Muslims in India are under attack and there is strong evidence pointing to Hindu nationalists planning to launch a genocidal campaign against them. The BJP government of Prime Minister Modi has propagated the idea that to be Indian, one must be Hindu, thereby threatening the identity of 200 million Muslims who do not fit this categorization. The proponents of Hindutva in their hate speech openly say that India should model its approach to its “Muslim problem” on the methodology Nazis used to deal with their “Jewish problem”.

In the 1980s, the BJP led a campaign for the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. After perpetrating the violent destruction of the mosque in 1992, the BJP rose to political power. The BJP’s policy is to stigmatize Muslims as the source of all Hindus’ troubles. They call Muslims termites who should be thrown into the Bay of Bengal.

Some time back, Dr Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch warned that a genocide of Muslims in India is a looming danger. Dr. Ellen Kennedy, founder and Executive Director of World Without Genocide, during a Congressional Briefing recently, warned, “I speak to you as a Jew. We must pay attention to what is happening to Muslims in India today because it is beginning to echo what happened to Europe’s Jews 80 years ago.” He was speaking on the decision of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to recommend India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in its 2022 annual report for egregious violations of religious freedom for the third year in a row.

Drawing a parallel between the Indian government’s policies of forced statelessness for Muslims and Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, Dr Kennedy pointed out that India’s growing Hindu extremist movement had “created anti-Muslim hate and official support and impunity for anti-Muslim violence.” In the past few months, violence against Muslims in India has spiked to dangerous levels, prompting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to rank India second in the world in this year’s Early Warning statistical risk assessment.

Without doubt, PM Modi is the mind and force behind the current campaign of extermination of Indian Muslims. In 2002 when he was the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, 2,000 Muslims were killed in communal violence in Ahmedabad which continued for three months. Modi, along with the rest of the BJP party, was accused of inciting Hindu mobs against Muslims and condoning the horrific violence. Modi was investigated but managed to get clearance. But later he was denied a visa to enter the US in 2005 due to his covert and overt support to Hindu extremists during these riots.

Modi is a pathological Muslim hater. During the last eight years that Modi has been in power, anti-Muslim sentiments, hate crimes, and discriminatory legislation have systematically targeted the Muslims of India. According to a survey, approximately 90% of religious hate crimes between 2009 and 2021 have occurred under Modi’s government. Under Modi’s rule, among countless discriminatory actions and statements, there have been three well calculated political moves that have posed a serious threat to the identity and status of Muslims in India. These are the Citizenship Amendment Act, the stripping of citizenship in Assam State, and the violation of autonomy in the Jammu and Kashmir region.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the Indian Parliament on December 11, 2019. Prior to the CAA, Indian law stated that, to be eligible for Indian citizenship, individuals must have worked for the federal government or lived in India for at least 11 years. The CAA amends this law for members of certain religions. If refugees arriving in India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, or Christian, they are eligible for citizenship within only six years of residency in India. The language used in this bill explicitly separates Muslims from non-Muslims and is outright discriminatory.The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that the law is “fundamentally discriminatory” and “undermines the commitment to equality before the law enshrined in India’s Constitution.”

The Act has been universally condemned as a brazen attempt by the Modi government to polarize and target Muslims and deprive them of their citizenship rights. Modi has also tried to impose his Hindutva agenda on the region of Jammu and Kashmir which after the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 was allowed to retain its autonomy. But the region was stripped of its constitutional status in August 2019, and since then its citizens, the majority of whom are Muslim, are virtually under house arrest, besieged by close to a million Indian troops.

Under the BJP regime, the Muslims are constantly under attack. There have been numerous cases of lynching of Muslims by Hindutva gangs. Muslim mosques and holy shrines are being demolished while houses of Muslims protesting against their tormentors have been demolished in Delhi, Allahabad and other places. There is a rising crescendo of hate speech, with Hindu goons publicly baying for Muslim blood.

The rising wave of anti-Muslim violence in India has been condemned by sane elements in India as well as abroad. Rev. Peter Cook, Executive Director of the New York State Council of Churches, recently said,“Hindu nationalists defy their Constitution… by devoting themselves to creating a Hindu nationalist state where Hindu people have more rights than anyone else”.

Organizations like the Indian American Muslim Council, World Without Genocide, Indian American Muslim Council, Hindus for Human Rights, International Christian Concern, Jubilee Campaign, 21Wilberforce, Dalit Solidarity Forum, New York State Council of Churches, Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations of North America, India Civil Watch International, Center for Pluralism and American Muslim have all in one voice asked the Modi government to change its policy to stop India’s slide into anarchy and chaos.

Last month, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, senior editor of Indian media outlet ‘The Wire,’ called on India’s secular forces and the progressive Hindu community to take a strong stance against anti-Muslim hatred. “It is the duty of the Hindu community now to condemn those who are committing atrocities against the minorities in the name of Hinduism”.

In this context it is important that the OIC and Muslim countries also play their role. By boycotting Indian goods they can bring a lot of pressure to bear on India and force it to mend its ways towards the Muslims.