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Journalists, intellectuals and dissidents are being threatened by Modi’s government..
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s a lethal virus scorches its way across continents, the leftwing Indian rights campaigner Gautam Navlakha has been reminding us of the words of Leonard Cohen, urging people to speak up for the right things: “There is a crack/a crack in everything, that’s how light gets in.” While many of us experience lockdown in varying degrees of constraint, Navlakha – who cited Cohen’s lyrics in a recent statement – faces actual incarceration as does another high-profile Indian, the eminent academic and Dalit intellectual Prof Anand Teltumbde. Meanwhile, Siddharth Varadarajan, the well-known journalist and a founder-editor of the respected investigative online portal the Wire, faces prosecution in an unrelated case. While locking down its vast population from coronavirus, why is India seeking to lock up dissident intellectuals and intimidate journalists?
The three men have been accused of outrages ranging from assassination plots to promoting “enmity, hatred or illwill among classes” — allegations that have been widely criticised as politically motivated. But their apparent common crime is one that underlies the harassment and intimidation of scores of other journalists, writers, academics and human rights campaigners in India. They have criticised the actions of the hardline Hindu nationalist dispensation that rules India today, as well as the culture of divisive bigotry that it has fostered widely in civil society.
The last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers
Navlakha is a longstanding critic of state and army atrocities in the disputed region of Kashmir, which has faced a disgraceful lockdown since August last year and continues to experience unconstitutional — and, in corona-ridden times, dangerous — limits on internet access. He is accused, along with respected figures like the poet Varavara Rao and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj, of allegedly conspiring in a plot against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018. Teltumbde, related by marriage to India’s towering Dalit leader and constitution-drafter, Babasaheb Ambedkar, has been remanded in custody in the context of violence in the town of Bhima Koregain in 2018. Ironically, Teltumbde has written in the past about how the Indian state seeks to “discredit and eliminate individuals it deems a threat to its apparatus.”
Varadarajan, whose platform the Wire has previously fallen foul of powerful and wealthy figures with strong connections to the government, faces a different set of charges. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there have been strong moves in the Indian media and sections of the ruling dispensation to pin blame for the spread of the virus on Muslim communities. Yogi Adityanath, a fundamentalist Hindu cleric turned politician with a good line in inflammatory speech, is the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where tensions have been rising. Although the Wire misattributed a quote to him on its website, the erratum was quickly corrected and acknowledged.
Nonetheless, Varadarajan now stands accused of a fantastical range of crimes, including disobeying an order of a public servant and creating or promoting enmity between classes. The real problem may be that the Wire reported correctly that Adityanath had attended a Hindu religious gathering after the national lockdown was declared on 24 March. This report came even as public feelings have been whipped up against Muslims because Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim organisation, held an event prior to the lockdown where many attendees did get infected. The Wire has also noted that “believers” in more than one religious community have been late in adopting precautions against large gatherings.
For a long time now, India has benefited from the title of world’s largest democracy (meaning, in fact, the most populous democratic state). That grand moniker continues to lull the world into believing constitutional rights and freedoms thrive in that nation, when they are in fact under grave threat. Although the misuse of state powers to intimidate principled journalists and of religious divides to garner votes has occurred under other governments, including those of the current Congress opposition, there is little doubt that the last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers.
Fourteen journalists have been killed in India since Modi’s election in 2014. (In the 10 preceding years when the opposition was in power, 17 journalists were killed.) Journalists routinely face intimidation, legal proceedings and restrictions on accessing information. Female reporters deal with constant online harassment, including threats of sexual violence. Three prominent rationalists who have challenged Hindu orthodoxy have been murdered in recent years. A widely condemned 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act promises fast-track citizenship to select religious minorities claiming asylum from neighbouring countries, conspicuously discriminating against Muslims.
