[The hard-line attitude of Narendra
Modi’s ruling party toward Muslims has undermined the nation’s reputation as a
voice for tolerance in South Asia.]
The victims were minority
Hindus living in Bangladesh, a majority-Muslim nation grappling with
increasing extremism, and the violence drew an outcry from politicians in
neighboring India. As the region’s traditional center of gravity, India has a
history of promoting tolerance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also
positioned himself as the champion of Hindus against a history of victimhood.
But the erosion
of human rights in India has weakened its moral high ground in a
region where ethnic and sectarian tensions are worsening. Sheikh Hasina —
Bangladesh’s prime minister and a close ally, who had just sent Mr. Modi 71 red
roses on his birthday — had pointed words for India, even as she promised to
hunt the culprits.
“We expect that nothing happens
there,” Ms. Hasina said, “which could influence any situation in Bangladesh
affecting our Hindu community here.”
India is losing leverage in South
Asia as its government tries to reshape the country into
a Hindu state. In marginalizing and maligning its
minority Muslims at home, Mr. Modi’s government has weakened India’s
traditional leadership role of encouraging harmony in a region of many fault
lines.
The shift could also open
opportunities for China, which has used the promise of investment and access to
its hard-charging economy to cultivate stronger relations with its rival’s
neighbors.
“The openly partisan approach to
communal issues has created a very peculiar situation for us as far as that
moral high ground in neighborhood policy is concerned,” said Yashwant Sinha,
who was India’s foreign minister when Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was
last in power in the early 2000s. “We can’t say ‘you stop it, this should not
happen,’ because we ourselves are guilty of it.”
Leaders of the ruling party
declined to comment. In public statements, officials have pointed to Mr. Modi’s
“neighborhood first” focus in foreign policy, something he announced soon after
taking office in 2014. They say the Indian leader is deeply invested in
improving regional connections “that bear prosperity to the neighborhood.”
Calls for tolerance in the region
are increasingly needed.
In Sri Lanka, a Buddhist-majority
country, the government has been taking a tougher stance toward the Tamil, a
largely Hindu minority whose grievances led to a three-decade civil war, and
toward its small Muslim population. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa recently
appointed a hard-line Buddhist monk to lead an overhaul of the legal system,
though he has been accused of stirring hatred against Muslims and jailed for
intimidating the wife of a journalist who had disappeared. The panel overseeing
the overhaul effort includes Muslim scholars but has no Tamil representation.
In majority-Muslim Pakistan, where
the ethnic Pashtuns and Baloch have long been marginalized, increasing Islamist
extremism has resulted in vigilante action against the Hindu minority, who make
up just 2 percent of the population. They have faced repeated episodes of
violence, vandalism of their temples, occupation of their land and an increase
in forced conversion of minority girls, according to Pakistan’s human rights
commission. Prime Minister Imran Khan has spoken out against the abuses, but to
little effect.
Communal violence in one country
often becomes fodder for the narrow nationalism of the other. Mr. Khan has
blamed Mr. Modi for “unleashing a reign of fear and violence against India’s
200 million-strong Muslim community.” Mr. Modi’s supporters frequently splash
videos of the anti-Hindu violence in Pakistan and elsewhere in the region as
justification for policies seen
as discriminating against Muslims.
But such violence and the abuse of
minorities is nothing new in South Asia, a region of deep ethnic and religious
fault lines that is home to a quarter of the world’s population.
The traumatic partition of India
and Pakistan in 1947, and the later war-driven split of Bangladesh from
Pakistan in 1971, left sizable ethnic and religious minorities in each country.
The domestic policies of one nation inevitably affect the population of
another.
Traditionally, how India — the
largest and the most diverse of the nations — tried to manage its affairs set
the tone for the rest. Even when sectarian violence flared within its own
borders, India was the big brother with larger-than-life leaders like Gandhi
and its legacy of ending centuries of colonial rule through nonviolence.
The policies of Mr. Modi’s party
have chipped away at that position, not unlike the erosion of the United
States’ global standing on human rights during the Trump administration. His
Bharatiya Janata Party has pursued a Hindu-first agenda that has often put the
country’s Muslims at a disadvantage. The party has also refused to rein in
hard-line elements within its ranks, sometimes leading to violence.
