Muslims in India: Need to Understand

By -Inamul Haq

A German Muslim Scholar Dr Murad Hoffmann wrote a collection about the future of Islam, in which he texted down the feelings of the Muslim world on the International level. He noted down that the “Muslim world did not experience decline because of colonisation of the western imperialism. However, Muslims became victims of decline first and thereafter paved the easy way for the imperialist forces. As a result, Muslims could not resurge after the destruction of their institutions at Cardova and pillage of Baghdad by the Mongols. The result was that they closed the doors for authoritative interpretation and adopted the static concept of conformism. They took recourse to a Sufism, which was non-political, individualistic and alienated from life. It must be remembered that confining religion to one’s personal life or its privatisation is the first step towards its complete annihilation”. The main of his writings was to highlight the serious issues that the entire Muslim world is facing today. While monitoring the global world, the strength of Islamophobia is holding its grip tight. From the USA to India, Muslims are considered as the second class citizens and Islam was reduced to terrorism only, which is narrow as well as the wrong interpretation of Islam. The human blood was made cheaper to such hatredness and was bombarded with the latest destructive weapons that were being rained down on the human population. In the words of Allama Iqbal:
 the soul of Muslims is still facing the same uneasiness
 it is divine secret; the tongue cannot say anything about it
Let’s see what comes out from the bottom of this ocean
And how the blue sky changes its colour
With the emergence of Corona Virus (Covid-19), the global world left aside all religious, political and other rivalries and started fighting together against this pandemic disease. While as, apart from Covid-19, India witnessed another virus in the form of hatred towards the Muslims. All Muslims, whether they belong any sect were considered as members of Tablighi. The discourse becomes more interesting after the NRI living in middle east countries started online hatred. The outrageous reaction from Arabian and middle east countries forced Prime Minister to tweet that Covid-19 is casteless and without religion and this war against this disease can be fought together. Earlier, Covid-19 the national capital of India (New Delhi) witnessed the worst violence in terms of riots. However, rather taking the action against the rioters, the Prime Minister was busy with the visit of Trump, who on the first day speak out against Islamic terrorism at Motera Stadium Ahmedabad. After this statement, the whole crowd clapped trump for speaking against Islam. After a lot of criticism from the international level. Modi also stated brotherhood in India after the destruction and killing of hundreds of Muslims on the call of Kapil Mishra. The question arises, what happened after giving a statement. Does all this ends or new theory is being planted against Muslims in India. The policy of India towards Muslims denotes the same as it was in Nazi Germany against the Jews. Hannah Ardent in her essay “the image of the hell” argues that in Nazi Germany, Jews were helpless before Hitler, who dragged them to death with the accumulation of terror. He first calculated them, then neglected and then deprived them of their basic rights.  All these things made the Jews weak and most of them took off their lives. Secondly, Hitler adopted the outright starvation, combined with forced labour, when people died by the thousands but at different intervals of time, according to their stamina. Last came the death factories (extermination camps) and they all died together, the young and the old, the weak and the strong, the sick and the healthy; not as people, not as men and women, children and adults, boys and girls, not as good and bad, beautiful and ugly-but brought down to the lowest common denominator of organic life itself, plunged into the darkest and deepest abyss of primal equality, like cattle, like matter, like things that had neither body nor soul, nor even a physiognomy upon which death could stamp its seal. However, Agamben in his book Remnants of Auschwitz argues that The Muslims were inmates of the camp who were reduced to bare life, the living dead, persons who lost all will and all consciousness. The Muslim is a stage of existence between an inmate and death. Agamben argues that the Muslim reveals the biopolitical essence of the modern detention camp. In his opinion, the camp is the most absolute biopolitical space ever. If the camp is a laboratory for creating sub-humans, an experiment in the destruction of spontaneity, then the Muslim is a biopolitical result. However, the concept of biopolitics was later on challenged by Achille Mbembe, who coined the new term ‘Necropolitics’ in the context of capital and its processes of geopolitical segregation of world zones based on the mobilization of the war machine. Mbembe claims that the concept of biopolitics should be replaced with Necropolitics, which changes ‘make live’ to ‘let live’. The concept of Necropolitics presents a pure abandonment which means that in a state, only those can live who are having capital and power and those who cannot live in the situation of a pure abandonment by the neo-liberal public capitalist structures are to be left to die or made to die
So, the current situation in India is neither ‘to kill or to let live’, nor ‘to make live and to let die’ but ‘to let’s kill and to stop killing’. The approach adopted by India during the reign of BJP is simply to create such religious bigotry so that the Muslims either run away or let them die on their own. The recourse of events that happening in India is due to all hatred towards on community and this hatred will end with genocide.
### The writer is a Research Student at Central University of Gujarat.