Narendra Modi eyes votes in communalising coronavirus pandemic and hounding Muslims

While the coronavirus crisis has engulfed the world since March, India, besides struggling to survive that threat of a foreign origin, has also at the same time fallen into a pit of its own making: perpetrating another bout of the communal virus on itself.

From blaming China initially for the origin of the coronavirus, the focus of India’s discourse on the crisis has shifted over a month to blaming the Muslim minority and branding them as "super spreaders" of COVID-19.

While country’s millions of migrant labourers were on the roads immediately after the unplanned lockdown order with only a four-hour notice, the media, instead of focusing on failures of government policies concentrated on a Tablighi Jamaat meeting in Delhi, which had taken place a week before the government ordered the lockdown on March 22.

This congregation of Muslims had brought several participants from Southeast Asia and some of them had carried the virus. No one asked why the Indian government had given visas to these delegates to come from #COVID-19 affected countries in Southeast Asia. There was no question even why the Indian government had allowed the congregation to take place, while Malaysia had uncovered a similar gathering in Kuala Lumpur of the same religious outfit in the last week of February that had caused the virus to spread in that country.

Of course, India was silent over many Hindu religious gatherings, which had taken place even after the Tablighi Jamaat meeting. Instead of taking the government to task over its failure to take preemptive action, the Indian media and Hindu Right-wing supporters accused the Muslim group and even went on to paint it as an act intended to harm India, branding it "Corona Jihad".

Muslims being hounded

While India’s media is going overboard to blame Muslims, the Indian government was directly participating in this project by highlighting the connection between the Tablighi Jamaat and a higher proportion of confirmed COVID-19 cases in certain parts of India.

It is another matter that while India is far behind compared to many parts of the world in testing COVID-19 cases, it went on overdrive to test only those who were supposed to have any connection with the Tablighi Jamaat. If you test only one group, you will find more in that group, but no one looks at this sampling bias and it helps the Indian authorities to paint a story as if Tablighi Jamaat is solely responsible for the coronavirus crisis in India. In this effort to blame Muslims only, several other hotspots like one in Indore with no possible link to Tablighi Jamaat were kept out of media attention.

As police and health workers searched all over the country and put Muslims connected to the Tablighi group under forced quarantine and even lodged criminal cases against them, it led to further mistrust of Muslims towards the authorities and in some places, they resisted the search and attacked government officials. There are also regular attacks by local residents on COVID-19 quarantine facilities, health professionals, airline staff, and even in some cases forcibly refusing the cremation of dead bodies.

However, the focus of media discourse and government actions has been kept on only some sporadic attacks by Muslims while ignoring the mindless reactions by some Hindus. As if the Tablighi Jamaat was not sufficient enough to vilify 200 million Muslim minority, the Indian government has also targeted Rohingya Muslim refugees living in the country for the special screening of coronavirus.

With the coronavirus crisis, there has been an increasing number of attacks on Muslims all over the country, particularly small store owners and street vendors. The attack on Kashmiri Muslims has also become common and there are several calls by Right-wing groups to economically boycott Muslims. There is almost complete impunity for the Hindu extremists to carry out these attacks and in issuing these threats.

The surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric in India has caught the attention of the world and particularly elicited strong adverse reactions from the Gulf countries, which has forced India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make a customary comment in a LinkedIn post saying that coronavirus doesn’t see race, religion or caste before striking. This comment is ‘too late and too little’ and it has neither has stopped nor going to subside anti-Muslim propaganda unleashed by the Hindu groups and its allied media houses.

Islamophobia has reached its peak in India with the increasing rise of coronavirus crisis. This is not just a primordial reaction of society, but a very well planned and finely executed political project. The Indian government has taken several missteps in addressing the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. It first refused to see the incoming crisis so reacted late, then went on prescribing Ayurvedic medicine. It has even been exporting medical protection equipment, while Indian medical workers don’t have basic protection. The 40-day lockdown has been done with only four hours of notice and not with proper planning. A large number of migrant workers have nowhere to go and the country’s poor are struggling to get even basic food for survival.

India’s economy was already in trouble and it will certainly get much worse even if it manages to escape a large number COVID-19 deaths. Thus, India’s Hindu nationalist regime aims to give the coronavirus crisis a communal colour, which will give it an escape route from its abject policy failures and also at the same time the increasing anti-Muslim environment will bring them political benefits in the coming elections in crucial states like Bihar. Coronavirus has brought a very serious crisis for India, but for the Narendra Modi regime, it has also provided a powerful political opportunity.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden