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Muslims are finding it increasingly difficult in India. The huge country has been ruled by the Hindu nationalist BJP under Narendra Modi for ten years, and five more are ahead.
Actually sends Narendra Modi for anti-Muslim tirades. But then India’s Prime Minister took the microphone himself. India’s Muslims are “invaders,” he shouted at a campaign rally in his home state of Gujarat. If India’s largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, comes to power, it would confiscate Hindu wealth and distribute it to communities that “have too many children.” It was a thinly veiled reference to Muslims. For decades, the cliché has prevailed among India’s Hindus that Muslim families have more children than themselves.
The parliamentary elections in India began on April 19th; the vote will be going through the states for weeks. Voting will continue until June 4th, and the election campaign will continue in a continuous loop. However, the only party that has a chance of winning the election is the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which will in all probability give its popular Prime Minister Modi a third five-year term in office. Up until now, Modi has always acted in a statesmanlike manner – even if he has always let his BJP agitators do as they please. That is now changing.
Another time, Modi said that the Congress Party was calling on Muslims to wage an “electoral jihad” – a holy war with the ballot paper: “The terrorists in Pakistan have waged jihad against India And here the Congress Party has announced a vote jihad against the BJP and is calling on the followers of a particular religion to vote unanimously against Modi.”
India’s parliamentary election: Week-long voting in all states
It is unclear why the Prime Minister himself is now acting as an agitator. Victory is assuredBut perhaps he fears missing his goal of a two-thirds majority, with which the BJP coalition could change India’s secular constitution. According to media reports, voter turnout is lower than in the last election in 2019, and euphoria is low. But the Congress Party is far behind in the polls. Like two dozen other parties, it belongs to the opposition center-left alliance called INDIA, short for “Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance”. But even together, the INDIA parties have little chance against the BJP-led coalition that has governed since 2014.
In general, the BJP and Modi are becoming less and less likely to hide their Islamophobia – and are not being hindered in doing so. The Election Commission has so far shown little interest in calling them out. And India’s international partners in the West are also silent about the dangers to the country’s democracy posed by Modi’s authoritarian tendencies. Critics have long accused the Prime Minister of creeping concentration of power and obstructing the judiciary and the media.
India’s Muslims: Increasingly excluded and discriminated against
Most of India’s 200 million Muslims have never been supporters of the BJP. According to the BBC, only eight percent of them voted for Modi’s party in the last parliamentary election in 2019. Since then, they have increasingly voted as a bloc against the BJP in regional elections – and vote for their opponents, no matter who they are: India’s party landscape is so diverse and regionalized that many parties only compete in individual states, but can certainly gain a majority there.
Correspondents of the New York Times and the BBC quoted Muslims in northern parts of the country in reports with anecdotes about their children being excluded from school or about property owners refusing to rent to Muslims. None of this had happened before. India is a multi-ethnic state; relaxed coexistence is a tradition – which is still the case in the liberal south. But since the BJP first came to power in 2014, this has been gradually changing, especially in its strongholds in the north. Hinduism is informally becoming the state religion. Almost 80 percent of Indians are Hindus.
Indian society: Growing divide between Hindus and Muslims
The aggression of radical Hindus towards Muslims in their country is also increasing. Right-wing organizations began to provoke sectarian clashes in parallel with the rise of the BJP, while the government looked the other way: Hindu mobs lynched Muslims on the mere suspicion that they might be beef traders. Cattle are sacred animals in Hinduism. Social media spread conspiracy theories of alleged “love jihad”, according to which Muslim men deliberately lure women in order to convert them to Islam.
The prejudice about large families is also being used politically. The BJP is using it to stoke fears of future demographic dominance of Muslims in India, says Archana Venkatesh of Clemson University in the US state of South Carolina. Since the end of the colonial era and the partition of British India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, “the idea of Muslim hyperfertility that already existed in the minds of Indian decision-makers has become even more entrenched,” writes Venkathesh“But such fears are unfounded. The Muslim minority has grown from eleven percent in the mid-1980s to 14 percent today. But their representation in parliament has declined from nine percent in the mid-1980s to five percent today.”
Modi now stresses that his speeches are not explicitly directed against Muslims. But his words – recorded and broadcast across the country – were certainly interpreted that way, by all sides.
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