Covid-19, communalism, and Islamophobia: India facing the disease

ABSTRACT

As threats to human security, epidemics cause fear and anxiety, thus generating conspiracy theories, fake news, and discrimination. In 2020, the most widespread xenophobic reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic was Sinophobia. In comparison, India’s response to the pandemic was both conventional and exceptional. Like other countries, India recorded a surge in Sinophobia; but –remarkably– in Islamophobia too. Turning to both history and theory, this paper investigates how Coronavirus got transformed into a ‘Muslim disease’ and connected to narratives of holy war and Islamization (‘Corona Jihad’). We contextualize the 2020 Covid-related Islamophobic wave within a longer process of demonization of the Muslim that is catalysed by the beliefs and policies of Hindu nationalism. In light of Muslims’ continuing relegation to the fringe of the Indian body-politic, we propose an interpretation of the 2020 disease-induced Islamophobia as scapegoating, based on René Girard’s mimetic theory. In conclusion, the case of Covid-19 in India confirms that in divided societies collective threats like epidemics are likely to exacerbate already existing forms of discrimination rooted in the society’s mainstream memory and norms, and highlights the role of beliefs in mediating between threat and violence. This case study also highlights the deep penetration of communal discourse in India’s everydayness and its far-reaching implications.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• Islamophobia
• Covid-19
• scapegoat
• Girard
• Corona Jihad‌

Introduction: beliefs, disease, and fear

Besides the loss of lives and economic stasis, outbreaks of infectious diseases cause fear and anxiety at both the individual and collective levels. People fall victim not only to the disease, but also to false information, conspiracy theories, and discrimination (Irwin, 2008; Nelkin & Gilman, 1988). The nexus between disease, fear, and otherization has been widely recorded across disciplines since ‘throughout history, societies have created scapegoats by blaming otherwise innocent people in order to rationalize and explain the origins and course of disease outbreaks’. Notably, ‘religious, ethnic, political, economic, and sexual prejudices all factor into the process of scapegoating, and these affiliations are not mutually exclusive’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 618). This means that the impact of epidemics on society is likely to reinforce the latter’s existing cleavages and norms.

Collective reactions to the disease, including when state-led, often proved detrimental to marginalized groups. In late nineteenth-century San Francisco, for example, health authorities ‘rationalised the failure of their sanitary programs by tracing all epidemic outbreaks to living conditions among the Chinese’ (Trauner, 1978, p. 70). In 1914 plague-hit Dakar, ‘la peste … raffermit dans leurs positions les partisans de la ségrégation résidentielle entre Noirs et Blancs’¹ (M’Bokolo, 1982, p. 44). Similarly, in twenty-first-century post-SARS Shenzhen, public health professionals conceived of migrants as ‘biological noncitizens’ and ‘a population to be sacrificed’ (Mason, 2012, p. 114, 126). Frequent recourse to a medicalized discourse –one configuring in ‘disease’ terms the alleged danger marginal groups pose to an ‘otherwise healthy’ society – bears witness to the impulse of purging these groups from the body politic (Markel & Stern, 2002; Fairchild, 2004; Ticktin, 2017).

Beliefs are what enables disease-induced fear to be directed towards such groups. Thus, ideological and conspirative understandings of a disease outbreak are often a reflection of the cultural and political climate of their times. For instance, Eamon’s analysis of a sixteenth-century aetiology of syphilis finds it to be influenced by the Counter-Reformist ethics of the time (Eamon, 1998, p. 31). Examples of prejudice-based blaming on the backdrop of an epidemic abound. One such example is the already mentioned plague outbreak in San Francisco during which, McClain (1988) argues, health authorities’ response betrayed racial superiority and Sinophobia. Similarly, such deep-seated belief associating Chinese customs with disease re-surfaced in the scapegoating of New York City’s Chinatown following the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s (Eichelberger, 2007). White exposes the link between US political and media discourses around leprosy on the one hand and anti-immigration/nativist beliefs on the other (White, 2010). Studies focusing on Ebola demonstrated that fear of the disease was correlated to specific beliefs, e.g. that Ebola-related xenophobia indexed higher levels of individualism (Kim et al., 2016, p. 941), or that risk perception was ‘positively associated with levels of prejudice toward African immigrants’ (Prati & Pietrantoni, 2016, p. 2006). Correspondingly, Benton and Dionne (2015) show that a worldview shaped by the legacy of slave trade, colonialism, civil wars, and hetero-directed neoliberalism influenced West African authorities’ and citizens’ reactions to the Ebola crisis. Reny and Barreto (2022) find that the rhetoric that in 2020 racialized Covid-19 in the US ‘activated pre-existing xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment’, translating them into behaviors (p. 16). Their case study confirms ‘the “othering” hypothesis’, i.e. that ‘mass understanding of the disease can become merged with prejudice toward a stigmatized group framed as responsible for the disease’ (p. 2).

