By Rana Ayyub
On the 12th of December, a young Muslim, Rahul Khan was murdered by a mob of Hindu men, many his own friends. The twenty-two year old Khan’s family discovered he had been lynched when they came across a viral video of their blood-soaked son in which he was being mercilessly beaten by a mob shouting “Hum Hindu hain Hindu, Tu Mulla hai Mulla (We are Hindus, you are a Muslim).”
This incident is a part of everyday life for Indian Muslims, who live in dread at Islamophobia and terrorism normalised by the state to such an extent that our mainstream media simply does not consider it newsworthy.
On the 13th of December, Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, and government functionaries of the secular republic of India, participated in a widely publicised, widely advertised, and non-stop-televised performance of Hindu rituals in the holy city of Benares in Uttar Pradesh. Ads for the event occupied the full front pages of almost every news daily in India, fulfilling a promise made by the Prime Minister to devout Hindus. Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India will go to the polls in three months.
To mark this particular occasion, Modi chose to deride India’s Muslim minority: “Invaders attacked this city, tried to destroy it. History has been witness to [17th-century Muslim Mughal king] Aurangzeb’s atrocities, his terror. They tried to change civilization with the sword. They tried to crush our culture with fanaticism,” said the Prime Minister.
A day before, Modi’s party chief, J.P. Nadda told an election rally that India faced threats from political parties loyal to Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. What both Nadda and his Prime Minister meant was clear to their supporters: They could carry out acts of terror, guided and celebrated by those in power.
Whether it is Hindu nationalists heckling and stopping a Muslim Imam from leading Friday prayers in Gurgaon, an hour away from the national capital, in presence of TV cameras, with cops as bystanders, or the burning of Christian holy books in the southern state of Karnataka by Hindu nationalists, the acts of terror are intended by Hindu nationalists to dominate and terrorise Indian minorities. Still more recently, a mob of Hindu nationalists on the 17th of December, another Friday, stopped Muslims from offering Namaz, forcing them to prove their patriotism and to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ ( Glory to India).
The Rashtriya Sawayamsevak Sangh, (RSS), is the ideological fountainhead of Narendra Modi’s BJP. It promotes the idea of a unified Hindu nation with Christians and Muslims as second-class citizens, and it is realising its dream with the support of ordinary Hindus encouraged to feel victimized despite being in the majority. For decades, right-wing nationalists have cultivated and manufactured stories of dominance by “Mughal” (Muslim) invaders and the conversion of gullible Hindus by Christian missionaries. It is this propaganda that led to the spine-chilling murder of missionary and activist Graham Staines and his two young children, aged 7 and 11, who were burnt alive in their car by Hindu extremists in 1999. Pratap Sarangi, the man who lead the local Hindu outfit whose members brutally murdered Staines and his children, is now a Minister of State for Home in Modi’s government.
For decades, extremist literature produced by Hindu nationalist organisations have repeated the same falsehoods and conspiracies that now course through social media. Conspiracy theories often focus on the Muslim population, suggesting that Muslims will outnumber Hindus by 2050 because Muslim men take multiple wives so that they can out-number Hindus and snatch away resources meant for the majority. These lies are now on the lips of the leaders of the ruling party, despite having fed a public hatred that led to sophisticated terror attacks on Indian Muslims. In 2008, six Muslims were killed and a hundred injured in the Malegaon terror attack, when terrorists bombed a mosque just before the Friday prayers. The front page of all leading dailies carried the image of a woman in saffron robes, referred to as ‘Sadhvi Pragya Thakur,’ who was the mastermind of terror attacks against Muslims.
India’s elite anti-terrorism squad was led by Hemant Karkare, who was martyred in another 2008 terror attack, this one in Mumbai. Under his leadership, Pragya Thakur, several retired army veterans, and a serving colonel of military intelligence, Srikant Purohit, were arrested for planning and carrying out the terror attacks. As soon as Modi assumed power, Thakur did not just receive bail—she fought a highly polarised election in which she won with a massive majority. Thakur is not just a part of the Indian parliament, but was also briefly on its defence panel of the Indian parliament.
The legitimisation of Hindu terror began with brazen gestures like the induction of Pragya Thakur; it continues unabated as the majority Hindu community is fed a steady diet of imaginary victimhood, all at the hands of the ‘evil’ Muslim, whose patriotism needs to be tested, questioned, whose public figures must be defamed, whose activists must to be jailed, whose poor must be lynched.
For the last three months, Muslims in Gurgaon have been threatened by a mob that refuses to let them offer their Friday prayers. Saffron-clad vigilantes can be seen in videos shared across the country on WhatsApp, Facebook, and news channels, where they threaten and heckle Muslim priests and locals. In one incident, a young Hindu man, Akshay Yadav, who I chose to believe is not an aberration, offered the premises of his business to Muslims for their prayers. In an interview with news publication Article 14, Yadav urged the media to not call him brave for doing the bare minimum as a member of the majority community.
I choose to believe that Yadav is not an aberration, just as I choose to believe that ordinary Indian Hindus are more concerned about the rising unemployment, inflation, starvation, the safety and security of their children. I choose to believe that insecure Hindu vigilantes who seek pleasure in denying Muslims their fundamental rights are a small minority. I choose to believe that the India I was born and raised in, where my friends, my doctor, my therapist, my psychiatrist, the surgeon who performed a potentially deadly surgery and saved me from paralysis, my next door neighbour without whom my family’s Eid festivities are incomplete, are the true Hindu majority.
I believe that the average Hindu in India felt the same rage as the Muslim next door when they lost their family members to the devastating second wave of Covid and the government looked the other way while dead bodies floated down the Ganges. I choose to believe that the silent Hindu is equally appalled when churches and priests are attacked, when Mother Teresa, a humanitarian icon, is besmirched in the new India as a con woman, whose legacy, and the Missionaries of Charity are probed by the Indian government for alleged forceful conversions.
The People’s Union for Civil Liberties released a report on the 15th of December about the attack on Christian minorities. It said, “In most cases, Christians have been forced to shut down their places of worship and stop assembling for their Sunday prayers. Effectively, these attacks on praying in a gathering that is enforced by Hindutva groups with the complicity of the State function as a bar on the freedom to practice religion itself.”
The glorious faith of Hinduism, whose practitioners are some of the kindest humans I know, is being hijacked by an increasing population of insecure fanatics led by opportunists who want them to wallow in an imagined victimhood and claim supremacy over the weak and the less-privileged. It is not too late for the well-meaning Indian Hindu to reclaim his faith from these terrorists, who claim to be acting on their behalf. Prime Minister Modi came to power in 2014 on the promise of development and an India that could compete with the fastest-growing economies; in the last seven years of his rule, he has only encouraged them to feel inferior to their countrymen who have equal stakes in the resources of this country as enshrined by our constitution. Never before in the history of India has the average Hindu been used as a mechanical prop to further extremist ideas and embellish the bloodshed of innocent minorities all in the name of a faith that claims no space for violence and fundamentalism.
The Indian Hindu must shun this imagined inferiority and insecurity because his silence will not just be detrimental to the secular fabric of this beloved land but also destroy his own existence because the fire of hate once unleashed will know no boundaries. It will not just stop at burning the wall of the neighbour, the flames will engulf his own existence.
This story first appeared on ranaayyub.substack.com