Step 1: reinterpret existing lawsIn February 2022, a human rights activist from the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, whom I’ll call *Tara, was arrested and sent to jail for four days.Tara told me that ten police officers showed up in the middle of the night to inform him that he had been accused of forms of hate speech. Under sections 153A and 295 of the Indian penal code (first introduced in 1860 by the British colonial regime), he was charged with “promoting enmity” between different religious groups and “insulting the religious sentiments of Hindus.”Although Tara was eventually released on bail, his time in prison, the brutality he experienced at the hands of the arresting police officers, and the threat of further court proceedings have left deep physical and psychological scars. Over the course of multiple conversations in the autumn of 2023, he revealed that he still found it difficult to sleep at night, for fear the police would return and take him away to prison again.To make matters more confusing, Tara is a devout Hindu. He belongs to India’s Dalit community, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy. In his village, many Dalits worship a local Hindu deity, Ramdev Pir, a legendary warrior of the high-ranking Rajput caste who was said to be close to his adopted sister, a Dalit, and therefore is revered both by upper-caste Rajput and Dalit Hindu groups (plus some Muslim followers of the Sufi branch of Islam).But Rajputs in the area would not allow Dalits or Muslims into the local Ramdev temple. Determined to change things, Tara called a meeting to discuss the issue. During the meeting, he publicly proclaimed that Ramdev is a deity who belongs to all Hindus and even Muslims—not just upper-caste Rajputs. That same night, the police arrived at his door.When we discussed his treatment, Tara’s reflections were nuanced, showing a deep understanding of the changing way India’s criminal code is being enforced.”The fact that Dalits are discriminated against by upper-caste Hindus is not new in itself … but what we are seeing now under this Hindu nationalist government is that sections of the criminal code are being interpreted in new ways to further exclude communities like Dalits. Now sections like 153A and 295 of the Indian penal code are being used by higher-caste Hindus to claim that marginalised groups who point out exclusion or discrimination are insulting ‘real’ upper-caste Hindus.”A prominent human rights lawyer in Delhi describes Tara’s treatment as the “Hindutva reinterpretation of criminal terminologies”. The British Raj introduced section 153 of the Indian penal code (IPC) to prevent public unrest between different religious communities. But now, the lawyer argues, Hindutva supporters are increasingly “weaponizing” it and other sections against minority groups who try to raise awareness about the forms of violence or exclusion they are experiencing. “In the Hindutva logic, when a marginalised person points out that they are experiencing violence or discrimination by powerful Hindu groups, this is an ‘insult’ and amounts to a declaration of hostility against them.”Tara’s experience is not an isolated incident. In January 2024, police in the north-eastern state of Manipur filed complaints against the Editors Guild of India, again under IPC section 153, for reporting on the ethnic violence towards the Christian minority Kuki-Zo tribes by the Hindu majority Meitei community. According to the complaints, media reporting on the violence was further fanning the flames of conflict between the two communities, so should be prohibited.For Tara, who now spends his time travelling around Rajasthan—both to raise awareness about the treatment of minorities under the Modi regime and because, after his arrest, he no longer likes to stay in his home for extended periods—this is a sign of the very twisted times in India. He complained that: “Hindus attacking marginalised groups is no longer discrimination in India. But stating that powerful Hindu groups are attacking minorities is now hate speech or incitement.”Step 2: introduce new lawsThe Hindutva political project contradicts the principles of secularism, equality and liberty enshrined in India’s constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950. Centrally drafted by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a legal scholar from the Dalit community, the constitution aimed to set up postcolonial India as a democracy defined by profound respect for social, political and religious diversity and guided by the principle of non-discrimination.The second element of Modi’s strategy is the introduction of new anti-minority laws and criminal codes. He understands that the reinterpretation of existing legal measures is insufficient to build a majoritarian state, where Hindus, as the largest religious community, can disproportionately determine policy decisions. Therefore, his government has expended substantial resources, introducing a series of new legal measures that have gradually pushed Muslims, in particular, to the social margins. Shortly after being re-elected for a second term in 2019, for example, Modi’s government revoked the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.At both national and state levels, the list