The New Natural

How staying alive is now full-time work for Muslims in India today. An extract

Ziya Us Salam

What started with Sheikh in Pune has since spread across India. With Muslims now being attacked for no reason except their faith. A little over 17 years ago, while reviewing noted film director Govind Nihalani’s film Dev, I began the piece with the words, ‘They judge everybody by the foreskin.’ It was enough to outrage the sensibilities of an editor. The sentence was deleted from the review. But today, as I review the Muslim killings, the truth of the words comes back to haunt me. In the initial years after Modi’s elevation, a fig-leaf allegation or suspicion of cow slaughter or transportation of animals for possible slaughter was enough to trigger a mob to vent its fury on a helpless man. None of the allegations of animal slaughter was substantiated. Worse, none needed to be. At least not in public perception. Neither did the dead come back to life. By 2019, even these flimsy excuses were done away with. Being a Muslim was enough to be vulnerable to murder, to one’s house being set on fire or bulldozed. Not every instance was as gory or gruesome as the ones we have read about till now. But there were instances when a clean-shaven shopkeeper with no visible sign of his faith--no beard, no skullcap, no amulet, no tehmat--was murdered on a whim! In some cases, the man was asked to ‘pull down trousers’--the attackers, you see, judged by the foreskin, its absence being a life-threatening condition. As Imran Khan, a street hawker, discovered in the north-east Delhi violence. In others, the victim was asked to say ‘Allah-u-Akbar’ by goons. The ability to pronounce the first line of the Muslim call for prayer was deemed sufficient fo