As Donald Trump wrongly claims his government has “absolute power”, we know from the case of Viktor Orbán, who has seized sweeping emergency powers in Hungary, that the global lockdown against the virus can strengthen authoritarian forces if not strenuously guarded against. It will take a vigilant citizenry and media to stop that from happening. In India it is precisely dissident intellectuals like Teltumbde, journalists like Varadarajan and committed activists like Navlakha who are leading the defence of pluralism and democracy. It is of the utmost importance that the world speaks up for them and stands by them now. For, in doing so, we stand up for ourselves and a world we will want to see changed for the better after the pandemic, one in which we can all breathe more freely.
Priyamvada Gopal is an academic at Cambridge University and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019)
Salil Tripathi is a journalist, human rights campaigner and chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International
Coronavirus conspiracy theories targeting Muslims spread in India
The men who beat Mehboob Ali did so without mercy. Dragging him to a field in the village of Harewali, on the fringes of north-west Delhi, the group hit him with sticks and shoes until he bled from his nose and ears. Ali was a Muslim, recently returned home from a religious gathering, and the Hindu mob was quite certain he was part of a so-called Islamic conspiracy to spread coronavirus to Hindus nationwide. His attackers believed the devout 22-year-old must be punished before he carried out “corona jihad”.
The allegations were entirely false, but according to video footage and his family, the men who beat Ali on 5 April were in little doubt of his guilt, demanding: “Tell us who else is behind this conspiracy.” Ali was then taken to a nearby Hindu temple and told to renounce Islam and convert to Hinduism before they would allow him to go to hospital.
Five days after the attack Ali’s family was still in fear of also being accused of spreading the virus. “If we file a police case, the Hindus will not let us live in the village,” said one family member, who asked not to be named. Police confirmed that due to his attendance at a Muslim convention in Bhopal a few weeks back, Ali was being held in the isolation ward of Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan hospital in Delhi as a “corona suspect”, though he had no symptoms.
The attack on Ali is symptomatic of the growing demonisation of India’s Muslim community, who are being accused, without any basis, of conducting a malevolent campaign to spread Covid-19 to the Hindu majority.
Already a minority under attack – it is just weeks since Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in religious riots in Delhi – Muslims have now seen their businesses across India boycotted, volunteers distributing rations called “coronavirus terrorists”, and others accused of spitting in food and infecting water supplies with the virus. Posters have appeared barring Muslims from entering certain neighbourhoods in states as far apart as Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh.
The troubles began when the gathering of an Islamic missionary organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, held in mid-March in the south Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin, was singled out by police and government as being responsible for the spread of coronavirus across India. The convention, which had been given the go-ahead by the Delhi authorities, was attended by about 8,000 people, including hundreds of foreigners. It soon became apparent that many at the convention had unknowingly picked up Covid-19 and brought it back to towns and villages across India.
Across the country, police were ordered to round up anyone associated with the organisation. So far, more than 27,000 Tablighi Jamaat members and their contacts have been quarantined in about 15 states. In Uttar Pradesh, the police offered up to 10,000 rupees (£105) for information on anyone who had attended the gathering.
In a statement this week, the Indian Scientists’ Response to Covid-19 group said “the available data does not support the speculation” that the blame for the coronavirus epidemic in India lies mainly with Tablighi Jamaat. The scientists emphasised that while testing for coronavirus is extremely low across India, a disproportionate number have been of members of Tablighi Jamaat, as per a government order, therefore heavily skewing the figures.
Yet the test results were swiftly seized upon by members of the ruling ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), who claimed Tablighi Jamaat members had intended to infect millions as part of an Islamic conspiracy and were carrying out “corona terrorism”.
Senior BJP leaders accused Tablighi Jamaat of carrying out a “Talibani crime”, described their members as “human bombs, but in the guise of coronavirus patients”, and called for Tablighi Jamaat leaders to be both hanged and shot. Kapil Mishra, a local BJP leader notorious for hate speeches, tweeted: “Tablighi Jamaat people have begun spitting on the doctors and other health workers. It’s clear, their aim is to infect as many people as possible with coronavirus and kill them.”
