India: Violence Against Muslims Reaches Dangerous Tipping Point.
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India’s secular democratic identity now rests on the same knife edge Weimar Germany tried to tip-toe along through the 1920s before eventually succumbing to far-right fascism under the Nazi Party in 1933.
Whereas the Jews, and others, were scapegoated by the Nazis for the stagnant post-war German economy more than 100 years ago, India’s ruling political party (BJP), and its insestual hillbilly cousin (RSS) have placed blame for India’s ills on 200 million Muslims today.
Violence carried out against Muslims by Hindu extremists has been ratcheting upwards both steadily and dramatically since Modi’s BJP party seized government in 2014, culminating with the brutal and savage lynching murders of 10 Muslims during the summer.
In December, however, Hindu extremist terrorism took on an even more menacing appearance when a Hindu man hacked a Muslim worker to death with a machete, while his nephew filmed the grisly murder and uploaded the video on social media. The macabre clip not only went viral, but was broadcasted across the country on mainstream television networks.
“I did this to protect the honor of Hindus against Muslims,” the attacker declared in the video.
Yet, not a single one of India’s 543 member congress has condemned the attack or the attacker, and even more alarming still — the attacker is now celebrated as a hero among RSS supporters, specifically, and Hindutva extremists generally.
Today, those who rape, assault, lynch and murder Muslims are feted as heroes, and those who defend the victims are threatened with death.
“There has become a permissive attitude towards all forms of violence [under Prime Minister Narendra Modi],” says best selling Indian author Arudhati Roy. “People know they will be protected in the end. Rape, yes, and lynching too, hacking someone to death because they’re suspected of eating beef, or flogging Dalits because they are transporting dead cattle. Every form of violence is being supported, even the victims have cases filed against them.”
“India is now standing at the entrance to a dark valley,” observes Indian journalist Anoop Sadanandan, who draws a concise parallel between the toxic anti-Muslim climate in India today with the toxic levels of anti-Semitism that gripped Germany in the years prior to the Holocaust.
Like the lies and conspiracies told by the Nazis about the Jewish people, which eventually lulled the German people into accepting the extermination of Jews to be both reasonable and rational, the weaponization of social media by Hindu extremists has brought upon India’s 200 million Muslims an existential crisis.
Turns out the Hindu extremist who murdered 45-year-old Muslim Mohammad Afrazul was radicalized by a “diet of hardline Hindutva videos” that served to “fuel his hatred of Muslims.” To that end, one can only imagine how much faster, larger, and even more brutal the Nazi genocide of European Jewry could’ve been, if that were at all possible, and if it took place in the age of ubiquitous social media.
“India is living the Germany of the 1930s,” Syed Mohd Murtaza, a research scholar at the Academy of International Studies in New Delhi told me. “Just like the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, 1992 and 2002 anti-Muslim riots of Gujarat, India is going through its worst phase in the 21st century.”
At this point, it’s illustrative to reflect upon the Gujarat riots of 2002, which was ignited by Hindu extremist generated rumors Muslims were to blame for the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims aboad a burning train in Godhra on 27 February, 2002, rumors that resulted in an orgy of violence, leaving 790 Muslims murdered, and countless others raped and abused in a 3-day period.
“The vast majority of those who died were Muslim. Mobs of [Hindu] men dragged women and young girls out of their homes and raped them,” according to The Guardian, while a 2007 investigative report disclosed ringleaders boasting of how they slit open the womb of a pregnant [Muslim] woman.
If 2018 already echoes the anti-Muslim horrors of 2002, consider that the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the riots is the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is rightfully blamed for helping ignite the violence because it was he who falsely accused Pakistani agents of igniting the deadly train fire.
Again, ask yourself how much more widespread and violent the 2002 riots would’ve or could’ve been if it took place today in the age of social media?
In short, Facebook has now become an existential threat to Muslim minorities around the world. Recently, the United Nations blamed Facebook posts for instigating the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and two weeks ago the Sri Lankan government blamed social media for fuelling the nationwide anti-Muslim riots across the Buddhist majority island state, and Facebook posts that falsely accuse Muslims of plotting to establish an Islamic emirate within India, spying for Pakistan, or for imagined crimes against Hindus have been blamed for causing a number of recent acts of mob violence against Muslims in India.
Recently, an online activist collected a large swathe of social media posts of Hindus calling for genocide against India’s 200 million Muslims, and also those living under Indian occupation in Kashmir. It’s alarming, horrifying, and widespread.
Moreover, Hitler and Nazism is being woven into the DNA of India’s ultranationalist political parties, so much so that Hitler has been revitalized as a heroic figure in mainstream Indian culture. Restaurants, bars, clothing labels, retail outlets, and even ice cream brands across the country are named after the 20th century’s most savage psychopath.
“Admiration for Nazism — often reframed with a genocidal hatred for Muslims — is rampant in the Hindu nationalist camp, which has never been as mainstream as it is now,” says Shrenik Rao, the famous Indian filmmaker.
When the now-Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2004, school textbooks published by the state under his control portrayed Hitler as a savior of the German people, according to Haaretz, and included chapters under the headings,“Hitler, the Supremo,” and “Internal Achievements of Nazism.”
Like Nazism, Hindutva is also an ideology that promotes the idea of a master race, one that places Hindus as the celestially ordained rulers of the sub-continent. Hindu nationalists know that in order to complete this national project, however, something must be done about the country’s more than 300 million non-Hindu citizens, and thus extremists are manufacturing communal violence in order to escalate the number of violent confrontations.
If Hindu nationalists aren’t manufacturing violence confrontations, then they’re just straight up carrying out random and organized attacks on Muslims and their places of worship, education, residence, and business.
India’s now rapid descending slide towards fascism is an immediate and direct threat to the lives of Indian Muslims, and thus should be ringing alarm bells in the halls of the United Nations, but until now almost zero attention is being given to the current crisis outside of India.
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