India is my country and i am proud to say that its world’s biggest democracy . every religion is equal hers because our constitution gives us power, because its democratic country
Indian leaders always speak about Mahatma Gandhi when they go on foreign tours. It plays well with the popular thought of India as a land of peace and love, and lifts its moral authority as a mindful democracy on the world stage. In this way, Gandhi and his ideas came up a tonne as Prime Minister Narendra Modi got out of India as of late without precedent for about one and a half years.
Meeting Modi at the White House on Sept. 24, President Joe Biden said Gandhi’s “message of peacefulness, regard, and tolerance matters today maybe more than it ever has.“
In his own discourse to the United Nations, Modi mourned that “the world faces the threat of backward thinking and extremism,” and he underlined his country’s democratic credentials. To reinforce his point, he even coined another sobriquet for India: “the mother of all democracies.”
Nobody knows what that means, least of all one Indian mother who is actually trying to make sense of the death of her 12-year-old kid. He was felled by a stray police bullet in the north-eastern state of Assam at the same time that Modi was pontificating in America.
“They murdered my child,” a dazed Hasina Bano continued to repeat between wails when journalists visited her at a distant village on the banks of the Brahmaputra. The kid, Sheik Farid, was hit when police started shooting at Bengali Muslim villagers protesting the constrained expulsion from their land that the public authorities presently want to provide for Assamese Hindus, whom it calls the “indigenous local area.”
Ironically, minutes before Farid kicked the bucket, he had gathered from the mailing station a national biometric identification card, establishing his own indigeneity.
The death of a youngster in such a manner should be the stuff of national disgrace. However, the same expulsion drive occurred in a significantly more terrifying manner when Farid’s neighbour charged at the police with a stick in a blind rage after they dismantled his home along with those of 5,000 others.The heavily armed cops, who far dwarfed Moinul Hoque and might have easily stifled him, instead shot him dead at point blank range.
It was all captured on a broadly circulated video. The images show police raining baton blows on him even as he collapsed, taking turns with Bijoy Baniya, a Hindu photographer accompanying the police team. As Hoque’s life ebbs away, Baniya fiendishly bounces and tramples his still body in an “act of per formative depravity.”
HINDUISM REALLY IN DANGER? I don’t think so
In a nation where 84% of the population is Hindu and simply 14% Muslim, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has achieved the astonishing feat of creating a profound feeling of Hindu victimhood, stoking the othering of Muslims via disinformation, hate discourse, opening old strictures, manipulating a subservient media, silencing moderate voices, and empowering Hindu supremacist vigilante gatherings. “Hindu khatre mein hain” (Hindus are in danger) is a right-wing refrain that resonates deeply today.
Accordingly, many Hindus have now been persuaded to accept that India’s most concerning issue is its Muslims. Before Modi took over in 2014, most residents thought their main worries were destitution, insufficient monetary development, and debasement. He rode off to turn on the promise to fix all that. In any case, as the economy has continued to deteriorate and joblessness and destitution have risen under him, the BJP has increasingly fallen back on supremacist governmental issues to divert attention and evade liability.
To continue to win decisions, it needs to continue to polarise Hindu citizens against Muslims, and spin outrageous campaigns to belittle Muslims. Muslims apparently desire Hindu ladies, procreating rapidly, fully intent on overtaking the Hindu population and establishing an Islamic state, necessitating new laws against “love jihad.” Similar regulations against strict changes and the slaughter of cows, which are sacred to Hindus, have encouraged vigilantism. Muslim hawkers and labourers have come under increasing attack from Hindu supremacist groups calling for a blacklist of Muslim businesses.
Indian social media today is loaded up with recordings of self-appointed defenders of Hinduism calling for the lynching of Muslims—an act so normal that it hardly makes the news anymore. High-profile Hindu supremacists are only occasionally reserved for hate discourse. Muslims routinely face random attacks for such “wrongdoings” as transporting cattle or being in the company of Hindu ladies. Now and again, the provocation is essentially that someone is visibly Muslim. As Modi himself has told political decision rallies, individuals “creating brutality” can be “distinguished by their clothes.”
POLARISATION IN ASSAM
The mistreatment of Muslims in Assam is only the beginning.
In any case, Baniya’s malevolence has a history longer than India’s plunge into the abyss of hate. Assam, the setting for his ghoulish death dance on the body of a Muslim, is the place where this development of the Muslim as the unwanted, dangerous untouchable has been sharpened and mainstreamed. The fear of being invaded by “untouchables” has almost been genetically encoded there over hundreds of years, dating back to the time the British started clearing the state’s rich backwoods for tea and other plantations. The clearances set off the inward migration of Bengali peasants from densely populated adjoining areas in search of easily obtainable, prolific lands.
Almost certainly stirring up a lot of discontent for the ethnic Assamese, the migrations have continued in late decades because of the rough partition of the subcontinent, financial hardship, political instability, and wars in what is currently known as Bangladesh. Climate-related factors have also determined a steady mass migration out of flood-inclined, deltaic Bangladesh into Assam.
With the rise of Modi, historical Assamese hatred towards non-Assamese speakers has blended with the legislative issues of Hindu nationalism into a dangerous mix of xenophobia and patriotism. Stomping on a Muslim body currently has a sparkle of patriotic righteousness to it, which is the reason it is being flaunted on camera. Dogmatism is presently an honourable badge. In his head, Baniya was protecting India, and police officers are seen hugging him in the video after Hoque’s death. His behaviour says much about the way Modi has weaponized history and valorised and incentivized hate.
Assam is Modi’s grand laboratory, where he is putting Muslims through the litmus trial of a resident verification drive, separating the trueborn from the chaff, prior to taking it national. The BJP says it basically wants India to be freed of “Bangladeshi migrants,” yet it involves them as a code for Indian Muslims. Naively, nearly 2 million individuals have been disenfranchised in the state, with no clarity as to what exactly is to happen to them. The nearest regional parallel to such large-scale, government-dictated statelessness as of late was the 1982 mass disenfranchisement of the Rohingya in Myanmar, before the massacres and mass migration years later.
The central minister of India’s greatest and most politically important state, Uttar Pradesh, has as of late blamed Muslims for cornering government-sponsored food. Uttar Pradesh, along with Assam, has introduced a two-kid strategy blaming Muslims for a runaway population development that officials say accounts for the backwardness of these states. The claim is not established in reality. In fact, the rate of wealth among Muslims has been rapidly declining.
Be that as it may, reality is, as of now, not important.
CONCLUSION
It conforms to the needs of the ruling party’s dehumanizing narrative against Muslims. As Jews in Nazi Germany were called “rats” and Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s were called “cockroaches,” so BJP individuals currently allude to Indian Muslims as “termites” eating away at India’s assets, denying Hindus what is due to them in their own land.
