianism is the economic violence it perpetrates against Muslims.
Hindutva-masterminded hate campaigns calling for the boycott of Muslim-owned businesses, alongside Islamophobic propaganda and alarmism that are parroted and legitimised by states, are spelling an economic disaster for India’s Muslims – especially poor and working-class Muslims, who stand to lose everything in the face of this systemic economic violence to which they are being subjected. The most recent instance of this occurred in Bhopal, but this is not a phenomenon confined to one city or state.
Members of a Hindutva nationalist organisation called Sanskriti Bachao Manch launched an Islamophobic campaign targeting Muslim-owned businesses in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal, in the days preceding Diwali. They placed religious markers identifying Hindu-owned shops which read ‘I am Sanatani’ and urged Hindu consumers to buy only from fellow Hindus and to prevent their money from going into the ‘wrong hands’. The president of the Hindutva outfit involved in the incident, Chandrashekar Tiwari, said in a speech, ‘We want to give this message that your money should not go to jihadis, and people who carry out incidents of love jihad should not use it.’
The incident in Bhopal’s New Market, while revolting, is hardly surprising when viewed alongside similar state-sanctioned discrimination in Madhya Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states like Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In July 2024, the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand governments issued diktats that mandated eateries along the route of the Kanwar Yatra – an annual Hindu pilgrimage – must prominently feature the names of the establishment’s owners and employees.
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.