Muslims in India are afraid to publicly proclaim their Islam

Muslims in India are afraid to promote their Islam**
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November 21, 1445
May 29, 2024 AD
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I hesitated to write this. I shouldn’t protest or oppose. Sometimes when I do this and post something online, the typical response is “go to Pakistan”. But why should I leave? I am Indian. I was born here as were my ancestors

Source: The New York Times – Author: Muhammad Ali[1]

There is nothing to indicate that I am a Muslim except my name. I do not wear a skullcap, I avoid dressing like a Pathan Muslim tribal in public places or mixing my speech with Urdu words because these are markers of Indian Muslim identity. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, you cannot risk expressing your Muslim identity in your country.

Since coming to power a decade ago, Modi’s ultra-Hindu nationalist government has consistently portrayed the country of 200 million Muslims as dangerous and unwelcome. Recently, during the six-week parliamentary elections, in which Modi’s government is widely expected to win a third consecutive five-year term, the rhetoric reached an all-time high, coupled with partisan propaganda by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, based on a direct description of Muslims as “agents” seeking to transform India into a purely Hindu nation.

Unfortunately for Indian Muslims like me, living in the wake of a decade of defamation, violence and murder, it is now commonplace, with daily fears of being identified and often forced to deny Islam to protect myself.

India is the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Islam came to us about 1,300 years ago and the ancestors of Muslims are the ancestors of this land who converted to Islam centuries ago. Many Indian Muslims rebelled against British colonialism and millions refused to accept the decision to partition India into Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947. India is our motherland and people like me are proud patriots.

Muslims’ response to their oppression has been largely silence. Many of us are simply unwilling to oppose the Modi government’s bitter bargain: that in order to survive as Indian citizens, we must meekly accept

But Modi’s Hindu nationalism has made us the target of the world’s largest campaign to indoctrinate people into extremism. Its seeds were sown in 1925 with the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu group that sought to create a complete Hindu state in India, inspired by the fascism of Europe at the time. When Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (a splinter group of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak group) won the 2014 elections and he became prime minister, he and his followers saw it as the civilizing moment that Hindus had been waiting for. Modi seemed like a god-king who could liberate Hindu civilization after centuries of control, initially by a series of Muslim rulers and culminating with the Mughal Empire, which ruled India for nearly three centuries, and then by the British colonialists who followed them.

Islamophobia is not new to India. Muslims have routinely faced discrimination and violence for generations, during which India’s secular democracy was dominated by an upper-caste, liberal Hindu elite. But under Modi’s right-wing leadership, things have changed, and hatred of Muslims has become de facto state policy. India is now a country where police are openly complicit when Hindus attack Muslims, where killers of religious minorities go unpunished, and where Hindu extremists openly call for genocide against Muslims.

Anyone who wants to protest risks being shot by Hindu mobs. This is what happened after the Modi government approved the citizenship law in 2019, which contained explicit discrimination against Muslims, and his party promised to expel “agents” from the country. When Indian Muslims protested, one of Modi’s supporters responded with inflammatory remarks, leading to bloody clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Delhi in February 2020, during which police destroyed Muslim shops regardless of their views.

Bulldozers have become common at right-wing rallies, with Modi supporters tattooing them on their arms and chanting during Hindu patriotic songs as they illegally demolish homes and businesses of Muslims in BJP-ruled areas who dare to oppose them. Some countries have made relations between Muslims and Hindus illegal, based on absurd Hindu conspiracy theories that Muslim men seduce Hindu women as part of a long-term plan to turn India into a Muslim country.

Today, Muslim parents repeat a series of injunctions to their children: Don’t display your Islam in public, don’t publish your name, don’t enter Hindu areas, don’t travel alone, don’t get involved in potential confrontations.

Rather than acknowledge their role in entrenching the sentiments that Modi has invested in, the liberal Hindu elites have done nothing to help except futile expressions of nostalgia for lost Hindu tolerance. Indian Muslims are powerless within the political system. While the Muslim share of India’s population has increased by 14%, the share of Muslim MPs in Parliament has fallen to less than 5%. Today, it is %, compared to 9% in the early 1980s.

Muslims’ response to their oppression has been largely silence. Many of us are simply unwilling to oppose the Modi government’s bitter bargain: that in order to survive as Indian citizens, we must meekly accept the distortion, dehumanization and demonization of history.

Because of this humiliation, and because he knows that he is not actually protected by the law, something inside a man dies. When my mother returned to Delhi after her visit, she no longer offered me mutton as she used to. Dozens of Muslims have reportedly been killed or attacked by Hindu mobs for allegedly killing cows, which are sacred to Hindus, or for eating or possessing beef. Today, Muslim parents repeat a series of injunctions to their children: don’t show your Islam in public, don’t announce your name, don’t enter Hindu areas, don’t travel alone, don’t get involved in potential confrontations.

While we warn each other not to assimilate, it’s hard to accept it all. It’s rooted in a sense of pain that’s hard to erase. The physical signs we try to hide aren’t entirely unique to Indian Muslims. My cousin may like to wear a pathnai kurna, but so do many Hindus. My sister likes to cover her head, as do many Hindu women, and even if I don’t like to use certain Urdu words that have long been a common feature of Indian culture, they’re also common to Hindus.

Denial of identity leads to deep frustration. Now, we avoid politics when we get together with friends and family because discussing the elephant in the room only reminds us of our helplessness. The cumulative impact of all this has created a mental health crisis for us, a crisis of fear and depression among Muslims. Yet, many Muslims still have to adapt on their own, as there is a severe shortage of mental health clinicians in India, and many non-Muslim Indian psychotherapists have limited understanding of our new reality.

I hesitated to write this article. I am not supposed to protest or oppose. Sometimes, when I do and post something online, the typical response is “go to Pakistan”. But why should I leave? I am Indian. I was born here, just like my ancestors who opposed the religious basis of partition with Pakistan and believed in the ideals of Indian secular democracy.

But due to the harsh political climate, many Muslims have fled over the years, moving to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Many without financial means have moved from the Hindu or mixed neighborhoods where they have lived for decades to poorer Muslim areas seeking safety. Two Muslim friends and I owned apartments in a suburb near New Delhi, where many upper-caste Hindus live. But in 2020, after the passage of discriminatory citizenship laws, a Hindu mob invaded the neighborhood, demanding the blood of Muslims. My two Muslim friends quickly moved out of the neighborhood. I kept my apartment, but one night in 2022, I overheard a conversation between two men in an elevator discussing how too many Katwa (a derogatory term for Muslims, derived from circumcision) lived in the area. I left the area the next day. Unfortunately, Hindu friends and colleagues became more cold and distant, and communication ceased.

On June 1, India’s general election period ended. For Muslims like me, it was a day of terror. Most people expected that Modi would win again, that mob rule would become more entrenched, and that the defiance of the 200 million Muslims, who make up the Hindu majority, would continue.

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[1] Mohammed Ali is a freelance journalist living between New York and India and is currently writing a book about growing up in India at a time when Modi and his government are seeking to turn India into a Hindu nation.

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**- M: Declaration.
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