(C) OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY ANDREA HANKS
MUSLIMS UNDER SIEGE
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are cheered and welcomed by crowds, Feb. 24, along the motorcade route in Ahmedabad, India
BETWEEN VIRUS AND VIOLENCE: The Horror of Being Muslim in India India’s state-sanctioned Islamophobia has singled out the country’s 201 million Muslims and scapegoated them as disseminators of coronavirus BY KHALED BEYDOUN
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wo weeks after Donald Trump’s visit to New Delhi, the ascending Indian public intellectual Rana Ayyub asked, “What is left for a virus to kill in a morally corrupt nation?” As the pandemic ravaged Iran and Italy, and ripped into nation after nation between and beyond, the Indian capital was besieged by a different kind of homegrown pandemic, concocted by none other than the nation’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Modi’s meeting with Trump in late February displayed all the grandiose pageantry of two egomaniacs, and incited the ongoing Delhi riots to reach an ever higher fever pitch. Buoyed by the meeting of the world’s two leading Islamophobe-in-Chiefs, mobs of Hindutva extremists stormed Delhi neighborhoods populated by Muslims and proceeded to burn down homes, destroy and desecrate mosques, and kill Muslims and those who sought to protect them.
The Delhi riots claimed the lives of 60 people, 47 of whom were Muslims. One of them was an 85-year-old woman who was tied up and lit on fire by a mob that chanted “Jai Shri Ram,” a common Hindutva slogan, as she burned to death. Modi, in the form of state-sponsored Islamophobia and the mob violence his policies and proclamations embolden, spread this pandemic of violence that has gripped India, most tightly in its capital city, strategically over the course of years. The banner of “Hindutva nationalism,” which holds India to be the home exclusively
BLAME FOR THE VIRUS’ SPREAD WAS ASSIGNED TO ANY AND EVERY MUSLIM IN THE COUNTRY”
60 ISLAMIC HORIZONS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020
for Hindus, was rapidly infecting the nation’s majority Hindu population and, in turn, exposing its 201 million Muslims to unspeakable horror. It seemed that Indian Islamophobia, and the climax of vigilante violence that gripped Delhi for weeks, had reached its limit; however, it was soon superseded by a new turn of events. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit the headlines and the coronavirus claimed the lives of thousands, Hindutva leaders saw an opportunity to further justify their persecution of Indian Muslims: blame its spread in India on Muslims. During March 1-15, Tablighi Jamaat — a Muslim missionary organization — held its annual conference in New Delhi. The gathering, attended by Muslims from around the world, met at Tablighi’s Markaz headquarters in the south Delhi neighborhood of Nizamuddin. The event had been planned months in advance and converged with growing concern within India about the domestic spread of the coronavirus. The state had not yet issued a lockdown, and Tablighi Jamaat — and religious gatherings from other faith groups — continued without interruption. However, the ire of the popular media — and the extremist mobs that ripped through the city that hosted the Muslim conference — found a convenient scapegoat for the domestic spread of Covid-19: Muslims. Not just the organizers of the Tablighi conference and the 2,000 attendees, but the whole of the Muslim population in India. All 201 million Muslims were instantly singled out and scapegoated as disseminators of the coronavirus in India. News headlines ran with the story that the Tablighi conference was the source of the national Covid-19 outbreak. In swift order, Hindutva nationalists took to social media, dubbing the virus “Corona Jihad” and the “Muslim Virus.” These labels were accompanied by vile caricatures of Muslims spitting on bystanders and physicians, and doctored videos of Muslims disobeying stay at home orders. Instead of criticizing the conference organizers, blame for the virus’ spread was assigned to any and every Muslim in the country. Even Muslims thousands of miles from Delhi, and those not associated with the Hanafi school of thought subscribed to by Tablighi Jamaat, were singled out. However, the facts mean little when fear mongering takes precedence. A novel strain
