Sane and peaceful Indians, which I hope form the majority of Indians, even if they are not Indian Muslims, should try to ostracize the fanatics among them that give their people and country a bad name abroad.
It should be the obligation of any sane Indian, based in the GCC, to denounce such compatriots if they are spreading hatred against their own Muslim compatriots or foreigners abroad.
Pakistani brothers living in the GCC should report such behavior to the authorities.
@Malik Alpha people who speak Urdu/Hindi and other languages and understand what hateful Indians are writing, should be at the forefront of this. There is a language barrier here for us Arabs here.
Country to country relations and economic relationships are not determined by Twitter comments from trolls but if such behavior becomes widespread and continuous, it will inevitably impact the perception of Indian and Indians negatively in the Arab and Muslim world. You can already witness this from people who previously where clueless to such behavior in parts of the Indian society.
I am not sure if this is a wise strategy. I don't know the inner dynamics of Indian politics and the ongoing online troll wars but this hatred cannot end well.
@prashantazazel @Kaniska @Joe Shearer and some of the users from Kerala that I have once discussed with on PDF in a cordial manner.
I saw some of your posts in that other thread (Tariq Fatah) and you seem like a sane individual. Can you briefly, to a relatively clueless foreigner, tell what those RSS fanatics are? Do those people have a hatred towards Indian Muslims and Muslims of South Asia or does this hatred extend to other Muslims like Arabs and if that is the case is the motive for that alone, that Muslims happen to be Muslims?
RSS, the group that India's PM Modi is part of, grew up with, is a Hindu supremacist organisation that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution.
The RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925—the mothership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its founding fathers were greatly influenced by Germanand Italian fascism. They likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany, and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India. The RSS today, in typical RSS chameleon-speak, distancesitself from this view. But its underlying ideology, in which Muslims are cast as permanent, treacherous “outsiders,” is a constant refrain in the public speeches of BJP politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by rampaging mobs. For example: “Mussalman ka ek hi sthan—Kabristan ya Pakistan.” Only one place for the Mussalman—the graveyard, or Pakistan. In October this year, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, “India is a Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu Nation. “This is non-negotiable.”
For the RSS to portray what it is engineering today as an epochal revolution, in which Hindus are finally wiping away centuries of oppression at the hands of India’s earlier Muslim rulers, is a part of its fake-history project. In truth, millions of India’s Muslims are the descendants of people who converted to Islam to escape Hinduism’s cruel practice of caste.
None of the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi groups that are on the rise in the world today can boast of the infrastructure and manpower that the RSS commands. It says that it has fifty-seven thousand shakhas—branches—across the country, and an armed, dedicated militia of more than six million “volunteers.” It runs schools in which millions of students are enrolled, and has its own medical missions, trade unions, farmers’ organisations, media outlets and women’s groups. Recently, it announced that it was opening a training school for those who wish to join
the Indian Army. Under its bhagwa dhwaj—its saffron pennant—a whole host of far-right organisations, known as the Sangh Parivar—the RSS’s “family”—have prospered and multiplied. These organisations, the political equivalents of shell companies, are responsible for shockingly violent attacks on minorities in which, over the years, uncounted thousands have been murdered. Violence, communal conflagration and false-flag attacks are their principal strategies, and have been at the very core of the saffron campaign. RSS starts training thier cadres at a
very young age, thereby indoctinating them with a gloriuos Hindu past which was only to be destroyed by Muslim invaders and hence they need to be punished.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the RSS all his life. He is a creation of the RSS. He, more than anyone else in its history, has been responsiblefor turning it into the most powerful organisation in India, and for writing its most glorious chapter yet.
