( Tomdispatch.com ) – Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too — worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has increasingly been enforced through violent means. While there are striking parallels between both countries, India appears to have ventured further down the road of far-right violence. Its experience could potentially offer Americans some valuable, if grim, lessons.

As a start, let’s look at two recent incidents, one in India and the other in the United States.

Laws passed in most Indian states against the killing of cattle have served as a common pretext for the violent enforcement of Hindu beliefs. Recently, for example, three men were arrested on charges of abducting and murdering Junaid and Nasir, two Muslim men transporting cattle through the northern state of Haryana. They first beat Junaid to death, then strangled Nasir. Both bodies were incinerated in a car left at the side of the road. That attack was linked to paramilitary gangs known as gao rakshaks (cow protectors) who, in these last years, have been on a rampage of violence in northern India, though similar horrors have recently been recorded further south in Maharashtra, home to India’s largest city, Mumbai.

In the United States, too, violent hatred is both on the rise and being all too perversely celebrated on the right. Within three days of being charged with involuntary manslaughter, Daniel Penny, the U.S. Marine veteran who made national news by choking to death Jordan Neely, a homeless, mentally ill Black man on a New York City subway car, raised a whopping $2.7 million from the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. Charged with manslaughter, he’s already been dubbed a “subway Superman” by Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, while his fellow Floridian, Governor Ron DeSantis, tweeted that to “stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda” we all must “stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny.”

Sadly enough, those episodes, occurring half a globe apart, are just two data points in surges of violent extremism sweeping both India and the United States. That trend first took off in India in 2014 with the election victory of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), making him prime minister. In the United States, it hit big time with the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. But such mayhem — and the broad approval of political violence by Hindu supremacists there and white supremacists here — has only grown in the years since.

Those incidents also illustrate one crucial difference between far-right violence in India and the United States. Whereas the surge of Hindu-supremacist violence has become a nationally organized collective effort, most American white-supremacist violence is still being committed by individuals acting alone.

In the U.S., we’ve experienced a growing outbreak of hate shootings in which the victims simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (and all too often of the wrong color), even as a longer-term trend of mass killings committed by racially motivated and ever better armed “lone wolves” rises. Notably, among those solo actors, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, and a host of others have reaped lavish praise from leading Trumpublican politicians, including that MAGA kingpin The Donald himself. (He, in fact, invited Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago in 2021.) And 2023 is already on track to set a record for mass shootings, while hate crimes in general rose to more than 200 per week in 2021, the last year for which the FBI has complete data. The vast majority of those crimes were committed by unaffiliated individuals.

In India, by contrast, hate violence is often highly organized. The cattle vigilantes recently arrested in Haryana, for example, were affiliated with Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of Vishnu Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council), which, in turn, is an offshoot of a vast Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The RSS movement was launched in 1925 with one mission: to make India (then still a British colony) a Hindu Rashtra — that is, a “Hindu Nation.” Its approach was inspired by the fascist movements of a century ago in Italy and Germany. Today, it has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locations across India. Worse yet, the ruling BJP party, with Modi at its head, is an offshoot of RSS.

In 2002, Modi was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat when horrific communal violence took almost 2,000 lives, mostly Muslim, in a political and social earthquake that helped kick off the current wave of Hindu nationalism. In 2014, on the strength of the Hindu nationalist bona fides he’d earned 12 years earlier, he became prime minister and soon all hell broke loose.

Cows and Bulls**t

In a majority of India’s states today, cow slaughter is designated a crime and put in the same category with rape, murder, or sedition. As Harsh Mander, who has organized against communal and religiously-inspired violence, explains in his book Partitions of the Heart, “The campaign today that claims to defend [the cow] has nothing to do with love of any kind.” It is instead “another highly emotive symbol to beat down India’s minorities into submission and fear.”

Laws against cattle slaughter and beef consumption lay largely dormant until 2014. Now, they are being enforced ever more violently by Hindu supremacist vigilantes. Those laws, in fact, have provided a much-needed pretext for extreme violence. As Tej Parikh noted recently in the Asia-Pacific magazine The Diplomat, “Two Muslim women were raped in Mewat [in Haryana state] in early September [2022], after their attackers had accused them of eating beef.” And to put those acts in the context of this moment, he added that “the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist in Haryana is three years less than for a cow slaughtering offense.”

