Muslims in India are subjected to widespread racial discrimination. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in India represents a period marked by the escalation of Hindu terrorism against Muslims. Discriminatory laws have been enacted against them, their historic mosques have been demolished, and not to mention the daily incidents of violence.
Nasim Qureshi, 47 years old, was walking near a mosque in the city of Chapra in the Indian state of Bihar, accompanied by his nephew, when a group of extremist Hindus attacked them. They beat them with sticks and severely assaulted them, leading to the death of Nasim Qureshi as a result of the attack. His nephew, Firoz, survived after managing to escape from the crime scene. He later went to the police station to file a complaint, where he was treated badly. One of the officers told him that the perpetrators were not responsible for his uncle’s death, and that Firoz and Nasim deserved what had happened to them.
Subsequently, the city’s police chief told the newspaper India Times that Firoz and Nasim were carrying illegal meat when they were stopped by local residents. It is commonly understood that the term illegal meat refers to beef, due to the Hindu veneration and worship of cows and the effort to prohibit Muslims from consuming it unjustly through violence and terrorism against them.
Activists on social media condemned the crime and described it as an example of the escalation of Hindu right-wing crimes in the country.
Member of parliament and head of the All India Majlis e Ittehadul Muslimeen party, Asaduddin Owaisi, said: “Hindu right-wing crimes are increasing.”
Prominent journalist Rana Ayyub described the incident as “evidence of the reality lived by Indian Muslims under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
This rise in violence by Hindu extremists against Muslims in India is undoubtedly linked to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Many inside and outside India accuse his government of encouraging Hindu terrorism and extremism against Muslims. This raises the question: what is the Bharatiya Janata Party, and what are its goals, policies, and methods regarding India’s Muslims, who number around 200 million, approximately 15% of the population?
According to the Hindutva ideology, Muslims are considered the primary enemy of Hindus and are portrayed as foreign invaders who entered India and historically oppressed Hindus. Hindutva is based on a falsified historical narrative that claims Hinduism alone represents India’s identity and history.
The Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India after achieving a sweeping victory in the 2014 general elections. However, its political roots go back to 1951, when the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded. It later merged with several parties to form the Janata Party in 1977, which won a majority and formed the government. This coalition soon collapsed in 1980, leading to the establishment of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the same year. In the 1984 general elections, the party won only two seats in parliament.
In 1996, the Bharatiya Janata Party became the largest party in parliament but did not secure a majority. Following the 1998 elections, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the party, formed a government that lasted one year. Another election then resulted in the formation of a new National Democratic Alliance government that completed a full term. In the 2004 elections, the alliance suffered defeat, though the Bharatiya Janata Party remained the main opposition party for the following decade.
The party returned to power with its well known victory in the 2014 elections and won again in 2019.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology is rooted in Hindutva, which it actively promotes. This doctrine represents radical Hindu nationalism. According to Hindutva, Muslims are the main enemy of Hindus and are foreign invaders who historically wronged them. This ideology rests on a fabricated reading of history that claims Hinduism alone defines India’s identity and past. This extreme right-wing Hindu nationalist thought began to take shape in the 1920s at the hands of writer and politician Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who laid the first theoretical foundations of Hindutva.
Objective historical studies of India refute this extremist Hindu narrative. Historically, Hinduism was geographically confined to a limited area in northwestern India, in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, before spreading to other parts of the subcontinent in later periods. The chronological span of Hinduism is also far shorter than the full span of Indian history. Moreover, the profound influence of 1,300 years of Islam on Indian culture and society cannot be ignored. One of the clearest indicators of this influence is that when Hindu nationalist extremists chant Jai Hind, meaning Victory to India, they use the word Hind, which has Persian-Arabic roots.
Before the political rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Hindutva was considered a marginal, radical viewpoint that no respectable Indian would adopt, and it was not widespread even among the Hindu public. The party’s success in spreading this ideology among broad Hindu social segments and inflaming hostility against Islam and Indian Muslims has transformed India’s social and political reality over the past 30 years.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s political ascent relied on extremist Hindu populism, both in discourse and in mobilising and amplifying sectarian violence against Muslims.
At the level of rhetoric, the party focuses on claims that Hindus were marginalised and excluded from decision-making during decades of Indian National Congress rule. It accuses the Congress of appeasing Muslims at the expense of Hindu religious beliefs and links voting for the Bharatiya Janata Party to protecting Hindu doctrine.
This extremist discourse also appears in the party’s foreign policy positions toward Pakistan and the Kashmir issue, where harsh statements and stances against Muslims in Pakistan and Kashmir are used to provoke Hindu nationalist sentiments and encourage hostility and bullying against Muslims.