In this paper, we argue that beliefs played a critical role in directing collective fear also in Covid-19-hit India, specifically in placing blame for the disease on the country’s Muslim minority. In order to understand how in 2020 Indian Muslims got blamed for the spreading of Covid-19, we analyse the otherization of the Muslim in contemporary India vis-à-vis Girard’s mimetic theory of the ‘Scapegoat’.

Covid-19 in India: from ‘Chinese virus’ to ‘Muslim disease’

While spreading across the globe, Covid-19 carried along a wave of anti-Chinese and anti-East Asian sentiments and behaviors. At first sight, these were motivated by the fact that the centre of the virus outbreak was in China. However, they also played on long-standing and widespread stereotypes of the Chinese as dirty and all-eaters (Roberto et al., 2020, p. 369; Ng, 2021; Sakki & Castrén, 2022, pp. 12–13; Gao, 2022, pp. 473–479). Discourses about the pandemic got also enmeshed in contemporary geopolitics, thus echoing the Sinophobia stemming from traditional powers’ discomfort with growing Chinese assertiveness in international affairs (Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, 2020; Zhao, 2020).

India was not immune to this wave of anti-Chinese sentiment. In the country, like elsewhere, reference to the disease as the ‘China virus’ became mainstream. Anti-Chinese incidents took place. Echoing US conspiracy theorists, some Indians declared that the ‘Chinese disease’ was being used as a form of biological warfare (“Ensure Strict Compliance of Treaty on Banning Biological Weapons: India”, 2020; Kunal, 2020; Jia, 2020; Kewalramani, 2020). Like elsewhere, Sinophobic sentiments were caused by a belief that China was the place of origin of the disease, whose containment the Chinese government had mismanaged (Kewalramani, 2020). Besides, in India Covid-related Sinophobia landed on ground already fertile for anti-Chinese attitudes, widespread among the population and the political class, and rooted in the memory of the 1962 Indo-China War, following border skirmishes, and the ongoing rivalry between the two Asian countries over influence in South Asia. These feelings escalated further in mid-June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, following violent clashes between the Chinese and Indian Armies on the Himalayan Line of Actual Control (Safi et al., 2020). Furthermore, in India Covid-related anti-East Asian racism extended to North-East Indians. Their Mongoloid traits liken them to the Chinese in the imagination of most Indians. Earlier called with China-related racial slurs like ‘Chinky’, following the virus outbreak they were being called ‘Corona’ and were even physically assaulted (Haokip, 2021). In short, in the throes of the pandemic, also India turned to Sinophobia.

While in its anti-Chinese reaction Indian public opinion was not different from that of other countries, it also proved ‘exceptionally’ xenophobic, as the country recorded a surge in Islamophobia as well. At first sight, the latter trend appears unconnected with the pandemic: Indian Muslims do not bear the ‘Chinese-ness’ that, in the other cases, was imagined (however wrongly) to be connecting other victims of discrimination with the virus. To understand India’s Islamophobic reaction to the individual and collective anxieties caused by Covid-19, let us establish the facts that demonstrated a display of Islamophobia in the first place.

The event at the centre of the controversy was a three-day congregation of the Tablighi Jamaat, a revivalist Islamic group, founded in 1926 in India and today active across the globe. The meeting was attended from 13 to 15 March 2020 by members of the Jamaat coming from both India and overseas (countries included Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, South Africa, and more) (“379 Indonesians among Foreigners from 40 Countries Attended Tablighi Jamaat Gathering: Sources,”, 2020). They gathered in Nizamuddin Markaz, a mosque located in India’s capital city New Delhi. Hosting the headquarters of the Nizamuddin section of the Jamaat, in May 2020 the Markaz was evacuated and closed. The congregation took place at the beginning of the country’s Covid outbreak when 82 active cases and two deaths had been reported (Worldometer, 2020). The event received vast coverage, often in abusive terms, through news outlets and social media –including Facebook and WhatsApp groups, key platforms for political communication in India (Farooq, 2017; Narayanan et al., 2019)– depicting Muslims as ‘super-spreaders’ and traitors of the nation.

