Ever since their introduction in the past few elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party has created a nationalist fervor that has swept the Indian subcontinent. The recent withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan has stoked islamaphobic sentiment throughout the country.
Some argue islamophobia on the Indian subcontinent dates back to Winston Churchill’s fateful decision to split up India and Pakistan, displacing tens of thousands of people and inflaming tensions between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. Others point to islamophobic sentiment from as early as 1336 CE, when the Viajayanagar Empire felt threatened by the growing power of Muslim merchants along Indian Ocean Trade Routes.
It is indisputable, however, that tension has increased tenfold, as the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, has tried to turn India into a Hindu nationalist state, even though secularism is ingrained into the country’s Constitution.
India is a diverse country, containing five major religious groups (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), as well as various subsects of each. More than 19,500 languages and dialects are spoken within its borders. With its 29 states and 7 union territories, the country opted for a multi-party representative parliamentary system. Each citizen votes for their choice for a representative from their district. The winner is elected to the Lok Sabha, or House of the People.
Currently, the BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and House Speaker Om Birla, has a hold on 282 seats out of the maximum 543 seats, a number that increased by almost 100 from the last election.
A main objective of the BJP has been to slowly erase Islamic history from India, the primary example being the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya. The BJP and its supporting group, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), claimed that the temple stood on top of an important Hindu religious area. In the following religious riots, almost two thousand people were killed.
The RSS have also been accused of plotting hundreds of assassination attempts, stoking conflict, and even participating in acts of terrorism against religious minorities.
Last election, many correspondents predicted a BJP loss after the party’s failure in eliminating so-called ‘black money’ inside the Indian state and an overall stunt in economic development. Nationalism created by the fight over territory in Jammu and Kashmir with neighboring Pakistan, a country with a Muslim majority, lead the BJP to the greatest victory for the party in almost 20 years.
With the tension of the Jammu and Kashmir conflict, the influx of Muslim and Afghani refugees have only inflamed disputes between the two religious groups. The Hindu nationalist fervor surrounding the events could be felt around the country, but especially within Muslim communities.
Muslim journalists, activists, and professors have been the target of thousands of islamophobic attacks. Many Hindu news networks have accused these civilians of being “pro-Taliban” after speaking against anti-Muslim violence.
Hashtags like #GoToAfghanistan trended on various social media platforms, similar to the #GoBackToPakistan trend that arrived just after President Narendra Modi’s recent reelection. Muslim journalists across the country have been arrested under the Unlawful Activties Prevention Act, a law aimed at counter-terrorism. It has now, however, morphed into the blind targeting of non-Hindu reporters and government dissenters.
India has taken in Afghan refugees since 1979, but in 2019, the Citizen Amendment Act was passed “prioritizing the citizenship of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.” This act has left thousands of Muslim refugees in bureaucratic limbo while they wait for the government to effectively grant them asylum.
Of course the BJP is partly responsible for the right-wing rhetoric that has flooded the Indian zeitgeist, but one mustn’t underestimate the influence of the West on islamophobia in India. Starting with the haphazard separation of Pakistan and India in 1947 under Churchill’s British rule and the equally flawed efflux from Afghanistan, America, the UK, and other parts of Europe should be held responsible as well for exacerbating religious tensions between the two groups.
A lack of forethought from colonization concerning India and the region in general aggravates religious differences, especially when using countries as almost expendable resources for the war on terror.
The BJP and the West’s own islamophobia has only worsened after the United State’s exit from Afghanistan, and this harmful sentiment will continue, so long as “terrorist” is used as a catchall term for Muslims. To change this situation, both India and the West must work to unite religious differences in the region, rather than further ostracize Muslims in the international conversation on terrorism.
