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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/arundhati-roy-indian-muslims-facing-genocidal-climate-amid-pandemic/">https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/arundhati-roy-indian-muslims-facing-genocidal-climate-amid-pandemic/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Arundhati Roy: Indian Muslims facing
‘genocidal climate’ amid pandemic</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Daniela Bezzi - June 11,
2020<br>
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<p>India’s coronavirus lockdown, which began in March,
has been one of largest and strictest in the world. It
has left tens of millions without work prompting a
mass exodus from cities; many have attempted to travel
hundreds of miles – on foot, by bicycle or even
clinging to trucks – to return to their home
villages. </p>
<p>This week, the government has begun loosening
restrictions despite the number of reported cases
continuing to rise. Although the numbers are
relatively low for a population of almost 1.4 billion
people, the country is yet to reach its peak.</p>
<p>As the lockdown lifts, we asked the acclaimed writer
Arundhati Roy, who has been an outspoken critic of
Narendra Modi’s government, what kind of India will
emerge from under lockdown.</p>
<p><b>The Indian government acted fairly quickly to
impose a lockdown. Has it worked?</b></p>
<p><b>Arundhati Roy</b>: The lockdown has been
disastrous. India is the only country where the
numbers climbed sharply through the lockdown and just
when the graph is the steepest the lockdown has been
relaxed. So we have a double disaster. An economic
wreckage as well as a raging pandemic. The COVID-19
numbers have been and continue to be, in my opinion a
bit unreliable not only in India, but everywhere. In
India, for example, we generally count the deaths in
hospitals, and who knows how many more have died at
home, how many have died of other illnesses that could
not be addressed because of this emergency. How many
from hunger, or exhaustion on their long march home,
in addition to the alarming death rates in India for
more usual reasons. </p>
<p>The only thing we know for sure is that both lockdown
and social distancing cannot be applicable in India,
if we think of the tens of millions living in the
slums. Take for example Dharavi, the largest slum in
Asia in the heart of Mumbai: almost one million people
in two square kilometers, one toilet for several
hundred people, what does quarantine or social
distancing mean in such conditions? </p>
<p>Instead of testing, monitoring, stopping public
gatherings and shutting down, say, restaurants and
malls, at a time when there were only a few hundred
cases, they brought the hammer down on the whole
country. They smashed an economy already in a deep
crisis and that is now obviously in a massive
recession. Hundreds of millions of jobs have been
lost. </p>
<p>The cases are rocketing up, and now number 280,000.
As the graph climbs the lockdown has been lifted.
Having broken everything, the government has now
absolved itself of all responsibility, and is telling
us that we have to learn to live with the virus.
People who should have been allowed to go home two
months ago, are now reaching their villages, carrying
the virus with them. </p>
<p>It is only Modi’s hubris, his unchallenged power and
his complete lack of understanding of the country he
rules that could have resulted in such a mighty
disaster. He is cunning, but unintelligent. That is a
dangerous combination. </p>
<p>Add to all this, the Modi Government’s overt
Islamophobia, amplified by a shameless, irresponsible
mainstream media – that overtly blamed Muslims for
being spreaders of disease. You have whole TV shows
dedicated to “COVID jihad” etc... All this came off
the back of the unconstitutional dismantling of
Kashmir’s special status (leading to a 10 month
on-and-off lockdown and internet seige of 6 million
people in the Kashmir valley – a mass human rights
violation by any standards), the new anti-Muslim
citizenship law, and the pogrom against Muslims in
North East Delhi in which the Delhi Police were seen
actively participating. </p>
<p>Young Muslims, students and activists are being
arrested every day for being “conspirators” in the
massacre. While ruling party politicians who actually
came out on the streets calling for “traitors” to be
shot, remain in positions of power and high
visibility. </p>
<p><b>You have been criticized for</b> <a
href="https://www.dw.com/en/arundhati-roy-claims-coronavirus-exposes-indias-crisis-of-hatred-against-muslims/a-53167812"><b>an
interview</b></a><b> that you gave to Deutsche
Welle, in which you describe this rampant
Islamophobia as something that could be a prelude to
genocide. Can you help us to understand the
escalation of this situation?</b></p>
<p>Yes. I said that the language being used by the
mainstream media against Muslims was designed to
dehumanise them. To paint an entire community as
“corona jihadis” during this pandemic, when there is a
pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is
to create a genocidal climate. </p>
<p>Over the last couple of years we have had so many
instances of mob lynchings and George Floyd-type
killings – the difference in India being that Hindu
vigilante mobs do the killing and the police, the
legal system and the political climate help them to
get away with it. </p>
<p>These episodes of violence and massacres against the
Muslim minority in India are nothing new. Think of the
pogrom that continued for months in 2002 in Gujarat,
when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of that State.
Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight. Modi
looked away and has never expressed regret. Quite the
contrary. He has ridden to power on that legacy. He
and his ministers are members of the Hindu supremacist
RSS, the most powerful organisation in India whose
founding ideologues were inspired by Mussolini and
Italian fascism. </p>
<p>Hindu fascism has vernacular roots too. The caste
system – a supposedly divinely ordained system of
social hierarchy in which Brahmins consider themselves
to be the master race – lays the foundation of fascist
attitudes. </p>
<p>But to come to the unfolding of events that set the
tone of our lockdown – from the very beginning,
immediately after its announcement at the end of
March, the media spread the news of several cases of
contagion in Nizamuddin, an area right in the center
of Delhi not far from where I live, that only a few
weeks before had hosted a large conference organised
by an Islamic congregation called Tablighi Jamaat,
with numerous delegates from abroad. Immediately the
hashtag <i>#CoronaJihad</i> started to circulate on
Twitter. Tablighis were branded “human bombs”. Muslims
were being denied admission to hospitals and local BJP
leaders and politicians were calling for Muslim fruit
and vegetable sellers to be boycotted. </p>
<p>It was terrifyingly similar to how, during the rise
of the Third Reich, Nazis began accusing Jews of being
spreaders of disease, carriers of typhus. And the tone
of the media – particularly channels like Zee TV and
Republic TV began to sound like Radio Rwanda. These
channels are specially rewarded by the Modi coterie,
granted exclusive interviews by him and his terrifying
home minister. The horror show is ongoing. </p>
<p>Muslims are being dehumanized, ostracised
economically as well as socially – if you read
scholars of genocide like Robert Jay Lifton, they tell
you that this is the first step, the way it all
begins. </p>
<p><b>And yet, in the months preceding the lockdown, a
protest movement was growing in opposition to the
government’s Citizenship Amendment Bill that was
passed in December. How do you explain such a rapid
deterioration of the situation?</b></p>
<p>Yes. A few months ago those protests were a little
like what is happening in the US right now. The
protests were non-sectarian. Poetic and beautiful. As
soon as the Citizenship Amendment Bill in December,
students rose in protest. They were put down brutally
by the police. Police entered campuses, smashed up a
library, and used weapons on students that would
normally be used in anti-terrorist operations. This
enraged the younger generation. There were massive
protests all over India. </p>
<p>In Delhi, in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood, thousands
of women gathered to block a city road. They sat there
for almost three months. Shaheen Bagh became the site
of collective creativity, poetry readings, music
concerts. It was mirrored in other cities like Mumbai,
Bengaluru and Kolkata. When the Delhi state election
campaign began, Modi and his party painted these women
as terrorists, as Pakistanis – it was the most vicious
campaign you could imagine. But they lost. The AAP
(Common Man's Party) won 62 seats out of 70. Soon
after that defeat, the anti-Muslim pogrom began in
North East Delhi. </p>
<p>President Trump was visiting Delhi while the
massacres and the fires raged. He pretended it wasn’t
happening and instead showered Modi with praise. Fifty
five people were killed. It made big news in the US,
which enraged the BJP. So now while we are all locked
down, there is a massive round of arrests. Young
students are in jail, being made to pay the price for
a massacre openly instigated by BJP politicians. </p>
<p><b>The last weeks of this Indian lockdown have been
particularly dramatic. A gas leak at a chemical
plant in southern India resulted in 11 deaths and
made hundreds ill; sixteen migrants died in their
sleep under a freight train; and a cyclone has
killed more than 80 people. What kind of India will
emerge from lockdown?</b></p>
<p>As with the human body, this virus had the effect of
making visible and accelerating the collapse at the
social scale. All the diseases – comorbidities of a
deeply unjust society – have exploded into view. It
will be a deeply wounded India, even more divided by
inequalities: the lockdown has not only meant the
undoing of the economy, but has also caused the
disappearance of a huge labor force that was being
cruelly exploited and paid barely subsistence wages. </p>
<p>It’s ironic that despite the horrifying sight of the
exodus – the reverse migration of that working class
that showed how fragile it is, how vulnerable, how
impoverished – we have the corporate class asking for
a further dismantling of labour protection laws (which
in any case apply to a very small section of the
working class) to enable India to compete with China
as a manufacturing hub. It's not easy to foresee the
consequences. If before the lockdown we had the worst
unemployment rate in 40 years, I can’t imagine what
will happen now, with an entire subcontinent in
distress. We run the risk of mass hunger, even though
warehouses are stocked with millions of tonnes of
foodgrain. </p>
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<p>Injustice was hidden away, by the media, by
Bollywood, by a literary and cultural community who
considered it the acceptable price for becoming a
superpower</p>
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<p>The only consolation is that this mosaic of
emergencies is out in the open: those who had the
privilege of confining themselves at home, could not
help but see the magnitude of the disaster, the
horrifying injustice and shame of being part of a
society like this. It was hidden away, by the media,
by Bollywood, by a literary and cultural community who
considered it the acceptable price for becoming a
superpower. What may happen in the coming weeks and
months, depends on each of us, not only in India but
everywhere: will we fall back on the same tracks, or
fight for change? </p>
<p><b>You’ve suggested that human rights courts should
examine government responses to COVID. </b></p>
<p>Yes, because what has been done to the people is in
my view a crime against humanity. In order to know the
full contours of it, we need facts we can trust. On
the health front, the economic front, the role of the
media – all of it. The documentation, the gathering of
evidence and testimonials will in itself be a
revolutionary act.</p>
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<p>Part of this interview was originally published by <a
href="https://ilmanifesto.it/">Il Manifesto</a> in
Italian.</p>
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