Islamophobia Archives - Lokmarg

So who proposed the name of India’s 11^th president, APJ Abdul Kalam, for a stint at the Rashtrapati Bhawan? It was the BJP top leadership of that time.

And who hugged fast-bowler Mohammad Shami in the Indian cricket dressing room after their loss at the World Cup, in which the pacer was brilliant all through the games, and unplayable? It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Only two examples. There are not too many similar instances in the BJP’s originally scripted hate text book of their life and times in Indian politics! After all, they don’t have a single Muslim minister in their central cabinet, nor one MP. Like the Nazis. No Jews were allowed.

The question is: was President Kalam, our Pokhran man, a ghuspaithiya? An infiltrator?

Was Kalam and other celebrated Muslims of India, part of the totally crude ‘Hum paanch hamaare pachchees’ and ‘baby-producing factories’ discourse first initiated by Modi in Indian secular politics, when he was the at the helm after the State-sponsored massacre in Gujarat 2002, when Muslim citizens of India were butchered, gang-raped, and burnt alive, women and children included, while the entire law and order machinery of Modi aligned with the mass murderers, all of them Sangh Parivar leaders and cadres?

Remember: Dosti bani rahe. Karan Thapar TV show, in which Modi wanted a desperate glass of water when asked about what? Has anything changed? Nothing.

Is Shami, with his Wasim Akram-like incredible reverse swing, a ghuspaithiya? An illegal infiltrator? Is Mohammad Siraj, another brilliant pacer in the current Indian cricket team, an infiltrator? Is budding fast bowler Umran Malik from Kashmir an infiltrator?

Are Mohammad Azharuddin, Syed Kirmani, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, Salim Durrani, Abbas Ali Beg, hockey forward Zafar Iqbal, multiple grand slam lawn tennis international champion, with a powerful forehand, Sania Mirza, boxing champion Nikhat Zareen, among scores of other Indians – are they all infiltrators?

It is said that like thousands of other Muslims, Shahrukh Khan’s father refused to stay in post-independent Pakistan and chose to relocate in India. Those days many Hindus and Muslims who left their homes in Pakistan, locked their doors with tears streaming from their eyes, their neighbours, Muslims, crying, as they were compelled to leave their sweet, ancient homes with strong community ties, which they loved – due to the damned bloodshed and communal carnage all over during the Partition. Read The Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, among other books. Read Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, brother of great actor Balraj Sahni, both from the Lahore College in pre-Partition India. Watch this great cinematic adaptation, still in the Doordarshan archives, enacted by another great filmmaker and cinematographer, Govind Nihalini.

They would carry their home keys thinking that they would come back and open the lock to their musty, rusty, old, open-to-sky courtyards one day again, with the smell of the familiar and unforgettable past, still stuck on the walls, with the old, faded black and white family pictures and the eternal cobwebs. They never thought they would never come back. You must surely read great writers – Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chugtai, Sadaat Hasan Manto, and even Gulzar. Find out a heart-rending story of a dead child travelling on a bridge over the turbulent river Sutlej in partitioned Punjab, the refugees on top of a packed, rickety bus. It’s called Raavi Par, written by Gulzar. Your heart will die with the end of the story.

It’s like the people of Palestine. In millions they went through the exodus after Israel took over their beautiful olive tree homeland under the protection of rogue, imperialist States like the US and UK, who are still accomplices in the genocide in Gaza; the blood has not dried on their hands since the 1940s. The Palestinians, now in huge refugee settlements in Lebanon, have still preserved their keys to their homes.

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Shahrukh Khan’s father came back because he did not want to live in an Islamic theocracy. He wanted to live in a pluralist, secular, modern, democratic India! Thousands of other Muslims who returned, or chose to stay back, they would have shared his deep intimacy with the language of Jawaharlal Nehru’s secularism, and the ideals of the freedom struggle.

Did any RSS leader participate, or sacrifice his or her life, in the freedom struggle – like Ashfaqullah Khan, again from UP, who was hanged?

No. Instead, they were glorifying Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. They were toeing the ethnic-cleansing line of their biggest original ideologues, Guru Golwalkar, who was celebrating the mass murder of six million Jews in the concentration camps of Poland and elsewhere in Europe. Read his Bunch of Thoughts.

So who sang the majority of Hindu bhajans in the Bombay cinema of old? Remember the song Man tarpat hari darsan ko aaj from Baiju Bawra? So who performed aarti and puja around an early dawn tulsi tree in old Hindi films? Remember them, yes. Legends of great secular cinema! Mohammad Rafi and Meena Kumari. Were they ghuspaithiyas?

Rafi saab sung many eternal romantic songs. Do they ever listen to romantic songs with their warped, pracharak, ghettoized minds? Did they ever watch that magical moonlight spectacle of a magical love song in a rebellious film with a Muslim backdrop – Pakeeza? Chalo dildaar chalo chand ke paar chalo… says the man. And Lata Mangeshkar sings so beautifully for the ostracized Muslim woman: Hum hain tayaar chalo…

Have they never ever have watched the sublime, exotic beauty, and brilliance of Madhubala and Waheeda Rehman? Did Bismillah Khan not play his legendary shehnai on the ghats of Benaras, the PM’s constituency? For which goddess of the Hindu pantheon did he play his shehnai? Saraswati. The goddess of education, knowledge, enlightenment.

Who was the guru of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, since he was a raw teenager of 18? Baba Allauddin Khan. Who made sublime music in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali? Did they ever see Ravi Shankar touching his guru’s feet, and hugging him, and his humble wife in a humble home, his wife crying, while Ravishankar says, Shorir bhalo toh? Meaning, are you in good health?

