In the year of G20 for India, hate against minorities remains flagrant and unchecked.

As world leaders converge for the G20 summit, anti-Muslim hate rallies and episodes of lynchings, presents a scary distortion of Modi's India.

This post is edited by Aastha D. 

Feb 26, New Mumbai: Mahendra Dama, late forties, is a grain trader at the Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) in Mumbai. This Sunday he wore a saffron scarf, picked up a matching flag with an angry Hanuman (a hindu deity associated with chastity and masculinity), and headed to a rally in New Mumbai against ‘Love Jihad’, ‘Land Jihad’ and (alleged) religious conversion of Hindus by Muslims in India. Dama is one of the many thousands who converged at a rally called by the ‘Sakal Samaj’ (an umbrella organisation of multiple Hindu right wing associations) in association with the Ganesh Naik Foundation, Naik being a prominent legislator of the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi. 

“Modiji is bringing the Sanatan Sabhyata (a return to the roots of a Hindu nation and supremacy) back to Bharat (a name for India from a Hindu mythology origin story that the ruling party is trying to make mainstream),  and we are here to tell him that we back him”. says Dama

Predictably, Dama tells me he received the invite for the rally on a WhatsApp group. On further probing, he calls over his friends, all donning saffron caps and scarves. They tell me that every third Muslim house in their neighbourhood is the case of a Muslim man who has attempted to seduce a Hindu woman and tried to marry her following religious conversion. The friends nod in unison, they claim many of the Muslim men that they know have been involved in such ‘love-jihad’ cases. I ask if they can help me identify these Muslim houses and neighbours and the nodding soon becomes a collective evading of eye contact. Dama comes to the rescue and offers the local corporator as the ideal source with the exact data of the numerous Love-Jihad cases. 

Centre: A minor girl dressed in bridal Hindu attire with half her face covered in a burqa. She is flanked by other minor girls and boys dressed as Hindu deities, royalty, and fictional characters. Photography: Zaufeshan Shaikh

Ten days before the rally, lifesize posters invoking Hindus to be a part of  Hindu Akrosh (Hindu anger) emerged in New Mumbai ( the twin-city of Mumbai, India’s financial capital). Loudspeakers perched on autos did the rounds of housing societies asking Hindus to step out in large numbers to protect ‘Hindu-sthan’ (Hindu nation) from the ‘traitors’ trying to destabilise India. 

This imaginary theory first found its roots in Kerala in the year 2000, and is now a part of mainstream politics and vocabulary. The delusional Love Jihad theory accuses Muslim men of seducing and luring Hindu women through deception into marriage, with the larger agenda to increase the population of Muslims in India. The Modi led government in Maharashtra, and several other states in India is using this love-jihad narrative to push a legislation that will closely examine all marriages between Muslims and Hindus in the state.

Jan 29, South Mumbai: I entered another anti-Love jihad rally (one of three in Mumbai), a stone's throw from the two day extravaganza, Lollapalooza. On one hand, the largest and most iconic music festival in the world rocked the city’s elite, cultured, artistic professionals; the flag bearers of creative freedom. And a mile away, a sea of saffron engulfed the city in its genocidal tides, members of the ruling party celebrating the new wave, a ‘New-India’. 

Raja Singh, the star speaker, a prominent legislator of the ruling party, the BJP, asked Hindus to not do any business with Muslims and asked Hindus to vote for a party that speaks to ‘their interests’. Assuming, projecting, and asserting that these interests are those of Muslim boycott, erasure, and genocide. As he spoke, the crowd cheered, revelling in hate. 

I got into a conversation with a bunch of teenagers, some who studied in the reputed local Ruia college. Shailesh, 20, is the son of a bank manager and has started a crusade against Muslim boys in his college dating Hindu women. He tells me that Muslim men are light skinned, and their fair complexion entices Hindu girls to fall in their ‘trap’. Shailesh seeks to protect ‘his women’ from the charms of the Jihadi men. His friend Ankur goes a step further. He is carrying a placard that says ‘Miya-Maulana, tumcha gela zamana’ (Muslims, your time is over). 

He asks me my name.  ‘Rana’, I say. He asks for my surname, I give him an upper-caste Hindu surname. He asks me if I have ever fallen for a Muslim man, and I stay silent. “If you were my sister and you had dared to marry one of these katuas (the circumcised)  I would have then shown you how Sanatanis are now fully awake and ready to take on these landyas”. I wonder what he would have tried to do if I had given him my actual surname. 

Woman holing a placard that says, ‘Wake up Hindus, identify and beware of the satan in a Muslim man’. Photography: Zaufeshan Shaikh

I had not heard the term ‘landya’ or ‘katua’ in a long time. Especially directed at me. Both are derogatory terms referring to circumcision, and were widely used and normalised in the 1992 anti-Muslim carnage of Mumbai. The words rang in my ears, taking me back to those days of volatile hatred. 

My sister and I had narrowly escaped  the wrath of a mob thanks to the warning and refuge of a Sikh family. Our family of six was forced to leave our rented apartment in Sahar and move to a Muslim dominated area in Deonar, our tenement sandwiched between the city’s garbage dumping ground and a slaughterhouse. One of the ugliest, least sanitary patches of land in the city became a safe haven for Muslim families, including mine. 

