Arundhati Roy, an Indian human rights activist, said they Muslims in Indaia are being dehumanized by the language used by the mainstream media against the Muslims.
“To paint an entire community as ‘corona jihadis’ during this pandemic, when there is a pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is to create a genocidal climate,” she said.
“Over the last a couple of years, we have had so many instances of mob lynching and George Floyd-type killings – the difference in India being that Hindu vigilante mobs do the killing and the police, the legal system and the political climate help them to get away with it,” she maintained.
She told a foreign media outlet in an interview that , “These episodes of violence and massacres against the Muslim minority in India are nothing new. Think of the pogrom that continued for months in 2002 in Gujarat, when Narendra Modi was chief minister of that state.”
In the broad daylight Muslims were being slaughtered. Modi had never shared remorse and looked away. Quite the reverse. He has ridden that legacy to power. He and his ministers are members of the Hindu supremacist RSS, India’s most powerful organization where Mussolini and Italian fascism inspired the founding ideologues.
There are vernacular origins of Hindu fascism too. The caste system, a system of social hierarchy supposedly divinely ordained in which Brahmins consider themselves the master race, lays the foundation for fascist attitudes.
But to come to the unfolding of events that set the tone of our lockdown – from the very beginning, immediately after its declaration at the end of March, the media spread the news of many cases of contagion in Nizamuddin, an region in the center of Delhi not far from where I live, which hosted a large conference organized by an Islamic congregation called Tablig just a few weeks before.
The hashtag # CoronaJihad instantly began circulating on Twitter. Tablighis have been branded as human bombs. Muslims were denied admission to hospitals, and local BJP leaders and politicians called for a boycott of Muslim fruit and vegetable vendors.
It was terrifyingly close to how Nazis started to accuse Jews of being disease spreaders, typhus carriers, during the rise of the Third Reich. And the tone of the media – channels like Zee TV and Republic TV in particular began to sound like Radio Rwanda. These channels are particularly rewarded by the Modi coterie, which has granted him and his terrifying home minister exclusive interviews. The show of horror persists.
“Muslims are being dehumanised, ostracised economically as well as socially – if you read scholars of genocide like Robert Jay Lifton, they tell you that this is the first step, the way it all begins,” she said.
