Gyanvapi Mosque Row; Another Attempt To Push Muslims To The Wall – OpEd
Keeping the malice concealed behind the sweet talk, India has desperately been trying to project itself as a secular, moderate and liberal country, but with the passage of time, the facade of so-called secularism has been removed and India has been completely exposed by the extremist policies of the RSS enthused ruling elite of the country.
During the past few decades, the RSS and Hindutva ideology has risen to a dangerous extent in Indian society, due to which the space for non-Hindus particularly Muslims has been narrowed.
The conspiracy of pushing the Muslims to the wall has now completely uncovered its face and has become an organized campaign being abetted by incumbent BJP leadership that is highly predisposed to the RSS ideology, in fact, all the prominent leaders, from Modi to Yogi, Amit Shah to Rajnath Singh, have been somehow aficionados of the extremist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Being devotees of this ideology, these leaders have always been in a leading role in provoking anti-Muslim sentiments in Indian society.
Islamophobia has become a common phenomenon in India, lynching, and mobbing of Muslims over alleged cow slaughter and love jihad has become a routine affair, but this was maybe not enough to serve the vindictiveness of RSS and Bajrang Dall adherents, so they decided to rename, dislocate or annihilate all historic places of worships or monuments that were named after Muslim sovereigns.
The envious Hindu mentality is still in the inferiority complex after being ruled by Muslim emperors for nearly a thousand years, so to conciliate their complex and religious agony against Muslims, they have ignited drives to remove all Muslim artifacts constructed by Mughal rulers across the country and give them a Hindu identity.
In such a campaign, the BJP’s CM of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath who is a well-known RSS partisan has altered the distinctiveness of all roads, railway stations, educational institutes, and tourist places in the state named after Muslim rulers and replaced them with Hindu names. Ironically this entire drive of obliterating Muslim identity was being accomplished under the full patronage of the ruling BJP.
Recently, another incident of communal hate against Muslims has divulged the true fascist face of the Modi government. Reportedly Hindu fanatics in India want the 1991 Places of Worship Act to be annulled because they see this act as a hurdle to regaining their subjugated heritage and temples that according to them were destroyed by the Mughal invaders.
This act was described as “an act to prohibit conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on the 15th day of August 1947″ and the act was enforced by the Congress government of Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao at a time when the Ram temple movement was at its peak.
The act is under debate in the wake of a recent row over the Gyanvapi mosque that is located in Banaras, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The Hindu extremists claim that the said mosque was built by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb after razing the Vishwanath temple in the 16th century. While superseding the issue, a local court in Varanasi of UP ordered the Archeological Department of India to conduct a survey of the mosque and investigate the claim. But the local Muslims have challenged the order of the survey under the 1991 Places of Worship Act. Later on, a three-member bench of the Indian Supreme Court after conducting a painstaking hearing of the matter raised a controversial point stating that “ascertaining the religious character of a place of worship is not barred under the Places of Worship Act of 1991″ and transferred the Gyanvapi mosque case being heard by it to the court of the Varanasi district judge for further trial.
Such irresponsible behaviour of the Indian Supreme Court was not expected by the moderate circles. This kind of biased approach and leaving a highly contentious matter unattended could spark a new wave of communal violence across India and could further spoil India’s global reputation which has already been depreciated due to increasing hate crimes against the minorities under the nose of the BJP regime.
The Muslim minority has always been the target of the Indian prejudiced judicial system. A few months ago, thousands of Muslims were deliberately targeted under the guise of communal riots in Gujrat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. It is a bare fact that such legislations always failed to protect the religious rights of Muslims in India, 1991 Places of Worship Act then failed to prevent the demolition of Babri Mosque and now the Hindutva regime doesn’t seem serious about implementing this act to safeguard Gyanvapi mosque from Hindu coercions.
From day one, the Modi government has been trying to ambuscade Islamic cultural and religious norms, they have targeted Muslims’ religious ideologies and historic architecture to disintegrate the Muslim harmony and contaminate their fundamental principles with Hindutva ideology.
The irony is that the international community has maintained a criminal silence over the brutalities and grave human rights violations against the Muslim minority in India by the BJP, and RSS sympathizers sitting at the highest ranks. There is a need to establish an independent and impartial commission to probe the incidents of Muslim genocide under the BJP rule and sanction those individuals and organizations inspired by Hindutva ideology involved in the mass homicide, else the international community and the champions of human rights would be the responsible for an imminent humanitarian catastrophe as a result of racial discrimination in India.
The writer is a freelance journalist and security analyst with a special focus on regional affairs. He can be reached at [email protected]