Lindia, with one in six of its inhabitants Muslim, is the third largest Muslim country in the world in terms of population, after Indonesia and Pakistan. This considerable minority is however subjected by the government of Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, to a real campaign of discrimination, in the name of hindutva, the identification of India with Hinduism alone. The Prime Minister’s party, the BJP (Indian People’s Party), has multiplied the provocations in the states he controls, with parades of Hindu extremists, armed with sabers and pistols, and bulldozing mosques. In February 2020, riots, stoked by the BJP, left around 50 dead in the mixed neighborhoods of northern New Delhi. In the fall of 2021, the BJP-led state of Assam was the scene of many atrocities against the Muslim minority, accused of not being Indian, but of having immigrated illegally from neighboring Bangladesh.
The complacency of Muslim regimes
This exclusion of Muslims from the national community is reminiscent of the campaign that had raged against the Rohingya, the Muslim minority of Burma, also accused of having infiltrated from Bangladesh, before being massively deported to this country in 2017, as part of what the UN has been able to describe as ” genocide ». The push to extremes, encouraged by the BJP, has further increased in recent weeks, without any noticeable reaction from Muslim leaders in the Middle East, anxious to preserve their privileged relationship with Indian power. This is how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogann officially visited New Delhi in 2017, warmly welcoming Mr Modi back two years later. The Indian Prime Minister was received with pomp in Egypt in 2020 by President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, and maintains close relations with his counterparts in the Gulf. He also held last February, a virtual summit », broadcast on local television, with Mohammed Ben Zayed Al Nahyane, who has since become the titular president of the United Arab Emirates, which he had in fact led for a decade.
This cordial understanding, however, was undermined by remarks on the private life of the Prophet Muhammad, made by a BJP spokesperson on May 26 during a televised debate. It took several days for such statements, deemed offensive to Muslims, to spread on social media, sparking protests in India, swiftly suppressed, and then a wave of condemnations in the Muslim world. Qatar, Kuwait, Iran and Indonesia summoned the Indian ambassador to denounce the controversial remarks. Saudi Arabia also issued a closed ” conviction ” such ” insults ». Erdogan’s party joined in the chorus of denunciations, while the Emirates judged such remarks ” contrary to humanitarian values and moral principles “. It was to stem this diplomatic crisis that the spokeswoman was suspended from the BJP, along with a party youth leader, also implicated for anti-Muslim diatribes.
The Uighur precedent
The confusion publicly expressed by the United Arab Emirates, India’s third largest trading partner, after the United States and China, convinced the Modi government to try to calm international emotion as soon as possible. It is true that 60% of Indian oil comes from the Gulf, where more than six million Indian expatriates work, responsible for half of the foreign currency transfers to their country. Threats to boycott Indian products, at this stage symbolic in Qatar and Kuwait, were therefore taken very seriously by New Delhi. In the absence of public apologies, the Modi government and the BJP have multiplied soothing declarations. They may nevertheless be surprised by this sudden fit of fever, after years in which the trivialization of hatred and violence against Indian Muslims had provoked very few reactions from the States now mobilized against ” the offense made to the Prophet Muhammad.
Modi arguably should have learned from Xi Jinping to avoid such a crushing disappointment. The Chinese leader has for many years pursued a systematic policy of repression of the Muslim minority in Xinjiang, with hundreds of thousands of detainees in ” re-education camps “, to the point that the United States, among others, were able to denounce a “ genocide of this Uighur population. But China has not made the gross error of publicly provoking Islam and its prophet, thus guaranteeing itself the complacent silence of most of the leaders who claim to belong to Islam. This is how the fate of Muslims in China, far from becoming a point of contention with the Islamic world, is now linked to the showdown between Western democracies and Beijing. It therefore appears that an international quarrel ” becomes Islamized rather by the questioning of the Prophet Muhammad than by the persecution of Muslims.
This is not the least lesson of the ongoing controversy in India.