Mohammad Jamil
Last week, a video surfaced showing two bruised and battered Muslim men being forced to eat cow dung. The Indian Express reported: “The video shows volunteers of the Gau Rakshak Dal (Cow Protection Group) forcing two men, who they suspected were beef transporters, to eat a mixture of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd and ghee near Delhi recently.” Earlier, in his TV comments Narendra had blamed the media for carrying reports of hate speech and communal incidents. He said the media made heroes of the communal propagandists. The surfacing of the video of a two-week old incident belies the claim because without the media’s help no one would know what really happened to the two men. Dharmendra Yadav, president of the Gurgaon Gau Rakshak Dal Admitted that they had forced the two men – Rizwan and Mukhtiar – to eat cow dung concoction on June 10.
A few months ago, Narendra Modi had kept silence over the lynching of a Muslim blacksmith near Delhi over claims that his family ate beef. There hve been more cases of bruising and harassing Muslims over the allegations of eating or transporting beef. The Indian state has failed appallingly in its obligations to Muslim citizens. There are 150 million Muslims in India, but as the government’s own figures show, only 4% are graduates, 5% have public employment, an overwhelming majority remain locked out of public institutions and their access to government loans and education is severely restricted. If this institutional exclusion should breed resentment, and the resentment produces violence, no one will hesitate to call it another instance of Islamic terrorism. But when Hindus massacre minorities and detonate bombs in the midst of Muslim crowds, Muslims are expected to be polite.
In 2002, the Indian government had banned the radical Muslim group Simi (Students’ Islamic Movement of India) citing the group’s charter, which seeks to establish sharia rule in India, and the terror charges some of its members were facing. But the Hindu radical outfit RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the National Volunteer Corps) remains open for business – even though it campaigns, very openly for a Hindu state in India. And its members incite and perpetrate violence against Muslim and Christian minorities. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin was a member of the RSS, as are Aseemanand and his cohorts. It is not difficult to understand that RSS poses a more immediate threat to India. Yet Simi was banned. In fact, BJP and its leader Narendra Modi had won elections with the support of Hindu extremist organizations on the basis of anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan slogan.
Narendra Modi had also allured the corporate sector that he would take India’s economy to unprecedented heights following Gujarat model. Since Modi took over, Hindu extremists, fanatics and hardliners have gone berserk and are involved in vile acts that would dim the shining of the so-called shining India, and could make India implode. Indian governments have been tolerant to Hindu nationalists, their organised violent eruptions across the country – slaughtering Muslims and Christians, destroying their places of worship, cutting open pregnant wombs – never seemed sufficient enough to the state to cast them as a meaningful threat to India’s national security. Swami Aseemanand, had confirmed that a series of blasts between 2006 and 2008 were carried out by Hindu outfits, but despite confessions, no action was taken against him or the organization. The attacks targeted a predominantly Muslim town and places of Muslim worship elsewhere.
Their victims were primarily Muslim. Yet the reflexive reaction of the police was to round up young Muslim men, torture them, extract confessions and declare the cases solved. An uneasy calm prevailed in state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) where a Hindu mob had lynched a Muslim man following rumors of cow slaughter and beef eating. India’s gradual descent into fundamentalism is alarming. The growth of anti-secular violence is a warning signal to all the right-thinking citizens of India to resist the growing clout of these medieval forces. At the national level the BJP advances the ideology of ‘Hindutva’ through propaganda, the manipulation of cultural institutions, undercutting laws that protect religious minorities, and minimizing or excusing Hindu extremist violence. At the state level its functionaries have abetted and even participated in such violence, which had been proved in the investigations by the government as well as by independent observers.
Last year, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members had beaten lawmaker Engineer Rashid Ahmed, in the Indian-held Kashmir’s assembly soon after its session began on October 8 for hosting a party where he was alleged to have served beef. The ink attack came eight days after 10 to 15 activists of Hindu terrorist outfit Shiv Sena, closely associated with ruling BJP of Narendra Modi, had attacked in a similar fashion, Sudheendra Kulkarni, organiser of former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book launch, hours before the event. The group was also accused of using threats to force the cancellation of an appearance in Mumbai by Pakistani singer Ghulam Ali. India has drawn flaks for the acts of the extremist Hindu organizations, and perhaps it is one of the reasons that Nuclear Suppliers Group refused to induct India into the group.