Though quickly debunked, the rumours of Tablighi Jamaat members refusing to go into quarantine, assaulting hospital staff and throwing bottles of urine at Hindus quickly spread.
Hashtags such as “coronaJihad”, “CoronaTerrorism” and “CoronaBombsTablighi” began to trend on Twitter in India. Mainstream Indian media repeatedly asserted that Tablighi Jamaat members were coronavirus “superspreaders”.
Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan, chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission, said that while Tablighi Jamaat had been shortsighted in holding the convention, there were “dozens of examples of government, political parties and other religious groups who also flouted the coronavirus restrictions and gathered in large numbers”.
He added: “But the whole focus is being directed only on Muslims. In the past few days, we have noted a new wave of attacks on Muslims across the country. There is talk of social boycott of Muslims, harassment of Muslims by Hindutva groups and Muslims are even being harassed by police in various areas.”
There has been a concentration of attacks against Muslims in Karnataka, where a BJP MP, Anant Kumar Hegde, has denounced Tablighi Jamaat as terrorists. Shortly after, an audio clip began to be shared widely over WhatsApp, urging people not to allow Muslim fruit and vegetable sellers into their areas, claiming they were spreading the virus through their produce.
Sayed Tabrez, 23, and his mother, Zareen Taj, 39, were among seven Muslim volunteers who were assaulted by a gang of local BJP members on 4 and 6 April, as they tried to distribute food to impoverished people in the Marathahalli and Dasarahalli districts of Karnataka.
“Some 20 local BJP members came on motorbikes and started shouting at us, saying, ‘You are not allowed to give out rations – you are Muslims so you all are terrorists spreading the disease. We know you are spitting in the rations and have come from Tablighi Jamaat to spread the virus’,” said Tabrez. Two days later, about 25 local BJP members followed them in vehicles before attacking Tabrez, his mother and the other volunteers with bats. Police have since arrested two people.
It is not an isolated incident. Manohar Elavarthy of the NGO Swaraj Abhiyan, which has been distributing lockdown rations, said dozens of attacks had been carried out against their Muslim volunteers in the past few days, including some by police.
In Mangalore this week, posters started appearing that said Muslims were no longer allowed in certain neighbourhoods. “No Muslim trader will be allowed access to our hometown until the coronavirus is completely gone,” read a sign in Alape. In the Hindu-dominated village of Ankanahalli, a video seen by the Guardian shows Mahesh, the village panchayat president, issuing a warning that if any Hindu in the village is caught fraternising with a Muslim “you will be fined 500 to 1,000 rupees”.
The hijacking of coronavirus as an excuse for discrimination comes after a growing state-sponsored campaign to turn Muslims into second-class citizens in India, as part of the BJP’s agenda of Hindu nationalism. Attacks on Muslims have become commonplace and the recent citizenship amendment act, passed by the BJP in December, prompted millions to take to the streets in protest, saying it discriminated against Muslims.
The situation got so bad last week that it prompted Equality Labs, a US-based south Asian human rights organisation researching Islamophobic hate speech, to release a statement urging the World Health Organization to “issue further guidelines against Covid-19 hate speech and disconnect it to religious communities”.
“Just weeks after the Delhi pogrom where hundreds of Muslim houses and shops were vandalised, an uptick in misinformation and harmful communal language are leading to violence,” said Equality Labs’ executive director, Thenmozhi Soundararajan. “The threat of another pogrom still looms.”
Inside Delhi: beaten, lynched and burnt alive
Violence in India’s capital has left more than 40 dead and hundreds injured after a Hindu nationalist rampage, stoked by the rhetoric of Narendra Modi’s populist government
He lay in a bloodied ball on the floor, but the baton blows kept on coming. As the 30 strangers beat him without stopping, Mohammad Zubair closed his eyes, brought his forehead to the ground and prayed.