The digital human rights group Equity Labs recorded that between 28 March and 3 April 2020 Tweets with the hashtag #CoronaJihad appeared nearly 300,000 times with a potential outreach of 165 million users (Perrigo, 2020). Other trending hashtags included #NizamuddinIdiots and #Covid-786, 786 being a number that carries a religious meaning for Muslims (“Coronavirus: Islamophobia Concerns after India Mosque Outbreak”, 2020). Then Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi called the congregation a ‘Talibani crime’. Many Indian television news channels that feed on communal reporting flashed headlines such as ‘Save the country from Corona Jihad’ and ‘Who is the villain of Nizamuddin?’ (Ibid.). As a consequence, the virus got communalized, effectively turning into a ‘Muslim disease’. The communalization was such that in Karnataka some Muslim youth were assaulted with cricket bats while distributing food to the poor (The Quint, 2020). Similar incidents occurred in other states of India. For instance, in outer Delhi’s village of Harewali, a young man who returned after attending the congregation was beaten up by a mob accusing him of being part of a conspiracy aimed at spreading Coronavirus (Dayal & Manral, 2020). In Punjab, gurudwaras’ loudspeakers broadcast messages prohibiting people from buying milk from Muslim dairy farmers, claiming it was infected with the disease (Gettleman et al., 2020). Numerous fake videos started circulating, claiming that Muslims were encouraged ‘not to wear masks, not to practice social distancing, not to worry about the virus at all’ (Ibid.). Another clip gone viral showed a vegetable seller allegedly coughing on the produce to infect it and spread the disease (Chandra, 2020).

According to the Government of India, as of 18 April 2020, out of the country’s 14,378 Covid-19 cases, more than 4,000 were linked to the congregation (Chandna, 2020). At the same time, Lav Aggarwal, then Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in a press briefing declared: ‘Nearly 29.8 per cent of the country’s total Covid-19 cases are linked to the Markaz cluster incident. The attendees to the congregation have affected people in a total of 23 states and union territories’ (Ibid.). As tension brew, in mid-April 2020, in a LinkedIn post Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote: ‘COVID-19 does not see race, religion, color, caste, creed, language or border before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together’ (“PM Modi Says Covid-19 Does Not See Race, Religion, Colour, Caste and Creed”, 2020). However, many of his party’s members were evidently of a different opinion. Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament Ajay Nishad stated that all attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat Markaz should be dealt with as ‘terrorists’ for spreading the virus (Jha, 2020). Referring to the link between Covid-19 and the congregation, Joint General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS) Manmohan Vaidya claimed that ‘Figures tell the truth’, that is to say, the Tablighi Jamaat members had been ‘exposed’ in their anti-national intents (“Figures Tell Truth’: RSS Leader On Virus Cases After Delhi Mosque Event”, 2020). Member of Parliament and BJP leader Shobha Karandlaje went to the extent of declaring she could smell ‘Corona Jihad’ (“Tablighi Event: Shobha Smells ‘Corona Jihad”, 2020).

Islamophobia, social distancing, and double standards

Once the Tablighi congregation attracted attention, in an attempt of escaping the police, its attendees fled into hiding in other areas of Delhi and in neighboring states, thus delaying contact tracing and further reinforcing conspiracists’ suspicion that an evil scheme was at play. However, when the congregation took place, no formal capping on gatherings had been introduced yet. On 6 March, the Indian Health Ministry had invited all states to avoid large meetings. The day before, Modi had announced he would have refrained from celebrating Holi (a Hindu festival), as a way to encourage citizens toward social distancing (Sud & Sharma, 2020).

Most importantly, the Tablighis’ was not the only mass congregation taking place in the country amidst the Covid-19 outbreak and following the government’s alert against large gatherings. In fact, many other gatherings took place from early March to late June and beyond, going comparatively under-reported and without producing public outcry, while equally posing a risk of virus transmission. Remarkably, these events had no Muslim coloring. When of religious nature, as was often the case, they were mostly Hindu events. For example, in March, the yearly Hindu festival of Attukal Pongala took place in Kerala. Every year women gather in hundreds of thousands in Thiruvananthapuram, the state’s capital, standing for hours side by side under the sun to ritually prepare and offer pongala, rice cooked in earthen pots. While Kerala’s Covid cases were on the rise, the festival went ahead (“6 Foreigners Sent Back from Attukal Pongala amid COVID-19 Outbreak”, 2020; “Lakhs Celebrate Attukal Pongala amid Coronavirus Fears; 6 Foreigners Sent Back”, 2020). Meanwhile, in Punjab’s holy city of Anandpur Sahib, the Sikhs celebrated Holla Mohalla, a festival of Khalsa martiality attracting crowds from across the state as well as the diaspora. Neither the Punjab state government nor the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee (the body governing Sikh shrines) suspended the program. The 2020 Holla Mohalla soon proved to be a hotspot, highlighting the lack of both basic preventive measures and political will to cancel a highly popular event. A granthi (preacher) who had attended the crowded event having freely travelled from Europe (including Italy, at that time the worst affected country in the world after China, based on official data) died of Covid soon after, having provenly infected others (Tur, 2020; “Coronavirus: India ‘super Spreader’ Quarantines 40,000 People”, 2020).