It is twenty years later as I walked into the rally, the familiar language of hate becoming mainstream all around me. Paraded around as ‘fact’, the realisation of a ‘new India’ hits me hard. Trauma, triggers, they no longer haunt you, but become a part of your daily existence. 

Just to naively get technical for a second, the spate of hate-rallies in with provocative speeches and genocidal language now viral on social media, are in outright defiance of a Supreme Court order on hate speech. But New-India’s loud and resounding middle finger to the highest office in the country takes precedence. 

In 1992 when full scale anti-Muslim riots ravaged the financial capital, Justice B.N. Sri Krishna, a devout Hindu had made scathing observations on the inaction by the Mumbai police and those who were meant to implement law and order. Twenty years later, the Khakee coloured uniform continues to embrace the same ineptitude. As leaders in these rallies, ask for the ‘termites’ to be wiped out by the collective efforts of Sanatan Dharma, the Khakee protect their ‘freedom of hate speech’ while simultaneously endangering a 220 million Muslim minority in India.

As I try to make my way through the Hindu ‘aakrosh’ rally, the echo of Raja Singh’s anti-Muslim speech gets loud and feisty, a complete production with a catchy background score. Women adorning saffron headgears dance the Lejhim, a Maharashtrian folk dance, to the beats of drums that make your heart pound. 

The celebration of hate across the state of Maharashtra has found an audience that is willing to believe every WhatsApp forward that first creates then justifies Hindu victimhood peddled by the highest office in India.

In New Mumbai, Digambar, an auto driver who has come to attend the rally with his seven year old, is there because of the water crisis in his area. He lives in the MIDC area of Mumbai and is convinced his water and other resources are taken away by ‘migrants’. 

Harsh, 21, works the floor at Croma, a chain of electronic showrooms, and cites unemployment to be one of the reasons he is at the rally. He feels, despite being a graduate he is still working as a ‘helper’ in a big company because the ‘migrants’ in India have taken over his job. Invoked and emboldened by the Home Minister of the country who justifies the building of detention camps to hold ‘migrants’, ‘outsiders’ and ‘terrorists’, post 2014 India has many a term to describe Muslim citizens of India. 

Both Harsh and Digambar live in a city that is governed by one of the world’s wealthiest municipalities, the BMC. However, their joblessness, lack of basic amenities, essential commodities needed for survival, the promise of a good life, and a respectable existence ( as frequently promised by Prime Minister Modi) are associated with bogus conspiracy theories of ‘Love-Jihad’, ‘Land-Jihad’ and other wild terms that found their genesis in ultra-right-wing websites and became mainstream through WhatsApp, public rallies, and general impunity that bigotry finds in new India. 

When the government of India was found inefficient in its handling of the Covid 19 crisis, when thousands lost their lives in India for lack of oxygen and hospital beds, the mainstream media created ‘Covid-Jihad’, to placate the Indian masses. News channels ran conspiracy theories of Muslims spitting on food and hospital staff to amplify the spread of Corona in India. The relentless hate on news channels found their way to WhatsApp groups of many like Digambar for whom the ‘Muslim is the enemy’, the Muslim usurps resources that are rightfully his, the Muslim is the aggressor who wants to impede the ‘growth‘ of a Hindu India. 

The indoctrination of minors into the saffron wave. Photography: Zaufeshan Shaikh

For the many Digambars, this is reality, this is truth. One could hear the echo of this truth as the crowd roared at another rally in Solapur in unison while, T.Raja claimed ‘Just like the great Hindu leader, Shivaji who chopped the hand of the butcher (Muslim), the same way the Indian Hindu will take up swords and give the dogs (Muslims) a fitting reply.’ If only one bothered to open a single book of history to read the names of many Muslim Generals in Shivaji’s and consequent Maratha armies. Raja continues to be a free man.

February 15, State of Rajasthan, India: Hate speeches left unchecked witness the expected fallout. Two Muslim men Junaid and Nasir were lynched by cow vigilantes, dragged to the local police station in Haryana, hours from the national capital, only to be turned away by cops. Barely alive and gasping for breath, they were then dragged back through the same corridors of justice. They passed away hours later. As I write, the journalists reporting the lynching and locals protesting about this ghastly infarction of justice are being sent notices by the police. And the local Hindus sit in solidarity with the man alleged to be the mastermind of the lynching, Monu Manesar. 

Prime Minister Modi is silent. Deeply occupied, welcoming ministers to the G20 summit, posters pasted across the country stare back at you, his ultra-groomed face and radiant smile, delirious and triumphant.  

This week foreign ministers of the most important democracies arrive in India for a meeting of G20 leaders in the backdrop of the war on Ukraine. From US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to far right leader and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, world leaders and spokespersons are set to participate in discussions that will shape the course of the future; of India and of the world. 

Can Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the India he represents today, in the backdrop of the state enabled hate withstand the contradictions with our global posturing as the ‘Mother of Democracy’? Will realpolitik overshadow the demand for a just and secular democracy that values its minorities and human rights. Will crude double standards and contradictions between India’s domestic and international politics escape the world’s attention yet again? And to what extent?

To his domestic audience, Modi is presenting the G20 summit and the presence of world leaders in India to give the appearance of a ‘Vishwaguru’, an architect of the world with solutions to global crises. He could begin the process by treating minorities in his own country as equal citizens.

Trigger Warning. Man holding a Placard that reads, “What are the markers of a Muslim man? They find no distinction between a goat and a woman”.