Coronavirus in India (2/2): "Muslims are the scapegoats"

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

On Sunday May 17, India extended its confinement by two weeks. The second most populous country on the planet has been deeply shaken by the health crisis. Second part of the interview in two parts with Christophe Jaffrelot, specialist in South Asia and director of research at CERI-Sciences Po / CNRS.

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At a standstill since the end of March, India extended Sunday by two weeks, until May 31, the national containment put in place to fight against the epidemic
of coronavirus, while the number of confirmed cases of contamination in the country exceeds 90,000. Experts say the peak of the epidemic will not be reached until June-July. The scale of the Covid-19 health crisis has both revealed and worsened, say experts, the age-old fragility of Indian society where the neoliberalism of decision-makers is widening the gap between the rich and the poor. In its fight to contain the virus, the Indian federal government has been accused of having imposed its decisions in an often brutal manner and of not having taken financial accompanying measures to the height of the upheavals caused by the pandemic.

RFI: The drama of Indian interior migrants traveling hundreds of kilometers on foot, with children and luggage, made the headlines in the international press. What does this abandonment of the most fragile, most vulnerable sections say about the leadership of the Indian federal government ?

Christophe Jaffrelot: There too, the crisis acts as a revealer. While faced with the crisis, some have put aid plans on the table, the federal government, until mid-May, has implemented only a very small "package" representing 0, 8% of GNP. On May 13, he shifted into high gear by announcing a plan valued at 10% of GNP. Perhaps it is changing. But until then he seemed to be a prisoner of the "less state" philosophy. This philosophy is one of the pillars of Hindu nationalism, the ideology of Narendra Modi, the idea according to which the company is first and the State an artificial institution which one fears besides the efforts to reform the company (and the make it more egalitarian in particular). Hence the invitation that Narendra Modi sent to rich families to take care of each of them, nine poor families, thus suggesting that the State would not do so. And this, not only because the state lacks resources, but also because the philosophy of at least one state has a societal component linked to the Hindu and neo-liberal nationalist ideology which dates back to the Liberalization in 1991: we have since observed a bias aimed at making the State lose weight, by privatizing sectors hitherto considered to be public services, starting with education and health. Despite high economic growth and even double-digit growth rates in some years, very few resources have been invested in the social sector.

Were there not advances in the 2000s in this area with laws such as the "Right to Food Act" or the "Right to Education Act" education ”) or NREGA (1) ?

Between 2004 and 2014, under the Congress government led by an economist, Manmohan Singh, significant investments were indeed made in the fields of education and rural employment where the NREGA represented up to 0.7 % of GNP in certain years. These expenses were partly intended to compensate for the liberalization policy that Manmohan Singh had initiated in 1991: they went hand in hand with the passing of laws which, by playing on flexible employment, gradually made workers more precarious. The objective of this informalisation was in particular to attract foreign investors by promising them cheap labor. With Narendra Modi and his party the Bharatiya Janata Party (the Indian People's Party - BJP) at the helm, India has gone even further in the same direction. Today, we are even witnessing in the states that the party leads (Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh etc.) a real dismantling of labor law.

The drama of internal migrants reminds us that India is a poor country where almost half of the population lives on 1.3 dollars a day. How to explain that we had forgotten this reality, when the poor were still there ?

The poor were still there, but government communicators had managed to mask this reality, with the complicity of Westerners placing their hopes in a more economically liberal India - notably to counterbalance China. The emergence of India, driven by a sector symbol of modernity - information technology - had thus made us forget the armada of laborers and day laborers who survive in the shade of buildings in big cities, by exercising small trades. I tried to measure the importance of this “  hidden side  ” of the so-called “Indian miracle” in 2012 in my book,India : the reverse of power  (2). But few people wanted to see that Indian growth was not accompanied by real development, especially in France, a country which seeks to become a strategic partner of "  the greatest democracy in the world  ". The scenes of migrants massed in stations and terminals, or the image of these men and women walking by the thousands on the main roads that connect the States of the Union to return to their villages of origin, bring us back, as we as said, to the stereotypes of a destitute and hungry India that still prevailed in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, as an important report (3) published last year shows, the liberalization of economy in 1991 contributed to widening social inequalities, instead of reducing them. Between the 2011 and 2012 and 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, it was observed for the first time since these statistical surveys an increase in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line. The Covid-19 crisis will add millions of poor people to an already fragile population.

