As Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was felicitating American president Donald Trump Delhi remained convulsed for four days in the last week of February by horrific anti-Muslim violence instigated by local leaders of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). From all reports, Delhi BJP leader Kapil Mishra initiated the current anti-Muslim violence on the day before Trump arrived in India.
Delhi has been the centre of the nationwide mass protest against the BJP government's anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In Delhi these were completely non-violent demonstrations in which women had taken part in large numbers in the impoverished neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh. Kapil Mishra warned with an "ultimatum'' to Delhi police to clear Delhi streets of anti-CAA protesters within three days, else his supporters would do the job.
This ultimatum was the immediate trigger for the start of the anti-Muslim violence that engulfed Delhi for four days. Since the day Trump arrived in Delhi groups of young BJP and RSS thugs armed with sticks and iron rods started setting fire on Muslim owned shops, homes and mosques. All these were happening right under the nose of the police who stood silent or looked other way, even they were missing when needed the most.
According to the Hindu newspaper, mobs started singling out Muslims whether on foot or in vehicles and began thrashing them out. Also, mosques, Muslim houses and shops were set ablaze while violent mob shouting "Jai Shri Ram (Long live the Hindu God Ram). Many Muslim residents of Delhi were dragged along the ground, beaten up with batons and made to sing the national anthem (composed by poet Rabindranath Tagore) - not by the murderous mob but by the police. To outdo the police, the murderous mob to filter out Muslims asked people suspected being Muslims to chant the Hanuman Chalisa, a beloved religious verse of for Hindus.
The police complicity has been in evidence since the protests began against the anti-Muslim legislation, the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act). Evidence of police complicity was captured in a photograph where a pistol wielding youth shot into a crowd protesting against the CAA while a line of police looked on. At Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI) the police just looked on when a gun was aimed at and then shot dead a Kashmiri student. The police also failed to apprehend a single masked attackers of anti-CAA student protesters at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in early January.
There are numerous eye-witness accounts of police officers allowing Hindu thugs to attack Muslims without any restraints, and even joining with them to attack Muslims. BJP leaders like Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Parvesh Sharma and others who espoused criminal violence including murdering of Muslims are free while an opposition Muslim politician has been booked for arson and murder.
A Delhi High Court Judge, Justice Muralidhar, felt obliged to admonish the police for not taking appropriate legal actions against three BJP leaders for their role in the anti-Muslim violence gripping Delhi. Justice Muralidhar noted that the police so far failed to lodge any First Information Reports (FIR) to enable the authorities to undertake criminal investigations against the BJP leaders. He expressed the view that such failures are cause for alarm. He then further went on to note that "In this city, we cannot allow another 1984 riot'', referring to the anti-Sikh pogrom instigated by the Congress Government of the time in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Solicitor General responding to the Court's criticism and said that the government would respond when the situation was "conducive''. Within hours of this exchange, the Ministry of Law and Justice transferred Justice Muralidhar from the Delhi High Court to the Punjab and Haryana High Court in a quite brazen act of retribution.
The role of the mainstream media is equally shameful mostly parroting the BJP line blaming anti-CAA demonstrators for inciting violence when in reality these demonstrations were peaceful. Almost equally culpable is the liberal segment of the media in their portrayal of anti and pro CAA demonstrators on equal footing when the target of pogrom was clearly a particular group.
While police and government authorities claim order has been restored since Thursday (March 05), by all accounts, parts of Delhi, especially the northeast part of Delhi still remains in a tense situation and violence continues. Ayyub Shabbir died on Friday (February 29) after being assaulted by a Hindu mob in the North East Delhi of Delhi, the epicentre of anti-Muslim violence. There are also now growing concerns that once situation returns to normalcy, whether Muslims who fled in terror from their homes in integrated areas will be allowed to return to their homes, now or ever. The Gujarat Disturbed Area act like legislation may be used as a blue print to prevent Muslims to return to their homes.
Last week's anti-Muslim violence constitutes by far the worst outbreak of communal violence in Delhi since 1984 when Congress party leaders purportedly instigated an anti-Sikh pogrom following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Prime Minister Modi's conspicuous silence during the whole period of anti-Muslim carnage in Delhi is a tell-tale manifestation of his acquiescent approach.
In fact, Hindu supremacist thugs went on a rampage stoked by Hindutva rhetoric espoused by Modi's BJP government leaving behind 43 dead and hundreds injured. Kenan Malik, an Observer columnist, opined that the violence in Delhi was not a "riot". It was a targeted anti-Muslim brutality.
