Modi: an Islamophobe on your way

India has in recent times become the world’s fifth largest economy with GDP amounting to 2.3 trillion euros. Last year’s economic growth was 6% thanks to structural reforms and its global position as a second largest agricultural exporter after China.

The creation of Pakistan in 1947 through partition with India was mainly due to religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslim minority that remained in India after partition was able to live mostly in harmony through the efforts of Gandhi and Nehru, who ruled the country from its independence from Britain until 1964.

On 11 December, India’s government passed a legislative reform that allowed tens of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to access Indian nationality even though they have entered the country illegally. However, on one condition: that they are not Muslims. Considering that Islam is the majority religion in these three neighbouring countries, the new law is cause for alarm: it is clearly segregationist. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP, defends itself by insisting that what it seeks is to protect is religious minorities fleeing those countries. Given Narendra Modi’s background on these issues, it should come as no surprise. The U.S. denied entry to the current Indian Prime Minister for years because of his responsibility when he was minister of the state of Gujarat for having brutally suppressed protests by the Muslim population in 2002, a crackdown that left a thousand dead.

Modi’s BJP party has a highly Hindu dialectic, and this is not the first step aimed at favouring this religious group. In India, about 14% of the population are Muslim, which amounts to more than 130 million people who feel threatened by Modi’s laws. Similar fears rose after the passage of a law prohibiting the slaughter of cows by the Muslim population. Protests against this measure left thousands dead and the parties were never reconciled, and nor was guilt was assumed.

The populist discourse that travels the world from the White House to Westminster and from Brasilia to Rome, has found in New Delhi a very important breeding ground, where a populist leader is taking advantage of the improvement of the economy to build a wall of discrimination towards a religious minority.

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