In April 2020 allegations about a Muslim congregation sparking a cluster of Covid-19 cases in India quickly took an Islamophobic turn.
Thousands of preachers from home and abroad had attended the gathering in Delhi by the Tablighi Jamaat, a near-100-year-old
Islamic missionary movement. Narendra Modi's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government called it a "super-spreader event".
Islamophobic memes and hashtags blaming the group for spreading the virus trended on social media, and news networks broadcast incendiary headlines such as "Save the country from Corona jihad".
India charged nearly a thousand people who attended the congregation for flouting lockdown protocols. (Eight months later, courts had acquitted the last of the detained preachers, saying they had been "maliciously prosecuted" under directions from the government.)
Most of the preachers came from Indonesia, a trading partner of India. Not surprisingly, Indonesia expressed its disquiet over the issue at regional summit meetings. The country's lawmakers alleged that the controversy was being used to taint Muslims in Hindu-majority India. A former Indian diplomat said this was an example of "externalization" of domestic issues.
India's ongoing diplomatic firefighting over offensive comments made by two senior members of the BJP about the Prophet Muhammad is not the first time that Mr. Modi's party or government has faced global censure for alleged Islamophobia.
- India in deeper crisis over Prophet Muhammad row
- The woman who started the Prophet Muhammad controversy
Two years ago BJP MP Tejasvi Surya found himself in the center of a storm when his 2015 tweet on Arab women went viral. Prominent businesspeople, lawyers, and commentators in Dubai and Kuwait condemned his remarks. (Mr. Surya deleted the tweet later.)
In a 2018 public meeting, India's interior minister Amit Shah said that Bangladeshi citizens who had entered India illegally were "infiltrators" who had "eaten our country like termites".
This whipped up a storm in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where a senior minister described the remark by India's second most powerful leader as "unwanted and uninformed". A Bangladeshi columnist wrote that Mr. Shah "had a long history of making hateful, insulting remarks about Bangladesh".
Over the past year, India has been hit by a tsunami of hate speech by saffron-robed right-wing Hindu radical leaders against the country's 200 million-strong Muslim community. Some of them have exhorted Hindus to take up arms and spoken about the genocide of Muslims.
In the past, the right-wing has raised the bogey of so-called "love jihad", a baseless conspiracy theory accusing Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage. Vigilante Hindu mobs have lynched suspected Muslim cow smugglers and demanded a boycott of businesses owned by the community.
On social media, female Muslim journalists and social workers have been ferociously trolled. Muslim women have been put up for sale in fake online auctions. Partisan news networks have added fuel to the fire by provoking participants into taking up extreme positions during shrill talk shows.