Modi government announces anti-Muslim citizenship policy ahead of Gujarat polls
Ahead of the elections in Gujarat state, the Hindu supremacist-ruled Union Ministry of Home Affairs has announced a move to give citizenship rights to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians hailing from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, living in two districts of the state. However, Muslims whose families have been living for in India are blatantly denied similar citizenship rights, and Muslim minorities fleeing genocide in countries such as Myanmar are also excluded.
In a notification, the ministry stated that the mentioned religious groups residing in Anand and Mehsana districts in Gujarat will be given Indian citizenship.
The move to provide certain religious groups fleeing persecution with citizenship while subjecting Muslims to persecution and discrimination is reminiscent of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which members of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have stated will go into effect after a new round of vaccinations for the Covid-19 pandemic is completed.
Hindu supremacists lynch Muslim man over relationship with Hindu woman
Hindu supremacists brutally beat a Muslim man to death in Bihar state over the victim’s romantic relationship with a Hindu woman. The accused are the woman’s family members, who murdered the victim, Nihal, after he and the woman eloped and got married.
According to his mother Shamima, Nihal was invited by the woman’s family to attend a ceremony, but the woman’s father Shambhu Sa and her maternal uncle Devinder beat him to death when he got there.
In November 2018, the couple had eloped and got married in a court. Rather than accepting the marriage, the woman’s family judicially harassed Nihal by filing a police report against him, leading to his arrest and subsequent bail.
The lynching is the latest in a series of violent crimes committed against Muslim men for having relationships, real or perceived, with Hindu women. Hindu supremacists often accuse these men of “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men have an agenda to seduce Hindu women and forcibly convert them to Islam.
Hindu supremacists target 3,000 mosques in attempt to erase Muslim history
Around 3,000 mosques are in danger of being forcibly converted into temples as Hindu supremacists twist historical facts to claim that the mosques were built on temples, according to a report published by The Guardian.
“We have a list of about 3,000 that we have decided to reclaim legally,” Sanjay Hariyana, spokesperson of the extremist Hindu group Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (ABHM) was quoted as saying.
The report states that Hindu supremacists, including BJP leaders, are pushing a false narrative that distorts the history of these mosques, claiming that ancient Hindu nations were oppressed and persecuted by ruthless Muslim invaders. These myths are further circulated by government-backed historians, politicians, and school curriculums, making Hindu supremacist narratives mainstream.
The alleged destruction of Hindu temples to build mosques has been central to this narrative. In May, a senior BJP leader falsely claimed that the Mughals had destroyed 36,000 Hindu temples and they would “reclaim all those temples one by one”.
Richard Eaton, a professor of Indian history at the University of Arizona, says these claims were “outlandish, irresponsible and without foundation”, with Mughals thought to have torn down only about two dozen temples.
Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, a professor of Mughal history at Aligarh Muslim University, described the BJP’s polarised version of Indian history as “fantasy, nothing more than fiction” invented to serve their political agenda.
Supreme Court issues notice against converting madrasas into schools in Assam
The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the Assam government on an appeal challenging a High Court verdict that sought to convert state-funded Islamic seminaries into state-funded schools.
The plea, filed through advocate Adeel Ahmed, contended that the High Court had
“erroneously observed that Islamic seminaries, wholly maintained by the state, cannot be permitted to impart religious instruction.”
The appeal challenged the decision that had in effect turned existing provincialized madrassas in Assam into regular government schools.
In BJP-ruled Assam, Muslim-run schools have regularly come under attack by Hindu supremacists. Recently, officials in the state demolished three madrasas illegally, on the blatantly false charges of being associated with “a terror organization.”
