In India, Muslims are blamed for spreading coronavirus
A Bengali Indian Muslim family living in Assam, India. Photo by Vishal Arora.
While people all over India are facing job losses and even hunger because of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, Muslim daily laborers and small shopkeepers are the most severely impacted.
Indian Muslims have been targeted in different parts of the country following reports that there was an outbreak of COVID-19 at a mid-March religious gathering in New Delhi organized by Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary group that focuses on teaching Muslims the basics of Islam. Violence against Muslims and Christians in India has been increasing since the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, six years ago.
News that six people who had participated in the Tablighi Jamaat died of the virus was reported on March 30. After this, many people started spreading fake news and rumors accusing the Muslim community in general of spreading the coronavirus.
In a recent video that has gone viral, people can be seen taking down and removing a small makeshift shop belonging to a Muslim man in Haldwani in the northern Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.
In the video, the people are heard telling the Muslim fruit seller Javed to remove his shop and not set it up again there. Javed is told that the spread of the coronavirus is due to ‘you people’ (Muslims). They tell Javed to clear away his shop as soon as possible.
Javed said afterwards: "It was seven o'clock in the morning. I had just set up my shop when some people came and asked me for my Aadhaar card (government-issued identity card). As I didn’t have my Aadhar card with me, they asked me my name. When I told them my name they asked me to remove my shop as they realized that I was a Muslim.”
Javed claimed that when his shop was being removed, bystanders failed to intervene. And the people who removed Javed’s shop told Hindu shopkeepers that they could set up their shops. It is believed that the people who asked Javed to remove his shop belonged to a radical Hindu nationalist organization.
After a three-week lockdown was declared on March 24, migrant workers all over the country began leaving cities to return to their respective native villages as they were rendered jobless and often slept in makeshift tents or outdoor areas no longer accessible under a curfew. But Javed did not leave for his village as he thought the sale of fruits would continue. Javed, who originally hails from Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, a state bordering Delhi, said: "Now we’ve nothing to do. I sit in the house without work or income. Now they will not allow us to set up the shop again." Javed used to sell fruits and his brother used to bring fruits from the market. Now both brothers have no work.
Similar incidents targeting Muslims have been reported in New Delhi, which saw the worst communal riots in years in February of this year. A video created by Hindu activists in the Delhi neighborhood of Shastri Nagar shows residents checking the identity papers of local fruit and vegetable sellers in an effort to ban Muslim shopkeepers from the neighborhood.
About one-third of India’s approximately 1,200 COVID-19 cases have been linked to the March 13-15 Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi, as confirmed by Luv Aggarwal, Joint Secretary of India’s Health Ministry. But now Muslims at large, comprising 14.2 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people, who have no connection with the event, are also bearing the brunt of the common people’s anger.
A campaign to connect the virus with religion is already well underway in India. Fake information and videos are going viral in a planned manner, carrying the charge that not only are Muslims suffering from the coronavirus, but that they are also spreading it deliberately.
Many such misleading videos have come out which were either false or their original reference was to something entirely unrelated to the pandemic.
On April 2, one Sonam Mahajan tweeted a video in which a Muslim man is seen wrapping food and breathing out through his mouth. Sonam Mahajan tweeted this video and justified a previous incident in which a person had allegedly refused to accept a food parcel from a Muslim delivery boy. According to the news reports, this video has also been seen by viewers in Indonesia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. The video is actually very old and has nothing to do with COVID-19. But it is now being shared to inflame anti-Muslim prejudice in India and beyond.
There has been a slew of such videos and messages since March 30.
“Many old messages are going viral. There is a whole network of people that spreads such messages,” said Amitabh Pandey, a journalist known for debunking fake videos. “When the common people get such messages, they easily believe them.”
In fact, such videos began to appear even more rapidly after a Northern Railway
spokesperson claimed that members of Tablighi Jamaat had spit on health workers at a quarantine center in Delhi. No video of this incident was released by the railway authorities, but many old videos started appearing on social media accompanied by messages making this very claim.
The fake videos are badly hurting members of the Muslim community who come from the lower economic classes. They are paying the price for the Tablighi Jamaat event and the false information being spread on social media is costing them their livelihood. They are now living in fear.
Nearly 8,000 people took part in the Tablighi Jamaat gathering in Delhi, and a handful of them were found to be COVID-19 positive. No doubt the virus has spread due to the event and many positive cases of infections across the country have been reported to be directly linked to the participants. But all too many people do not understand that Muslims, in general, have nothing to with the participants of the Tablighi Jamaat event.
The Indian Health Ministry has also maintained that the spread of COVID-19 should not be linked to any religion or region. Nonetheless, many incidents are being reported of people’s religious identity being linked to the coronavirus.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has also said that there is no link between the coronavirus and any religion or race.
"COVID-19 is nobody's fault,” said WHO's Emergencies Program Executive Director Mike Ryan. “Every infected person suffers from it. It is very important that we do not associate it with any race, religion, or sect.”
Shuriah Niazi is a journalist based in India. He works on a broad spectrum of issues for a variety of media outlets, but specializes in social, religious, environmental and health issues, especially as they related to women. Shuriah Niazi is on Twitter at @shuriahn.