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As Mander has pointed out, such beef bans are a tool for subjugating Muslims, Dalits (formerly referred to pejoratively as “untouchables”), Christians, and Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) to Hindu rule. Strange as it may sound, an American analogy could be the criminalization of abortion. In one country, cattle, in the other, human fetuses are being used as right-wing implements to oppress, socially control, and reassert supremacy over significant sections of our respective populations.

As in the U.S., violence against women is rampant in India and perpetrators are often treated with remarkable leniency. Consider Sandip, Ramu, Lavkush, and Ravi, four upper-caste Hindus who, in 2020, tortured, gang-raped, and killed a 19-year-old Dalit girl in the middle of a pearl millet field in the state of Uttar Pradesh. This March, a court found Sandip alone guilty — and only of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder.” The other three men were acquitted.

In the Hindu supremacist context, the phrase ghar wapsi (which literally means “homecoming”) refers to forcibly converting people from Islam or Christianity to Hinduism. In a recent typical case, a BJP politician, the state secretary of Chhattisgarh in northeastern India, home to many low-caste Hindus and tribal peoples, coerced more than 1,100 Christians into undergoing a ghar wapsi ceremony.

Hindu supremacists regularly use confinement and violence to secure such conversions. For instance, two women have filed a complaint against priests at a yoga center in the state of Kerala where they were held captive in an effort to do so. “I was forced to do work as housemaid including cleaning and preparing dishes for 65 inmates,” one of them swore in her affidavit. A priest, she wrote, “threatened that they would kill Isaac [her Muslim husband] if I went back to him.” The other woman told the court, “People at the [yoga] center asked me to leave [her Muslim husband] Hameed. When I resisted, they slapped my face, kicked my lower abdomen and stuffed cloth in my mouth to prevent me from screaming.”

Hindu nationalists are also raising alarms over “love jihad,” a false conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are out to charm Hindu women into wedlock, conversion, and the production of Muslim babies. A recently released propaganda film, The Kerala Story, purports to show how 32,000 women from that state were converted to Islam and recruited by Islamic State terrorists. No matter that none of that ever happened, “love jihad” rhetoric, including the portrayal of Muslim men as “deceitful, sexual monsters,” is being embraced even by white supremacists in the United States, according to Zeinab Farokhi, a professor at Toronto University.

East Meets West, West Meets Caste

Washington and New Delhi recently announced that Prime Minister Modi will be making a state visit to the U.S. in June. During that visit, notes the Indian outlet The Wire, “Modi is likely to visit New York for Yoga Day on June 21.”

Indeed, he will, for that annual yoga event was Modi’s brainchild. In 2014, he proposed that an International Day of Yoga be celebrated at the summer solstice and the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution to that effect. An avid yoga practitioner, Modi then wrote, “Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action… a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and well-being.” These days, maybe Modi should take a little more time for yoga, which might allow him to gain a more holistic understanding of the hate and cruelty now rippling through Indian society. (Substitute Donald Trump for Modi doing yoga, if you want a little grim humor right now.)

Today, there are an estimated 4.3 million South Asian-Americans living in the U.S., including people from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. A report released by a caste-abolitionist group, Equality Labs, entitled “Caste in the United States,” found that even in America, “many South Asians who identify as being from the ‘lower’ castes… tend to hide their caste,” because they fear that “they and their families could be rejected from South Asian cultural and religious spaces, lose professional and social networks, or even face bullying, abuse, and violence.”

Recently, however, a few rays of light have pierced the political gloom. In February, Seattle became the first city in the U.S. to prohibit caste discrimination and (joke, joke) yoga had nothing to do with it. The ban passed because of the hard work and solidarity of local activists, along with socialist Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant who proposed it. Then, on May 11th, casteism was banished from an entire state, the nation’s largest, when the California senate passed a bill to that effect.

