Goodwill is Not a Weak Weapon
You didn’t really expect it. Decades of free speech and of living next to people of different ethnicities and different religious beliefs had induced a sense that both democracy and diversity would reign for the foreseeable future. True, autocracies were never very far, and history provided examples of a sudden loss of freedom. Still, you didn’t think that your country would permit the supremacy of one kind of people and legitimize harshness towards other types.
And yet this has happened in India, though not only there. While liberty, equality, and fraternity remain in the country’s constitution, life on the Indian ground confronts a relentless drive for supremacy and the pressure of vigilantes.
Newspapers have succumbed, universities have been handed over to supremacists, and movies and TV channels purvey the line that actually it is the Hindu majority that’s under threat. Hindus are warned that fanatical Muslims are on the prowl to convert Hindu children or lure young Hindu women into marriage and thence into Islam, and that Christian churches too are traps for the innocent.
The odd but historically known phenomenon of people belonging to a large majority believing that they are menaced by individuals from a minority group has marked India for some years now. Such a belief survives even as India’s Muslims remain economically disadvantaged and underrepresented in legislatures, schools, colleges, the police, the bureaucracy, and the corporate world.
Bolstered by men in political power, this assumption of Hindu victimhood has also penetrated the police and the judiciary. While widely voiced, the belief is imposed, not voluntary. It is contrary, moreover, to visible facts. Fear of unpleasant consequences suppresses its candid repudiation.
Satyagraha or nonviolent protest has been one response from India’s Muslims. In December 2019, when the Citizenship Amendment Bill opened citizenship doors to non-Muslim immigrants but shut those doors to Muslims, large-scale nonviolent protests erupted across India. Covid’s onset and repression by the state eventually stopped the protests, but New Delhi was compelled to shelve its plan of a National Register of Citizens. The NRC had been designed to exclude large numbers of Muslims by requiring them to prove with documents that neither they nor their parents were illegal migrants from Bangladesh -- an impossible demand for poor people living under makeshift roofs.
Although the NRC was put on hold, bids to remove Muslim names from electoral rolls continue.
SILENT REJECTION
When nonviolent defiance is suppressed by arrests and bans, what options are left for dissenters? For one thing, at least in their own minds they can say an uncompromising “No!”. Even silent rejection has some power.
Another option available to the suppressed, and their allies, is to deploy goodwill. Befriending those who are targeted, be they Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Dalit, Adivasi, or anything else, can be a helpful exercise. In fact, goodwill can be seen as a wonderful twin of satyagraha, and it can be extended even to the foe.
Two weeks ago I commented in this space on the spontaneous bravery on Sydney’s Bondi Beach of an Arab American, Ahmed El Ahmed, that probably saved a few lives and certainly won global praise. “A billion-dollar campaign for the eradication of Islamophobia,” I wrote, “could not have done what’s been achieved by the video that captured Ahmed’s response to the danger his fellow humans were facing.”
Fierce propaganda may demonize a Muslim in some countries, a Jew elsewhere, and a Christian, Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi or Sikh in large parts of India, but goodwill can puncture supremacy and restore equality, fraternity, and insaaniyat -- to use the wonderful South Asian word, instantly understood all across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, for the virtue of humanity.
Moreover, opportunities to extend goodwill to members of a targeted group may come to us in the ordinary course of daily life -- while buying or selling something maybe, or traveling somewhere, or performing any other quotidian chore. Extending goodwill will not demand the bravery that Ahmed displayed.
THREE WEAPONS
The troubled of the world can keep their spirits strong by accessing any one of three superb weapons: satyagraha, silence, and goodwill.
Usually backed by Big Money and the Big Gun or the Big Stick, the call to humiliate the weak “other” is both sickening and frightening. Fortunately, goodwill for the “other” also evokes strong support -- from the human heart anywhere. This support may be silent but it does not lack force. One day it will topple oppression. Like an earthquake.
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Tired of favoritism and autocracy, the people of Bangladesh, led by their youth, rose in August 2024 to remove Sheikh Hasina, who had been in power for a total of 20 years, including 15 continuous years from 2009. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning economist who pioneered microfinance, was installed as interim leader. Since Hasina (currently living in exile in New Delhi) was viewed as being allied to India, a strong anti-India sentiment rose in conjunction with her ouster.
Among sections of Bangladeshis, this sentiment has resulted in anger and violence against the country’s Hindus, who make up a significant 9 percent of the population. Also, radical Islam seems to have received a fillip. The parliamentary elections scheduled for February 12 therefore hold a good deal of interest.