Modi’s political career was jump-started in October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, when the BJP removed its elected chief minister in the state of Gujarat, and installed Modi in his place. He was not, at the time, even an elected member of the state’s legislative assembly. Five months into his first term, there was a heinous but mysterious act of arson in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train coach. As “revenge,” Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned rampage across the state. An estimated 2,500 people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad daylight. Women were gang-raped on city streets, and tens of thousands were driven from their homes. Immediately after the pogrom, Modi called for elections. He won, not despite the massacre but because of it. He became known as Hindu Hriday Samrat—the Emperor of the Hindu Heart—and was re-elected as chief minister for three consecutive terms. During Modi’s 2014 campaign as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP—which also featured the massacre of Muslims, this time in the district of Muzaffarnagar
in the state of Uttar Pradesh—a Reuters journalist asked him whether he regretted the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat under his watch. He replied, in all sincerity, that he would regret even the death of a dog if it accidentally came under the wheels of his car. This was pure, well-trained, RSS-speak.
More than four hundred round-the-clock television news channels, millions of WhatsApp groups and TikTok videos keep the population on a drip feed of frenzied bigotry.
On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled on what some have called one of the most important cases in the world. On 6 December 1992, in the town of Ayodhya, a Hindu vigilante mob, organised by the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—the World Hindu Council—literally hammered a four-century-old mosque into dust. They claimed that this mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple that had marked the birthplace of Lord Ram. More than two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the communal violence that followed. In its recent judgement, the court held that Muslims could not prove their exclusive and continuous possession of the site. It turned the site over to a trust—to be constituted by the BJP government—tasked with building a temple on it. There have been mass arrests of people who have criticised the judgement. The VHP has refused to back down on its past statements that it will turn its attention to other mosques. Theirs can be an endless campaign—after all, everybody came from somewhere, and everything is built over something.
Inter-communal incitement has reached such proportions in India under the BJP that it is no longer possible to dial back. Communal fault lines have existed in the subcontinent for ages, deepened irrevocably by the bloody partition of India in 1947. The BJP's propaganda exploits these fault lines to turn India's unemployed and undereducated youth into its foot soldiers and the country's middle-class into armchair supporters of its politics of hatred. Frankenstein's monster, once created, takes on a life of its own and is impossible to tame.
Even if the strategy does not always win elections in some localities, moving away from it would only mean losing an electorate which has already been electrified by anti-Muslim messaging.
Furthermore, the BJP's anti-Muslim rhetoric is not merely opportunistic. It is more than a mere tactic to polarise voters and distract from an underperforming economy and goes to the very core of its raison d'etre. The party's roots go back to a socio-cultural movement that advocates that India should be a Hindu country and rejects its inherently secular constitution.
In a bid to reduce Muslims to second-class citizens in the country, the party is hollowing out India's democracy and constitutional principles by co-opting institutions such as the judiciary election commission investigative agencies and the police force. It reached for archaic anti-free speech laws to crack down widely on dissidents, critics, journalists, politicalopponents and even peaceful protesters holding candle-lit vigils.
India is set to be the world's youngest country, with almost 44 percent of its population under the age of 25. A large number of these young people are unemployed or underemployed, with the government failing to create the number of jobs needed to keep pace with those entering the workforce.
This makes a large population of young people particularly, though not exclusively, susceptible to the monster of communal polarisation unleashed by the ruling party and its expansive propaganda machinery.
This precarious scenario is worsened by the deliberate decimation of the very institutions that are meant to safeguard against the breakdown of law and order. The anti Muslim violence in Delhi in Feb 2020 is an urgent reminder that India is on the edge. If, in the capital city, citizens can be displaced, hurt, and killed with impunity, it is horrifying to imagine what is to come in the remote parts of the country.
At the same time, there has been no serious reaction from the international community to the BJP's increasingly divisive politics. The day violence broke out in Delhi, US President Donald Trump was visiting India. It takes a special kind of callousness to praise Prime Minister Narendra Modi for maintaining religious freedom in India while parts of Delhi are on fire. The most astonishing part was the deadly silence from the Arab / Muslim countries.
The world, which should hold India to high standards of democracy and civil liberties, does not seem to have taken proportionate cognisance of the country's sharp turn towards a dangerous precipice. This, despite the fact that the sheer size of the country's population will magnify the consequences of widespread unrest and the repercussions will be felt beyond the region.