Before you start reading, I'd like to make it clear that the purpose of this article is not to defame a nation, but to inform you about the injustices that have taken place in and have targeted a minority disproportionately and unfairly. It also highlights the impact of spreading misinformation by the biased Indian media and the lack of action taken by the government to counteract the unfortunate events that have taken place over time. Various factors have a part to play in this and therefore, the blame doesn't fall on one individual but, a society. To be specific, the group of people I am mentioning here are Muslims, the largest minority in India with 209 million followers. The differences between minorities in India have existed for decades, to the point where the Indian subcontinent split the population into separate nations in 1947. However, the conflict still resides within the country and only worsened during the covid-19 pandemic. So, we will focus on how the Indian government and mainstream media responded to this situation.

We have seen the dehumanisation of specific groups in the past and how it led to the violation of basic human rights and caused mass massacre of humans. A very clear example would be the dehumanisation of Jews during the holocaust. This just shows that to justify the injustices against a group of people, they are dehumanised so that society perceives them negatively and therefore, the violation of their rights is excused and not questioned by the public. 

The current ruling party in India is a right-wing Hindu nationalist party called BJP which means that many of the supporters of the government are Hindu nationalists. The initial official ideology followed by the BJP in 1965 was integral humanism which meant that 'primary concern in India should be to develop an indigenous development model that has human beings as its core focus'.

However, this changed in recent years when the government came in power this time and made several decisions which did the opposite of the initial ideology of focusing on the public and treating the people equally and fairly. When PM Modi came into power in 2019, he introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act which allowed a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants of all religious minorities who fled persecution but Muslims. This was the first time that religion played a part in such laws and the bias against Muslims wasn't understandable. After the law was passed, protests happened nationwide by minorities, and this led to BJP-affiliated groups attacking the protestors. It is more concerning that BJP leaders tried to blame the protestors of conspiring against the country. The police also failed to prevent the attacks by the extremists and even used lethal force against the protestors, majority of which were Muslims.

It seems to me that the government has used the minorities like dehumanising the Muslims, portrayed them as dangerous to get the favour of the Hindu majority. Their right-wing Hindu extremism has let them help the BJP come into power and get the vote as they are favoured by the nationalists due to their anti-muslim campaign. After the killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the Secretary General of another Hindu right wing organisation said that "All Hindutva opponents will be sentenced to death and people will carry that out themselves. The process of forming a Hindu supremacy has begun with Gujarat"

The situation of Muslims being targeted got worse as Covid-19 started spreading across the country. After an Islamic gathering in spring last year led to a surge in covid cases in India, the statements of politicians and bias on the mainstream media controlled by the BJP fuelled the anger in the public against Muslims. The number of assaults on Muslims started increasing as the virus continued to spread in April 2020 and they got the blame for the rise in case numbers. As the news of the cases due to the gathering spread nationwide, Muslims were targeted on social media. A hashtag called #CoronaJihad trended on twitter which spread fake information and news to 'an estimated 170 million Twitter accounts'.

The impact of the fake news, viral videos and misinformation was so severe that many Muslims were stopped from working, their businesses were shut down as people would stop buying food from Muslim sellers, and they were assaulted or beaten up countrywide.

Even the mainstream media didn't hold back from spreading hate against the minority. A famous TV news anchor, Arnab Goswami, claimed 'these are dangerous people, these lockdown cheats!' 'They have compromised us all!'. Such statements made the public believe that all Muslims were purposefully spreading covid and portrayed a negative and dangerous perception of them to the nation and the public, hence, putting them at further risk of attacks regardless of whether they were affiliated with the conference which caused the increase of cases or not. This statement came after the Islamic conference in spring 2020, which caused a rise in covid cases around the country. However, since then, many other religious events were held by other religious groups. But those events didn't cause national outrage nor were such statements about those groups released by the media. 

Mass gatherings have continued to take place as villagers in Andhra Pradesh threw cow dung at one another as part of religious celebrations. The Daily Mail informs that 'Similar recent mass gatherings, including hundreds of thousands bathing in the Ganges, have been blamed for being 'super-spreader' events. ' 1000 cases were reported due to this large gathering. This has taken place after India reported 200k cases in a day since the beginning of the pandemic. The government has had to stop the export of vaccines due to shortage of supply within the country. Cases are on the rise as many hospitals in Delhi, the capital and the hotspot for covid cases, are now having two people sharing a single bed due to lack of critical care facilities. ITV news states that these gathering are spreading covid to rural areas which has almost negligent healthcare infrastructure.' As said before, these events didn't spark the anger or attacks against Hindus as were faced by Muslims last year.

The extent of the extremism has led to the creation of social divisions between the biggest social and religious groups in the country. India claims that they're a big democracy however these actions clearly contravene with human rights, and it is the responsibility of the Indian government make sure that they don't unfairly disadvantage the people based on the race, ethnicity, or religion. This means that they shouldn't introduce laws which unfairly target a specific group of people. It is also their job to ensure that any bias in the media is prevented as it deceives the public and creates conflict between members of the public. If such events occur, the police and the court must ensure that the victims are given justice. I also believe that to prevent these continuous assaults against minorities, the UN must interrogate into the matter, hold the perpetrators responsible and treat it like an emergency to prevent further mass massacres of Muslims being normal to society.