To add another positive note, the very next day, Modi’s BJP was trounced by the Congress Party in elections to the legislative assembly of Karnataka, a crucial state in Indian politics. When the BJP won it five years ago, it was considered a key step in that party’s rise to national dominance. Now, those of us in favor of genuine democracy and not right-wing terror in both countries can only hope that the Karnataka defeat is a harbinger of BJP’s decline (just as we hope that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis can take the White House in 2024).  

But even small victories don’t come without pushback from Hindu-nationalist expatriates and RSS/BJP “intellectuals” in India, as is true with Trumpists in America. Unsurprisingly enough, they condemned the new caste measures in the U.S., declaring them “Hinduphobic” (just as white right-wingers here chant “All Lives Matter” in the context of police violence and to mock the Black Lives Matter movement). But, asks the political theorist Kancha Ilailah Shepherd, “How can the practice of caste discrimination… be tackled without local laws or institutional rules?”

Too many upper-caste Indians and white Americans think of themselves as the only ones worthy of enjoying the spoils of the earth. They want it all and are ready to get it by exploiting, not to say violating, non-upper-caste bodies in India and non-white ones in the U.S., along with cows and fetuses, using religion as a tool in both cases. The bodies of Dalits, Muslims, Christians, the people of occupied Kashmir, liberals, journalists, historians, climate and human rights activists, educators, Blacks, Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ people — all of them are fodder for the violent right-wing in both countries.

In the sludge of such destructive exceptionalism, there can be felt a sense of uncertainty, a potential for both of our societies to break down completely. Sadly, yoga and vegetarianism do not encapsulate life in India; upper-caste exceptionalism does. Similarly, “peace and love,” not to speak of democracy, hardly define life in America anymore for a growing set of Trumpublicans. For them, white exceptionalism does and, worse yet, these days it goes all too well armed with that best-selling weapon of this moment, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Honestly, there needs to be a deeper discussion of all of this before it’s too late.

Copyright 2023 Priti Cox and Stan Cox

Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – During Ramadan, a man attacked a mosque in Markham, Ont. He allegedly yelled slurs, tore up a Qu’ran, and attempted to run down worshippers in his vehicle.

Some people on Twitter have raised the idea that the attacker was connected to Hindu extremist groups; however, the investigation is still ongoing.

This is one of two hate-motivated incidents at mosques in Markham in a week. Although police said they don’t believe the incidents are connected, as a researcher of online extremism I can theoretically link these events to a global trend of Islamophobic violence.

Legal discrimination and violence

From the United States’ Muslim ban, to India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, to Québec’s Bill 21, Muslims face legal discrimination globally.

The Quebec City Mosque attack happened Jan. 29, 2017. [Graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi]

Alongside these laws, Muslims face physical violence. This includes: the beating, lynching and burning of Muslims in India, the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019, the Québec City mosque shooting in 2017, and more recently the murder of the Afzaal family in London, Ont.

Collectively, these policies and killings demonstrate a transnational quality of Islamophobic prejudice and violence.

While the two incidents in Markham may not be directly linked to extremist groups, they have occurred within this global ecosystem of Islamophobia. To me, the attacks indicate that these online conspiracies do not occur in a vacuum and can have potentially horrifying real consequences.

Hindutva-based terrorism in Canada

Over the last several years, I have carefully examined the digital and transnational connections between white supremacists in North America and far right Hindu nationalists in India.

My preliminary findings show how these two seemingly unrelated extremist far-right groups have become increasingly allied on social media platforms as they position Muslims as a “common enemy.”

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing Hindu nationalist organization, promotes the Hindutva ideology which believes India only belongs to Hindus.

A recent published report by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organization documents how this organization has gained ground in Canada. Jasmin Zine is a Canadian scholar whose recent report also outlines a network of Hindu nationalists that aids in the circulation of ideologies that promote Islamophobia.

Governments spreading misinformation

In 2014, the BJP, the most prominent Hindu nationalistic right-wing party in India came to power. Like the RSS, the BJP and other Hindu nationalist parties believe that India belongs only to Hindus.

Since elected, the BJP has actively spread misinformation and conspiracies about Muslims through social and mainstream media, intensifying hostilities between Muslims and Hindus.

