It is no secret that the world’s attention tends to be selective; to pick and choose among the issues that are easier to get behind and cause outrage at any given time. While modern media allow determined stories of injustice to not only come to the surface, but also to be widely addressed, which can undoubtedly not be considered reproachable, we must not turn a blind eye to those who are not as “popular”. Particularly because it would be naïve to think that such division is subject to randomness or regulated by market-like laws of demand and supply: the direction of the public’s concern is, rather, a quite deliberate and politicised process, of which all should be increasingly aware.
An example can be found in the different attitudes regarding the conditions of Muslim populations in Asia. The treatment of the Uyghur Muslims by the People’s Republic of China’s authorities, in fact, has increasingly been under fire, has caused international outrage and led to public figures speaking out and launching global initiatives in their protection, such as the Uyghur Human Rights Project. Without shadow of doubt, the situation is grave and requires not only attention, but also direct action, which groups are calling for the UN Commissioner for Human Rights to acknowledge and implement.
Comparable attention, however, cannot be said to have been granted to the progressively worsening conditions of Muslims under the Modi administration in India. The entire subcontinent, and India with particular significance, has been historically shaped by the complex dynamics and grievances between the Hindu and Muslim communities, instrumentalised by British authorities in the 1947 partition of the Raj. The strong bond between nationality, religion, and language that defines the identity of nearly two-thirds of Hindus – according to the Pew report on religious tolerance in India – has been reinforced by the strongly nationalistic and pro-Hindu skewed attitudes of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While it is expectable for the build-up of identities to be composite and politically charged, especially in the populous, diverse, post-colonial Indian society, the trends that define inter-religious social and institutional relations – mainly between Hindus and Muslims – are cause for concern.
Hindu religious leaders and activists, in fact, have been enjoying the blind eye turned by officials – both nationally and globally – on their escalating fomentation of religious segregation and belief-based violence. The institutional silence on the calls to arms from monks, advocating openly for Indian Hindus to follow the example of Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority group, does not merely enable the message to spread among the population, but factually acts as an endorsement. While violent clashes are mostly portrayed as spontaneous expressions of the communal relations, local activist increasingly report credible suspicion that they are in fact orchestrated by authorities who, after allowing their escalation, proceed to shut down the clusters of disagreement with unequally harsh crackdown and arrest rates for the involved Muslims. The institutionalised discrimination of Muslims, combined with the increased intolerance of the majoritarian religious group and the explicit extremist right-wing rhetoric of the incitement of ethnic cleansing against Muslims to achieve a pure Indian society paints a grim scenario. As history teaches, in fact, genocide does not start with mass executions and deportations; rather, the conditions for its flourishing are achieved through the support of deepening social divisions, inter-group violence, and narratives that pain one common enemy to be blamed for the misfortunes of society. Dehumanising propaganda has repeatedly been one of the most fundamental instruments of genocidal regimes and, in most cases, it gained sufficient popularity to have disastrous consequences as more or less conscious choices were made by the general population and the political elites to either ignore or attempt to appease such attitudes.
Indian discrimination patterns, furthermore, have already moved past the ideological plane: an independent activist hate crime tracker, whose attempts to report on the situation in the country were repeatedly shut down or censored, has highlighted at least 400 instances of mob violence against Muslims in the past four years. Tensions can be expected to continue rising as institutional authorities join in on the targeting of the religious group, as witnessable in the destruction of mosques and Muslim-owned businesses in northern Delhi and across other major urban hubs – claiming that they were illegally constructed while avoiding Hindu temples just a handful of meters away – which will destabilise communities and deepen the grievances between the confessions.
In fact, Muslims have reported increasing rates of discrimination; particularly in the North, the Pew Research Centre has found concerningly high rates – over 40% – of Muslims reporting such episodes of intolerance and violence. Surely such trend does not appear meaningless, as the Northern region of India borders the contested and highly volatile regions of Jammu and Kashmir, where the Muslim majority has been championing anti-Indian administration protests, for which they have been steadily targeted and condemned as terrorists. Last in an extensive list of similar instances was the closing of Srinagar’s main mosque following banned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Yasin Malik’s sentencing to life in prison on terrorism charges. Here, religious-ethnic aspects intertwine with geopolitical interests over the control of the region and with openly conflictual (Muslim) Pakistan, deepening the complexity and implications of actions taken by Indian authorities.
Attempts from independent international monitoring groups, such as Gregory Stanton’s non-profit Genocide Watch have been rare, but not absent, and have highlighted the gravity of the situation, which increasingly resembles the previous warnings issued for Rwanda in the 1990s and presently in Myanmar. Despite them, official international organisations and global player have followed Modi’s example, and remained silent, whether “distracted” by emergencies in other parts of the world or consciously unwilling to sour relations or pick a fight with the nuclear-armed pro-Western giant of Asia.
As such, for instance, India is, and stands to remain for the foreseeable future, the one of largest beneficiary of the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) trade conditions. The granting of preferential imports into the Union, which for India currently amount to a total value of over €11 billion, should supposedly remain conditional on the coherence of the favoured country’s policies to EU values. Requirements for the receival of GSP, according to EU Regulation No 978/2012, include the recipient country’s adherence to the fifteen core Human Rights and Labour Rights UN/ILO Conditions – first of which, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Clearly enough, Modi’s (lack of) action in response to the progressive setting of the conditions for such developments to take places cannot be called “preventive” of genocide, even though the country has officially ratified the convention.
Despite the increasing divergence of India from the ethical and legal principles of the EU, as well as their inconsistency with the sustainable environmental practices that have been made the core of the von der Leyen Commission’s policy approach, it seems highly unlikely that concessions be put into question or decreased. The Union’s executive hands remain mostly tied if it wants to be able to fulfil the 27 countries’ demand for cheap imports of chemicals, machinery, and textiles allowed by the slashing of custom duties and tariffs under GSP. The situation in India thus highlights the dual dimension of the EU’s action as a global player based on ideological advocacy for fairness and respect of humans rights until the same can prejudice its strategic and economic standing.
Looking at the current status of affairs, little remains to be done apart from wondering at which point the institutional discrimination will become violent enough for the Union to put an end to its silence, lest internationally broadcasting its hypocrisy.
Bibliography
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Sahgal, N., Evans, J., Ariana Monique Salazar, Kelsey Jo Starr, & Manolo Corichi. (2021, June 29). Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project website: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
Generalised Scheme of Preferences. (2018). Retrieved May 30, 2022, from Trade website: https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/development-and-sustainability/generalised-scheme-preferences_en
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By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
