Vulnerable At Home: How To Make Sense Of Indian Variant Of Islamophobia

There is a growing perception that Indian Muslims are increasingly victims of targeted violence by various means such as lynching, assault allegedly for ‘love jihad, random acts of violence like the recent shooting carried out by a police constable on a Mumbai-bound train; and also in a more systematic fashion as part of ‘bulldozer justice’ mainly und­ertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states such as Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, etc. In a recent execution of bulldozer justice in the wake of the violence in Nuh, Haryana, close to 1200 structures were demolished. The Punjab and Haryana High Court while taking note of this ill­egality invoked ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a possible fallout. This series of violent incidents in various forms occurring over the span of the past few years is argued to be an outcome of growing  Islamophobia. Does this indeed represent a pattern of Islamophobia? Or is there something more to it?

The application of the concept of Islamophobia to analyse the violence against Muslims is rather a new app­roach to the analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in India. This violence bet­ween two communities: Hindus and Muslims—has been occurring for a long time—particularly since the late 19th century. Though the idea of Islamophobia is rather new in its Indian usage, it has been widely used in the West—particularly after 9/11 and the Western response to the war on terror that followed. This was also exported to other parts of the globe including India as part of conversations on the war on terror.  The observation, “all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims” is an outcome of the West-inspired Islamophobic interpretations of the war on terror. This phrase found currency in India’s public conversations during a few terrorist incidents that took place in India after 9/11 as well.

However, it could be argued that the existence of Islamophobia is as old as Islam itself. Under varied contexts, the concept has been deployed differently—at times carrying more weightage or relevance. As a religion, Islam is the youngest member of the family of Abrahamic religions. Like Judaism and Christianity, it has been operating in a very competitive space seeking to make a positive case for itself among its followers. In the process, it has invited hostile interpretations from rival faiths, giving rise to what is now widely known as Islamophobia. But the sources of Islamophobia are not entirely theological. Islam’s close relationships with State power, particularly in the power struggle in non-Islamic societies such as Spain in Europe or in South Asia also contributed significantly to the emergence of Islamophobia. The politics and violence associated with the Muslim empire have also been the source of Islamophobia, especially among those who challenged it such as Maratha power or replaced it such as the British Empire. In India, the examples of Babri Masjid, Gyanvapi Masjid or Somnath are part of the stories connected with the power struggle or conquest with no connection with Islamic theological issues. They are perceived to have contributed to the rise of massive Islamophobia in South Asia and have made ordinary Muslims vulnerable to increasingly organised militant Hinduism in modern times. Historians have been debating about how much writings and interpretations of scholars associated or sympathetic to the British contributed to creating an Islamophobic image of Muslim rule in India.  According to historian  Illyse R Morgenstein Fuerst, author of Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion (Bloomsbury,  2021), minoritisation and racialisation of Muslims after the 1857 Rebellion “created a grammar in which  to be a Muslim meant one was a threat  to the empire.” Almost a similar Muslim image is now presented to Indian society by the hegemonic Hindu Rights politics and their regimes.

Interestingly, it is very rare to find the phrase Islamophobia in the vast bulk of scholarship on the subject of Hindu-Muslim violence in India or South Asia that occurred during the 20th century and after. The prominent explanatory term deployed for this has been ‘communalism’. During the 20th century, there are two movements that created fertile conditions for widespread Hindu-Muslim violence. The first one was the separate Muslim homeland movement, also called the Pakistan movement which took place in the first half of the twentieth century culminating in the 1940s. The great debate that took place between Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad versus Mohammad Ali Jinnah is widely interpreted as a debate over India’s communal problem—not Islamophobia in any particular sense. The Hindu Right was very much part of this conversation, but it became hegemonic in the second movement, the Ayodhya movement (also known as the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi movement) that flourished during the latter half of the 20th century causing a great deal of  Hindu-Muslim violence directly or indirectly, and continues to spawn even now. It is also explained as a communal problem, mainly by secular scholarship. In both instances, particularly in the second one, one would find evidence of plenty of Islamophobia. But the dominant argument is about India’s growing communalism, and its more dignified parallel concept called Hindu nationalism. To make sense of the Indian variant of Islamophobia, it is vital to examine its relationship with the notion of communalism—particularly their points of convergence.  It will be safer to argue that Islamophobia existed all along, but its manifestations as a prominent phenomenon took place during the Ayodhya movement in the 1980s and later, with abuses such as Babar’s santan and Aurangzeb’s aulad gaining public currency in political conversations. Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’ use of the phrase, “Aurangzeb ki aulad” during the Kolhapur violence in June 2023 is a good example.

However, since the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri district in 2015, a new term called intolerance has been deployed. It was further argued that growing incidents of lynching mainly signified the greater evidence of intolerance in modern India. For some reason or other, the word ‘intolerance’ substituted the vocabulary of ‘communalism’. In my view, each of these concepts: Islamophobia, communalism and intolerance—do have autonomous existence in India’s scholarly and political discourse. For a clear understanding of Hindu-Muslim violence, therefore, it will be useful to understand the relationships between these three rather powerful concepts—particularly their overlapping attributes.

Without a doubt, Savarkar’s tract on Hindutva, which has argued that Indian Muslims cannot be completely loyal to India because their sacred religious place Mecca is located outside India has been a major source of Islamophobia. But it will be wrong to assume that every footsoldier of Hindu Right organisation has read Savarkar’s famous tract. But this tract, together with other writings of Hindu Right thinkers like M S Gowalkar or Deen Dayal Upadhyay have contributed to the making of an inimical public image of Indian Muslims, such as that they are disloyal, militant, and have a hidden agenda to convert India into an Islamic land. For the promotion of religious tolerance and multi-culturalism, it is crucial to challenge such formulations, highlight the indigenous origins of Indian Muslims, and embrace their impressive contributions in the domain of art, cinema, culture, music, sports, etc. No religion has produced only saints and Islam is no exception. The basic point is: Muslims are normal people like the followers of other religions such as Hinduism or Christianity. Their value needs to be appreciated by the bulk of ordinary selves who lead ordinary lives. Out of which often extraordinary Indians have emerged and have made a difference.

(The writer’s book Shikwa-e-Hind: The Political Future of Indian Muslims is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster)
(This appeared in the print as 'Vulnerable At Home')

Dr Shaikh Mujibur Rehman teaches at Jamia Millia Central University, New Delhi