Mutual accusations between Hindus and Muslims are rekindled in India – Gwynne Dyer

As everyone knows, the gods are touchy. Both the many deities of the classical pantheons – Greek, Roman, Hindu – and the jealous unique deities of monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Just criticize them in any way, and they will punish you severely. Or at least their earthly followers will.

The latter see themselves as the executive arm of the power of their gods, who, for some mysterious case, only act through the hand of humans: to expect direct divine punishment from critics is sissy. The zealous faithful express uncontrollable indignation, and attack those who have attacked the divine. As, for example, happens today in India.

The ruling Bharatiya janata party (BJP), the People’s Party of India, is a Hindu nationalist formation whose goal is to transform India into a sectarian country in which all religious minorities have second-class citizenship. The main target is Muslims, 15 percent of the population: nearly 200 million people in all.

Muslims are the most suitable target because long ago their ancestors of the Mughal dynasty conquered India and ruled it for many centuries. In the eyes of Hindu extremists India is a “wounded civilization”, and “Muslim infection” must be purged to restore the health of a truly Hindu society.

All this is stated ignoring, however, that the majority of Indian Muslims are descended not from foreign conquerors but from local people who converted to Islam, for religious or practical reasons, during the many centuries of Muslim rule. It is also ignored that Indian Muslims today possess less wealth and education than Hindus. But more than anything else it voluntarily overlooks the fact that the last conquerors of India were the British, who have left an even stronger imprint on the country but are not used as a scapegoat because they are no longer in India, and because they have been them to pave the way for the rise of Hindus in politics, overthrowing the power of the moguls.

It was hatred and fear of Muslims that brought the BJP to power, and in order to continue to stir up its supporters, the party must constantly find new scandals to attribute to Islam. The latest was the “discovery” that a historic mosque in the city of Varanasi, one of the holiest sites in Hinduism, would be built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. How did they find out? Because the mosque’s ablution basin contains a fountain that could, if viewed in the right light and with half-closed eyes, be interpreted as a manifestation of a shivling o shiva linga: a carved stone that symbolizes the ineffable essence of Siva, god of destruction and asceticism.

Why Muslims so long ago would have incorporated such a symbol into the mosque’s ablution basin remains a mystery, but the BJP quickly embraced this claim. Other mosques were destroyed by angry groups of BJP supporters for equally spurious reasons, and so various Muslim spokesmen immediately took up defense of the place of worship.

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One of them, discussing on television with the national spokesperson of the BJP, Nupur Sharma, allegedly used disrespectful words about Siva. What could they possibly have been? Did he say she has too many arms? That tends to destroy things a little too much? We may never know. The video was made “unavailable”. The fact is that Sharma, feeling unreasonably provoked, responded by slandering the Prophet Mohammed. Since this could be a threat to my life, I won’t report them, but they were about the age of the Prophet’s youngest wife, Aisha. It is all written in the Koran.

As for Sharma, she was suddenly downgraded from a national spokesperson to a “fringe element” of the party and suspended by the BJP, at least for a while. BJP spokesman in Delhi, Naveen K. Jindal, who tweeted his support for Sharma, was expelled. Is the BJP therefore turning the page? Not at all. It is frantically backtracking just to appease the anger of the Muslim Gulf countries. Rich in oil, they supply most of the fuel consumed by the country and employ millions of Indian workers. The BJP’s war on Islam is for internal purposes only.

Likewise, the Gulf states will gladly continue to ignore the Indian government’s behavior at home in exchange for fake apologies, just as they ignore China’s oppression of Xinjiang Muslims by continuing to sell their oil to Beijing. The dimensions of this hypocrisy are breathtaking, but they are also sadly familiar.

And none of this proves that rival religions are incompatible. Multireligious societies have prospered peacefully both in the past and in the present, even if every believer must necessarily believe that those who follow another faith are totally, even catastrophically, wrong. A little good education can go a long way.

A sense of humor also helps. “Mughal architecture is amazing! They always start by building an ancient Hindu temple in the basement, ”tweeted an Indian Muslim, disproving the BJP narrative without a single word of anger. But things are looking bad in India: religion is being turned into a weapon in ways that have already led to massacres and could lead to genocide.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)