My father came to the UK from India in 1957 and made this his home until he died in 1999. He was born in a small town called Hadiabad in Punjab and later went on to study at a college in Lahore, now in partitioned Pakistan. As a young student, he had two passions, one to get the Brits out of his country and two, to try and ensure that India was not partitioned. He and many of his friends including his Muslim friends who succeeded on the first count and failed on the second. This led to communal violence on a scale which resulted in the deaths of some 500000 people.
When India gained its independence, the founding fathers created the world’s largest democracy and built a nation from a diversity of religions, ethnicities and geographies all underpinned by a groundbreaking secular constitution. My father would speak of this with immense pride. India has a population of 1.3 billion with 79% Hindu and 15% Muslim, totalling two hundred million and the rest being Sikhs and Christians. The current Indian Muslim population represents the second largest in the world.
Since the election of Modi’s BJP party, there has been a significant rise in both Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim violence, all with a nod and a wink from Modi to his acolytes such as the RSS, (Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh) a sort of “brown shirts” of Modi’s BJP. This group has tens of millions of members with a single war cry that the Hindu faith and culture are in danger. Sounds odd as Hindus make up 79% of the population. My father also talked of the RSS as I grew up but only with great disdain.
The anti-Muslim violence and sectarianism have taken many forms, such as lynching Muslims who have allegedly broken restrictions on the slaughter of the holy cow, proscribing Halal meat, banning veils in schools and restricting calls to prayer. A new imagined conspiracy is known as the “love jihad” which propagates that Muslim men are marrying Hindu women with the single objective of converting them to Islam. At the lunatic fringe of the BJP, members call for the expulsion of Muslims. Even some so-called Hindu religious leaders have joined in with extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric. All this mixture of violence and demonisation of Muslims is dangerous and growing, all done with the tassid approval of the ruling party. Mr. Modi is playing with fire and is lucky that there has been no significant pushback by Indian Muslims. If there is a push back and with Isis floating in the region who knows what could happen, that is terrifying. Add to that an opposition that is fractured, weak, and with no real future-facing message, it seems that Mr. Modi will be in the driving seat for some time yet.
I am aware that Hindus here of which I am not one, (I am an Atheist) talk about Modi as some sort of Hindu hero. My father if alive today, would be ashamed of India’s trajectory. He died a Hindu believing in the principle of Sanatana Dharma, Dharma meaning duty. These duties include maintaining peace, harmony and serving your needy fellow human beings, all underpinned by moral and spiritual responsibility. I can proudly say my father Ram Sarup Sharma lived by these principles and where he fell short, he was happy to be reprimanded by my mother Sudershan. It was he who first quoted Martin Luther King Jnr to me, with a slight change, “I have a dream that one the day we will live in a nation where you will not be judged by the colour of your skin or religion but by the content of your character.”
I would advise Mr. Modi who has illiberal tendencies, not to destroy this flawed yet ground-breaking democratic experiment that is India, because the pyre he may create will consume not just the people of India but India as a unitary state.
Let us know what you think in the comments section👇
Suneil Sharma
June 2022
The Gob 
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