Muslims are experiencing increasingly difficult times in India. This great country has been ruled by the Hindu nationalist BJP under Narendra Modi for ten years, and another five years are on the way.

Actually send Narendra Modi his party officials for anti-Muslim tirades. But then the Prime Minister of India took the microphone himself. Indian Muslims are “invaders,” he shouted at a campaign rally in his home state of Gujarat. If India's main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, comes to power, it will confiscate Hindu wealth and distribute it to communities that “have too many children.” It was a veiled reference to Muslims. For decades, Hindus in India have held the stereotype that Muslim families have more children than their own.

General elections in India begin on April 19; voting took place across the state for weeks. There will be voting until June 4 and the election campaign will continue. However, only the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is likely to give popular Prime Minister Modi a third five-year term, has a chance of winning the election. So far, Modi has always appeared as a statesman – although he has always let the BJP agitators have their way. That changes now.

On another occasion, Modi said that the Congress Party was calling on Muslims to undertake an “electoral jihad” – that is, a holy war with the ballot: “The terrorists in Pakistan are fighting jihad against them. India call. And here the Congress Party has declared a voting jihad against the BJP and asked followers of a particular religion to vote against Modi.”

Indian parliamentary elections: Week-long voting in all states

It is not clear why the Prime Minister himself is now an agitator. Victory was certain for him. But he may fear falling short of his goal of a two-thirds majority that the BJP coalition could use to change India's secular constitution. According to media reports, voter turnout was lower compared to the last voting in 2019, and euphoria was low. But the Congress Party lags far behind in opinion polls. Like two dozen other parties, it belongs to a center-left opposition alliance called INDIA, short for “Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance.” But even together, INDIA's parties have almost no chance against the coalition led by the BJP, which has been in power since 2014.

In general, the BJP and Modi are hiding their Islamophobia less and less – and are not being deterred from doing so. The General Election Commission (KPU) has so far shown little interest in recruiting them. India's Western international partners have also been silent on the dangers posed by Modi's authoritarian tendencies to the country's democracy. Critics have long accused the prime minister of centralizing power and obstructing the judiciary and media.

Indian Muslims: Increasingly marginalized and discriminated against

Most of India's 200 million Muslim population have never been BJP supporters. According to the BBC, only eight percent of them voted for Modi's party in the last election in 2019. Since then, in regional elections, they have increasingly voted as one against the BJP – and voted for their opponents, no matter who they are: party landscape India is so diverse and regionalized that many parties only run in certain states, but can certainly have a majority there.

correspondent from New York Times and the BBC cited reports by Muslims in the north of the country that included anecdotes about their children being excluded from school or apartment owners refusing to rent houses to Muslims. None of this existed before. India is a multiethnic country; There is a tradition of relaxed coexistence – which still exists in the liberal south. But since the BJP first came to power in 2014, things have slowly changed, especially in the north. Hinduism has informally become the state religion. Nearly 80 percent of India's population is Hindu.

Indian Society: The Growing Divide Between Hindus and Muslims

Aggression by radical Hindus against Muslims in their country is also increasing. Right-wing organizations began provoking sectarian clashes with the rise of the BJP, while the government took the opposite action: Hindu mobs lynched Muslims simply on suspicion of being beef traders. Cows are sacred animals in Hinduism. Social media spread a conspiracy theory known as “love jihad”, which claims that Muslim men specifically lure women to convert them to Islam.

Prejudice against large families is also used politically. Therefore, the BJP is fueling fears of future Muslim demographic domination in India, said Archana Venkatesh of Clemson University in the US state of South Carolina. Since the end of the colonial period and the partition of British India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, “the idea of ​​Muslim hyperfertility that was already present in the minds of decision makers in India has only grown stronger,” wrote Venkathesh. “But such fears are unfounded. The Muslim minority has grown from eleven percent in the mid-1980s to 14 percent today. But their representation in parliament has fallen from nine percent in the mid-1980s to five percent today.”

Modi has now emphasized that he did not explicitly target Muslims in his speech. But his words – recorded and distributed throughout the country – were understood the same way, from all sides.