What types of discrimination do India’s Muslims face?
Muslims have experienced discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing
[PDF]. Many encounter barriers to achieving political power and wealth,
and lack access to health care and basic services. Moreover, they often
struggle to secure justice after suffering discrimination, despite
constitutional protections.
Over the last two decades, the representation of Muslims in parliament has stagnated:
after the 2019 elections, Muslims held just 5 percent of seats. That’s
partly due to the rise of the BJP, which by mid-2022 had no Muslim
members of its party in parliament.
Meanwhile, a 2019 report
[PDF] by India-based nongovernmental organization Common Cause found
that half of police surveyed showed anti-Muslim bias, making them less
likely to intervene to stop crimes against Muslims. Analysts have also
noted widespread impunity for those who attack Muslims. In recent years,
courts and government bodies have sometimes overturned convictions or withdrawn cases
that accused Hindus of involvement in violence against Muslims. States
have increasingly passed laws restricting Muslims’ religious freedoms,
including anti-conversion laws and bans on wearing headscarves in
school.
In addition, authorities have turned to extrajudicial means to punish
Muslims, through a practice critics call “bulldozer justice.” In 2022,
authorities in several states destroyed people’s homes,
alleging that the demolished buildings lacked proper permits. However,
critics said they primarily targeted Muslims, some of whom had recently
participated in protests. In response, India’s Supreme Court said that
demolitions “cannot be retaliatory,” though the practice has continued.
What controversial actions has the Modi government taken with regard to Muslims?
In December 2019, the parliament passed and Modi signed the
Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows for the fast-tracking of
citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian
migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Critics say the law is discriminatory
because it excludes Muslims and applies a religious criteria for the
first time to the question of citizenship. The Modi government argues
that the law is designed to provide protection for vulnerable religious
minorities who faced persecution in these three Muslim-majority
countries.
“The longer Hindu
nationalists are in power, the greater the change will be to Muslims’
status and the harder it will be to reverse such changes.”
Ashutosh Varshney,
Professor, Brown University
At the same time, the BJP promised in its 2019 election manifesto [PDF]
to complete a National Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC was created
in the 1950s for the unique case of the state of Assam to determine
whether residents were Indian citizens or migrants from what is now
neighboring Bangladesh. In 2019, the Assam government updated its
register, which excluded nearly two million people.
If implemented nationwide, all Indians would be required to prove their
citizenship. Critics say this process could render many Muslims
stateless because they lack necessary documents and are not eligible for
fast-tracked citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Modi has meanwhile diminished the political standing of what was
India’s only Muslim-majority state: Jammu and Kashmir. In August 2019,
the government split the state, which lies in the mountainous border region in dispute with Pakistan,
into two territories and stripped away its special constitutional
autonomy. Since then, Indian authorities have cracked down on the rights
of people in the region, oftentimes under the guise of maintaining
security. They shut down the internet eighty-five times
in 2021, harassed and arrested journalists, and detained prominent
political figures and activists. Dozens of civilians have been killed by
armed groups since the division, despite government claims that the
security situation had improved.
“The longer Hindu nationalists are in power, the greater the change
will be to Muslims’ status and the harder it will be to reverse such
changes,” says Ashutosh Varshney, an expert on Indian intercommunal
conflict at Brown University.
What have been the largest outbursts of violence?
Babri Masjid, 1992. Disputes over the mosque in the northern
city of Ayodhya have turned deadly in recent decades. Hindus claim a
general from the Muslim Mughal empire built the mosque on the birthplace
of the Hindu deity Ram during the sixteenth century. In 1992, Hindu
militants destroyed the mosque. An estimated three thousand people, most
of them Muslim, died in ensuing riots—the deadliest religious clashes
since partition. In 2020, Modi set the cornerstone for a new Hindu
temple on the site after the Supreme Court approved its construction.
Gujarat riots, 2002. Nationwide clashes broke out after a
train of Hindu pilgrims traveling from Ayodhya through the western state
of Gujarat caught fire, killing dozens of people. Blaming Muslims for
starting the fire, Hindu mobs throughout Gujarat killed hundreds of Muslims,
raped Muslim women, and destroyed Muslim businesses and places of
worship. Opposition politicians, human rights groups, and U.S. lawmakers
criticized Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, and the BJP for not
doing enough to prevent the violence and in some cases encouraging it.
