Cannot hold our head high because...

India tops the list of Covid-related religious hostilities

Rachana Ramesh | NT

Bengaluru: Pew Research Centre, a Washington-based think tank, has released a study that puts India at the top of its index of social hostilities involving religion in 2020, in the context of the impact of pandemic restrictions.

The study highlights the targeting of minorities during the period of the pandemic in India, including the use of social media hashtags like “#CoronaJihad.” In the 198 countries listed in the Social Hostilities Index (SHI), 11 countries have been clubbed together as they all have “very high” scores of 7.2 or more.

India has taken the first place while other countries in the list in a descending order are Nigeria, Afghanistan, Israel, Mali, Somalia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Pew has attributed the rise in India’s score, which was already significantly high, “in part to increased violence around protests of the Citizenship Amendment Act (a 2019 law that excludes Muslims from expedited citizenship offered to non-Muslim migrants).”

Released on Tuesday, the study focuses on how Covid-19 restrictions affected religious groups around the world in 2020. In the context of India, it notes the Tablighi Jamaat meeting controversy in Delhi which occurred during the early stages of the pandemic and the consecutive use of “Islamophobic hashtags like #CoronaJihad” that was “circulated widely on social media, seeking to blame Muslims for the virus.”

The report also has India on the list of four countries that witnessed private actors use force against the religious groups for pandemic related reasons. “Pandemicrelated social hostilities against religious groups that involved physical violence or vandalism by private individuals or organisations were reported in just four countries – India, Argentina, Italy and the United States.

In India, there were multiple reports of Muslims being attacked after being accused of spreading the coronavirus,” the report says. The report concludes that in about 23%, 43 out of the 198 countries, authorities used physical means such as prison sentences and arrests in order to enforce coronavirus related restrictions on worship services and other religious gatherings.

In 54 of these countries, the religious groups either reached the doors of court or spoke out against their places of worship being treated unequally in relation with secular gathering places when it comes to the public health measures that were taken up.

However, in 97 countries, religious groups and leaders helped promote public health measures to stop the spread of the once deadly virus, the study noted. Quoting the USCIRF (US Commission on International Religious Freedom), Pew noted that through 2020, religious minorities, especially the Sikhs, were continued targets for deadly attacks in Afghanistan, to an extent where their population was “near extinction”.

In March, a series of attacks targeting the Sikh community killed over 25 people and further led 200 more to leave Afghanistan for India, the report said, citing the US state department.