On 14 March, while the Tablighis were gathering in Nizamuddin, elsewhere in Delhi Swami Chakrapani Maharaj, head of the Hindu Mahasabha (Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha) organized a public ‘gaumatra drinking party’ where a drink of cow urine, curd, and other substances was consumed publicly and offered to attendees and passers-by. The drinking party hosted a banner depicting the Coronavirus as a lion-head multi-armed monster, resembling demons of Hindu iconography – surrounded by cartoons of Chinese-looking faces depicted while eating various animals and saying ‘Save us Corona’ (“Coronavirus: Group Hosts ‘Cow Urine Party’, Says COVID-19 Due to Meat-Eaters”, 2020). Earlier the Swami had declared that Om Namah Shivaya chanting, cow urine drinking, application of cow dung, and special yagna are valid cures for the virus (“Coronavirus Can Be Treated by Cow Urine, Dung: Hindu Mahasabha President”, 2020; “Coronavirus in India: Can Cow Dung and Urine Help Cure the Novel Coronavirus?”, 2020).

On 22 March, Modi asked Indians to observe a curfew (called Janata curfew, i.e. people’s curfew) throughout the day until 5 pm, an attempt to officially introduce the concept of social distancing into India’s collective response to the outbreak (Modi, 2020). Incidentally, this was one of a series of initiatives designed to build a sense of ‘unity’ and hope within the country during the ongoing ‘war’ against the virus that were communicated to Indians via frequent broadcasts of the PM addressing the nation.² While thousands delighted in sharing their participation in support of the government on social media, daily wagers were left to face the sudden lack of income, food, and housing on their own. Millions of migrant workers had to embark on a desperate internal mass migration back to their villages, via whichever mean available and often on foot; in a bid for survival and in the indifference of most, including government authorities who intervened late with an inadequate social transfer scheme. Obviously, social distancing was neither a priority nor of easy implementation (Duflo & Banerjee, 2020; Ranjan, 2020). As far as the Janata curfew was concerned, sadly enough, on the same day after 5 pm citizens across the country flocked to the streets in mass to engage in group parades and dances, celebrating the curfew and, at the same time, defying the purpose of the same (“Social Distancing Forgotten, Country Raises a Racket at 5 Pm”, 2020).

Towards the end of March, with the national infection rate still rising and Modi declaring a 3-week nationwide lockdown starting from the 24th of the month, yet another of the major Hindu festivals dotting the Indian calendar approached. Ram Navami Mela is a massive fair celebrating the Hindu god Ram in the city of Ayodhya, in the Northern State of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous one and home to a sizeable Muslim population. Ayodhya has a special significance for some Hindus, who consider it the birthplace of the god, thus a holy city. It has also acquired a dreadful significance in Indian politics due to its history of religious violence. Hindu nationalists agitated for decades to obtain the demolishment of a sixteenth-century mosque (Babri Masjid) considered to have been built on the ground where the original Ram temple previously existed (Ram Janam Bhoomi, lit. Ram’s birth land). In 1992, the clashes culminated in its forceful demolition at the hands of mobs mobilized by extremist Hindu organizations known under the umbrella term of Sangh Parivar. The latter includes the RSS, a radical Hindu organization linked to the BJP by not only ideological filiation but also overlapping membership of many key political figures, including Modi. The 1992 demolition was among the worst events of communal violence in the history of India. It came to represent the progressive expansion of intolerant political Hinduism, reconquering Indian soil literally and metaphorically, to the detriment of the country’s secular tradition and via the elimination of its Muslim historical and cultural component. A few months before Covid hit India and the world, on 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court had delivered its final judgment on the controversy, ordering the contended plot of land be assigned to a to-be-formed trust to build the Ram temple. This is why the Ram Navami Mela acquired in 2020 even more importance: as the first festival edition to take place on officially re-appropriated Janam Bhoomi following the Court’s imprimatur, it was a symbol of victory for the political forces involved and their electoral base. This possibly explains why the event (24 March – 2 April 2020) was not cancelled. Instead, to prevent the usual mass gatherings, the local authorities invited the public to refrain from travelling to attend the festival. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, took part in the last day’s functions culminating in the idol placement that inaugurated the temple’s erection. Surrounded by another twenty people (unmasked and unprotected) he also spoke inviting citizens to respect Covid-related safety norms (“On First Day of Nationwide Lockdown, Adityanath Attends Ram Navami Event in Ayodhya”, 2020).