While seemingly different on the surface from white supremacy, my research shows how these two movements similarly mobilize emotional rhetoric and visual content to spread their influence.

Twitter, as one of the main platforms for both groups, has been used extensively to perpetuate new forms of gendered Islamophobia and to forge surprising alliances and affinities.

The Love Jihad conspiracy

One of the conspiracy theories shared by these groups is called Love Jihad. Originating in India by Hindu nationalists in 2013, this conspiracy alleges Muslim men actively seduce non-Muslim women to marry and convert them to Islam.

The #LoveJihad hashtag was quickly picked up on social media by white extremists and other Islamophobic groups in North America, modulating it to fit their own conspiracies such as The Great Replacement.

This example demonstrates how anti-Muslim sentiment online spreads quickly and transnationally.

Groups I monitor on Twitter from India constantly talk about the perceived threat of Love Jihad. One such Hindu nationalist group, Hindu Jagruti Org, warns Hindu women against “dangerous, sexually aggressive” Muslim men. The tweet below is an example:

O Hindu girls, remember that Jihadis consider Hindu women as objects to fulfil their lust #LoveJihad #5thHinduAdhiveshan

— HinduJagrutiOrg (@HinduJagrutiOrg) June 24, 2016

These tweets portray Muslim men as “deceitful, sexual monsters” who view Hindu women as “objects to fulfill their lust.” Hindu extremists argue that to combat these “Muslim monsters,” precautionary measures are needed.

#LoveJihad travels to North America

The #LoveJihad conspiracy was quickly taken up by Islamophobic groups in North America. For example, Robert Spencer, who runs Jihad Watch which has a large following among Hindu nationalists, tweeted the following:

Love Jihad in India: Five Cases of Muslim Men faking Hindu Identities to Lure and Trap Hindu Women https://t.co/lzbn2vJhXU pic.twitter.com/npmSvrKz4c

— Robert Spencer (@jihadwatchRS) August 8, 2021

The tweet includes an article that claims the Islamic State encourages Love Jihadis to target non-Muslim women and “abduct,” “forcibly convert, and marry” them.

Love Jihad has been proven a farce.

Yet, Spencer continues to claim there are “real cases that show how Muslim men have duped Hindu women into toxic romantic relations year after year.”

Responses from users to Spencer’s post demonstrate his success in establishing #LoveJihad as fact. For instance:

As these posts indicate, Love Jihad easily reinforces belief in Muslim men as “terrorists” and “groomers” — that is, men who create trust with girls and young women in order to exploit them.

Transnational alignment of hate

This shared intense hatred of “monstrous” Muslim men brings Hindu and white extremists into a “transnational affective alignment.” That is, the mutual hate of Muslims and a mutual love for Hindu and white national ideals.

Social media platforms such as Twitter are important in creating these alignments and perpetuating related conspiracies, gaining considerable traction through their repetition.

This alignment is produced through the demonization of Muslim men and extremists’ shared hate and fear of them across borders. Through transnational responses and retweets, extremists forge a layered and cumulatively condensed affective message: Muslim men are dangerous. We fear them. Thus, we hate them.

While it remains to be seen whether or not the recent mosque attackers were directly influenced by online, transnational and affective Islamophobia, recurring incidences such as this should remind us that hate does not abide by international borders.

Misinformation and conspiracies find fertile ground in the echo chambers of social media.

Our response to such crimes — and their online equivalents — must consider that the fear and hate of Muslims does not happen by accident.

As the #LoveJihad conspiracy demonstrates, strange bedfellows are easily made when there is a perceived common enemy. Conspiracies and acts of anti-Muslim hate impact us all.