“The blows kept raining on my head, hands and back,” said Zubair, 37. “I did not ask them to stop beating me. I became silent, tried to hold my breath and stiffen my body.”
As he spoke, tears rolled down his face. “First I asked, ‘Why are you attacking me? What wrong have I done?’ But they did not listen to my words and went on hitting me from all sides. They were shouting maro shaale mulleko [kill the bastard Muslim] and jai Sri Ram [a Hindu nationalist slogan]. There were many other men who stood by who did not come to save me.” The photo of Zubair being ruthlessly beaten in broad daylight in the streets of Delhi by a mob of young Hindu men was one of the most shocking images of the brutal religious riots that engulfed Delhi, where Hindus were pitted against Muslims, thousands were injured and 43 people killed.
The violence raged across the north-east of India’s capital for four days as mosques were set alight, Muslims were burned alive in their homes or dragged out into the streets and lynched. Muslim businesses and property were also set alight. In streets where Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully side by side, bodies lay bloodied alongside discarded and burned-out cars, bikes, shattered glass and smouldering shopfronts. The police have been accused of enabling, encouraging or even joining in with Hindu mobs.
Hindu mobs were stopping men in the streets demanding to see their ID cards. If anyone refused, they were forced to show whether or not they were circumcised, as is common among Muslim men. Imran Khan, 30, a street hawker who lives in Shiv Vihar, north-east Delhi, was walking home on Monday evening when a group descended on him.
“Some of them forced me to pull down my trousers,” he said. “They started beating me violently as soon as they became sure that I was Muslim.”
Armed with iron rods, crowbars and metal pipes, the Hindu mob beat Khan unconscious. When he came to hours later, he found that the attackers, assuming he was dead, had tied a rope around his neck and dragged him into a gutter.
There has been brutality on both sides, but it was the Muslim community of Delhi who were overwhelmingly targeted by Hindu mobs in their tens of thousands. In Chand Bagh, one of the worst hit areas, only the Muslim businesses – hairdressers, ice-cream shops, butchers – lay in ruins. On one corner, the charred husks of hundreds of oranges, bananas and watermelons spilled out of the front of a Muslim fruit stall, filling the air with the putrid smell of burnt fruit.
Among the 43 dead was Musharraf, a 30-year-old Muslim man. He was at home with his wife and children in the Bhagirathi Vihar area of Gokalpuri, north-east Delhi, when a mob of around 30 men with iron rods, knives and chains – many wearing motorcycle helmets so they could not be identified – broke down the locked door shouting jai Sri Ram.
“They cut the electricity, so it was all dark, and started smashing the house,” recounted Shakir, his brother-in-law. “His wife was calling the police but they did not come. Everyone got into the beds to hide but the men covered everything with kerosene and shouted: ‘Will you come out or do you want us to burn you alive?’.”
Shakir continued: “They smashed the bed where Musharraf was hiding underneath and he screamed, so they grabbed him and dragged him out into the street. The children ran out, too, and were screaming. His daughter, Kushi – she is just 11 – fell on the feet of those men, pleading ‘Don’t kill my father’. She tried to save him but they beat him to death in the middle of the street and threw him in the gutter.”
Like so many other Muslims in Delhi, Shakir and his family said that after the riots they could no longer stay in the city they had called home for decades and were moving back to their ancestral village. “We have never felt threatened and always lived peacefully with our Hindu brothers,” he said. “But I don’t feel safe anywhere in Delhi now.”
Violence has been a stain on India’s history since partition in 1947, when Pakistan was formed as a separate Muslim state and up to two million people died in the fighting and its aftermath. Riots have continued to erupt along religious lines in a country where around 14% of the population are Muslim, with an 80% Hindu majority. The fracturing of relations began in the 1960s and 1970s, but a flashpoint took place in 1992, when a rightwing Hindu mob of thousands, which included several members of the now ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), tore down the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.