As late as June, at the height of the virus outbreak, with more than 180 thousand of active cases nationwide and the infection curve still rising, another mass gathering took place in the Eastern state of Odisha: the Rath Yatra of Puri, a yearly parade of the idol of the Hindu god Jagannath. Remarkably, the event had been initially declared unviable by the Supreme Court, in observance of the social distancing measures valid since 17 May and extended on the 30th (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2020). The court, however, was asked to reconsider the case and eventually approved it so that, with some preventive testing, the festival went ahead (Das, 2020).

The infractions of gatherings limitations and norms of social distancing were many more; providing a complete timeline is beyond the scope of this paper. The examples mentioned, however, suffice to demonstrate that the infamous Tablighi gathering that took place at the beginning of the Indian outbreak was certainly not the only event defying the extant rules thus posing a risk to public health. Yet only this event was sensationalized and attributed evil intentions. The intense and hateful media coverage it received compared to other gatherings – that received approval from the relevant authorities and indifference from the public opinion instead – as well as the incidents involving random Indians of Islamic faith highlight double standards and confirm that Islamophobia was indeed one of India’s first responses to the pandemic.

Last but not least, a few months later, the congregating Tablighis were acknowledged as ‘scapegoats’ in a judicial case. Following the congregation at the Markaz, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India, instructed to track down, screen, quarantine and deport the foreign attendees of the congregation. States such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and others traced these individuals and placed them under quarantine. On 2 April, 960 foreigners from 36 different countries got blacklisted for violation of their visas under The Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Disaster Management Act, 2005 (Nizamuddin Markaz: 960 Foreigners Blacklisted for Attending Tablighi Jamaat, 2020). Thirty-four foreign nationals challenged in front of the Supreme Court of India the Union government’s decision to blacklist and prevent them from travelling to India for the next ten years. The Court invited the petitioners to make individual representations before the concerned authorities (Tablighi Jamaat: Supreme Court Says Blacklisted Foreign Nationals can Approach Concerned Authorities, 2020). On August 21, judging on three petitions filed by 29 foreigners and six Indians, the Bombay High Court declared that the Government of India acted with ‘malice’ and under political compulsion, and the foreigners attending the Tablighi congregation became a ‘scapegoat’ for the state of calamity caused by the pandemic (Bombay High Court, 2020). Thus, even the judges recognized that panic-ridden India, compelled by the then so-called ‘China virus’, had effectively turned its own Muslims into a scapegoat.

Muslims: India’s Girardian scapegoat

In early 2020, from daily routines to national and international ecosystems, a Covid-19 pandemic wiped away twenty-first-century normalcy. In the words of René Girard, whose mimetic theory provides a comprehensive and versatile theorization of the scapegoat, the world was faced with a ‘generalised loss of differences’, i.e. a sudden vanishing of established social meanings and institutions, which pushes society toward chaos. This ‘loss’ is what triggers the scapegoat mechanism. According to Girard (1979), by attributing blame to a single member (i.e. the scapegoat) and eliminating it, society purges itself of its all-destructive impulse:

any community that … has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat. Its members … strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual … who can be easily disposed of (pp. 79–80).

In so doing, society also gains in cohesion: ‘a unity that emerges from the moment when division is most intense … suddenly the opposition of everyone against everyone else is replaced by the opposition of all against one’ (Girard, 1987, p. 24).

As India too started ‘losing differences’ following the virus outbreak, the Nizamuddin congregation and the Tablighi Muslims provided ‘the crimes that eliminate differences’ and the ‘actors that can be blamed’, two further requisites for the scapegoating to kick in. Girard contends that persecutors require a specific action and an actor to be blamed for the catastrophe looming over society, thus justifying the scapegoat’s sacrifice. Taking place in mid-March, while India’s officially reported cases were still few but the pandemic was raging outside the country, the congregation appeared as the reason for the unfolding crisis. Turning into an infection hotspot (although certainly not the only one), the congregation was the ‘crime’ demonstrating, in the persecutors’ narrative, the Muslims-scapegoat’s intention of bringing the nation to collapse. Some politician called it a ‘Talibani crime’ indeed. Finally, the mimetic theory contends scapegoating features violence aimed at ‘destroying these victims or at least banishing them from the community they ‘pollute’ (Girard, 1986, p. 25, chap 2). In India, this took the form of verbal violence, perpetrated by official and unofficial media accusing Muslims of conspiracy and treason; and physical violence too (like in Delhi and Karnataka).

