Islamophobia gains ground in Indian election campaign

Publishing date: 24 April 2024

Published in: Le Monde

It didn’t take long for the mask to fall off. Two days after the opening of polls for the parliamentary elections due to end on June 1, Narendra Modi, leading the campaign for his party, went on an openly Islamophobic rant. On Sunday, April 21, at a rally in Rajasthan, in the tribal region of Bhanswara, the Indian prime minister targeted and stigmatized Muslims, without naming them.
He accused the Congress, the main opposition party, of wanting to distribute national wealth “to those who have the most children, the infiltrators,” claiming that the government of Manmohan Singh, his predecessor, had declared that Muslims had “the first right to the nation’s resources.” “That means they will collect all your wealth and distribute it to whom? – To those who have the most children. They’ll redistribute it to the infiltrators. Do you think your hard-earned money should be given to the infiltrators? Do you approve of that?” he challenged the crowd to a round of applause.
His allusions echoed an old refrain of Hindu nationalists and a theory they have developed, the Great Replacement theory, known as “love jihad.” His party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), argues that Muslims – around 200 million people in India – pose a demographic threat to Hindus, as they are said to have a strategy to take control of India, by having children and overtaking Hindus demographically. They seduce Hindu women with the sole aim of converting them. Since Modi came to power in 2014, several BJP-ruled states have thus passed anti-conversion laws, highly stigmatizing and threatening religious minorities, Muslims and Christians, whose members can find themselves in prison on mere accusations of wanting to convert Hindus.
▪️ The major far-right organization to which the BJP belongs, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has made Muslims the enemies of the nation. From 1940 onwards, it was led by Golwalkar, who was inspired by Adolf Hitler and praised Nazi Germany as an example of racial pride. This influential man, admired by Modi, claimed that minorities should be treated as the Nazis treated the Jews. For this proponent of a purely Hindu India, Christians and Muslims were internal threats.
The prime minister’s remarks, usually worded more cautiously, sparked a wave of indignation. On Monday, the Congress referred the matter to the electoral commission, calling for sanctions against the “blatant targeting,” “divisive, reprehensible and malicious,” of “a particular religious community.” The electoral code prohibits stirring up communitarian feelings. But this independent body, which is responsible for ensuring that the elections run smoothly and that the code of conduct is respected, has fallen under the control of the government. In March, the government appointed two election commissioners close to the BJP.
More than 2,000 citizens also wrote to the Election Commission on Monday, demanding action against Prime Minister Modi. Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan also condemned the Islamophobia in Modi’s speech and the BJP’s communal tactics. He said he was sure that the Election Commission would take no action against the prime ministerial candidate. “I can’t even imagine that the prime minister of a country would make such remarks. His responsibility is to guarantee the unity of the country and its people. But on Sunday, we saw the prime minister stoop to the level of an RSS worker to make absurd communitarian remarks (…) For RSS, minorities don’t deserve to live in this country. Today, a prime minister has clarified their position,” he said.
▪️ Asaduddin Owaisi, one of the few Muslim MPs in the lower house of parliament, scoffed at these stereotypes. “Modi said Muslims have more children. This is a lie. The fertility rate has fallen in the community and, according to official data, it’s 2.36%,” said the MP from Hyderabad. The Muslim fertility rate is, in fact, now barely above the national rate (2%), close to the replacement level, according to the latest Family Health Survey 2021.
The BJP regularly lapses into Islamophobia. During the last election campaign in 2019, at a rally in West Bengal, Interior Minister Amit Shah, very close to Modi, referred to illegal migrants as “termites.” “Illegal immigrants are like termites. They eat the grain that should go to the poor. They take our jobs,” promising that the BJP would throw them out.
In its editorial on Tuesday, The Hindu, the leading daily, pointed out that “One of the main features of Narendra Modi’s politics is his reliance on an unapologetic brand of right-wing rhetoric that is moored in demagoguery, hate speeches against minorities and the use of dog whistles – political messaging intended to please the bigoted sections of his support base.” Asked by the Indian press to comment on the controversy, the BJP spokesman retorted that the Prime Minister had called a “spade a spade.”