These elections will carry a serious defect. They will exclude Hasina’s party, the Awami League, which spearheaded Bangladesh’s liberation struggle and ran the country for 24 of its 54 post-independence years. The AL has been banned and will not be allowed to take part in the elections. Reports claim that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which governed for two five-year terms in the past, is the favorite. The death, just reported, of Khaleda Zia, who was the prime minister in both terms, may contribute a sympathy vote to the BNP’s tally.
Whether the student movement that toppled Hasina will sponsor a political party in the elections is not clear as of writing, but it can be assumed that an Islam party will contest.
ENCOURAGING STATEMENT
I drew some encouragement from a statement made on December 25 by the BNP’s Tarique Rahman, Khaleda Zia’s 60-year-old son and the one tipped to lead his party. Arriving in Dhaka after a 17-year exile in London, Rahman said in widely quoted remarks:
"It is time we build a country together. This country belongs to the people in the hills and the plains, to Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and Hindus."
East of Bangladesh lies India’s state of Assam, which in three months’ time will elect a new legislature and a new government. The BJP, which has governed the state for nearly ten years, has begun its campaign for reelection by accusing the Congress Party of encouraging illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh. Here’s what Narendra Modi’s close associate, Home Minister Amit Shah, said in Assam’s Nagaon city on December 29:
"Vote for BJP another five years, we will drive out illegal infiltrators not only from Assam but from the entire country. We will free every piece of land encroached by infiltrators.”
Blaming Muslims in Assam may be electorally profitable today for the BJP, and blaming Hindus may be similarly advantageous for some parties in Bangladesh, but the parallel ploys only prepare the beautiful region for future tragedies.
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South of Jammu & Kashmir, the union territory administered by New Delhi, lies the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh. South of HP lies another hilly state, Uttarakhand. In recent days, humble Kashmiris who journey in the winter to HP and Uttarakhand to sell handmade shawls have been humiliated and assaulted by Hindu Nationalist vigilantes.
Bilal Ahmad Ganie, a resident of Kupwara district in north Kashmir, has evidently been selling Kashmiri shawls in Uttarakhand’s Kashipur town for the last nine years. On December 22 he was hawking his shawls door to door when five or six young men riding motorcycles on Kashipur’s main road stopped him. A video taken by one of the blocking team shows another member grabbing Ganie’s right arm and ordering him to say, “Bharat Mata ki jai!” – “Victory to Mother India!”
DID THE VIGILANTES WIN?
The video shows curious motorcyclists and pedestrians, including some women, stopping to watch what’s happening. Bilal Ahmad is slapped but refuses to chant the demanded line. “I can chant, Bharat ki jai (Victory to India),” he says, and he also politely asks the video-taker to turn off his camera.
A flurry of abuses, slaps, and kicks follow. The leader of the vigilantes says, “Are you a Pakistani?” Bilal Ahmad is then pinned to the ground and accused, “You eat what India provides you. You do business in India and earn here but you won’t say, Bharat Mata ki jai.”
To his associates and the surrounding crowd, the leader says, “Look at these bastards. They live in Kashmir.” Eventually submitting, Bilal Ahmad Ganie recites the line demanded from him.
The vigilantes “won” but gave India a coating -- a shawl you might say -- of shame. The crowd watching the “patriotic” spectacle without intervening provided no alleviation. The head of the area’s police, Manikant Mishra, later reported that a case had been registered, that the “offensive video had been removed from social media,” and that a few unnamed individuals had been arrested. Political leaders in Jammu & Kashmir, including Engineer Rashid, an MP who is behind bars, had evidently protested.
According to TheWire.in, the online portal from which I have taken this report, a similar assault on a Kashmiri shawl-seller had taken place some days previously in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh.
Earlier this month, after Anjel Chakma and Michel Chakma, two young brothers studying in Dehradun, Uttarakhand’s capital, were assaulted in a brawl, Anjel died. Hailing from Tripura, one of India’s northeastern states, the brothers had journeyed a long distance to study in Dehradun. It appears that in “jest” the northeasterners were called “Chinese” and also that they were required to speak Hindi to prove that they were Indian.
Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in India’s parliament, commented on X on the assault: "Hate doesn't appear overnight. For years now it is being fed daily - especially to our youth - through toxic content and irresponsible narratives.”
TRUMP’S CLAIMS
Meanwhile Trump continues to claim, as he has done for nearly a year, that he is about to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, and he has also renewed his effort for a “deal” over Israel and Palestine. But the words of veteran BBC journalist John Simpson, aired on December 29, are also worth noting:
I've reported on more than 40 wars around the world during my career, which goes back to the 1960s... But I've never seen a year quite as worrying as 2025 has been... Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that the current conflict in his country could escalate into a world war. After nearly 60 years of observing conflict, I've got a nasty feeling he's right.”
We must hope that Simpson is wrong and Trump is right.