In the eyes of the perpetrators, the crime provides the causal link between the actor and the crisis, thus enabling the transfer of blame. However, it does not suffice for turning the actor into the scapegoat. The scapegoat must also feature some signe victimaire (sign of the victim), i.e. some form of social, cultural, or physical deviance qualifying it as abnormal compared to the standard. Being a minority is a typical sign, as the minority generally occupies a prejudiced place in the community’s imagination (Girard, 1986, p. 17). Girard writes: ‘If there really is an epidemic, then it might well stir up latent prejudices. The appetite for persecution readily focuses on religious minorities, especially during a time of crisis’ (Girard, 1986, p. 6).

Muslims are not just a minority in India. In a country where religion is a major political category, they are the biggest religious minority. Also, rightwing discourse constructs them as the most ‘deviant’ one.³ In particular, it represents Islam as a foreign religion while asserting that other minority creeds (Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism) developed as branches of Hinduism. As a creed from the Judaic fold flourished in the West, Christianity does not enjoy such a connection. However, its image is not encumbered by the same antagonism that has characterized the history of Hindu-Muslim relations recounted from a nationalist perspective.⁴

The Muslim as evil and disloyal is an idea rooted in India’s traumatic 1947 Partition, its consequent strained relations with Pakistan, and Hindu nationalists’ fuelling of communal hatred. The Partition of India was a violent affair in which millions were displaced and forced to migrate, killed by violence, disease, and hunger, and sexually assaulted (Butalia, 1998). The unprecedented violence of Partition cast a long shadow on India-Pakistan relations. Saluted in Pakistan as the achievement of self-determination, the event was and remains for most Indians a brutal dismembering of the country, which the right wing blames on Muslim nationalism and the political ambitions of Muslim League leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Partition also generated the Kashmir conundrum, which brought the two countries to war more than once and configured Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir as India’s only Muslim-majority state (now Union Territory). The rise of militancy against the center in the Kashmir valley in the late 1980s, the involvement of Pakistan, and the prolonged presence of the Indian Army and paramilitary forces in the state further worsened bilateral relations, claimed the lives of countless Kashmiris; and also consolidated in the eyes of many Indians the belief that Kashmiris, as Muslims, sympathize for Pakistan and anti-India terrorists (Bose, 2005, pp. 48–50; Donthi, 2013). Partition’s long shadow has also influenced Hindu-Muslim relations within post-colonial India. Although after independence the Indian secular state did not carry out policies that were discriminatory toward the Muslims per se, nonetheless at the social level they have been relegated to the status of second-class citizens (Bhargava, 2007; Hasan, 2011, chap. 6; Ranjan, 2018). Both Islamophobia and Muslims’ self-perception as a vulnerable minority have been exploited by party politics.⁵