I tell you, the PM must watch yet again the action-replays of the magnificent ‘catches behind the wickets’ by ace wicket-keeper Syed Kirmani. And the silken strokes of Azharuddin, an ace fielder as well, hanging out at the crease, like an eternal, tired, traveler. The PM must watch his multiple debut centuries, every block at middle-stump, and every divine, offside stroke, reminding him of how Azharuddin was not a ghuspaithiya – one of the greatest captains of Indian cricket team, like Saurav Ganguly.

Chino arab hamaara… Hindostan hamara… rehno ko ghar nahi hain… saara jahan hamara… After his vitriolic speeches and the mythical 18-hours hard work as the Prime Minister, only if Modi could listen to this song written by Sahir Ludhianvi, enacted by Raj Kapoor, and sung by Mukesh, depicting the homeless in Bombay’s nocturnal, dark streets. He could even listen to Sahir’s utopian song, which is not about Hindu Rashtra: Woh subah kabhi to ayegi…

Ghuspathiye?

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Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is often in the news for making bold statements, but she recently scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. She says there is no place for Islam in Europe: ‘There is a problem of compatibility’

Her comments were made at a political festival organised by her far-right party – the Brothers of Italy, in Rome, which was attended by the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and X’s owner Elon Musk, too.

In her speech Meloni said, “The Islamic cultural centres in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe, there is a very Islamisation process distant from the values of our civilisation! I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization.”

Meanwhile, an old video of her also re-surfaced on various social media platforms that shows her saying she would not allow Sharia law to be implemented in Italy. Meloni also criticised Saudi Arabia for its strict Sharia Law.

“I believe that these should be raised, which does not mean generalising on Islam. It means raising the problem that there is a process of Islamisation in Europe that is very distant from the values of our civilisation,” she added.

During his speech at the event, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of a growing number of refugees could ‘overwhelm’ parts of Europe.

He even warned that some ‘enemies’ were deliberately ‘driving people to our shores to try and destabilise our societies’.

“If we do not tackle this problem, the numbers will only grow. It will overwhelm our countries and our capacity to help those who actually need our help the most,” Rishi Sunak said, adding, “If that requires us to update our laws and lead an international conversation to amend the post-war frameworks around asylum, then we must do that.”

Meanwhile, Tesla’s founder and X’s owner Elon Musk marked a rare appearance as he met world leaders at the annual gathering. “Immigration isn’t enough to combat population shrinking,” he said at the event, explaining: “There is value in cultures, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we want to maintain a reasonable cultural identity of those countries or they won’t be those countries.”

Analysing the speeches given by these three leaders, makes it clear that not only political leaders alone but even business leaders are increasingly turning to Islamophobia, based on their belief systems and also converting political issues to anti-Islam utterances, to gain public support.

Both Sunak and Musk couched their Islamophobic feelings into anti-immigrants policies. This could be partly blamed to these countries’ own doing. Firstly, various European nations opened their doors for immigrants from the Muslim dominated countries.

The migrant’s flow to many western countries increased as the increasing prosperity there was matched with no desire to engage in menial jobs at lower wages, gaps which were filled by the migrants. Further, they allowed Muslim immigrants entry to assuage their own guilt feeling, as many of the migrants fleeing their homes were coming from those countries where these countries had started or were supporting wars against the so-called radical or Islamist elements.

Though many of these immigrants were not connected to any radical ideology, but they became an easy scapegoat to be blamed for any wrongs happening in these western societies.

Rishi Sunak has been accused of adopting the “toxic” rhetoric of his former home secretary Suella Braverman, after he warned that migration would “overwhelm” European countries without firm action.

Sunak also said that both he and Meloni, with whom he has been forging a close relationship over hardline migration policies, were taking inspiration from Margaret Thatcher’s steadfast radicalism in their quest to do “whatever it takes” to “stop the boats”.

Sunak’s relationship with Meloni, Italy’s first female premier has blossomed over their shared hardline approach towards immigration through policies that have pushed the limits of legality. They have also bonded over their admiration of Thatcher.

As far as Elon Musk is concerned, recently studies have found that Islamophobic comments are being spread widely through X and the company does not respond to complaints or seem to take any remedial action, to handle the issue. X users resort to spelling mistakes intentionally while debating controversial subjects like religion, terrorism, crime, and even the Indian history.

These are not errors made in the heat of the moment, but careful distortions meant to keep the tweet from being flagged or deleted for hateful content. For example, a tweet posted in November 2022 that singled out people with Muslim names from a series of random crime news reports did not refer to the perpetrators as “Muslims” but instead used the phrase “Ola ke Bande” (Ola’s group or Ola’s gang). The word “Ola,” which refers to the Indian ride-hailing taxi service, was used in place of “Allah.” The tweet author currently has close to 7,00,000 followers.

Reporting such tweets for targeting a group of people based on their religion is now more difficult than reporting a hateful tweet simply referring to “Muslims,” as the X moderators viewing the complaint would have to be familiar with not only the Hindi phrase being used, but also understand the double meaning of “Ola.” Moreover, if the moderation process were automated, the machine would most likely see a user verbally abusing a taxi service, which does not constitute hateful conduct.

Meanwhile, reports from France speak of a parliamentary vote in favour of a new tough bill against the immigrants. Right-wing French leader Marine Le Pen described this as an ‘ideological victory’, due to the inclusion of many hardline measures

In fact from Italy’s Meloni to France’s Le Pen, to Geert Wilders’ popularity in the Netherlands and Austria and Hungary’s increasing public support to the right-wing politicians on the rise, the recent developments point to the wave of right-wing and Islamophobic politics overtaking Europe.

(Asad Mirza is a Delhi-based senior political and international affairs commentator.)

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Tag: Islamophobia

Grumblings of a ‘Ghuspaithiya’

Islamophobic Politics Amplified in Europe