Zeinab Farokhi, Assistant Professor (limited term appointment), Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The ruler Akbar (r. 1556-1605), a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I, invited to his court holy men from the Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Zoroastrian communities where they held dialogues on the truth. When Akbar conquered Gujarat, he encountered Portuguese Christians based at the colony of Goa, and invited some Jesuits to his court. At one point he commissioned them to write a Persian account of the life of Jesus. Jesus is recognized as a messenger of God in the Qur’an, but the Muslim tradition was often chary of reading the Gospels. Although the Gospels were praised in the Qur’an, as well, some medieval Muslim thinkers developed a doctrine that their text had been corrupted by later interpolations. The Jesuit “Mirror of Holiness” is a short illustrated manuscript with early modern European illustrations, including of the birth of Christ.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
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(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

The Mughals maintained a large artistic establishment of both Muslim and Hindu painters who executed Persian miniatures to be interleaved with books of history and literature. Nowadays we often see these miniatures hanging on the walls of museums, but originally they were meant for manuscript books in the royal library and mainly would have been seen by royalty or courtiers.

Because Europeans visited the court, not only the Jesuits but also Protestants like Thomas Roe, many of them more interested in commerce than spirituality, Mughal-era painters discovered Renaissance art and were influenced by it.

One of the themes the painters took up was the nativity story, the birth of Christ, a story that is told with great eloquence in the Qur’an itself. Mary and Jesus are honored in Islam and the Qur’an spend more words on Mary than does the New Testament.

So here is an example, “Mughal depiction c 1630 of Virgin Mary and Jesus (J.14,2). British Library:”

Another one: British Museum:

The notes say that this one is 18th century:

“The Virgin Mary and child; single-page painting mounted on album folio, B-side. Mary, in blue cloak and mauve dress, seated on a terrace holding baby Jesus, surrounded by attendants holding various bowls and dishes. A tree and a building with red and green curtains in background. Ornate colourful floral border.”

Here is a drawing, also at the British Museum, by artist Ghulam Shah Salim, putting over into a Mughal-style drawing a piece originally by the “the Flemish artist Bernard van Orley (1492-1542). Dedication to Shah Salim Jahangir [Akbar’s son] before his accession to the imperial throne in 1605 and artist’s signature at lower left above figure’s knee. Void background. Inscribed. Ink, gold and watercolour on paper.”

Here is another from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

The Museum explains that it is from 1600-1610, produced at the Mughal court:

Contact between Europe and the Mughals began in 1573, when the emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) led his forces into Gujarat and captured the great port city of Surat. Here, he encountered Westerners for the first time. They were from the Portuguese settlement of Goa to the south, and as a result of this meeting Akbar decided to send an embassy to Goa. This led in 1582 to the first of several Jesuit missions from Goa to the Mughal court. The Jesuits brought prints and paintings that were shown to the royal artists, who began to copy or adapt elements from them. This scene may be very loosely based on a depiction of the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem. It probably dates to about 1600-1610, and was formerly in the collection of Arthur Churchill, from whom the museum bought it in 1913.

These paintings attest to the interest at the Mughal court in the life of Jesus, considered by the Muslim rulers one of their own prophets, and the way in which Renaissance art was a global phenomenon.

( Middle East Monitor ) – In their quest to refashion India as a Hindu state, Hindutva extremists have placed themselves on a collision course with the country’s secular constitution. Their goal is no less than the reformation of India as an ethno-religious state affording special rights and privileges to Hindus within a multi-tier system of citizenship. The model state that they aspire to replicate is Israel.

The Zionist state has become an aspiration as much as an inspiration for far-right nationalists around the world, India included. Founded to protect the exclusivity of one ethno-religious majority over everybody else — especially the indigenous population — Israel is looked upon with envy by the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer. The far-right extremist, who once described himself as a “white Zionist”, praised Israel gushingly following its adoption of the Nation-State Law last year, which declared Israel to be a state of the Jewish people only. The bill was criticised strongly for relegating non-Jews to secondary status in a move akin to the US or Britain declaring themselves to be “white, Christian” nations by law.

Israel has passed the Nation-State Law becoming officially an Apartheid State – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Israel’s ability to pass itself off as a democracy despite relegating minorities to second-class status has a special appeal for ultra-nationalists. Its strength as a highly militarised nation, able to maintain an apartheid system without suffering any consequences on the international stage, has a unique attraction. The success of the Zionist state has turned what were once ultra-nationalist fantasies — which many thought, mistakenly, had been relegated to the dustbin of history — into a realistic political vision in a world beset by fear and conflict.