Furthermore, Islamophobia spread through mainstream domestic politics along with the rise to power of the Hindu nationalist BJP. In 1989 the Ram Janam Bhoomi movement, supported by the BJP, aimed at building the mentioned Ram temple in Ayodhya attracted a large section of the Hindu middle class towards right-wing politics, awarding the party good electoral performances at the parliamentary and state-level elections (Ranjan, 2019). In the early 1990s, the BJP grew as a significant political party within the Indian arena. Its consolidation was also helped by the securitization of politics that followed two terrorist attacks perpetrated in Delhi (2001) and Mumbai (2008) with the involvement of Pakistani militants. While Indian Muslims had been looked at as fifth columns since 1947 (Pandey, 1999, pp. 613–614), these and similar militant attacks in Indian cities further deepened the perception. It is not uncommon for Muslims who raise their voice on communal issues to be told to ‘go back to Pakistan’ still today (“ ‘Go to Pakistan’, BJP MP Tells Poet Munawwar Rana’s Daughter”, 2020). The BJP had been in power at the center from 1999 to 2004 and in the opposition after that. Things changed in 2014, when the party gained a majority in the parliamentary elections in a landslide victory, replicated in the following elections of 2019. During this period, India witnessed the progressive erosion of its secular institutions and a ‘saffronization of the public sphere’ (Anderson & Jaffrelot, 2018) that currently makes it a largely majoritarian democracy. The space for political dissent shrank: those who oppose the government are often publicly labelled as ‘anti-national’ and in some cases even faced with sedition charges (Sheikh, 2020). In the last two years, Indian Muslims met increasingly hostile treatment from the government. On 5 August 2019, it revoked the Special Status of Jammu & Kashmir sanctioned by article 370 of the Constitution, demoting its status to Union Territory. In addition to this, on 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India delivered its final verdict concerning the piece of land in Ayodhya where the Ram temple is currently under construction (“In Unprecedented Move, Modi Government Sends Former CJI Ranjan Gogoi to Rajya Sabha”, 2020). On 23 February 2020, attacks targeted at Muslims took place in low-class Muslim areas of New Delhi, triggered by statements of BJP leaders, turning into the worst episode in decades (“Delhi HC to Hear Harsh Mander’s Petition to Book Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Singh on March 12”, 2020; Khan, 2020). In the meanwhile, the NRC (National Register of Citizens) and the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) came to the fore as the most divisive issues of contemporary Indian domestic politics. The two measures are considered discriminatory against Indian Muslims and an attack on the country’s secular character. Furthermore, Jamia Milia Islamia University and Aligarh Muslim University, India’s leading ‘minority Universities’, have been the theatre of violent clashes between overwhelmingly Muslim students and the Indian police after this broke into the campus (“Pregnant Jamia Student Safoora Zargar Gets Bail In Delhi Riots Case”, 2020).

The Muslim as a scapegoat is at the basis – in Girard’s terms, it is a ‘foundational myth’ – of the cultural political economy of Hindu nationalism. As a doctrine, this laments that the golden age of Indian civilization was abruptly interrupted by the invasion of hostile external forces, Islam in the first place. Their persistence within the nation is what prevents it from returning to its legitimate greatness. The way forward is to eliminate this burden that holds it back from turning into a muscular and homogeneous ethnic state: like with the Girardian scapegoat, its sacrifice is the path to the restoration of the original order.

In sum, as a consequence of India’s turn to Hindu nationalism and mainstream discourses developed around Partition, national identity, and Pakistan, India’s Muslim minority is defined by a negative characterization and far more rigid, neater, and sharper boundaries when compared to other groups that constitute the nation. This very characterization amounts to unmistakable and powerful signes victimaires. Moreover, in force of it, Muslims feature a liminality that truly characterizes them as India’s Girardian scapegoat par excellence. Because, as seen, they are placed furthest from the normative standard imposed by the majority, they are most easily identifiable as ‘others’. At the same time, they exist within the body politic, although as an unwelcomed member, now increasingly pushed towards its fringes under the advance of saffronization. As outsiders and insiders at the same time, they inhabit an in-between space. This half-belongingness makes them the perfect tool of sacrificial redemption: the Girardian scapegoat needs to be repulsive yet relatable to the group. This is because the scapegoat’s simultaneous abnormality and similarity vis-à-vis the society whose pains it expiates are both necessary to enable the scapegoating mechanism (the transfer of blame) and the scapegoat effect (the catharsis deriving from the performance of surrogate violence). Similarity enables blame projection, while abnormality makes the sacrifice bearable (Girard, 1979, pp. 11–13; 1986, p. 22). In other words, as insiders Muslims can take up the burden of society’s fear; and because they are outsiders, violence against them appears possible, painless, necessary.

It is thus clear that these Girardian ‘signs of victims’ had dwelled in the nation’s imagination long before the current pandemic, thus allowing it to feed onto them and ignite the scapegoat mechanism when the virus reached the country. The phrase ‘Corona Jihad’ stands witness to the link between this latest episode of Islamophobia and India’s long-standing Islamophobic beliefs. As mentioned, Corona Jihad is a popular formula created in March 2020 and used by perpetrators across all media –as a catchphrase in news headlines or as a hashtag on Twitter– to spread accusations against Muslim ‘super-spreaders’. It is modelled on ‘jihad’ and its many compounds, including the typically Indian ‘Love Jihad’. At the basis of all of these phrases, there is the idea that Indian Muslims are involved in a continuous holy war (jihad) whose final aim is the Islamization of India and the world. As per Islamic doctrine, jihad might be performed in various forms; these, according to Indian Islamophobia, include seducing and converting Hindu women (Love Jihad) and, since 2020, spreading Covid-19 in the country (Corona Jihad). Thus the calque ‘Corona Jihad’ demonstrates how Covid-induced Islamophobia emanated from a previous substantial discourse of Muslims as traitors of the nation.

