India’s slow slide towards fascism
The anti-Muslim pogrom in northeastern Delhi last week killed only 43 people, and a few of them weren’t even Muslims. But then, on Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in Germany in 1938, only 91 Jews were killed. It was still a Nazi declaration of war on the Jews, and a forewarning of the millions of Jewish deaths to come.
Is this India’s Kristallnacht? History does not repeat, but it does have patterns, and there are disturbing similarities.
First, a disclaimer. Many senior officials in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP (Indian People’s Party) indulge in bloodcurdling anti-Muslim rhetoric, and more than a few have urged violence against Muslims, but there is no plan to exterminate them in death camps. It can’t be done.
Only one in a hundred Germans was Jewish in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power. One-seventh of India’s population – 200 million people – are Muslims. A Nazi-style ‘‘Final Solution’’, or even expulsion of the entire Muslim population, is just not practical in India.
It can still be done with smaller numbers of people. Myanmar recently expelled its entire Muslim Rohingya population, some 700,000 people, just by murdering a few thousand and driving the rest across the border into Bangladesh. But you can’t do that to all of India’s Muslims: it would be like moving the entire population of Japan and both Koreas somewhere else.
Narendra Modi is not squeamish about dead Muslims. He presided (deniably) over the slaughter of at least 1000 Muslims in targeted ‘‘rioting’’ as chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002, and for three days he said nothing about the ‘‘rioting’’ targeting Muslims in Delhi. Then he made a vague appeal for ‘‘peace and brotherhood’’, and that was all.
Modi is a realist, and his project is not genocide. It is the redefinition of Hindus as the only ‘‘real’’ Indians, and the demotion of Indian Muslims to second-class citizenship at best.
But it will still take a lot of violence to cow Muslims into accepting their new lower status, and that is what we were seeing in Delhi last week.
Modi’s project went into high gear soon after his landslide reelection last May. In August, he stripped Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, of the special status it had enjoyed since joining India in 1947. The state has been locked down under military occupation ever since, and most senior Kashmiri politicians are still in detention.
Then in December, he brought in two new laws that will, if they stand, make second-class citizenship for Muslims a reality.
One is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which makes it easy for immigrants of every faith, except Muslims, to become Indian citizens. The other is the National Register of Citizens, which will force the hundreds of millions of Indians who have no documents proving their nationality to apply for citizenship, as if they were migrants from somewhere else. Getting Indian citizenship will be easy if they are Hindu (or Sikh, or Christian, or Buddhist), but almost impossible in practice if they are Muslim.
The huge non-stop protests since December show that many Indians, including many Hindus, are appalled by these discriminatory laws, and by Modi’s frontal assault on the principle of a secular Indian state whose citizens are equal before the law. But most Hindus seem to approve, and Hindus make up 80 per cent of the population.
Modi hasn’t won yet. The protesters have not given up, the courts are not completely subjugated by the ruling party, and the BJP actually lost the election for the Delhi state assembly last month. But a BJP leader who lost his seat in that election, Kapil Mishra, then incited Hindu mobs to attack Muslims in Delhi.
It wasn’t just neighbour turning on neighbour in some spontaneous outburst of hatred. There was a good deal of that after three days, but it was started by young Hindu thugs armed with iron bars, sticks and machetes, trucked in from nearby rural parts of Uttar Pradesh state to attack Muslims and get the violence going.
Similar but smaller events like that are occurring all over India – and in almost every case, police stand by or join in the anti-Muslim attacks. (Police are controlled by the national government, not by the states.)
The protests may go on for another month, or another six months, but Modi has four more years to play with before he faces another election. By then, India may be unrecognisable: a ‘‘soft’’ fascist state achieved more or less by democratic means.
Many Indians, including many Hindus, are appalled by these discriminatory laws.