This May, there has been an outcry from Indian Muslims over comments made about Prophet Muhammad by the national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the current ruling party in India. Nupur Sharma made the remarks about the prophet and Muslim beliefs on the Times Now 1 news channel. Following the comments, the head of the party’s media in Delhi, Naveen Kumar Jindal, posted a message about Prophet Muhammad on Twitter, which has since been deleted. The tension has escalated into the beheading of a Hindu man by two extremist Muslim men in a town in the state of Rajasthan in an apparent hate crime. This incident of religious tension ending in violence is not an isolated one. While India is officially secular, the current ruling party, the BJP, is a hindu-nationalist party and since they’ve risen to power, religious violence has increased. The party has incited violence and has deepened India's religious divide.
The story behind this religious divide goes back hundreds of years. The Arab traders had set up trade routes before the birth of Islam, trading African goods and spices. Right after the birth of Islam, during the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Arab merchants trading on India’s west coast brought Islam to the country. Islamic coastal communities along India’s west coast were established through immigration and conversion. This was India’s first contact with Islam. In 711, the Umayyad caliphate began to expand westward into India. They took control of Sindh (modern day Pakistan). This was the first major wave of Islamic influence in India. Over the next centuries, Islamic empires and dynasties successively took control over parts of India. Under Muslim rule in India, the religion was not forced on the population. The Hindus and Buddhists could freely practice their religion. Many of those born into lower castes converted to Islam, as it guaranteed them rights to their low status, as Hindus didn’t.
Successive Islamic dynasties controlled swaths of India for centuries, and Islam became an important part of Indian culture and heritage, such as Islamic architecture. The Mughal Dynasty (1526–1857) is famous for its architecture. One of the 7 wonders of the modern world, the Taj Mahal was built by the Muslim Mughal ruler Shah Jahan as an ode to his love for his wife. In essence, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious minorities have coexisted for centuries. However, this is not to say that tension was non-existent; rather, all groups were mostly tolerant and managed to exist peacefully.
In the mid 1850s, Mughal rule in India came to an end as the British took control of India as a colonial possession, under the British Raj. By the early twentieth century, movements for Indian independence had sprung up. Under British rule, minority groups were guaranteed rights. For example, Muslims were given separate electorates from Hindus. The Indian National Congress had been fighting for independence since the early 1940s. Their famous leaders include Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian National Congress envisioned one large Indian state with a strong national government. While officially secular, minorities feared that their rights wouldn't be guaranteed in the same way the British had in a large Indian Hindu-majority state. Support for the leading Muslim party in India led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah grew in predominantly Muslim areas of India such as Punjab and Bengal. The party opposed a large independent Indian state and sought a separate nation for the Muslims.
When Britain entered the Second World War, it brought India into the conflict with it without any discourse with the British Raj’s government. The Indian National Congress opposed the war, and after large demonstrations in 1942, its leaders Nehru and Gandhi were arrested. As the British desperately needed local allies in India for the war effort, the All-India Muslim League saw it as an opportunity. They were to cooperate with the British as long as they agreed to their "Pakistan" resolution to create multiple Muslim states in India. After the war, the British economy was crippled, and the country was in no state to rule over a large colonial possession. Meanwhile, religious tension had escalated into violence. A riot between Hindus and Muslims in the city of Calcutta, known as the Great Calcutta Killings, left 4,000 dead. The British wanted a speedy exit from India, and in June 1947 announced that independence would be hastily moved to August of that year. The British presented the two-state solution. Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims and India as a majority-Hindu secular state.
Pakistan is comprised of an east and a west part on either side of India. The borders were drawn by lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never been to India and never returned after their independence. He later admitted he used outdated census maps to draw the borders.
In August 1947, India and Pakistan were granted independence from the UK. But it was in no way a happy occasion. The separation of India and Pakistan, known as the Partition in the Indian subcontinent, was bloody and gruesome. As many fled to their "correct" side of the border, violence ensued. Stories have been passed down of trains full of dead bodies arriving at train stations. Houses of Muslims were burned in India, and Hindu homes were burned in Pakistan. Thousands of women were raped. Families were massacred and separated. While there is no official number, anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million people died during the partition of India. Despite the hate and violence that took place in 1947, 35 million Muslims stayed on in India.
Post-partition, Muslims are still the largest religious minority in India, accounting for 15% of the population. Through the second half of the twentieth century, Muslims and other minorities in India faced cases of discrimination. However, they have been able to coexist with Hindus for the most part. While there have always been isolated incidents of violence, they have skyrocketed in recent years, since the election of the BJP party.
The principle of Hindu nationalism in India is that Hindus are the rightful owners of the land as their holy sites are in India, but Christians and Muslims' holy lands are outside of India. The current BJP party, or Bharatiya Janata Party, is a right-wing Hindu nationalist party that originated from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary group. The party came to power in 1998 and won its single party majority in 2014, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After a campaign of anti-Muslim messaging, they were re-elected in 2019, and their five-year term ends in 2024. Ghazala Jamil, an assistant professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told the Council on Foreign Relations that "the Modi government made it extremely clear to Muslims that they were not going to address them at all." "The exclusion was quite blatant," and that "there has been a marked increase in anti-Muslim hostility in all kinds of institutions." (Maizland). Modi also introduced the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which gives fast track citizenship to Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Many criticized the act as it excluded Muslims.
Many other actions have excluded Muslims, such as the stripping of Indian-administered Kashmir, the only majority Muslim state in India, of its special autonomy and cutting the area off from internet and mobile services for months. In recent years, there have been multiple riots and incidents of violence. Attacks against Muslims are on the rise in the country. Cow killings are becoming more common, where Hindu vigilante mobs attack and kill Muslims under the suspicion of eating, selling or transporting beef. In Hinduism, cows are seen as sacred, and beef is banned in many Indian states. The Hindustan Times published statistics on the rise in cow killings. They found that 86% of the victims in cow-related attacks since 2010 were Muslims, and 97% of those attacks happened after Modi came to power (Abraham and Rao). The BJP has not taken action against these cow killings. After the killing of Akhlaq, a fifty-year old Muslim man, killed after it was rumoured he had beef, which turned out to be lamb, there was an outcry from across the country. However, one of Akhlaq’s accused murderers was invited to be in the front row of a rally of a BJP politician.
Cow killings are not the only form of attack propagated against Muslims. The term "love jihad" has been coined by Hindu nationalists and is used to describe Muslim men who try to seduce Hindu women with the intention of seducing them. There have been cases of violent attacks on Muslim men who marry Hindu women. The BJP’s anti-Muslim sentiment is clear. At an election rally, Yogi Adityanath, appointed by the BJP as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and home to the largest Muslim population, said that Muslims are a "green virus."
The BJP has not only allowed for religious violence against minorities but also silenced them. Just two days ago, muslim Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of a fact-checking website, was arrested after posting a tweet highlighting the comments made by Nupur Sharma on Prophet Muhammad during a debate. He was arrested under the pretense of "insulting Hindu religious beliefs" (BBC). A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists found that in 2021, India had the most journalists murdered for their work in the world (newslaundry).
Religious violence in India will not come to an end under a government that incited violence deepens the religious divide and discriminates against its minorities. While both Muslims and Hindus are responsible for the violence, the BJP is inciting and supporting this violence and its deepening India's religious divide. The government of India is slowly losing touch with its principle of secularity. Religious-based violence will only continue if the government doesn't take action against extremists on both sides, rather than turning a blind eye, or taking a side. For the foreseeable future, the religious violence in India will not come to an end, as the religious divide deepens.
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