"Too much poison": Attacks on Indian Muslims grow after Ram temple ceremony Article by Al Jazeera

An article on discrimination against Muslims in India has been published on Al Jazeera’s website. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Driving through the Mira Road neighbourhood of Mumbai was a usual affair for 21-year-old Mohammad Tariq, who ran errands on his father’s white loading auto carrier.

But on January 23, participants in a Hindu nationalist rally stopped the vehicle in the middle of the road. Young boys – mostly teenagers – dragged him out. They punched and kicked him and thrashed him with batons, flag staffs and iron chains, his 54-year-old father, Abdul Haque told Al Jazeera. Since then, Haque said, “[Tariq] has been terrified.”

The rally, which was shared over multiple live streams, turned into a mob, targeting several Muslims in the locality, rampaging through their shops and damaging vehicles while chanting “Jai Shri Ram” (Victory to Lord Ram). Similar rallies, often to the beat of booming far-right pop music, took place outside mosques and Muslim neighbourhoods across several states in India.

The trigger was the consecration of a Ram temple in the ancient city of Ayodhya in northern India by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 22. The temple is being built on the site where the 16th century Babri Masjid stood until 1992, when Hindu far-right mobs tore down the mosque, triggering nationwide riots that killed more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

Yet, as India celebrates its Republic Day on January 26, the inauguration of the temple, the Indian state’s role in it, and the violence and vandalism that religious minorities have faced since then are, to many, markers of a country that has moved away from the Constitution adopted this day in 1950.

Soon after the consecration, a Muslim graveyard was set ablaze in the north Indian state of Bihar, a Muslim man was paraded naked in southern India, and a saffron flag representing militant Hinduism – was hoisted atop a church in central India.

“This country is increasingly unrecognisable to me, where Muslims are like rubbish for them,” said Haque, on his way to a police station with his son after the January 23 attack. “There were so many people [during the Mira Road attack] but no one stopped them from beating my child. It is shameful for society. It is a city of the blind.”

However, Modi’s critics say that the event was political, rather than a religious one. “It was more about Modi than Ram – a total instrumentalisation of Ram’s figure to serve the cause of an elected monarch,” said Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi.

India has been continuously slipping in international democracy indices and was tagged “partly free” for the third year in a row by Freedom House, a US government-funded nonprofit. Human Rights Watch warned last year of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) “systematic discrimination and stigmatisation of religious and other minorities, particularly Muslims”.

The chest-thumping rise of Hindu nationalism and apparent departure from secular values also pose troubling questions for India’s international allies, especially in the West, who have strengthened ties with New Delhi in recent years and view it as a counterweight to China.

“Modi has now positioned India to become a Hindu state in a formal sense, a move that would be welcomed by his large base but decried by many non-Hindus and critics as a betrayal of India’s secular traditions,” said Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

But the construction of the temple will fail to “satiate the bloodlust” of the Hindu nationalist movement that went mainstream with the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, argued Apoorvanand. After the ceremony, he saw slogans being raised in his university for the demolition of other mosques contested by the far-right in the cities of Mathura and Varanasi.

“There is no closure to all of this,” he said, adding that the temple opening “will only lead to more violence and those violent forces getting emboldened”.

Harsh Mander, a prominent civil rights activist, could not bring himself to watch the broadcast of the consecration, he said. Instead, he gathered in Kolkata, a city in eastern India, for an “anti-fascism march” with thousands of others. Similar marches were organised by student and activist groups in different parts of India. On social media, Modi’s critics shared snaps of the preamble to the Indian constitution, which guarantees equal rights to all citizens, irrespective of religion.

“The consecration day is an important milestone in the history of the collapse of India’s secular democracy,” Mander said in a phone interview with Al Jazeera. “It is a question of the soul of India. Is it the Hindutva conscience over secular, constitutional morality?” according to the article.