Erasing Muslim identity

The far-right Indian government is still working overtime to otherise Muslims, not just by attacking and silencing the living, but also erasing the dead. While secular India had already died the moment the Butcher of Gujarat became prime minister in 2014, the 12 years since have seen concerted practical efforts to ensure that it is impossible to see Muslims as anything but a drain on society.

Now many people hold more negative views of Muslims than they do of violent criminals. This is because all they see and hear about Muslims is negative propaganda, while the achievements of living Muslims are given little to no airtime, and even the historical achievements of Muslims are either being erased or falsified to credit upper caste Hindus.

A recent example is the recommendation by a panel at Jammu University to drop Muhammad Ali Jinnah and several Muslim thinkers from the syllabus because the student wing of the extremist RSS was 'upset' by their inclusion in curricula. Even members of the panel were unable to offer any good academic reasons for removing Jinnah and his politics — the man was one of the architects of the partition and is thus automatically one of the most important people ever in the history of South Asia. Without him, the history of participation is incomplete. Academics have every right to analyse Jinnah and his politics as good or bad through an Indian lens, but erasing him is insanity.

Meanwhile, Muslim critics continue to be silenced through legal means. In New Delhi, a special court handed down long sentences to Kashmiri activist Asiya Andrabi and two of her associates. Andrabi got life imprisonment for essentially making social media videos and allegedly having direct telephonic contact with every imaginable Kashmiri separatist and Pakistan-based terrorist, and even former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The court also undermines itself by opining that the three women never used or called for violence, but they still deserved long sentences because they did not outright condemn violence.

If this continues, India will continue on a path to becoming a country that values ignorance over education while criminalising dissent.