In fact, pre-existing beliefs are necessary for instigating the group against the scapegoat. Girard (Girard & Williams, 2000) writes:

One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaders, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate, which is the belief of the crowd, our own belief (p. 266).

In March 2020, Indian news channels and social media handles of both public and private citizens propagated the conspiracy theory. The power of media in constituting and reinforcing political opinions (Farooq, 2017; Narayanan et al., 2019) and beliefs formulated about groups in relation to diseases (Eichelberger, 2007, pp. 1285–1286; Monson, 2017) is a consolidated fact. Among all media, social media appear especially powerful because of their immediacy, broad outreach, and light-touch moderation of fake news. For the conspiracy theory to be persuasive, however, reaching audiences is not sufficient: to strike a chord in people’s imagination it needs to find fertile ground. This was prepared, in this case, by a history of communalism and anti-Muslim political discourse. The country’s Covid-19 outbreak could be swiftly connected to notions of holy war and national threat because it got grafted on an already strong belief of Indian Muslims as fifth columns.

Ultimately, it does not seem inexplicable that in Covid-hit India Muslims were scapegoated and the virus turned into a ‘Muslim disease’:

In order to blame victims for the loss of distinctions resulting from the crisis, they are accused of crimes that eliminate distinctions. But in actuality they are identified as victims for persecution because they bear the signs of victims (Girard, 1986, p. 21).

To paraphrase Girard: in order to blame Muslims for the descent into chaos caused by Covid-19, these got accused (by nationalists, affiliated media and electorate, and the wider public opinion) of spreading the virus and hindering the government’s containment effort by holding a congregation in Nizamuddin. But in actuality they were identified as scapegoats because, since the country’s birth, they bear the signs of victims; i.e. the general beliefs configuring them as invaders, separatists, supporters of Pakistan, and terrorists. In conclusion, as the mimetic theory demonstrates, Indian Muslims are the nation’s absolute scapegoat, so much so that they get targeted even for a ‘Chinese virus’: like Girard’s Oedipus, ‘manage[s] to combine the marginality of the outsider with the marginality of the insider’ and are ‘a veritable conglomerate of victim’s signs’ (1986, pp. 25–26).

Conclusions

This paper has investigated Covid-hit India’s wave of Islamophobia, i.e. the widespread blaming, demonizing and, in some cases, assaulting of Indian Muslims as super-spreaders of the disease. Based on a recollection of relevant facts in light of Girard’s mimetic theory, it has demonstrated that this episode represents a classic case of scapegoating. Specifically, the anxieties caused by the virus outbreak have been blamed on the country’s Muslim minority and linked to discourses of national insecurity and holy war. This episode of scapegoating and its corresponding securitization of the notion of Covid-19 were possible because the Muslim minority is configured within India’s mainstream imagination as a scapegoat par excellence, so defined by the legacies of Partition as well as the rise to power of Hindu nationalism, as both doctrine and policy. This case study concurs to establish that in divided societies epidemics can easily exacerbate already existing forms of discrimination rooted in the society’s mainstream memory and norms; on the backdrop of the crisis, these become further manipulable by political entrepreneurs and readily accessible to panic-ridden people attempting to make sense of the crisis and dispel it. In particular, the paper finds that in such scenarios beliefs (discourses, prejudice) have a critical role in mediating and directing fear towards specific targets. Finally, the case study draws attention to the ongoing escalation of religious strife in India and highlights its already deep permeation across Indian society and its wide-reaching implications, including its merging with the current global pandemic.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the Anonymous Reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Trad. ‘The plague … strengthens in their positions the supporters of residential segregation between blacks and whites’.

2 Like other heads of state, Modi made wide use of military terms (‘war’, ‘warriors’, ‘fight’, ‘victory’) to define India’s effort to contrast and manage the virus outbreak, especially across his social media outlets.

3 The notion of a cultural gap between Hindus and Muslims reflects mainstream views formulated and propagated by privileged groups and does not reflect empirical subaltern reality. We are thankful to the Reviewer for highlighting this point.

4 This is not a claim to Islam’s and Christianity’s foreignness to India. A majority of India's Muslims and Christians are from historically caste-oppressed indigenous communities. The institution of caste and the practice of untouchability persist among Muslims and Christians: lower caste people are considered polluting including by co-religionists who belong to an upper-caste background. See Sikand (2001), Alam (2009), Trivedi et al. (2016), Lee (2018).

5 See for example: Wilkinson (2004) and Yadav (2003).