Abdulla Moaswes in Dubai and Hari Prasad in Washington DC
SOCIAL media users across the Gulf states, a region that is home to millions of Indian expatriates, have hit back at what they see as Islamophobia being imported from India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The campaign – exemplified by the likes of Gulf News Editor-in-Chief Abdul Hamid Ahmad, whose editorial posted on Twitter on May 7 calling for Indian media to stop “exporting hate to the Gulf” was liked more than 13,000 times – has sparked vicious retaliation from supporters of Modi’s party and the closely affiliated Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The online anti-BJP campaign was launched in response to an uptick in reports of Islamophobia involving Indian citizens residing in the Gulf. Some of the social media accounts involved are thought to be run by Pakistanis posing as individuals from the region, but those belonging to Arabs are seen as encouraging the idea of Pan-Islamic solidarity with India’s Muslims.
Such appeals for solidarity have long been used by Gulf states in opposition to anything that the ruling regimes perceive as ideological threats to their power.
This approach, for example, was a large part of the effort to contain the spread of Soviet ideological influence in the region in the 1980s, then seen as a threat to oil supplies and trade.
Today, it is being used in an attempt to contain the spread of Hindu nationalism in the Gulf, as states that have enjoyed largely cordial ties with India in recent years look on with suspicion at the role the RSS is taking within their borders.
The RSS is a far-right, Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation that has been described as the ideological fountainhead of Modi’s BJP. Notoriously Islamophobic, its members and supporters are known to orchestrate campaigns of violence against India’s Muslims, including 2002’s Gujarat riots and the riots in New Delhi earlier this year.
In 2016, it was reported that the head of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, had held several meetings with prominent Indian businessmen living in the Gulf with the intention of expanding the organisation’s influence.
Countries in the region will see this as a potential security threat that complicates bilateral ties, given the proximity of RSS to India’s executive branch under Modi.
According to journalist Abdul Majid Zargar, these meetings have become a regular occurrence and their increased regularity has coincided with an increase of incidences of Islamophobia by Indian expatriates in the region.
Mazhar Farouqi, a Muslim Indian journalist in the UAE, said he had been the target of multiple death threats on social media from accounts linked to the BJP’s “IT cell” because of his frequent reporting on said incidents.
The expansion of the RSS into the Gulf has come under further scrutiny because of a high-profile fraud scandal relating to Indian businessman BR Shetty. Shetty is among Modi’s strongest allies within the Indian business community in the Gulf, having been the chief coordinator of the prime minister’s trip to the UAE in 2015.
He was among the key figures to meet Mohan Bhagwat and had also supported Modi in his controversial abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, which had granted the then state of Jammu and Kashmir a level of political autonomy despite it being under brutal Indian military occupation.
For Gulf states such as the UAE and Kuwait, where Indian nationals make up an estimated 25 to 30 per cent of the population, an increase in Islamophobic hate speech and threats of violence by individuals connected to the RSS represent a credible national security threat.
It stands to reason that such states would aim to develop their influence among Indian Muslims as a form of leverage against the growing influence of state-supported Hindu nationalists back home.
For decades, India’s leaders mostly followed the lead of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and minimised interactions with the diaspora – a policy that remained in place until roughly the 1990s.
However, this left a voidthat was filled by the RSS and other Hindutva organisations which offered diaspora members a sense of connection to their homeland and Hindu pride. Yet it also bred an army of internet trolls whose recent actions on social media have brought to the fore the harm such keyboard warriors can do to a country’s soft power.
Against this background of rising Islamophobia that has caused such a backlash in the Gulf, Modi himself was moved to make a rare intervention on Twitter on April 19, urging “unity and brotherhood” in response to the coronavirus pandemic, as it “does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language or borders before striking”.
COVID-19 does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language or borders before striking.
Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood.
We are in this together: PM @narendramodi
— PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 19, 2020
The backlash still caught many Indian pundits by surprise – despite the international controversy caused by the BJP’s policies towards Kashmir and last year’s Citizenship Amendment Act both of which have been described by critics as anti-Muslim.
Only a handful of Indians have been expelled from the Gulf for Islamophobia so far, but the threat of future expulsions or visa denials could become a potent tool – especially in a region that generates nearly US$65 billion in remittances for India’s economy.
While the debate on how much reputational damage has been done continues, little is being done to make changes domestically. BJP figures and pundits continue to demonise the Muslim community, with online trolls even spreading fake news about Muslims spitting in Hindus’ food – a claim that fact checkers have found to be false.
The polarisation that results plays into the hands of Hindutva organisations and their goal of “consolidating” the Hindu voting base – meaning it will only escalate as the government tries to hide policy failures and economic stagnation.
India will continue to be dominated by the BJP for the foreseeable future, with the country moving towards the possibility of one-party rule. While some regional parties will resist Hindutva policies, states’ powers are being weakened – thereby eliminating their resistance – by the continued centralisation of the country.
But the Gulf Twitter dispute has opened up fault lines between some of Modi’s supporters and those in government who have to contend with political realities. For right-wing pundits such as Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, for example, Modi’s tweet was seen as appeasement.
The Modi era has empowered extremists across Indian society and even its end will not necessarily mean a more moderate BJP – or even a government in which Hindutva is not a powerful ideological force.
Other major BJP figures like Amit Shah and Yogi Aditynath make Modi look like a moderate in comparison, which suggests that Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia in Indian society, both at home and abroad, will only intensify.
Therefore it stands to reason that the Gulf states, which are resistant to the development of internal ideological threats, will seek to gain leverage over Hindu nationalists in India by mobilising Indian Muslims virtually to express sentiments of solidarity.
Criticisms of Modi from within the BJP, as well as Modi’s own tweets of appeasement, demonstrate that this is a potentially successful tactic, at least when it comes to containing the spread of Hindu nationalism outside India.
c.scmp.com