GUJARAT POGROM: Modi as the Chief Minister of Gujarat orchestrated the anti-Muslim violence in the state in 2002. The Gujarat pogrom claimed 2000 lives. Ehsan Jaffri, an elderly Congress politician and a member of the Lok Sabha, was paraded naked and then dismembered and burned. As the anti-Muslim pogrom process accelerated in Gujrat, Modi became invisible as happened in Delhi as well. Like in Delhi in many areas of Gujrat, the police not only stood by but according to numerous human rights groups, even took part in it.
Modi's assault on Muslims continues as reflected in the ever-escalating series of anti-Muslim legal and administrative actions taken by his government. The anti-Muslim CAA is just one of anti-Muslim acts to deprive them of their basic human rights, right to full citizenship. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) "Citizenship is the right to have rights''. And Modi is now getting down to do exactly the opposite by depriving Muslims in India of their citizenship rights. Stripping Muslims in India of citizenship will leave them vulnerable to brutal treatment which already is manifesting in the streets of Delhi.
The new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) openly discriminates against Muslims. The proposed national register requires residents to prove their citizenship with documentation which most Indians including Prime Minister Modi (his office has recently confirmed that he has no documentation to prove his residency) lack.
Together these two laws and the 2020 National Population Register (NPR) put Indian Muslims without documentation in a quandary. The RSS, the ideological fountain head of the BJP, is quite clear what Hindutva stands for - "India is first and foremost a nation for Hindus''. When the Hindu mob set fire to a mosque in Delhi and put up Hindu supremacist flag at its minaret, they chanted in Hindi "Nation belongs to Hindus'.
The BJP now is the ruling party of India and it has been so since 2014. The BJP has begun to change citizenship laws that echo the Hindutva ideology to make India a Hindu Rashtra. Now the process has been put in place for Muslims in India who are ineligible for citizenship to put them into concentration camps (Noam Chomsky noted symptoms of fascism in India under the ruling BJP government) which are already being built in Assam. Hannah Arendt described in her book the concentration camp is "the central institution of totalitarian power''. The CAA is principally designed to push Muslims out, primarily to Bangladesh and to privilege Hindus in the citizenship laws.
WORLD REACTION: Protest has been a constitutional and legal right to raise issues of concern in a democratic society. Only in totalitarian societies such a fundamental human right is denied. Women in Shaheen Bagh and students at JNU and JMI were just exercising their fundamental right to peacefully protest against anti-Muslim CAA which will jeopardise Indian Muslims' citizenship right. It was quite disingenuous for the Indian Foreign Secretary to suggest that the CAA was "misunderstood'' at a seminar held in Dhaka last week. The CAA has been widely criticised by legal experts around the world as brazenly anti-Muslim.
Amnesty International's US executive director Margaret Huang accused the Trump and Modi governments of anti-Muslim policies. Barnie Sanders criticised Trump for his response to anti-Muslim violence and described as a failure of leadership on human rights. Nadia Whittome, a British MP, described anti-Muslim violence in Delhi as sustained and systematic Hindutva violence waged against Muslims, sanctioned by the BJP government. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet in her address to the Human Rights Council's 43rd session expressed concern over the deadly violence that began in Delhi on February 23, highlighting in particular reports of police inaction in the face of attacks on Muslims. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also expressed his concern over the situation in Delhi. Arundhati Roy commented on the Delhi violence and said "This is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick''.
But bigotry and hostility towards Muslims in essence is the shared value of Trump and Modi. While the racial bias in the US citizenship laws has been toned down over time, with Trump becoming President all that have gone into reverse gear. Trump's first Attorney General Jeff Session did propose a return to the 1924 Immigration Act which barred non-whites to enter the US. Trump himself advocated his dislike for immigrants coming from "shithole countries'' and his preference for people from Nordic countries like Norway to come to the US.
Citizenship laws have been used by fascists throughout our contemporary history like Hitler's Nuremberg laws to give shape to the totalitarian state. India under Modi is advancing quite decisively to make India a totalitarian state by welding together Hindutva ideology and terror.
Trump lavished praise on Modi the "true friend'' for his democratic and tolerant leadership when the atrocities instigated by Modi's BJP government were being visited upon Delhi Muslims while he himself was in Delhi. The anti-Muslim violence orchestrated by the BJP government under the leadership Modi and Trump's own deep-seated bigotry against Muslims as exemplified both in words and actions stand in sharp contrast to cynical claims promoted by both Washington and New Delhi and echoed and promoted by the Western media that Indo-US strategic alliance against China is based on "shared values'' of democracy and religious tolerance. (The article has been slightly edited)
Muhammad Mahmood is an independent economic and political analyst.