India’s expected economic rise in the coming period is likely to gain momentum as the United States and its allies seek to turn India into the world’s factory as an alternative to China, to slow China’s rise as a global power.
In terms of sectarian violence, numerous incidents have been instigated or exploited by the Bharatiya Janata Party to significantly boost its popularity among the Hindu majority. The most notable include:
The attack on the Babri Mosque in 1992 in the city of Ayodhya in northern India, its demolition, and the subsequent violence that followed, after years of mobilisation since 1989.
The 2002 train fire in the state of Gujarat, which killed dozens of Hindu pilgrims. Muslims were blamed for the incident, leading to widespread violence, killings of Muslim citizens, and the destruction of their homes and mosques.
The formation of Hindu vigilante groups that track Muslim cattle traders, intercept them, and in some cases kill them, rejecting cow slaughter because cows are considered sacred by Hindus.
In 2019, Muslims organised large scale popular protests in response to parliamentary amendments to the Citizenship Act of 1955. The Hindu nationalist government and its supporters violently suppressed these protests, resulting in dozens of Muslim deaths and injuries, in addition to the arrest of hundreds.
These protests erupted because the amendments granted citizenship rights to migrants fleeing religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan if they belonged to Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jain, or Zoroastrian faiths, while explicitly excluding Muslim migrants.
Human rights advocates agreed that these amendments amounted to a legal entrenchment of a climate of hatred, reinforced by the rhetoric of leaders of the ruling right wing party toward the Muslim minority.
Alongside these sectarian incidents, and within the same framework of stoking extremist Hindu nationalist sentiment, there has also been the cultivation of a youth oriented trend in music and singing on YouTube and other social media platforms. Through this growing genre, Hindu right-wing supporters spread hatred against Muslims.
The lyrics of these songs are either openly insulting to Muslims or contain threats against them. They are based on the idea that Hindus suffered for centuries under Muslim rule and that the time has come for Muslims to pay the price. These songs are often used to mobilise Hindu youth for sectarian violence against Muslims, mosques, and Islamic properties, or for political mobilisation in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In general, it is observed that whenever the Bharatiya Janata Party feels a political threat to its popular support among the Hindu masses, it resorts to inflaming Hindu fanaticism against Islam and Muslims. This has been seen in measures such as banning Muslim women from wearing the hijab, demolishing Muslim homes in several states, and stripping thousands of Muslims of citizenship in others.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has strengthened its social base by supporting the establishment of more than 45,000 branches of the extremist Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which possesses شبه military formations. This has expanded its presence across Indian states and enabled it to mobilise Hindu votes in favour of the party during legislative elections.
These sectarian practices and Hindu extremism have led many international human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to warn that violent attacks against Muslims in India are escalating. They have accused the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of ignoring these abuses and, at times, enabling hate speech against Muslims.
A report issued by an independent international panel of experts in July 2022 classified Muslims as a persecuted minority in India, after reviewing a series of human rights violations. These included the adoption of laws and policies that target Muslims or impact them more negatively than others, as well as the state’s failure to protect Muslims from attacks that, in some cases, amount to killing and torture.
At the level of international politics, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party and India’s current prime minister, is exploiting ongoing shifts in the international order and the sharp global polarisation. Major powers are seeking to reshape alliances. The European American bloc aims to draw India into its camp against the alignment of Russia and China, opposing the Western alliance, after successfully strengthening security, military, and political treaties with major Eastern powers such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Australia, building on long standing economic alliances.
At the same time, Russia seeks to leverage its long historical relationship with India, dating back to the former Soviet Union, in order to transform it into a strategic alliance supporting a global alignment against American dominance of the international system since 1990 until recently.
Narendra Modi is clearly exploiting both Russian and Western courtship to strengthen India’s overall capacity and its rise within the emerging international order. This will likely reinforce his political strength and that of the Bharatiya Janata Party domestically.
India’s economic ascent in the coming phase is expected to gain further momentum as the United States and its allies push to make India the world’s factory as a substitute for China, aiming to slow China’s rise as a global power. As a result, trillions of dollars in international investments are likely to flow, to some extent, into India in the coming period. These investments previously moved to China over the past three decades, when it was positioned as the world’s factory under Western strategic direction. That orientation is now shifting out of concern over the consequences of China’s rise, and is increasingly turning toward the Indian elephant instead.
Sunna Files has no billionaire owner or shareholders demanding profit.
We are fiercely independent, and every dollar we receive is reinvested directly into our journalism
Helping us pursue the stories that matter and ensuring our reporting remains open and accessible to everyone.
Click here to Donate & Fund your Islamic Independent Platform
