Head-on | Does India treat its minorities fairly? Why the global narrative subverts the facts

On 29 December 2021, The Washington Post published an opinion column with this headline: “In India, calls for Muslim genocide grow louder. Modi’s silence is an endorsement.” The author of the piece, Rana Ayyub, is known for conspiracy theories. Few in India take her seriously. Some in the foreign media do. This shouldn’t matter because knowledgeable editors recognise such alarmist views for what they are. Nations and societies are judged by how they treat their minorities. How does India treat its minorities? It allows Muslims, who make up 15 per cent of the population, to keep their personal laws. Hindus who comprise 80 per cent of India’s population, don’t enjoy that privilege. Their personal laws were codified in 1955, soon after Independence. Over the next several decades, India’s Muslims were given control of Wakf land and funds, control over madrassas, and subsidies for the annual Haj pilgrimage. Muslim educational institutions like Aligarh Muslim University were encouraged with finance and patronage. The majority of Hindus did not regard all this as preferential treatment to a large minority. To them Muslims were civilisational Hindustani. They had chosen India over Pakistan in 1947 and deserved their special privileges. Muslims were elected presidents of the Indian Republic and occupied high office in the armed forces, judiciary and civil services. But they were not the only minorities treated with respect. Parsis, a minuscule minority, kept their own personal laws as well. So did Jews, another tiny minority. Both Parsis and Jews had arrived in India centuries ago, fleeing persecution and seeking new lives in a subcontinent that embraced diversity. Christians too were early arrivals and embedded themselves into India’s plural culture. Did India undergo a cathartic change in 2014 with the arrival of the Narendra Modi government? India has always received bad press internationally. Through the 1960s, foreign media was acerbic about India’s non-alignment. While Pakistan slipped happily into the Western security orbit, India was seen as a defiant geopolitical outlier. As I once wrote: “While Independent India developed into a socialist democracy, Pakistan emerged as a capitalist dictatorship. For the US, socialism was culturally and politically anathema. It welcomed Pakistani dictators, but had little love lost for socialists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. “The US, Britain and other Anglosphere nations have a grim record of committing historical crimes: shipping Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America during the centuries-long slave trade; invading and colonising countries; waging extra-territorial wars; destablising elected governments; supporting apartheid in South Africa; perpetrating genocide against Aborigines in Australia and indigenous Indians in the US; imposing a racist White Australia immigration policy till the early 1970s; and legally segregating African-Americans in the southern states of the US till as late as the mid-1960s. “The Western media tries its best to avoid highlighting these issues. It was only when Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Kamala Harris raised the issue of reparations for slavery that the US media took cognisance with a nervous editorial twitch. Warren has gone further by suggesting compensation for indigenous Indians whose land was usurped by European settlers in the US. “Amidst all this, India is a tempting target. A large, diverse democracy, it has multiple mutinies, as the late VS Naipaul wrote, going on raucously at the same time. These provide easy pickings for Western journalists. They have learnt their lesson the hard way after the French magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by Islamist terrorists, several of its staff killed and the publication eventually forced to change ownership. The lesson learnt? It is safer to criticise India. Indians don’t hit back. “India, in fact, provides Western media an invaluable additional resource: Indian journalists. These editorial recruits can be inveigled to write how viscerally casteist and communal India is. Were Western journalists to write the same articles, they would be accused of racism. Indian journalists serve as useful surrogates.” A global narrative has increasingly been created that India is intolerant towards its minorities, especially Muslims. The absence of a single BJP MP in the Lok Sabha is cited as evidence. The imprisonment of Muslims like Umar Khalid and Siddique Kappan, prosecuted for inciting communal violence, is seen as more evidence of the Modi government’s deliberate targeting of Muslims. The reading down of Article 370, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the Supreme Court’s order in favour of a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid structure stood buttress the global narrative of India systematically eroding Muslim rights. This narrative ignores the evidence: India’s 210 million Muslims have more freedom than Muslims in most Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Pakistan. Indian Muslims vote in free democratic elections. Muslim women wear the hijab everywhere – in markets, schools, colleges, on the street. The only exceptions are a few schools (perhaps 1 per cent of all schools in India) that have specific dress codes. Muslim women in India are encouraged to join the armed forces, the police and other professions from where women in Muslim-majority countries are barred. In India Muslim women professionals are treated with dignity and respect. India’s armed forces — Army, Navy and Air Force — have prayer facilities for every faith: Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh. Few armies in the world, even in liberal democracies, observe such secular plurality. Britain’s parliament begins sessions with Christian prayers. In contrast, India’s Parliament does not cater to the majority with Hindu prayers. And yet, the narrative in the global media does not point out Britain’s Christian Protestant majoritarianism: the head of state (now King Charles III) can only be a Protestant. In India, the head of state has frequently been Muslim or Sikh. The narrative that India’s minorities are mistreated is amplified by Indian-origin journalists who feed their Anglo-Saxon editors with the spin they want. It comes as no surprise that Pew research found the two professions the public in the West trusts least are politics and journalism. The writer is editor, author and publisher. Views expressed here are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.