What happens in India ... doesn't stay in India!

Slightly over a month ago, I blogged about an anti-Muslim behavior in New Jersey.  Not the Republican Party anti-Muslim venom, which we have come to accept as one of their party platforms.  Nope.  This was from Indian immigrants!

I wrote there:

The event in Edison, NJ, is an echo of the regression in India, where the Hindu majoritarian party is rapidly taking India away from democracy and making it an electoral theocracy.  The public space is becoming more and more Hindu in sights and sounds, and the public identities of other faiths are getting erased by the day.

That was a month ago about an incident in Edison, NJ.

Two weeks later, I was shocked about a news that I read; I tweeted about it:

In #Leicester, hundreds of men wearing masks and balaclavas chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, a #Hindu chant that has become synonymous with anti-#Muslim violence in #India.https://t.co/bIlochLFXp#Islamophobia #modi

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 19, 2022

It was in the UK.  Hindu-Muslim tension in Leicester.  A city that until now had shown the UK, and the world, that immigrants from the Subcontinent, and their children, had made Leicester a "largely a model city."  The South Asian immigrants were not only Hindus--they were Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians too--and coexisted with the white population, despite the initial protests from the far-right.

But that was then.

Writing about the British incident, The Economist summed it up well in its headline: "India’s government is exporting its Hindu nationalism | The communal clashes seen in India are now being replicated elsewhere."  And Leicester is a model city no more!

Leicester has seen many waves of migration, but this new violence between small sections of British South Asian communities is alarming. Such scenes between Hindus and Muslims is extremely rare in the UK - especially in Leicester. Many locals, including families who have now lived in the city for several generations, are shocked and disturbed by what they are witnessing on their streets.

Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) has established itself well in the US and the UK, thanks to the Hindu nationalistic Indian government.  The Economist underscores that the American and British incidents are consistent with the alarming trends in India:

This is all of a piece with the bjp’s majoritarian approach at home, where Hindus constitute four-fifths of the country’s 1.4bn people and Muslims about one-seventh. Islamophobia is rampant among bjp stalwarts (though Mr Modi usually carries a dog whistle). When Hindus and Muslims have clashed in Delhi or in bjp-ruled states, authorities have bulldozed Muslim homes in retribution. Mr Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 grants Indian citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries—so long as they are not Muslim.

This NY Times report also finds echoes of modi and his Hindu nationalism in the events outside India:

Experts say it is only the latest example of how the toxic politics that are roiling India — and leading to the persecution of Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities — have migrated to other parts of the globe.

In a world where liberal democracy is under a blistering attack, modi has found a way to present his country as a flourishing democracy to the West, which is only ready to overlook the Hindu nationalism because of the potential to sell goods and services to the growing demand there.

#Modi had been much more effective than #IndiraGandhi in combining India’s traditional democratic credentials and #autocratic controls, aided by an unparalleled #propaganda operation https://t.co/zHbCq2IyBf #HumanRights

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 25, 2022

Human Rights Watch argues well the point that India gets a free pass:

Western governments eye India as an attractive alternative market, especially with growing unhappiness with Beijing as a trade partner. 

But democratic governments should not repeat the same mistakes they made with the Chinese government by pursuing deeper trade engagement while sidelining human rights concerns. Today, China is not only an economic powerhouse, but the human rights situation has worsened and the government boldly wields its repression within and across national borders. 

Meanwhile, the escalating human rights crisis in India under the Modi administration receives inadequate attention.

I will wrap this up with the following excerpts from a commentary in India's rapidly shrinking independent media landscape:

Hindutva is now a major part of India’s foreign policy. This involves both the use of Hindu nationalist symbols and ideas while conducting foreign policy to even going so far as to support purported Hindu causes in foreign countries. ...

It also meant a vital role for the Indian diaspora in foreign policy. A stark feature of Modi’s first term was highly publicised interactions with foreign citizens of Indian origin, relayed back to India using wall-to-wall television coverage. Much of this flowed from already existing Hindutva networks with the Indian diaspora, especially in places such as the United States.