Aakar Patel

Asian Angle | Modi’s theatrics ring hollow to victims of India’s anti-Muslim mobs

The prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party seems intent on shoring up its Hindu support by marginalising ‘beef-eating’ Muslims, and in effect condoning violence

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Police try to control a mob after riots erupted between two communities in Bhopal, India. Tension between Muslims and Hindus has increased over the right to pray inside the Hamidia Hospital complex in Bhopal's Old City. Photo: EPA

Aakar Patel

Published: 2:47pm, 2 Jul 2017Updated: 2:47pm, 2 Jul 2017

India’s Hindu nationalist government is playing a dangerous game sacrificing the country’s minorities to consolidate its vote bank.

The game is played as follows: the central government and the state governments controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stoke hatred of Muslims through laws and rhetoric that target them directly and indirectly.

This happened when the BJP mobilised millions of Indians in a campaign of hatred against an ancient mosque that was pulled down in 1992. Two thousand Indians, mostly Muslims, died in the riots that followed, but it gave the party a successful campaign issue.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is placing more restrictions on the slaughtering of cows. Photo: AFP

The current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using a more banal issue, beef, to achieve similar goals. After the government took power in 2014, its ministers and chief ministers in the provinces began to legislate the banning of cow slaughter, or to tighten existing laws. Cow slaughter is banned in some states; the consumption of beef is not, but nobody really understands the laws, including the police.

The bans have been accompanied by rhetoric that exalts the position of the cow and demonises those that work in the meat industry, who are predominantly Muslims and Dalits, the lowest rung of India’s caste hierarchy.