The accusation had followed the venomous anti-Muslim diatribes of the pro-BJP television channels after the Islamic outfit, Tablighi Jamaat, violated the lockdown norms by congregating in a New Delhi mosque and subsequently being held responsible for a rapid spread of coronavirus. Although the minister has now tried to soft-pedal the issue by saying that an entire community cannot be blamed for the misdeeds of a few, this was’t how the pro-BJP television channels and other Muslim-baiters saw the Tablighi gathering.

To them, the faithful in the mosque provided an opportunity to resume their customary anti-Muslim propaganda which had to be put on hold for a few days after the Covid-19 outbreak. It was obvious that the TV channels and the saffron trolls had been straining at the leash to reinforce the stereotypes of the Muslims as being bigots and backward and the Tablighi episode came as a godsend for them. While dropping their restraint, however, the pro-Hindu zealots did not realize the adverse diplomatic fallout of their vitriol.

After the OIC’s indictment, the government woke up and deputed Naqvi to contain the damage. But the effort may not only have come rather late in the day, but the minister may have also spoilt his own case by his overblown rhetoric, which recalls Joseph Goebbels’s maxim about the efficacy of the Big Lie. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it”, the Nazi propaganda minister had said, “people will eventually come to believe it”.

To many, Naqvi’s claim about India being a heaven for Muslims is in keeping with Goebbels’s dictum. A few months earlier, he had denied that his co-religionist were “majboor” (helpless and harassed); instead, they were happily engaged in “mauj” (enjoyment). Besides, the iniquity of holding an entire community responsible for the transgressions of a few has always been ignored by the Sangh parivar led by the RSS. Through its history, the parivar has demonized the Muslims for invading India, destroying temples and finally partitioning the country to carve out a separate homeland for themselves.

The intensity of the vituperation of the parivar’s members such as the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad reached a fever pitch during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in the 1990s when Muslims were castigated as “Babur ki aulad” or children of the Mughal emperor, Babur, and told that their places were either in Pakistan or in graveyards – Musalmano ki doh hi sthan, Pakistan ya kabaristhan.

The riots which occurred in those years, especially when L.K. Advani embarked on his rath yatra (chariot ride) to “liberate” Lord Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya and when the Babri masjid was pulled down by frenzied kar sevaks disabused Muslims of any hope (if there ever was) of India being a heaven for them. Their disillusionment was strengthened when the Narendra Modi government was formed in 2014 as they experienced lynching by gau rakshaks (cow protectors) while their protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) were stigmatized as a precursor to the establishment of Caliphate 2.0.

Following the expressions of unease by the UN, the US, the European Union and others over the fears of the Muslims, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar had to spend much of his time explaining what Naqvi is saying now – that the Muslims had nothing to be apprehensive about. But the fact that his assurances were not convincing enough was evident from his observation that India now knew who its friends were in view of the realization that support for the country had dwindled to a handful of far right and anti-immigrant Europeans.

In the aftermath of the outpouring of communal poison by the saffron TV anchors and cyber warriors, both the prime minister and the external affairs minister have been reaching out to the Islamic countries in West Asia to echo Naqvi’s “heaven” assertion. But, as in the cases of the citizenship law and Kashmir, their efforts will probably be in vain if only because the BJP will not find it easy to pass itself of as “secular”. The party’s longstanding murky record in this respect has palpably become murkier. Moreover, its leaders do not carry the credibility of, say, someone like Atal Behari Vajpayee, whose commitment to pluralism was widely believed at home and abroad.

In the 70-year history of the Jan Sangh-BJP, there has been no one like Vajpayee who succeeded to a considerable extent in keeping at bay the “inner demons of hatred, greed and ignorance”, as the celebrated historian, Yuval Noah Harari, has said in the context of the coronavirus outbreak, adding that “people are reacting to this crisis … with hatred … blaming ethnic and religious minorities”. In the case of the Jan Sangh-BJP, however, the inner demon of anti-Muslim animosity has come to the fore not now, but has always been a part of its DNA. Vajpayee managed to push it into the background. Others haven’t even tried.
(IPA Service)