In fact, far from being a democracy, Israel is unique in the way that it has created a multi-tier citizenship modal within the state for the purpose of maintaining its Jewish character. A number of laws have been enacted to build the state around institutionalised discrimination. The 1950 Law of Return, for example, incorporates the fundamental ideology of Zionism: all Jews, no matter where they were born, have the inalienable right to migrate to Israel. It’s easy to see why ethno-nationalists across the world would like to see this replicated elsewhere.

The 1952 Law of Citizenship (better known as the Nationality Law), meanwhile, gives all persons who are accorded Jewish nationality in the above Law of Return the right to claim Israeli citizenship automatically upon arriving at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, without any formal procedures. The same law, however, stipulates specific protocols for non-Jews who wish to have citizenship.

Right-wing nationalists find Israel’s extraterritorial notion of sovereignty appealing. In this form of political order, citizenship is granted to anyone sharing the same ethnicity or religion, regardless of where they live in the world. In Israel’s case, only Jews are granted nationality rights, while non-Jews residing in the same territory are deprived of such rights.

Unlike liberal democracies in the West, Israel upholds a constitutionally-imposed distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Only Jews are granted nationality and able to enjoy the full spectrum of rights granted by the state. An odious system of delivering state benefits is used in order to foster an impression that Israel is not discriminating against non-Jews.

The separation of services between “national” institution and “government” institution allows for the legal siphoning-off of resources to provide services for Jewish citizens only. For example, institutions financed by Zionist groups such as the Jewish National Fund can and do discriminate openly in favour of Jews without seeming to taint the apparently democratic government with the stench of racism.

This kind of Jew/non-Jew bifurcation of public services denies non-Jewish citizens of the state from accessing funds and services open to Jews only. With 92 per cent of the land of Israel “owned” by the JNF, much of it expropriated from Palestinians, non-Jewish Israeli citizens are deprived of access; they are unable by law to own, lease, live or work on it.

Israel is thus a model to imitate as far as Hindutva ideologues are concerned. Guided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalists seek to “Israelify” India into a racialised state. Their reasoning is simple: if Israel is accepted as the “only democracy in the Middle East” despite its many apartheid policies, then why can’t India continue to claim to be “the largest democracy in the world” while becoming an ethno-religious state?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) hold a joint press conference following their meeting in Jerusalem on 5 July 2017 [Haim Zach/GPO / Handout /Anadolu Agency]

Such a project is fraught with danger. The Hindutva vision for India is almost certain to stir up the demon of communal strife, the like of which led to the killing of millions during the country’s partition and independence in 1948.

Unlike Israel, which was founded on ethno-religious tribalism — rather like Pakistan — Hindutva ideologues have to abolish the country’s secular constitution to realise their vision. The conceptual shift made possible through propaganda and rhetoric has been underway for some time, with some of the worst dehumanising language being used to describe Indian Muslims now becoming socially and politically acceptable.

Indian ministers have fuelled anti-Muslim hostility by demanding the reduction of legal protection for minorities and suggesting that western standards of human rights are somehow not compatible with India. A similar argument was made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in defence of Israel’s right to continue its annexation policy by disregarding the human, civil and political rights of Palestinians and insisting that applying international law to the situation in Israel-Palestine simply isn’t feasible.

Of course, just as there are anti-Zionist Jews who challenge Israel with regard to its discriminatory policies, not all Hindus endorse Modi’s racist political project. Indeed, many denounce Hindutva’s ideology as a malign distortion of Hinduism itself.

However, as is often the case in such ideological battles for hearts and minds, moderate voices are drowned out by the roar of fanatics seeking to recreate what they envisage to be imagined past glories. Spurred on by the global paralysis of support for human rights and the growing disregard of international law, despots, autocrats and ideologues of all political and religious backgrounds are seizing this moment to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable.

Beyond the rhetoric, measures are underway to change the face of India. Amongst the inflammatory steps taken by Modi since his re-election in May is the push for new legislation, the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). This controversial move, which threatens to demote the status of the country’s two hundred million Muslim citizens, sparked protests across the country recently; at least 20 people have been killed in clashes with the security forces.