When the BJP were elected to government in 2014, led by prime minister Narendra Modi, divisions widened. The BJP is the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation that has been accused repeatedly of orchestrating attacks on Muslims. The BJP, which believes that India should be a Hindu, not a secular, nation, has fostered an environment of hate in India. Lynchings of Muslims began and Muslims have been gradually relegated to second-class citizens in their own country.
Even before he became prime minister, Modi’s reputation had been tainted by hatred and violence. As chief minister of Gujarat, he had been accused of encouraging sectarian riots in 2002 that left more than 1,000 people dead, 800 of them Muslims. Modi denies the charges, which resulted in him being banned from the US. He was cleared by the Indian supreme court in 2012 but has never apologised nor expressed remorse for the killings.
His landslide re-election victory in May 2019 prompted an escalation of the Hindu nationalist agenda. But it was the passing of a citizenship amendment act (CAA) in December last year that proved the tipping point. The law, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major South Asian religion except Muslims, was widely condemned as discriminatory. Many saw it as an attempt to enshrine the Hindu nationalist agenda into law and undermine the country’s secular foundations.
The controversy has triggered India’s longest period of unrest in 40 years, with millions of people of all religions taking to the streets in protest. But the BJP response has been to ramp up their rhetoric, particularly in the recent Delhi state assembly elections. “The BJP began fermenting this crisis in Delhi weeks ago, as a way to win Hindu votes in the election,” said Ashis Nandy, a well-known political commentator.
The spark for the latest violence was provided by Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader who had just lost his seat in those elections, when he incited a Hindu mob to violently remove a group of Muslims who were blocking a road in north-east Delhi in protest against the CAA. Addressing the peaceful protest, Mishra issued an inflammatory ultimatum: “If the roads are not cleared … we will be forced to hit the streets.” Stone pelting began between Muslims and Hindus, which quickly descended into the violence that spread through the city.
But these riots were not simply neighbours turning against neighbours. Last Sunday, false rumours of a Muslim uprising spread across rightwing Hindu social media, alleging dozens of mosques in Delhi had announced over loudspeakers that they would throw all Hindus out of Delhi and that the police had arrested 32 imams. It prompted many outside Delhi to comment that they would come out to “teach our Muslim brothers a lesson”.
Soon after, residents in Mustafabad, an area right on the edge of Delhi badly affected by the riots, reported seeing Hindu youths armed with machetes, metal rods and wooden sticks coming in trucks from the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. “We all saw truckloads of these mobs coming over the border from Uttar Pradesh, it was outsiders who came in and incited the violence,” said Shoaib Alam, 32. “And that then stirred up local people.”
Uttar Pradesh, whose BJP chief minister is the firebrand Hindu nationalist and openly Islamaphobic Yogi Adityanath, is a notorious hotbed of criminal activity and lawlessness. Uttar Pradesh has also been the state accused of carrying out some of the worst state-sponsored attacks, detention and torture of Muslims in a crackdown against the anti-CAA protests.
“I have not the slightest doubt that this was not a chance, spontaneous riot,” said Harsh Mander, an author and activist who is director of the Centre for Equity Studies, a Delhi research organisation. “It was certainly orchestrated and built up as part of the politics of the ruling party. I think the BJP were unnerved by the scale of the protest against the citizenship amendment law and, more specifically, that it was Hindus and Muslims coming out together in the resistance.
“It was only a matter of time before they would try and convert it into a Hindu-Muslim violent riot and encourage the most primal kind of hatred that wins them support. And after their defeat in the Delhi election, it seems this was an outlet for all the hatred they built up.”
Government spokesman Raveesh Kumar denied that the Modi government had inflamed religious tensions or had any role in the riots. “These are factually inaccurate and misleading, and appear to be aimed at politicising the issue,” he said.
In al-Hind hospital, a cramped and basic medical facility in Mustafabad which was on the frontline of the violence, Dr Meeraj Ekram looked shellshocked as he spoke of the more than 500 victims that had come through its doors since the riots began. Mainly they had gunshot wounds, but there were also stabbings, acid burns and mutilated genitalia. Police were not allowing ambulances into Mustafabad to rescue the wounded, and hundreds of patients lay on the floor.
