‘Under Modi’s leadership, anti-Muslim sentiment has become blatantly mainstream’

Even as the Citizenship Amendment Bill was tabled in Lok Sabha on Monday, The New York Times carried a column titled ‘India Prepares to Block Naturalization for Muslims’, terming the move as a major step for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda.

‘Muslim Indians are furious and terrified. They see the new measure, called the Citizenship Amendment Bill, as the first step by the governing party to make second-class citizens of India’s 200 million Muslims, one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, and render many of them stateless,’ the opinion piece says.

It quoted MP and chief of AIMIM, Asaduddin Owaisi, as saying: “We are heading toward totalitarianism, a fascist state. A member of Parliament and a Muslim, said of the bill. “We are making India a theocratic country.”

The legislation goes hand in hand with a contentious program that began in the North Eastern state of Assam this year, in which all 33 million residents of the state had to prove, with documentary evidence, that they or their ancestors were Indian citizens. Approximately two million people — many of them Muslims, and many of them lifelong residents of India — were left off the state’s citizenship rolls after that exercise, the oped says.

‘Mr. Modi and his party are deeply rooted in an ideology that sees India as a Hindu nation. And since the B.J.P.’s landslide re-election win in May, Mr. Modi’s administration has celebrated one Hindu nationalist victory after another, each a demoralizing drumbeat for Muslims,’ it says.

‘First came the Assam citizenship tests. Then Mr. Modi stripped away autonomy and statehood for Kashmir, which used to be India’s only Muslim-majority state. And last month, Hindu fundamentalists scored a big court victory allowing them to build a new temple over the ruins of a demolished mosque in the flash point city of Ayodhya,’ it adds.

‘Under Mr. Modi’s leadership, anti-Muslim sentiment has become blatantly more mainstream and public. Intimidation and attacks against Muslim communities have increased in recent years. And overt displays of Hindu piety and nationalism have become central in pop culture and politics,’ it says.

It quotes actor and BJP MP Ravi Kishan: “There are Muslim countries, there are Jew countries, everybody has their own identity. And we are a billion-plus, right? We must have one identity.”

The oped says: When asked if he was trying to turn India into a Hindu nation, he laughed. “India has always been a Hindu nation,” he said. “The Muslims also are Hindus.”

‘This is a common Hindu nationalist belief: that India’s Muslims are relatively recent converts, even though Islam arrived in India hundreds of years ago,’ it adds.