Unhelpful stereotyping

There has been a belated apology from a police chief in Gujarat, India, about the way he conducted an anti-terrorism exercise. The drill was filmed and screened widely across the country. Why he apologised was that for the purposes of the exercise, the ‘militants’ were dressed in such a way as to present them as Muslims. Five policemen were shown capturing and restraining three men who were wearing white knitted skullcaps, typical of what Muslim men wear in the subcontinent. The message would have been obvious to anybody viewing — ‘terrorist = Muslim’. The exercise was in preparation for a visit to India by John Kerry, the US secretary of state.

In the fraught India-Pakistan relationship, symbols are everything. India, in 2014, elected a right-wing nationalist government led by Narendra Modi, a man whose sympathies for minority groups may be superficial at best. International diplomatic protocols will curb the worst excesses of his nationalist rhetoric, but he has done little to dispel the anxieties of the huge Muslim ‘minority’ in India and the wider world. Representatives of the Muslim community in India have protested at the ‘profiling’ of Muslims in the mock drill, saying it was “atrocious and highly condemnable”. Quite apart from raising tensions with Indian Muslims, the incident will have been noted in Pakistan as well. The year has already got off to a bad start with firing across the Line of Control on January 1 by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF); following on from the killing of two Rangers officials by the BSF, who were killed as they went to attend a flag meeting at the request of the Indians. Although the mock drill stereotyping Muslims as terrorists may seem a trivial matter, it is far from it. Minority Muslims and Christians have recently protested in the Indian parliament against forced conversions to Hinduism. The Modi government needs to rein in the hotheads that are stoking the fires, because symbols really do matter.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 3^rd, 2015.

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