“The injuries we were seeing were horrifying; I have never seen such terrible things in my whole life,” said Ekram. Muskan, a 20-year-old Muslim girl who was eight months pregnant, lay in a critical condition in a hospital bed after she was set upon by a Hindu mob. “They threw me to the ground, kicked my stomach and my whole body,” she whispered. “I pleaded with them not to harm my baby, I said ‘please, please’ over and over, but they kept kicking.”
Also among the patients brought into al-Hind on Tuesday night were two local imams. With a grimace, Ekram showed photos of the imam of Shiv Vihar mosque, whose face had been badly disfigured. When men had entered the mosque, the imam had attempted to run away but had been caught by the mobs, who threw a bucket of acid into his face.
Mufti Mohammad Tahir, the imam of Farooqia mosque, near Mustafabad, suffered a similar fate. He told the Observer how he had locked himself in an upper room of the mosque when the riots broke out. But police broke down the door, dragged him out and handed him to the waiting Hindu mobs, who beat him unconscious, smashing his limbs. The mosque was torched: shelves of dozens of blackened qu’rans lined one wall and a bowl containing burned fragments of Islamic religious scripture sat on a table.
Many who witnessed the riots claim that police stood by as Muslims were attacked or helped the Hindu mobs. Most of those who called the police for help did so in vain.
While the Delhi government is controlled by the progressive Aam Aadmi party (AAP), the Delhi police are under the control of the BJP minister for home affairs, Amit Shah. The police have said the focus of their investigation into the riots is on local Muslim leaders, while no BJP leaders have been charged. Delhi police were not available for comment.
Even the local politician for Mustafabad, the AAP’s Haji Yunus, described how the police ignored his requests for help. “I made several calls to the police station and they did nothing to help,” he said. “My entire government felt helpless, there was no way for us get the situation under control. There was no effort from police at all for at least two days. The police were not even allowing the ambulances through to carry out the injured people.”
Yunus said that the hatred stirred up by the BJP in the Delhi elections should be investigated. “The BJP did not think they could be defeated so badly in the election and so after they lost, they let out their frustration this way.”
Yet the prospect of holding Delhi police to account for their role in the riots through the legal system looks increasingly unlikely. Justice S Muralidhar, a judge in the Delhi high court, openly condemned the actions of the police and government last Wednesday at a hearing into the riots. But by Thursday morning, the judge was transferred to another court and the case was taken from him. The new judge gave the government four weeks to respond to the charges.
But for all the tales of discord, dozens of accounts were also given to the Observer of how Sikh and Hindu families helped save their Muslim neighbours, sheltering them in their homes as the violence broke out or helping them escape as the mobs descended.
One Hindu man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, spoke of how he secretly escorted seven Muslim families to safety in Shiv Vihar.
“I formed a small group involving a few other elderly Hindu neighbours and we managed to thwart the planned attacks on those Muslim households,” he said.
Meanwhile, in the Hindu-majority neighbourhood of Gokalpuri, a Sikh father, Mohinder Singh, 53, and his son Inderjit used their motorcycles to rescue around 70 Muslim men and children, the youngest just nine years old. They had been trapped in the mosque and madrasa, as a mob roamed the streets outside. Singh took the children two at a time on his bike, putting turbans on their heads as a disguise.
“I did not see if they were Muslim or Hindu, I did this for humanity,” said Mohinder. “I had to save them.”
Majinder Singh Sirsa, a Sikh leader in Delhi, said the community had opened up its gurdwaras for shelter, but had been attacked by hardline Hindu and Muslim groups for doing so. “We do feel the pain because we were also targeted 35 years ago,” he said, referring to the anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi in 1984 where more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed. “Back then, Delhi was burning and humanity died. This week, it has happened once again.”
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