RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-government-considers-a-muslim-ban-11555629051

Will India remain a secular state committed to treating all faiths equally, or will it morph into an explicitly Hindu nation whose Muslim minority is kept in its place? A debate about migrants will help settle this fraught question.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party wants to fast-track Indian citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighboring countries while pointedly excluding Muslims. This foolish idea may win the BJP votes in the current election, but at the cost of undermining interfaith harmony, seeding long-term domestic instability, and tarnishing India’s reputation for tolerance.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government failed to pass a proposed law that would make it easier for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to become Indian citizens. But as India’s six-week-long election grinds on, the issue has returned to center stage as part of a broader bid by the BJP to consolidate Hindu votes by raising the pitch of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

At a campaign rally in West Bengal last week, BJP President Amit Shah likened Muslim migrants from Bangladesh to “termites” who “are eating the grain that should go to the poor.” He promised that a BJP government would toss out all “infiltrators,” except for Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs.

A promise to welcome oppressed religious minorities is hardly objectionable. Hindus and Sikhs who happened to find themselves stranded in Islamic Pakistan after it was carved out of British India in 1947, and to a lesser extent Hindus and Buddhists in Bangladesh, have long faced persecution. In both countries, the proportion of non-Muslims has declined precipitously since partition, to under 4% in Pakistan and about 10% in Bangladesh. If India won’t throw these people a lifeline, who will?

Moreover, nobody can seriously argue that majority Sunni Muslims face persecution for their faith in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Even if they did, India could not realistically be expected to throw open its doors to hundreds of millions of people.

But it’s one thing to welcome persecuted Hindus and Sikhs to their historic homeland, and quite another explicitly to reject persecuted Muslims merely for their faith. In a constitutionally secular, multireligious nation like India, upholding the principle of nondiscrimination matters.

Mr. Shah’s remarks may apply only to illegal migrants, but they end up legitimizing a combustible idea: that only followers of so-called Indic religions can be truly Indian. This echoes the hard-line Hindu nationalist view that the country’s 172 million Muslims and 28 million Christians live in India only on sufferance.

This idea is morally repugnant and wildly impractical. Like many countries, India faces a challenge in integrating its Muslim minority and curbing fundamentalist strains of the faith that sometimes act as a conveyor belt to terrorism. This entails pushing back against radical Islam, the interpretation of the faith that seeks to order all aspects of modern life by medieval Islamic precepts. But it also requires reassuring the moderate majority of Muslims that India will treat them fairly.

It’s no coincidence that the BJP targets its incendiary message toward parts of the country where some Hindus already feel threatened by demographic change. According to the 2011 census, Muslims account for about a third of the population of Assam. The state is in the midst of a messy attempt to identify migrants who settled there after 1971. In West Bengal, where Mr. Shah made his comments, more than a quarter of the population is Muslim.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14090/spain-islamist-hate-speech

“The external enemies want to tell us how to run our country…. Angela Merkel and her fellow travelers, George Soros, the immigration mafias, believe that they can tell us who can and cannot enter our country. They demand that our boats pluck so-called castaways out of the sea, transfer them to our ports and shower them with money. Who do they think we are?” — Ortega Smith, Secretary General of the Vox party, Spain.

“These…. groups stand out not because of prejudice (‘Islamophobia’ or racism) but due to their being the least assimilable of foreigners, an array of problems associated with them, such as not working and criminal activity, and a fear that they will impose their ways on Europe…. Other concerns deal with Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including Christophobia and Judeophobia, jihadi violence, and the insistence that Islam enjoy a privileged status vis-à-vis other religions” — Daniel Pipes, historian, “Europe’s Civilizationist Parties,” Commentary, November 2018.

“We all know about the lack of freedom, if not direct persecution, suffered by women and Christians in Islamic countries, while here they enjoy the generosity characteristic of freedom, democracy and reciprocity, of course, all of which they systematically deny….” — Santiago Abascal, President of the Vox party, “Trojan Horse,” Libertad Digital, December 2014.

“The left defends any gratuitous offense, even the most beastly ones, against Christians as ‘freedom of expression.’ At the same time, the mere fact of criticizing Islam is branded as ‘Islamophobia.’ …. Is this still Spain or are we in Iran?” — Elantir, blogger, Contando Estrelas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indonesias-democratic-advance-11555630087

Indonesia faced an election choice Wednesday between incumbent President Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, a former general supported by radical Islamist groups. Preliminary results project a Widodo win, which is good news for the world’s largest Muslim democracy.

Unofficial “quick count” numbers from at least six pollsters show Mr. Widodo leading by nearly 10 percentage points in a popular vote which directly elects the president. The incumbent declared victory but cautioned supporters to wait for official results to be released in coming weeks. Mr. Subianto disputes the polls, but quick counts proved accurate when Mr. Subianto lost to Mr. Widodo in 2014. The former general’s spokesman says he doesn’t want violence over the election result, and voters should hold him to it.

Should the results hold, Indonesians have avoided a dangerous turn. Mr. Subianto, once the son-in-law and potential successor of former dictator Suharto, was expelled in 1998 from his special forces command after allegedly leading bloody crackdowns against democracy activists. On the 2014 campaign trail, he said that direct elections are “not in accordance with our own culture.”