“Islamophobia” is an omnibus term that encapsulates hatred, distrust and fear of Islam and its adherents. Although etymologically the word was coined in 1877, it actually   describes a phenomenon that has existed in Muslim-West relations for centuries, even before the Crusades. The discourse around Islamophobia is imbued with the definitive, unnuanced and deeply problematic Occidental prejudice that denigrates Muslim religion, culture and tradition. 

In the unequal world of ideas dominated by the hegemonic West, from Dante and his ‘Divine Comedy’ (AD 1321) to Voltaire, Karl Marx and Max Weber, the Orient has been subjected to the vilest polemical violence, portrayed as cruel, sensual and inferior to the enlightened West. It took the deeply probing forensic scholarship of the Arab Christian, Edward Said in his opus “Orientalism’, to deconstruct the age-old bigotry against Arabs and Muslims. 

Lest we forget, the condescending, dismissive Western attitude toward the Orient included the colonised in India whose inhabitants are described by that jingoist Rudyard Kipling as uncivilised “sullen people, half devil and half-child”. Nevertheless, Islamophobia is a term that has hitherto defined the West’s attitude toward the Muslim societies of the Middle East, a cultural ailment that has poisoned relations not only between nations but also within multi-ethnic nations with a significant Muslim presence.

Till a few years back, the Indian Muslim believed that as a citizen of a former colony that had reinvented itself as a vibrant secular, democratic country, she was spared Islamophobia’s deadly embrace. Of course, given the baggage of Partition and a conflictual history, there has always been an undercurrent of distrust between Hindus and Muslims, but this animosity was confined to a certain section within the communities.  It was a distant evil that you heard and read about, but in the last seven years Islamophobia is the all-encompassing menace that every Indian Muslim faces. Not to mince words, the India of today has mutated into a majoritarian state that is no longer a safe haven for the minorities, particularly Muslims. There is a raging ubiquitous Islamophobia sweeping across this country today. Even children have been sucked into this maelstrom of hate.

Bland news reports may be merely factual and evanescent in public memory but they are the most authentic purveyors of the unvarnished truth. Instead of turning to abstract polemics to prove that Islamophobia is now front and centre in our polity, a few news reports that appeared on successive days last week provide indubitable evidence that Muslims are up against it. 

The national dailies gave due prominence to the recently released 2022 annual report of the RSS, which is the ideological and cultural progenitor and guru of the present dispensation. Tucked in the inner folds of the drab report is the incendiary attack on the Muslim community.

At a time when Muslims are being besieged from all sides by extreme right-wing troublemakers, Hindutva advocates and a wide swathe of silent but subscribing middle-class collaborators (our friends included), the RSS, in a textbook example of psychopathic self-projection, has accused Muslims of “growing religious fanaticism” and seditious designs which include “elaborate plans…. to enter the government machinery” apart from devising newer strategies for religious conversion and for whipping up communal frenzy. The panacea, as spelt out in the report, lies in the social and religious leadership and institutions of Hindu society making “all-out efforts with organised strength to defeat this menace”. What is terrifying is that these are not offhand remarks by some right-wing deviant but deadly serious stuff propagated by the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS), the highest decision-making body of the RSS. In its cold-blooded othering and demonization of an entire community, the report shares an eerie kinship with the propaganda pamphlets against Jews in Germany of the 1930s.

Considering that the last seven years have been an unending litany of crimes against Muslims in the name of religion, to accuse Muslims of religious fanaticism is, to summon an analogous truism, the pot calling the kettle black. But what’s jaw-droppingly shocking about the RSS propaganda is the big lie accusing Muslims of seditious intent, and the insinuation that Muslims aspiring for government jobs are actually engaged in a devious, subversive plan to wreck society from within! In effect, the message is stark: Muslims are traitors, the enemy of Hindus, who must rally to the cause “to fight this menace”.

Ironically, on the day after the RSS annual report was publicised, another news item appeared that emphatically nails the absurd claim that Muslims are infiltrating the institutions of governance with evil intent. On the contrary, the report seems to confirm the worst fears that the saffron wave has permeated the most pivotal domains in our society, including the law-and-order apparatus.

The news item summarises the Delhi High Court order asking the Delhi Police to complete the investigation into the death of 23-year-old Faizan in the North Delhi riots of February 2020 “without fear or favour.”. To recap that horror, Faizan was video graphed writhing on the ground even as police personnel forced him to chant Vande Mataram and the national anthem. The sheer nauseating inhumanity is out there, actually on camera and as clear as day, and yet the case is still being probed more than two years later. One was impressed with the honourable HC judge’s even-handedness, until he objected to the prosecuting lawyer’s use of the term “Muslim youth” to describe the men being beaten, piously stating that the police did not differentiate between religions, thereby mitigating what was clearly a religious hate crime!  

