News coming from India is alarming. With increasing islamophobia and systematically created political void of Muslim representation in the majoritarian Indian states, the condition of an ordinary Muslim in Asia’s biggest democracy is in shambles. The International media and scholars have pointed a potential genocide situation in near future. This is a moment of great self retrospection for Indians overall to rethink. As 20th century is a stepping stone of the majority of modern political and sociological happenings. While it gave good governance models, eradicated, and for capitalist reasons, again created famines, boosted capitalism, sidelined red movements worldwide, reintroduced genocides, and taught the world powers to politic them into their interests. Specifically speaking, In South Asia, the torchbearer of secularism is witnessing Nazi-like government policies of hate speech and segmentation of Muslim nation that is majority besides Hindus, but still referred to as minorities.
In order to be sidelined and put in its place. The current hijab ban in Utter Pradesh, Bihar (both are Muslim majority states) and Karnataka is denying Muslims of education but it would systematically lead to the point where they’ll be denied from banks, health care, and business. India has already seen its parti pris face of discrimination in past and would again witness this majority terrorism if Modi’s third term is on tap.
As Gregory states his ten stages of genocides and mass killings, it starts with hate speech, the segmentation into ‘them’ and ‘us’. For instance, Germans didn’t even consider Jews as humans like themselves but diseases on their land. Voices coming from BJP MPs and Hindu clerics are not different. They are the bunch of proud and crude majority that has serious innate historical and political complexes. Treaty of Versailles is a textbook example of how some nations get infected with inferiority complexes after setbacks and how their governments cash the so-called humiliation felt by the common masses. All sorts of inhuman acts are done to show fake political muscles. That’s an interesting political phenomenon to understand the psyche of oppressors. Nazis weren’t born with killer DNAs they were common people who learned to hate, learned to make Auschwitz gas chambers and their delusions of grandeur have turned them into monsters.
Furthermore, heavily marginalized communities often go through political cleavages. Their political differences and demands are in sharp contrast to mainstream politics. So is the case of Indian Muslims, who perpetually lack political leadership, it has always been Owaisi vs. Owaisi in most Muslim thick parts. This void, in BJP, led Hindutva environment has pushed this community through a deep social shift that has triggered the political cleavage like never before.
Historically, Indian Muslims were sidelined the moment the Mughal empire fell, and after independence, till last year thousands of Indian Muslims have died in fifteen major riots from the 1946 Calcutta killings to the 2020 Delhi riots. Muslims are deprived of their civil, social, and fundamental rights. They are robbed of their religious ethos and purposely tangled in the identity crises under forged secularism or one-nation blankets; even those Muslim political activists who claim to be a part of ‘only an Indian’ gang end up as political prisoners. Umar Khalid, a secular Indian who happens to be a Muslim is behind Tihar bars on fake charges just like Yasin Malik, a Kashmiri leader who is in the same jail on and off since the 1990s. on other hand Hindu boys who put Muslim women on online auctions roam free, Hindu MP’s who are accused of criminal past even proven rapists are in office. Political discrimination comes with media propaganda, injustices are normalized and justice is delayed on purpose. BJP, in both its terms, has crushed its opposition in order to run one party majoritarian state that has total control over major sectors like courts, military, and media.
Constitution has already been compromised with the abrogation of article 370, the military has been Hindu majority since India’s creation, and other RSS-led armed groups are trained to further the saffronisation of India which is a future face of Hitler’s Third Reich’s Aryanization. Genocides don’t happen overnight, they come in waves. An unstable India would be a risk for itself and secondly for Pakistan as well, as one can’t stay sane when a neighbor’s house is on fire. The whole region would reap the consequences of this Hindu delusion of grandeur if Asia’s Hitler gets his Third Reich.