Activists say the pandemic is also intensifying Islamophobia in India, with social media and the media denouncing a so-called " coronajihad ". Isn't this anti-Muslim hatred the real time bomb facing Indian democracy ?

Here too, the Covid-19 crisis acts as a revealer and a “particle accelerator” by amplifying older trends. As I showed in India by Modi  (4), the country is on the way to becoming an ethnic democracy where minorities are swallowed up as second-class citizens, while the Hindu majority becomes the embodiment of the nation. This is reminiscent of the Israeli trajectory, and, in fact, the concept of "ethnic democracy" was born in Israel. The Covid-19 crisis exacerbated this trend, firstly because Muslims served as scapegoats. A meeting of members of the Tablighi-i-Jama'at, a community founded in 1927 in India, in Delhi, was presented by the authorities and in the media as a decisive factor in the spread of the virus in India. The media and social networks have taken over from the political parties here to stigmatize the Tablighis, when they found nothing wrong with the meetings organized as part of Hindu religious ceremonies, which were just as massive, however. Hostility to Islam has increased in recent months to the point that Muslims are denied access to certain hospitals, certain neighborhoods, certain villages, or even boycotted Muslim merchants in certain markets, when these are not literally lynched on a real suspicion or a fantasy of contamination.

What is at stake ?

The Covid-19 crisis only amplified a latent trend. The rejection of Muslims moreover crossed a milestone in 2019 when the Indian Parliament adopted the law known as CAA for "Citizenship Amendment Act" prohibiting the access to Indian citizenship to the Muslim refugees coming from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and from Pakistan. This law poses the question of the place of Muslims in the Indian Republic, a subject which I approach in my book The India of Modi , whose subtitle is besides “  national-populism and ethnic democracy   ” given that the BJP has made the fight against the Islamic threat one of its favorite themes. If for several years we have witnessed a change in Indian democracy where the Hindu majority imposes its law on minorities on the way to becoming second-class citizens, the amplification of the phenomenon linked to the health crisis has recently led the Saudis and the Emiratis to make an official approach with New Delhi, through the Organization of the Islamic conference (OIC), to protest against "  Indian Islamophobia  ". This approach is a first on the part of these Muslim countries. It was interpreted as a serious warning by New Delhi, forcing Narendra Modi to crack a press release recalling that the virus had no religion or race, in order to ease tensions in the country.

Could the chaotic management of the pandemic cost the federal government the election, whose observers have stressed the insensitivity to social distress, the lack of preparation and the brutality ? Who would internal migrants vote for in the next legislative elections ?

It's very difficult to say! Before the 2019 elections, many observers predicted that the BJP would fall into the polls because of the poor economic record of the first Modi government. And then a punitive military expedition against Pakistan largely contributed to re-elect the outgoing team following a remarkably efficient and richly funded electoral campaign where Modi played on the nationalist and security fiber. The strength of the Hindu nationalists in power is precisely their ability to play on the fear of the other by showing their muscles, like other national-populist regimes that thrive around the world. Will Narendra Modi's BJP be able to repeat this operation in 2024? It is of course too early to say, but it is not impossible, because this government seems to escape all "accountability". Everything happens as if he were not accountable for his failures. It is the magic of populism, which one finds in the United States also it seems: the identity and security discourse prevails over everything else. Besides, Narendra Modi no longer engages in “policies” (“  public policies  ”), he only does “politics”, political politics. It hardly promises development anymore, and suddenly we cannot blame it for not keeping its promises. I would say that it is situated on a “higher” or stratospheric plane which escapes the contingencies of the conjuncture. In a sense, he is trying to sell the dream, as his recent decision to send army helicopters spilling rose petals over Covid-19 hospitals across the country has shown. Modi plays a score full of symbols. The result of this emotion-based communication strategy is the permanent spectacle. For now, the show continues to seduce. It looks like a never-ending Bollywood film where the hero is not only a strong man, but also a superman. But if he emerges unscathed from the current crisis, this will of course not be the case for his country and he could end up paying the price.

► To read also: Coronavirus in India (1/2) : “ a time bomb ? "

(1) Promulgated under the government of Congress in 2005-2006, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) guarantees 100 working days per year to poor and rural families in the country.
(2) India, the other side of power: inequalities and revolts, by Christophe Jaffrelot. CNRS éditions, Paris, 2012
(3) This is the income report published every 5 years by the National Sample Survey (NSS) based on household surveys.
(4)  India of Modi: national-populism and ethnic democracy , by Christophe Jaffrelot. Fayard, 2019.

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