Unfounded Islamophobia

Islamophobia or Muslim phobia is being projected as a strategic political emotion to mislead and gain political dividends

- Tanvir Aeijaz

PRACTICING democracy by nation-states in the real world is seen, of late, to be guided more by their own pathologies than by their perseverance. More citizens are getting disgusted by its observable pathos of public rhetoric and barbed emotions, and there seems to be a growing cynicism to the core features of democratic ethos itself. Democracy has unfolded with a lot of emotional and psychic baggage, and in the present conditions of denials, we, as a nation, need to be careful of what we aspire for.

One of democracy's smothering emotions is its capacity and propensity to generate enormous amounts of hate, fear and rage in its polity and in society, especially on the basis of the majority-minority binary. To cobble up a working majority for government formation, political parties appeal to the core sensibilities of ethno-political emotions of the voters and produce new forms of hatred, and sometimes extreme forms of ethnocidal and communal violence. Counting of 'us' and 'them', this sort and that sort of people in a given territory, demography, enumeration and representation, all of these become the repeat motifs of community-building exercises. The strange inner tensions of the categories of majority' and 'minority' yield to the 'angst of deficiency or lack' and drive the majorities into conditions favourable to paroxysms of violence against the minorities. In India, it is this sense of incompleteness that finds its cause in Islamophobia-the fear of Islam and the core of Hindutva politics of hate and intimidation of Indian Muslims.

Institutionalisation of Islamophobia