India’s fascist government has been ramping up anti-Muslim persecution with violent and illegal deportations of citizens. The country’s 200 million Muslim citizens were already a target for highly controversial Hindu-nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, but the recent escalation of the ongoing Kashmir crisis has apparently worsened the situation further.

As the Guardian reported, Indian authorities have been rounding up “thousands of people” across the country without “due legal process”. And in some cases, the country’s border security force has pushed people over into neighbouring Bangladesh “at gunpoint”. Bangladeshi authorities, meanwhile, have returned hundreds of people to India after discovering they were actually Indian citizens.

A researcher from Bangladeshi human rights group Odhikar said:

India is pushing mainly Muslims and low-income communities from their own country

This, they said:

is against national and international law.

Bangladesh claims India has broken with previous procedures and ignored its requests for their renewal.

Picking on older, disabled citizens

62-year-old grandmother Hazera Khatun is physically disabled. She recounted that Indian authorities picked her up and later pushed her into a van, saying:

They treated us like animals

The thugs also to told her:

‘We will shoot you if you don’t go to the other side.’

Bangladeshi authorities later returned her and others to India because they were Indian citizens, and they:

had to walk through forests and rivers

The ordeal was ‘deeply traumatic’, leaving her with bruises all over.

A 67-year-old Indian citizen, Maleka Begam, is “physically infirm and cannot walk unassisted”. She also said authorities had used guns to threaten her to cross the border. But so far, she has been unable to return home.

In Gujarat, where Modi himself once presided over deadly anti-Muslim riots, police recently paraded thousands of people through the streets, only 450 of whom were in the country illegally. In Assam, meanwhile, which is also under the control of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), authorities has persecuted and even disappeared people it labels “infiltrators”. Previously, the state exempted non-Muslims from having to prove they were citizens, but it has now opted to “automatically expel” the people it targets.

Intensifying persecution, with the West’s blessing

Under Modi’s regime in the last 11 years, the persecution, harassment, and disenfranchisement of Muslim citizens in India has intensified. India’s ongoing occupation of resource-rich territory in Kashmir (a legacy of Britain’s brutally divisive colonial rule), for example, stepped up a gear with Modi’s 2019 revocation of the region’s autonomy, which led to severe human rights abuses and growing militarisation. The West allowed this because it increasingly values India’s role in countering Chinese power. And as tensions erupted earlier this year after an anti-Indian attack in Kashmir, a fragile ceasefire did nothing to stop the runaway train of anti-Muslim rhetoric within India.

The dangerously divisive language of expelling “outsiders”, “traitors” or “infiltrators” has skyrocketed in recent weeks. Fascist voices on social media have spread such language, as have a wave of Islamophobic songs. And in just two weeks after the Kashmir attack in April, there were reportedly “184 anti-Muslim hate incidents across India”. Authorities even arrested a prominent Muslim academic for calling out such attacks.

From the US to Britain, Western governments have prioritised backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza while ramping up tensions with Russia and China. And in this environment, they have little interest in condemning the useful extremists ruling India today. But everyone in the world should absolutely be very concerned about the increasing consolidation of fascism in yet another nuclear-armed state.

Featured image via Unsplash/ Kanishk Agarwal

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.