Hindu Mobs, anti-Muslim Boycotts: In Modi’s India, the Echoes of 1930s Germany Are Growing Louder – By Debasish Roy Chowdhury
Taking part in the nine-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit just over a week ago, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced a familiar concern in the region following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan: the heightened risk of Islamist fundamentalism.…
Modi could breathe easy on this front, though. Much to the surprise of international security analysts, Indian Muslims have historically stayed away from global jihad movements…. But, for Modi, whose Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) uses Muslims as the electoral bogeyman to consolidate a culturally diverse and caste-riven Hindu vote base against a common “other,” it makes sense to bang on about Muslim “radicalization” all the same, as a means of Hindu mobilization. In reality, the radicalization of the majority is a much bigger threat confronting India than minority extremism….
In the 1920s, boycotting Jewish businesses began to be normalized by Germany’s right-wing parties at the regional level, long before it became declared state policy. Under a party born of a nearly 100-year-old Hindu nationalist movement inspired by 20th century European ethnonationalism, is India heading the same way?…