of anti-minority laws introduced during Modi’s reign is bewilderingly long. Just one example is the Prevention of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, introduced in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, in 2021, which has enabled the easy arrest of interfaith couples, especially young Muslim men accused of seducing Hindu women as part of a “love jihad.”But the most blatant anti-minority legislation is the 2019 Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which denies Muslim immigrants in India the same citizenship pathways as other religious groups. Couched in the language of national protection and Hindu rights, the CAA was quickly declared a “fundamentally discriminatory” law by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.Critics feared that along with the National Register of Citizens, launched in 2003 to keep track of all “legitimate” Indian citizens, the CAA would leave thousands of Muslims on Indian soil stateless. As a result, its introduction sparked an outbreak of Hindu-Muslim clashes now known as the Delhi riots, in which at least 53 people were killed (of whom 38 were Muslim and 15 were Hindu) and hundreds more injured over four days of violence in February 2020.“One day you wake up and are told that your whole community now officially counts as secondary Indian citizens,” Rashid*, a student at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi, told me in 2023. “Then, within the blink of an eye, you are engulfed by violence just because you challenged that assumption. And the police do nothing. Why? Because we all know that the orders from above are to let us Muslim ‘traitors’ die.”Rashid had been part of the peaceful anti-CAA protests in Delhi that began in December 2019. The following February, the situation escalated when Hindu mobs, reportedly unhindered by the Delhi police, began to attack Muslim protesters after some BJP politicians had again publicly called them “traitors”. Hindu crowds burned down Muslim homes and businesses, and a video emerged apparently showing five Muslim men being beaten by policemen while forced to sing the Indian national anthem. One of them, reportedly, died two days later.The impact of the Delhi riots on Muslim communities across India has been profound. According to a Muslim lawyer who works in the supreme court, the introduction of the CAA and subsequent Delhi riots sent not one but several messages to Indian Muslims.First, we are told we don’t belong to India in the way other religious groups do. Then, we better not challenge our partial inclusion because it will result in our death. And also, law enforcement will not protect us. Finally, we are shown that those who want to help Muslims fight for their rights will see their careers impacted.Following the Delhi riots, Justice S Muralidhar, a Delhi high court judge, convened an emergency hearing in which he directed Delhi police to file complaints against the BJP politicians who had called the Muslim protesters traitors. Within 24 hours, the Indian government announced Muralidhar’s transfer to a different high court, confirming that he would no longer be presiding over the Delhi riot case.Step 3: silence the judgesThe high court judge’s rapid transfer offers a glimpse into the third strategy that India’s government has used to cement power and undermine democratic structures: the silencing of a once-independent, critical judiciary.In April 2023, I returned to Delhi from the UK to conduct ethnographic work on hate speech hearings in the Indian supreme court. I found an apartment in a neighbourhood where many lawyers had their chambers and soon established a network of local advocates who fed me information about ongoing cases and relevant supreme court hearings.I was at home one day when one of them urgently directed me to watch a livestream of a supreme court hearing. It concerned a petition submitted by a group of concerned human rights and supreme court advocates, which detailed how the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra had repeatedly failed to respond to public and extremely bloody hate speeches by a small group of Hindu radicals.As I watched, the proceedings were intruded on by India’s solicitor general, the country’s second-highest legal official and adviser to the government. Interrupting the presiding judge, who belonged to India’s Christian minority, the solicitor general accused the court of bias for hearing a petition that only involved hate speech against Muslims. He demanded to know why the court was not investigating hate speeches against Hindus. “Let us not be selective!” he chastised the bench.As proceedings descended into chaos, the judge was forced to reschedule the case for another day. The next morning, some news outlets reported claims that this Christian judge had shown pro-Muslim bias, and had even smiled at the suggestion of a possible genocide against upper-class Hindus by Muslims. The lawyer who had submitted the petition was left frustrated and furious by these events: “By the end, no one could even remember that this case was about stopping calls for genocide against Muslims. This is what the government does: create chaos, ignore proper legal procedure, and delegitimize courts through a theatre of distractions.”



Source link