Reinforcing the inexorable majoritarian, Islamophobic framework being systematically put in place across the board, the Karnataka High Court’s much-awaited final verdict of 15th March on the hijab predictably declared that the headwear is not essential to Islam and hence is banned in classrooms.  The Court’s foundational premise that essential religious practices are valid only if they were formulated when the religion came into being is outright absurd and, as one commentator wryly pointed out, could be used to justify untouchability as a practice sanctified by the Sutras, Shastras and Smritis. The judges have misinterpreted both the law and the religion to yank off the hijabs of school children.

As if on cue and to unequivocally ram home the point that the Hindu Rashtra is up and running and to hell with secularism, on 16th March the Gujarat government issued a circular introducing Shrimad Bhagavad Gita in the school syllabus for classes 6 – 12 with the objective of “cultivating a sense of pride and connection to traditions”, which will be conducive to “the holistic development of the students.” The Karnataka government and the Mayor of Delhi have already signalled their intent to follow suit. 

Paradoxically, the Hindutva devotees who applauded the Karnataka HC verdict in the hijab case for privileging the Constitution, secularism and uniform practices in educational institutions above religion, have now justified subjecting school children to Hindu religious indoctrination on the grounds that the Gita’s values are universal and endorsed by all religions, a debatable claim made by all religions about their sacred texts. The way things are panning out, we would quickly need to coin a suitable term for the Hindu equivalent of a madrasa, because that is going to be the reigning spirit in our schools in the near future!

In the run-up to the UP-Assembly elections, Yogi Adityanath had publicly announced that the contest was between the 80 percent versus the 20 percent, a blatantly communal statement which he tried to walk back when the BJP think-tank felt that it would damage the party’s electoral prospects. But the runaway victory in four of the five Assembly polls has convinced the saffron camp’s Vicharaks that all-out Muslim bashing is the way to go! And it is a no-holds-barred bombardment! 

In this multi-pronged assault on Muslims, even the celluloid screen has been weaponised, and how! The film -- Kashmir Files – drips with hatred for the Muslim. There is no doubt that the Kashmiri Pandits suffered grievously during 1989-91, but to manipulate their angst with the sole purpose of demonizing the entire Muslim community and whipping up communal frenzy, reduces it to venomous “hate cinema”. To put this horrific period in perspective, in a recent interaction with The Telegraph, the former R & AW chief, A. S. Dulat quoted a reply to an RTI query that out of 1724 people killed by terrorists in Kashmir during that period, 89 were Kashmiri Pandits, with large numbers leaving the State for safer regions. The point of quoting this statistic is not to minimise the gratuitous suffering of the Pandits but to point out that a very large number of Muslims were also killed in this hellish time. 

Hollywood has a famous saying that shit has its own integrity but this film fails even that basic test. It is a shoddy travesty of history and no more than a souped-up RSS version of the happenings in Kashmir in 1989-91 and the student upsurge in JNU in 2016, but what makes it bone-chilling is that this alternate reality is being lapped up by the gullible masses in the tens of millions. The in-your-face propaganda film screams out the following messages: terrorists are Muslim and so all Muslims are terrorists; Hinduism is imperilled, khatre main hain; the urban Naxals are anti-national; the Hindu sages founded Kashmir and Muslim tyrants deflowered it. Like one perceptive commentator said, “it is less a film than an RSS playbook!” What is truly heart-breaking is that Muslim children are portrayed chanting in Taliban style, “Convert, leave or die” The film is a war cry to Hindus to gang up against Muslims. The film is hate propaganda of the worst kind that any responsible leader should condemn. Instead, we have the Prime Minister of the country working as lead publicist for the film!    

Even as Islamophobia reaches a feverish pitch in our present pseudo-religious and spiritually destitute ecosystem, our government used verbal subterfuge to evade committing itself to the straightforward and non-specific UN resolution designating 15th March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. There is a saying that a sure sign of a guilty conscience is when one justifies oneself even before an accusation is made, which is what India has done. India’s statement which is pure semantic dissimulation, reads like a guilty defendant’s attempt to obfuscate and cover up the raging Islamophobia in India by invoking foggy generalisations about anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh, and anti-Buddhist phobias. As a friend wryly remarked; “India doth protest too much!”

(Abdul Khaliq and Mathew John are former civil servants; the former is also the secretary general of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas). Views are personal)