Some Indians enjoy Arab hospitality but can’t give up Islamophobia

A spate of Islamophobic messages on social media in the Gulf by expat Hindu-Indians, in combination with the anti-Muslim slant given to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, could have adverse consequences on an otherwise-peaceful coexistence of the two communities in the Arab region.

The latest was Bala Krishna Nakka who was sacked from his job in Dubai and accused of posting messages on his Facebook account blaming Muslims for the spread of the coronavirus. Earlier, Rakesh B. Kitturmath was dismissed by his employer for taunting the Islamic practice of five-time prayer in a day that some Muslims claimed would ward off the virus.

Prior to this, similar action was taken against Mitesh Udeshi, an Abu Dhabi resident who drew a cartoon on his social media post making fun of Islam while another expat Sameer Bhandari was also sacked for asking an Indian Muslim job-seeker to ‘go to Pakistan.’

The anger of the local population was reflected in a tweet by Princess Hend Al Qassimi, a member of the UAE royal family, who stated tersely that ‘the ruling family is friends with Indians, but as a royal your rudeness is not welcome. All employees are paid to work, no one comes for free. You make your bread and butter from this land which you scorn and your ridicule will not go unnoticed.’

Princess Qassimi was responding specifically to one Saurabh Upadhyay who had stated in his social media post that it was Indians who had built Dubai from scratch and had used the term  ‘radical Islamic terrorists’ to describe the Muslim community besides other Islamaphobic rants.

The princess was quoted as saying in response, “Anyone that is openly racist and discriminatory in the UAE will be fined and made to leave.”

The UAE and the rest of the Gulf region have, for over 50 years, played host to millions of Indians, employing them in positions from top managers down to construction workers. According to estimates, there are nearly 10 million expat Indians in the Middle-East. And, this has proven immensely beneficial to the Indian economy.

Indians ranks first on the list of nationals remitting thousands of dollars back to their country of origin. For instance, in 2018, over $37,000 million were repatriated to their home country by Indians in five Arab states – UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.

It is not just the earning and the money repatriated to India, but also the quality of life of most middle-income Indians in the Middle-Eastern region which is more often better than in their home country. There are undoubtedly issues with the way blue-collar workers are treated in the region but that is a generic problem and not country- or religion-specific.

With scores of Indians, a sizeable section of whom are Hindus among non-Muslims, making the Arab region their home for decades and benefiting from it, what is being disregarded is the consequence there of increasing Islamophobia in India. While it is no doubt true that Indians have made their mark in the Middle-East with their hard work, it is equally true that they have benefitted in turn from the opportunities afforded to them in these oil-rich economies.

Saudi scholar Abidi Zahrani was quoted as saying a list must be drawn up of individuals who worked in the Middle-East with Islamophobic views while another post called for collecting all evidence of those targeting the Muslim community and presenting it to the International Criminal Court.

The COVID-19 pandemic should have logically forced people to temporarily forget their petty differences based on religion, sect etc as the coronavirus that causes it targets humans irrespective of what their beliefs are.

Though this has largely been the case, in India, the pandemic has taken on a communal hue with a section of the Hindu majority blaming the Muslim community for the spread, triggered partly by the Tablighi Jamaat conference. This meet from March 13 to 15 in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin area was attended by scores of people from around the world, some of whom were unknowingly asymptomatic COVID-19 positive. The organisers, however, point out that the conference was conducted with the permission of the police and it was held at a time when there was no lockdown in India and the coronavirus itself had not turned into a major threat in the country.

Notwithstanding these assertions, a section of the pro-Hindutva right-wing supporters of the BJP government twisted the narrative to make it appear as if the Jamaat meet was the cause of its spread in the country, and by extension, blamed the Muslim community.

So much so, according to reports, Muslim vegetable vendors in some parts of the country are not being not allowed into Hindu residential areas, a hospital in Gujarat segregated Hindu and Muslim patients of COVID-19 while a cancer hospital in Meerut said it would admit Muslim patients only if they tested negative for COVID-19 – indicative of a larger bigoted trend.

Probably, the repercussions of the anti-Muslim slant worried the Indian government causing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to tweet that ‘COVID-19 does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language or borders before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together.”

With nations on the edge over the continuing pandemic and governments busy in fire-fighting the coronavirus, the last thing anyone would want is needless inflammation of religious tensions. But in an age of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, with their immense reach, all it needs is a stray sentence, phrase or opinion of a bigot to set off a domino-like reaction that could jettison relationships between otherwise-friendly countries and communities.

As history has shown, it is never possible to bring sense into each and every individual in this world. After all, it needed one individual Gavrilo Princip to shoot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria way back in 1914, which ended up triggering World War I.