Ms. Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime
minister, and others have suggested that the hardening attitudes toward Muslims
in India have contributed to violence against Hindus in Bangladesh.
“The situation that happened in
Bangladesh is empowering the Hindutva politics, and they are trying to exploit it,”
said Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan, a professor of international relations at Dhaka
University, referring to the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalist ideology. “And at the
same time, the Hindutva politics of India is empowering the B.J.P.-type
politics in Bangladesh.”
The violence last month in
Bangladesh was set off by rumors that a Quran, the Muslim holy book, had been
disrespected in a Hindu temple. Seven people have been killed, the police said.
That violence has further deepened
sectarian tension in India. In recent weeks, a right-wing Hindu group has been
organizing large protests in the Indian state of Tripura, just over the border
from Bangladesh, against the anti-Hindu violence there. Police have had to
deploy heavy security to protect mosques, after members of the group vandalized
at least one mosque and burned shops. A group of lawyers and activists
who went to Tripura to document the damage found
themselves charged with violating a
draconian antiterror law.
While some B.J.P. officials
criticized the violence, Mr. Modi himself has been largely silent. In contrast
to Pakistan, where tensions with India sometimes break out into open conflict,
Mr. Modi has cultivated good relations with Bangladesh, and harsh words could
sour diplomatic ties between New Delhi and Dhaka.
India’s neighbors can find friends
elsewhere. China, flush with development projects and loans, has actively
placed itself as a potentially lucrative alternative. In addition to
strengthening economic ties with Pakistan, it has also used Covid-19 vaccines
and other aid to improve relations with Nepal, Sri
Lanka and Bangladesh.
But the ruling party’s Hindu
nationalist ideology has made India more inward-looking, said Aparna Pande,
director of the India initiative at the Hudson Institute. Previously, its
pluralistic example of governance had avoided stoking tensions, and it took at
times a paternalistic view toward its neighbors. Now, she said, Mr. Modi’s
“neighborhood first” policy appears at odds with the backlashes caused by the
Hindu nationalist vision at home.
“If you are pushing a nationalist
narrative, it is difficult to then ask your neighbors to not do the same,” Dr.
Pande said. “You will then see every country in South Asia becoming more
nationalist and, forget about anything else, that creates a strategic challenge
for India.”
Today, said Mr. Sinha, the former
foreign minister, Mr. Modi’s silence “creates the impression as if we have lost
control of the situation or that the state is actively encouraging violence
against minorities.”
Mr. Sinha, who quit the B.J.P. and
now belongs to an opposition party, was foreign minister immediately
after some
of the deadliest communal violence in India in 2002 in Gujarat, where
Mr. Modi was the state’s chief minister. He said such violence did not affect
India’s standing because the country’s prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, made clear that the episodes were both unacceptable and isolated.
These days, Mr. Sinha said: “The
interlocutor can turn back and say ‘Why don’t you practice at home what you
preach to us?’”
Saif Hasnat in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, Zia ur-Rehman in Karachi, Pakistan, and Aanya
Wipulasena in Colombo, Sri Lanka, contributed reporting.
Comment
Hindu fundamentalism has always been around in India. That was why Mahatma Gandhi fell to the bullet of one Nathuram Godse in 1948, a time when Indian cosmopolitanism otherwise seemed to be taking roots under such secular leaders like Gandhi himself, Jawaharlal Nehru, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Lal Bahadur Shastri and so on. But the BJP under Modi the Hinduttva campaign seems to have attained alarming proportions putting extraordinary pressure on India's traditionally deriving ethos of pluralistic coexistence. However, lately, it seems to show signs of unraveling as evidenced by BJP's astounding defeat in many state and local elections. But this process seems to be accompanied by many socially destabilizing turmoil in India as well as in the neighborhood as signified by increasingly frequent communal strife. As pointed out in the article, the Hinduttva brigade's alleged campaign against minority Muslims seems to be "answered" by unfortunate anti-Hindu backlash in Muslim majority countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In sum, in the 21st century world, this cannot be seen as responsible politics. All indications are that more turmoil seems to be in store for India even as a massive proportion of India's billion plus population continues to toil in obscene poverty, thus earning for itself, at least, in international academic discourse the ignominy of being "home to world poverty". Time for new statesmanship in India.
Bihari Krishna Shrestha,
Kathmandu, Nepal