An Indian government investigation said the train fire was an accident,
but conflicting reports have said it was arson.
Muzaffarnagar riots, 2013. In towns near the city of
Muzaffarnagar, more than sixty people were killed in clashes that broke
out between Hindus and Muslims after two Hindu men died in an
altercation with Muslim men. An estimated fifty thousand people, most of
them Muslim, fled the violence; many lived in relief camps for months,
and some never returned home.
Anti-Muslim mobs. Hindu mob
attacks have become so common in recent years that India’s Supreme Court
warned that they could become the “new normal.” One of the most common
forms of anti-Muslim violence is vigilante groups attacking people
rumored to trade or kill cows, which many Hindus believe are sacred. At
least forty-four people, most of them Muslims, have been killed by these
so-called cow protection groups, according to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report.
Muslim men have also been attacked after being accused of “love jihad,”
a term used by Hindu groups to describe Muslim men allegedly trying to
seduce and marry Hindu women to convert them. Hundreds of Muslim men have been arrested for violating anti-conversion laws that several BJP-led states passed in an effort to prevent love jihad.
New Delhi clashes, 2020. Violence
broke out as Muslims and others protested the Citizenship Amendment Act
in New Delhi. Around fifty people were killed, most of them Muslim, in
the capital city’s worst communal violence in decades. Some BJP
politicians helped incite the violence, and police reportedly did not
intervene to stop Hindu mobs from attacking Muslims. A 2021 Human Rights Watch report found that authorities had not investigated police complicity, while they had charged more than a dozen protesters.
Protests over Islamophobic rhetoric, 2022.
In May, two BJP officials made profane comments about Prophet Mohammed,
leading to deadly protests across India and condemnation from
Muslim-majority countries. The BJP suspended the officials. The
following month, two Muslim men killed a Hindu man who supported one of
the BJP officials in an attack they filmed and shared online.
“The idea was that if you were a Muslim, you were liable to be attacked anywhere, anytime.”
Ghazala Jamil,
Assistant Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Critics say that BJP officials have ignored recent violence against
Muslims. “During Modi’s first five-year term, there were continuous
attacks on Muslim individuals, which kind of made the community feel
under siege,” says Ghazala Jamil, an assistant professor at Jawaharlal
Nehru University in New Delhi. “The idea was that if you were a Muslim,
you were liable to be attacked anywhere, anytime.” Hate speech and
misinformation spread online have also encouraged violence against
Muslims.
Who wants to preserve India’s secularism?
Experts note that although anti-Muslim sentiment is rising among
Hindus, not all Hindus and not all people who voted for the BJP are
anti-Muslim. Both Muslims and Hindus, including activists, legal
scholars, and students, have fought against the BJP’s moves to undermine
India’s secularism. For example, after the Citizenship Amendment Act
was passed, chief ministers of several states said they would not
implement the law and nearly two thousand academics and professionals signed a statement condemning it for violating the spirit of the constitution.
How is the world responding to the rising discrimination in India?
Many foreign governments and international bodies have condemned the
BJP’s discrimination of Muslims, citing actions in Kashmir, the
Citizenship Amendment Act, and anti-Muslim rhetoric as particular
concerns.
The UN human rights office described the Citizenship Amendment Act as “fundamentally discriminatory.” Iran, Kuwait, and Qatar were among the Muslim-majority countries that lodged formal complaints
against India in 2022 over public officials’ Islamaphobic remarks. The
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of fifty-seven member
states, called on India to curb the “growing spate of hatred and defamation of Islam” and “systematic practices against Indian Muslims.”
Successive U.S. administrations have been reluctant to publicly call out India’s abuses as they have boosted ties with the country. For example, when President Donald Trump visited India in February 2020, he praised Modi’s commitment to religious freedom and said nothing about the outbreak of violence in Delhi. The Joe Biden administration has reportedly voiced concerns in private, while expanding cooperation with India including through the so-called Quad. Meanwhile, in its 2020 report
[PDF], the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an
independent government agency, classified India as a “country of
particular concern”—its lowest rating—for the first time since 2004. The
latest reports have maintained that designation and urged the U.S.
government to sanction Indian officials responsible for abuses. Some
members of Congress have also expressed concerns.