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The Taliban’s return contains a warning for India
By: []
Date: 2021-09
Since the Taliban entered Kabul on 15 August, politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other Hindu nationalist ideologues have manipulated fears for the rights of women and minorities in Afghanistan in order to fan the flames of already rampant islamophobia in India.
It would be better, however, if the crisis in Afghanistan prompted some much needed soul searching in India. For the question must be asked: has life for women, religious minorities, and oppressed castes in India during the last seven years of BJP rule been staggeringly different than what is about to befall those in Afghanistan?
In the ‘new’ Afghanistan, it is alleged that the Taliban will implement laws that will relegate Shias, non-Muslims and women to second-class citizenship. Hindu nationalists have used this to draw favourable comparisons with India, suggesting that Indian Muslims should be glad to live where they do. Yet even a cursory glance at the laws brought in by India’s current government suggests that it is targeting Muslims by taking a wrecking ball to the country’s secular constitution.
Too many parallels
In Afghanistan, one focus of attention now is the Hazara minority, Shia Muslims who have long been persecuted and portrayed as alien by the Taliban. How is this any different from the way in which the BJP and its ideological fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), views Indian Muslims as outsiders?
When Indian Muslims ask for their constitutional rights as equal citizens of India, BJP politicians often tell them to “go to Pakistan,” as if to suggest that they do not belong in India. Indeed, the Indian government’s controversial amendment to citizenship law in December 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which provides a pathway to Indian citizenship for anyone but Muslims, is rooted in this belief.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his maiden speech in parliament in 2014, he suggested that the BJP’s ascent marked the end of 1,200 years of servitude. This unusual periodisation of India’s history refers to the period of Muslim rule and is intended to suggest that there was something uniquely oppressive about Muslim-led conquest, obscuring the fact that the subcontinent’s northwest was always a route for invasions and migrations, going back to the arrival of Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryans in the second millennium B.C.
Similarly, The Taliban views Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic past as an age of ignorance and idolatry. This motivated its demolition of the sixth century Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. In much the same manner, zealots affiliated with the BJP demolished the 16th-century Babri Mosque in northern India in 1992, viewing it as emblematic of the period of ‘servitude’ that Modi later alluded to. At the time, this led to religious polarisation across India, which the BJP greatly benefited from.
In its earlier incarnation, the Taliban shocked the world in 2001 with plans to make Afghan Hindus and Sikhs wear yellow badges as a mark of identification. This had an uncomfortable echo in India at the height of the anti-CAA protests, when Modi said protestors could be identified by their clothes. This was an obvious ploy to split the protest movement by singling out Muslims, who could supposedly be identified by their unique dress.
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