Netanyahu and Modi: Kashmir and Palestine are punchbags for their occupiers – Cartoon [CarlosLatuff]

The bill grants amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from three neighbouring countries, namely Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. While India’s federal government says that the law will protect religious minorities fleeing persecution, opponents say that by dividing alleged migrants into Muslims and non-Muslim categories, it explicitly and blatantly seeks to enshrine religious discrimination in the law, contrary to the country’s longstanding, secular constitution and ethos.

The CAB is only one of the initiatives threatening India’s constitution. Another is the pan-India citizen verification process known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Critics say that it has become weaponised by hard-line Hindus and that its true motive is to disenfranchise many of India’s Muslims. When it was trialled in the Indian State of Assam, 1.9 million mainly Muslim citizens were made stateless overnight.

By themselves, the CAB and NRC may appear harmless. Seen within the context of the rise of Hindutva and the march towards re-creating India as a Hindu state, though, these measures serve a hostile and divisive political agenda.

The international community must support all Indians in their resistance to the hard-line Hindu nationalists and not indulge Hindutva’s racist ideologues in the same way that it has indulged Zionism since 1948. Hindu nationalists are clearly seeking the Israelification of India; they must be stopped.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Quick Take by Bloomberg: “Activist Arundhati Roy Joins Students in a New Delhi, India Protest Opposing the New Citizenship Law”

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and other bigots on the far right are nothing new in American history. Rather, they remind us of the worst and most shameful detours of the American Republic in the past. From the mid-nineteenth century racial theory became prominent in European and American discourse, in which peoples were conceived of as endogamous (only marrying among themselves and so producing ‘pure’ and ‘less pure’ ‘races.’) In contrast, in the 18th century most Western thinkers believed the differences among peoples had to do with climate and diet. The nineteenth century Romantic notion of race is a fantasy– people get all mixed up over time.

But it would be a mistake to think race was the only consideration in American xenophobia (hatred for foreigners). Powerful Christian revivalist movements created movements to missionize the world that had a horror of having heathens on the continent.

These twin pathologies of racism and religious bigotry were implicated in a whole series of white, Christian supremacist laws aimed at excluding whole swathes of the world from immigration to the United States enacted between 1882 and 1924. Here are the highlights. Or, lowlights.

1. Chinese Buddhists Both racism and religious bigotry built up toward Chinese-Americans brought in from 1849 to build the trans-American railroad. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first time a whole people was excluded from the United States. In the prejudiced language of the day, that Chinese were Buddhists, Confucianists or Taoists, i.e. “pagans” or “heathens” from an Evangelical point of view, was one of the reasons they should be kept out of the country. The total exclusion lasted until 1943, when 100 Chinese a year began being admitted, which was not much different from total exclusion. In 1965 the Immigration Act ended racial and religious exclusions based on racism and religious fanaticism, including of Chinese. Chinese-Americans have made enormous contributions to the United States, despite the long decades during which they were excluded or disrespected.

2. Japanese Buddhists. In 1907-08, the US and Japan concluded a “gentlemen’s agreement” whereby Japan would limit the number of passports it issued to Japanese wanting to come to the United States. In turn, the city of San Francisco agreed to end the legal segregation of Japanese-Americans in that city (yes, they had their very own Jim Crow). Not satisfied with the agreement, in 1924 racist Congressmen ended Japanese immigration completely. This action angered Japan and set the two countries on a path of enmity.

3. Indian Hindus & Sikhs and other Asians. Not satisfied with measures against Buddhists, white Christians next went after Hindus and Sikhs. The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act excluded from immigration everyone from the continent of Asia– it especially aimed at Indians, including especially Sikhs, but also Koreans, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesians, etc. etc. The American Immigration Council writes:

