India Under Modi's Hindutva Programme

India under BJP’s Hindutva Programme

Dr. Mozammel Haque

Since Narendra Modi won the general election in 2014, he intends to turn India a Hindu-centric state, the Hindutva programme – where the country’s huge Muslim minority – roughly 200 million people – is at a calculated disadvantage. The Hindutva programme includes Kashmir, Babri Masjid and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Modi’s government is implementing one after another of its Hindutva programme.

Amit Chaudhuri, a novelist and professor at the University of East Anglia, wrote in The Guardian on 22 December, 2019: “Absolute power became for the BJP a licence to initiate one draconian change after another, all of them in some way to do with the status of Muslims in India, and, umbilically connected to this, with the status of democracy. Among these was the implementation of a national register of citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam, ostensibly to uncover illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. The real motive seemed to be to identify Muslim migrants. The government made a promise: once this was complete, it would happen in the rest of India.”

The New York Times wrote on 16 December 2019 about the policy and programme of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has rounded up thousands of Muslims in Kashmir, revoked the area’s autonomy and enforced a citizenship test in north-eastern India that left nearly two million people potentially stateless, many of them Muslim.”

Revocation of Article 370 on Kashmir

Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution in August 2019. It abolished Kashmir’s special status, which is guaranteed under Article 370. Speaking to Islam Channel on Kashmir, Lord Ahmed said, “And then on the 4^th of August there is no democracy in the Indian Occupied Kashmir; they suspended the Legislative Assembly, they arrested their own elected chief minister of their own party coalition; they dismissed and the numbers you quote actually 500; these are actually politicians; 10,000 youths have been taken from their valley and more than 10,000.”

Bollywood actress Rani Mukerji tweeted on 9 August 2019 at 9:44 AM: “My stance on Kashmir is clear. I have said it before, will repeat the same thing again. I believe both India and Pakistan should leave everything aside & work towards a referendum on what the Kashmiris want. Everyone has the right to self-determination. £Article 370.

Rani Mukerji again tweeted on 11 August 2019 at 5:51 PM: “You Do Not Need To Be Muslim To Stand Up for Kashmir, You Just Need To Be Human.”

The Observer editorially mentioned on 22 December, 2019: “As we noted at the time, the arbitrary imposition, without prior consultation, of direct rule from Delhi and the suspension of Kashmiris’ democratic freedoms, which continues, amounted to an authoritarian coup with negative global implications. Indeed, Kashmir turned out to be a test run for the internet and mobile phone shutdowns that greeted last week’s protests against the citizenship law.”

“By removing the right to self-governance, and opening Kashmir state territory to Hindu settlers, Modi ignored UN resolutions on the dispute with Pakistan over the Kashmir region and, notably, the 1972 Simla agreement, which stipulates Kashmir’s final status must be resolved by peaceful means, not unilateral diktat,” commented by the editorial.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen writing on 9 November 2019 reported, “In June, a Hindu mob tied a Muslim man to a lamp and lynched him to cries of “hail Lord Ram”. The Modi government’s actions in Kashmir in August, stripping the state of its long-held semi-autonomy, was also seen as directly targeting its majority-Muslim community.”

Writing in the Guardian Simon Tisdall under the caption ‘Why Modi’s Kashmir Coup Threatens Indian Democracy’ wrote on 10 August 2019: “Though popular with many in India, Modi’s constitutional coup undermines the federal compact and pluralist democracy. “India has many asymmetric federalist arrangements outside of Kashmir. This act potentially sets the precedent for invalidating all of them,” wrote Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a leading academic, who pointed to possible knock-on instability in Nagaland, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal.”

Babri Masjid-Hindu Temple Controversy

Hannah Ellis-Petersen writing on 9 November 2019 reported “Since Modi and BJP took power in 2014, the rebuilding of a Ram temple at Ayodhya has been at the forefront of their Hindutva agenda, which has pushed India away from its secular roots and toward a strongly Hindu identity.”

The sensitive decision over whether to rebuild a place of Muslim or Hindu worship on the site was dragged out over 27 years. A 2010 court ruling divided the land between Muslims and Hindus, but was rejected by both sides. The case was taken to the supreme court in August.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen also mentioned: “The Indian supreme court has ruled that India’s most hotly contested piece of religious land rightfully belongs to Hindus, and has granted permission for a temple to be built on the site in Ayodhya. The five supreme court judges based their unanimous and historic judgment on Hindus’ claim that the site is the birthplace of the god Ram. They ruled that a mosque that had stood on the site since the 16th century, and was the basis of the Muslim claim to Ayodhya, was “not built on vacant land” and that the Hindu belief could not be disputed.”

The Observer editorially wrote on 22 December, 2019: “Then, last month, India’s supreme court injudiciously ruled that the hotly contested religious site of Ayodhya, which Hindus regard as the birthplace of Ram and where a 16th-century Mughal mosque was demolished in 1992, belonged solely to Hindus, not to both communities. The ruling was seen as a triumph for Modi’s divisive “new India” agenda. It was another step along the path to a country that, no longer the open, inclusive, pluralist and secular society envisaged by its founding fathers, is defined as a Hindu nation run by and for Hindus. Nor are Muslims its only victims. Critics say India’s other minorities, and its democratic tradition, are under attack, too.”

Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)

Now this new enactment of Indian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 which favours every other South Asian faith than Islam has set off days of widespread protests across the country. Mumbai. Chennai. Varanasi. Guwahati. Hyderabad. Bhopal. Patna. Pondicherry. The disturbances keep spreading, and on Monday they tied up several areas of the capital, New Delhi.

The New York Times on 16 December 2019 reported: “Mr. Modi’s government has responded with troops, internet shutdowns and curfews, just as it did when it clamped down on Kashmir. In New Delhi, police officers beat unarmed students with wooden poles, dragging them away from stunned colleagues and sending scores to the hospital, many with broken bones. In Assam, they shot and killed several young men. India’s Muslims had stayed relatively quiet during the other setbacks, keenly aware of the electoral logic that has pushed them to the margins. India is about 80 percent Hindu, 14 percent Muslim, and Mr. Modi and his party, which espouses a Hindu-centric worldview, won a crushing election victory in May and handily control the Parliament.

The New York Times also reported: “The world is now weighing in, too. United Nations officials, American representatives, international advocacy groups and religious organizations have issued scathing statements saying the law is blatantly discriminatory. Some are even calling for sanctions. Critics are deeply worried that Mr. Modi is trying to wrench India away from its secular, democratic roots and turn this nation of 1.3 billion people into a religious state, a homeland for Hindus that will discriminate against others.”

“They want a theocratic state like Pakistan or Israel, where they give rights to one religion and the other religions aren’t given anything,’’ said B.N. Srikrishna, a former judge on India’s Supreme Court. “This is pushing the country to the brink, to the brink of chaos.” “This is how waves of communal violence start in the country,” he added.”

Commenting on this legislation, The Guardian editorially observed on 17 December, 2019: “The legislation is the proof that Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist project is not a containable anomaly, but an enterprise that threatens the nation’s very foundations of pluralism and secularism. Fear overshadows the hopes of that seven-decade endeavour.”

“It is inherently one of exclusion, which discriminates against Muslims fleeing persecution, and signals that Muslim citizens are not “truly” Indian. It undermines constitutional protections which apply to foreigners as well as citizens in India,” commented the editorial. .

The Guardian editorial also observed, “The legislation, warns the noted scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta, is a giant step towards converting a constitutional democracy into a unconstitutional ethnocracy. The question is only how many more such steps India takes, and how fast.”

The Observer editorially commented: “Evidence may be found in the ongoing, repressive and violent police response to the citizenship law demonstrations, whose rapid spread and multi-faith character has shaken Modi’s government. It is found in the BJP’s smothering of India’s independent press and digital media, its neutering of the judiciary and its bullying of opponents. It is found in the outrageous official indifference to vigilante lynchings of Muslims. Modi should think again.”

Gujarat bloodbath of 2002

Mr. Modi is no stranger to communal violence. The New York Times reminded, “The worst bloodshed that India has seen in recent years exploded on his watch, in 2002, in Gujarat, when he was the top official in the state and clashes between Hindus and Muslims killed more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims.”

“Mr. Modi was widely blamed for not doing enough to stop it. Courts have cleared him, but many people believe he was at least partly responsible for the brutality that unfolded,” reported The NY Times.

Writing on the Citizenship Amendment Act The Observer editorially wrote under the caption ‘Narendra Modi has gone too far: Hindus and Muslims deserve better from a secular nation’: “Since becoming India’s leader in 2014, Modi has tried to rehabilitate himself as a world statesman and savvy technocrat leading India to greatness. But this latest furore is a reminder, at home and abroad, of his personal roots in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a sometime-banned, far-right Hindu supremacist organisation. The BJP is the RSS’s political arm.”

The Editorial continued: “According to a recent report by the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, the Indian psychologist Ashis Nandy interviewed Modi when he was still a lowly BJP functionary. Modi exhibited “all the traits of an authoritarian personality” and claimed that India was the target of a global conspiracy in which every Muslim in the country was probably complicit, Nandy said.

The Observer editorially reminded: “Not forgotten, either, is Modi’s time as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, when thousands of Muslims were killed in sectarian violence he failed to halt (to put it kindly). The US and Britain imposed sanctions on him at the time. Maybe he has changed since those torrid days. But Modi should be in no doubt: the world is watching him now. His reputation and India’s are in the balance. The hateful victimisation of Muslims must stop. A good start would be the immediate scrapping of the noxious citizenship bill.”

Writing about Judiciary Professor Amit Chaudhuri of the University of Anglia observed, “The act was challenged in the supreme court by several litigants for its unconstitutionality and legal arbitrariness. But the Modi government’s second term has seen an exceptional departure from predictability in the judiciary.”

Ahmer Khan contributed reporting from Assam to the Guardian said, “the Urdu writer Mujtaba Hussain declared he would return his Padma Shri award in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act. “The situation in the country is becoming worse day by day and in my lifetime I have never witnessed such situations … the country is getting separated in the name of religion and hatred,” he said.”