A Sea of Saffron: The Rise in Hindu Nationalism and the Oppression of Muslim Women
Secularism is a cornerstone of India’s Constitution. Yet, in recent years, the line between state and religion has blurred. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been accused of encouraging the oppression of Muslims and attempting to transform a pluralistic and secular India, which is currently made up of 80% by Hindus and 14% by Muslims, into a Hindu nation state.
Religious tensions in India have persisted since Partition was declared in August of 1947. India was divided into two separate states- India and Pakistan- based roughly on religious composition. India was declared as the Hindu-majority state, and Pakistan as the Muslim-majority state. The partition resulted in one of the largest and fastest population exchanges in history, as about fifteen million people migrated from one side to the other. It led to widespread violence among migrants, ultimately resulting in the deaths of up to two million people.
Following Partition, the Indian government established the Constitution, which repressed Hindu nationalism and enshrined secular and egalitarian principles. Yet, since Prime Minister Modi’s election in 2014, these values have been undermined.
In 2017, Modi appointed Yogi Adityanath as the head of Uttar Pradesh, the largest Indian state. Adityanath is widely known to be a Hindu nationalist. The Hindu extremist group which he founded, Hindu Yuva Vahini, has carried out Ghar Wapsi, the mass conversion of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism. The group has attacked those they believe to be practicing ‘love jihad,’ where Hindu women are lured in and converted by Muslim men. Adityanath himself has a long history of calls for violence against Muslims. His appointment by Modi symbolizes an intent to move away from a secular India.
Adityanath is not the only political leader who has expressed anti-Muslim sentiment. In December of last year, a video showing Hindu leaders calling for the genocide of Muslims went viral. The Hindu nationalist conference took place in Uttarakhand, a state in northern India, and was attended by anti-Muslim and right-wing Hindus, as well as at least one member of the BJP. One delegate, Prabodhanand Giri, the head of a hard-line Hindu group, called for a “cleansing” of Muslims and for those in attendance to either “die or kill”. Similarly, Pooja Shakun Pandey, a senior member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha party, claimed, “If one hundred of us become soldiers and are prepared to kill two million [Muslims] then we will win… protect India, and make it a Hindu nation”. Another member in attendance compared the ideal scale of killings to that of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Though the video went viral and sparked outrage, the police did little to punish those in attendance. Prime Minister Modi himself did not speak out against the incident. His silence implied that he supports and endorses Anti-Muslim rhetoric. Indeed, the Muslim community has continually accused the government of turning a blind eye to hate speech- this incident was no exception. Muslims have faced other types of discrimination in settings including education, employment, and housing. Violence has become rampant in most of these incidents, with examples such as Hindu nationalists attacking Muslims on the ground of slaughtering cows, which are sacred in Hinduism.
Muslims have struggled with gaining justice after reporting these instances of discrimination to authorities. A 2019 report by nongovernmental organization Common Cause found that police often had an anti-Muslim bias, making them less likely to intervene in hate crimes against Muslims. The report also confirmed that even when the perpetrators of these attacks were brought to justice, they often went unpunished, as their convictions were often overturned or withdrawn entirely.
By not taking the correct action, Modi and the BJP are allowing the hate crime against Muslims to go on.
On the 3rd of January, an app called Bulli Bai shared photos of over one hundred photos of Muslim women, stating that they were ‘on sale.’ This came after a similar incident in July of last year, where more than eighty Muslim women were put up as ‘deals of the day’ on the app Sulli Deals. The app pretended to offer the chance to purchase a ‘Sulli,’ a derogatory term for Muslim women. There was no actual sale, instead the app was intended purely to degrade and humiliate the women. The creators formed profiles using public photos from the social media accounts of vocal Muslim women, including artists, journalists, and activists. Once they discovered that they were on the app, many of these women deleted their accounts, fearing further harassment. The creators of the profiles were suspended but did not face further punishment.
Prior to this incident in May, during celebrations of the festival of Eid, a YouTube channel ran an ‘Eid Special’- a live auction of Muslim women. According to Hana Khan, a woman who was put ‘up for sale’ on Sulli Deals, “People were bidding five rupees (forty eight pence) and ten rupees, they were rating women based on their body parts and describing sexual acts and threatening rape”. The auction was, once again, not a real sale of Muslim women, but sought to demean, intimidate, shame, and silence these women. According to an Amnesty International report on online harassment in India, the more vocal a woman was, the more she was targeted. The attacks were meant to prevent educated Muslim women from expressing their opinions and speaking out against Islamophobia.
These attacks on educated Muslim women are not only online. Earlier this year, Muslim women began to be targeted in schools. In Karnataka, a state in southwest India, Muslim women are currently fighting their schools, right-wing Hindus, state governments, and the state judiciary to wear their hijabs in classrooms. The fight began in September of last year at a college preparatory school for girls in Udupi, a city in the southwest of Karnataka, when several Muslim students wearing hijabs were turned away from schools and marked absent. The school would not allow students with hijabs to enter the campus, much less the classroom, claiming that the head covering “violated the school’s dress code”.
The school’s decision to ban hijabs was followed by peaceful student protests. Muslim students stood in front of the gates, exclaiming that the ban violated their right to religious freedom and demanded that they be let inside the school. The teachers refused. Muslim students were met in opposition by protests from Hindu students wearing saffron- the colour most associated with Hinduism, particularly with Hindu nationalism. The rival protestors chanted religious Hindu slogans supporting the BJP and demanded that the women remove their hijabs. In response to the protests, the state ordered a three-day closure of all high schools in early February. The state court later upheld the school’s hijab ban, declaring that students must stop wearing the head covering in class, as they were not an “essential religious practice” of Islam.
This sharp rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes by right-wing Hindu nationalists and extremists is concerning. The blurring of the line between state and religion is threatening to undermine the largest democracy in the world.
Image courtesy of Arun Sambhu Mishra via Shutterstock.com © 2021, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