“During the same period, Asian Indians, particularly Sikhs from the Punjabi region who were originally brought by the British to work the Canadian-Pacific railroads, began to move south into the U.S. Pacific Northwest and California as farm workers. In response, nativist rioters burnt out the Asian Indian settlements in Bellingham and Everett, Washington in 1907. In the following decade, protectionist and racist groups, epitomized by the Asian Exclusion League, campaigned against the “Hindu invasion” or “Turban tide” that was perceived as an economic threat to native farmers. Laws were passed in California to strip land ownership from Asian Indians and Japanese in 1913 and 1920. In response, many Asian Indians married Mexican-American women, which for a time exempted them from the law. Asian Indian students who were supporters of independence from the British Empire were expelled from the country by order of President Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Finally, sustained political attacks against Asian Indians such as those orchestrated by Democratic Representative John Raker and immigration commissioner Anthony Caminetti culminated in the imposition of the 1917 Barred Zone Act. Asian Indians joined other Asian country nationals (except Japanese and Filipinos) who were excluded from immigrating to the United States. The final injustice to Asian Indians was exacted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which considered to which race Asian Indians belonged. The Court decided that although Asian Indians were Caucasian, they were not “white” and therefore could not be U.S. citizens. Harassment of the Asian Indian population continued, forcing many to return to India. By 1940 half of the Asian Indian population had left the country, leaving only 2,405.”

The provision in the act barring “polygamists” was aimed at Muslims. Would-be Muslim immigrants were asked at their port of entry if they believed a man could have more than one wife, and if they said yes, were turned away.

Japanese were not part of the act only because the Gentlemen’s Agreement already mostly excluded them. Filipinos were not excluded because the Philippines was then an American territory (i.e. colony).

4. Syrians-Lebanese. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reappeared on the national stage and agitated against immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. The Klan infiltrated the Democratic Party and took it over, and won the whole state of Indiana.

The racist 1924 Immigration act set country quotas based on the percentage of Americans from that country already present in 1890. How exactly they determined how many Americans were British, German, etc. is not clear to me. But one consequence of basing the quotas on 1890 rather than, as was originally proposed, 1910, was that populations that came in big numbers during the Great Migration of 1880-1924 were often given low quotas. Populations that came in the eighteenth century or the mid-19th (e.g. in the latter case, Germans) had relatively large quotas. Syria-Lebanon (which were not separated until the French conquest of 1920) were given a quota of 100, even though tens of thousands of Lebanese came to the United States, 10% of them Muslim during the Great Migration. That community produced the great Lebanese-American writer and artist, Kahlil Gibran.

Now what we would call the Lebanese were excluded. In fact, some racists in places like North Carolina argued that greater Syria was in West Asia and so Lebanese/Syrians should be excluded on the basis of the Barred Asiatic Zone. They put Lebanese Muslims and Christians into the category of the “Yellow Peril”!

5. Other Middle Easterners, including Armenians. The 1924 Nazi-style quotas based on “race,” which mostly lasted until 1965, excluded most of the Middle East. The quota for Egypt? 100. Palestine? 100. Turkey? 100. Even the persecuted Armenians were given only 100 spaces annually.

The racial hierarchies visible in the 1924 act fed into an increasing concern with eugenics, with fears of decadent races and a determination to strengthen the master race by forbidding intermarriage and even by experimenting on live human beings.

6. Jews. In the 1930s when it would have mattered, the US government excluded Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany from coming to America. I wrote elsewhere, “the US in the 1930s did betray its ideals as a refuge for people yearning to be free. The episode of the SS St Louis, a ship full of 900 Jewish refugees that got close enough to Miami to see its lights before being turned back to Europe, epitomized this failure. A third of the passengers were later murdered by the Nazis. One Jewish refugee the US did take in was Albert Einstein. How would we not have been better off if we’d had more like him?”

Racists of that time argued that German Jews shouldn’t be admitted because Nazi agents might covertly exist among them.

Trump is proposing a 21st century version of the racist and religiously bigoted Barred Asiatic Zone and its racist and bigoted successor, the 1924 Immigration Act. This is the new Ku Klux Klan, infiltrating the Republican Party this time.

Those who have said they’ve never seen anything like it in American history don’t know their American history very well. The problem is not that what Trump is saying is unprecedented. It is that it echoes the ugliest episodes of American intolerance.

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Related video:

New York University: “When Long Island Was the Eugenics Capital of the World”