With India’s elections in full swing, the victory of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party seems all but assured. That is dire news for religious minorities and anti-government critics in India, who are frequent targets for the violence and retaliatory incarceration of the Modi regime.
While Modi’s decision to call Muslims “infiltrators” in a campaign speech received attention in the West, the full extent of the prime minister's hate speech in the current election is not well known. Other recent speeches of his have promoted Islamophobic conspiracy theories, including the claim that Muslims are practicing a "Love Jihad." This is similar to racist notions in the U.S. depicting African-American men as sexual predators, and the “love jihad” claim has motivated killings of Muslim men throughout India. Modi has also described Muslims as “terrorists” who are conniving to steal the welfare benefits of caste-oppressed groups, and presented the opposition Congress Party as stealing Hindu money in order to give it to Muslims.
This kind of bigotry and persecution is not solely directed at Muslims. Last year, India's intelligence service allegedly launched two assassination attempts against Sikh activists in North America, ordering the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada last June and hiring a hitman in a failed effort to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a U.S. citizen who lives in New York. Nijjar's killing provoked a major crisis in Indo-Canadian relations, but the Washington Post reports that the Biden administration has sought to respond to the attempted assassination of Pannun "without risking a wider rupture with India" or directly implicating officials in Modi's government.
Americans should be aware that the spread of such ideas is much more than a faraway event in a remote country. When BJP leaders call for violence against religious minorities, the India-based relatives of American families are endangered. When Indian Americans raise millions of dollars for Modi and the BJP, and advocate for their policies in the halls of Congress, it helps to legitimize an authoritarian regime. This regime targets U.S. citizens and Indians alike. What goes on there has a profound impact on what goes on here — and vice versa.
As an Indian-American Muslim, I am deeply worried about my relatives in India. But I have also learned that the 4.4-million-strong Indian American diaspora, along with everyone else in the U.S., can be a force for good in the entwined future of our two countries.
I first began to get a sense of how the United States could stand up for human rights abroad in 2002. I was employed as an engineer at IBM at the time, and one day when I was at work, I started to receive call after call from my friends and relatives. Did I see, they wondered, what was happening in Gujarat?
Anti-Muslim riots had erupted across the north Indian state. At the end of a week of violence, Hindu nationalist mobs had killed an estimated 2,000 people, most of them Muslim Indians, and had destroyed hundreds of mosques and displaced more than 100,000 people.
Nishrin Hussain, an Indian-American community member from Delaware, lost her father, Ehsan Jafri. A prominent politician in Gujarat, he was burned alive by Hindu nationalist paramilitary groups during the pogrom. He had allegedly called Modi, who was then the state’s chief minister, begging for help before his death, but to no avail.
In the aftermath, more and more evidence piled up suggesting that Modi was at least partly culpable for the violence. Human Rights Watch and the British Foreign Office both suggested that Modi helped stoke religious tensions beforehand and ordered police not to stop the rioters.
The Gujarat violence shattered my perception of India. Though anti-Muslim violence has a long history in India, my birth country now seemed far more dangerous for my friends and family.
My allies and I set to work organizing across religious and political lines in the U.S., to make sure that the violence was not forgotten. After relentless advocacy, the State Department revoked Modi’s U.S. travel visa in 2005, in recognition of his complicity in the riots, banning him from setting foot in the U.S. for almost eight years.
That was a major victory, showing that Indian Americans could positively influence our country’s relationship with India. In subsequent years, my coalition has successfully blocked anti-Muslim ideologues from addressing American crowds and raised awareness about Islamophobia among Hindu nationalist organizations based in the U.S.
Once Modi became prime minister in 2014, however, his political fortunes in the U.S. began to turn. Modi had his visa privileges restored and, in 2023, received red-carpet treatment on a state visit for meetings with President Biden. As the U.S. seeks to bring India into a military and strategic alliance against China and Russia, the era of reliable, widespread criticism of Modi's government and its propensity for bigotry, discrimination and violence has come to an end.
In 2019, Modi hosted a Texas event with Donald Trump, helping to galvanize an increasingly influential U.S.-based Hindu nationalist movement. This movement’s most extreme proponents have hosted fundraisers in Texas to fund anti-minority violence in India and have paraded anti-Muslim hate symbols in New Jersey. Other factions have pursued subtler forms of influence, such as inserting Islamophobic language into an Illinois state legislative bill or hosting "yogathons" in an effort to whitewash the image of U.S.-based organizations with ties to Indian paramilitary groups.
In January, Indian Americans hosted a Times Square celebration for Modi’s consecration of a huge Hindu temple that had been built over the remains of an ancient mosque that was razed by mobs in 1992. Crowds in New York called for the takeover of two other historic mosques.
With India now the most populous nation in the world and by far its largest electoral democracy, with influence that extends worldwide, the U.S. has become yet another battleground for Hindu nationalism. If American citizens and our political leaders continue to court Modi and accept this poisonous ideology, the decision could come back to haunt us.
As mentioned above, Modi's government has reportedly targeted Sikh activists in the U.S. and Canada for assassination. Hindu nationalists issued numerous death threats to California state Sen. Aisha Wahhab, a Muslim of Afghan ancestry, after she introduced legislation aimed at combating caste discrimination in her state. A smear campaign orchestrated by an Indian intelligence officer was launched against my organization and our allies, Hindus for Human Rights, distributing dossiers full of misinformation in Congress. Indian Americans have lost their visas and resident cards for speaking out against the Modi regime.
If Modi and the BJP sweep the elections in India, as expected, we are likely we to see more transnational repression and more violence against Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other regime critics living in India. We can expect to see more Indians seeking refuge in North America. We can expect to see more division within the diaspora along lines of religious and nationalist identity.
But we will also see more and more vibrant, diverse and resilient resistance. We will see young people coming together to refuse the discredited propaganda of this brutal regime.
India stands at a crossroads, facing grave threats to its democracy, to the rights of minorities and to the separation of religion and government. Indian Americans of all backgrounds, along with other Americans who believe in democracy and human rights, need to stand up now to ensure our country takes the right path.
