More than 1,200 academics, activists and civil society members in India have come out in support of a Muslim professor arrested over a social media post about the recent military confrontation with Pakistan.
They have signed an open letter demanding an end to the malicious campaign aimed at maligning the professor’s image and spreading misinformation.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a Cambridge-educated professor of political science at Ashoka University in the Indian state of Haryana, was arrested on Sunday on charges related to inciting secession and insulting religious beliefs following a complaint by a local leader of the ruling BJP party’s youth wing.
Calling the arrest of the political science professor “preposterous”, the open letter highlights the “targeted harassment and attempted censorship” of the academic for speaking against the “blind bloodlust for war”.
Nationalistic fervour runs high in both India and Pakistan after the two nuclear-armed nations carried out missile and drone attacks against each other for four days before a ceasefire was announced on May 10.
New Delhi launched airstrikes inside Pakistani territory in response to the killing of 26 tourists in the mountain town of Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir. India has held Pakistan indirectly responsible for the violence, which reignited nationalist anger across the country. Pakistan denies the charge.
There have been calls for boycotting Muslim-owned businesses in Hindu-majority but constitutionally secular India. Many supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi view the Indian Muslim population as unpatriotic and sympathetic towards Pakistan because of their religious identity.
“(Mahmudabad) has done nothing except carry out his duties as a teacher, a citizen and a person who believes in harmony and peace,” says the open letter.
Any confirmed jet downing would not only dent New Delhi’s military prestige, but also signal its miscalculation in assessing Pakistan’s upgraded aerial strength.
What did Mahmudabad write?
Mahmudabad took aim at war hawks in a Facebook post a day after India launched a series of air strikes against Pakistan on May 7.
Mahmudabad wrote he was “very happy” to see “so many right-wing commentators applauding” Colonel Sofiya Qureshi – a Muslim officer of India’s armed forces, who briefed the press on the military attack against Pakistan.
“(But) perhaps they could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the BJP’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens,” he wrote, adding that the ‘optics’ must translate to reality or it would be interpreted as ‘hypocrisy’.
Three days later, Mahmudabad wrote another social media post where he called out fellow Indians demanding that Pakistan be “wiped out” from the map of the world.
“(What) exactly are you asking? For the genocide of an entire people? I know Israel is getting away with doing this – and some Indians admire this – but do we really want to advocate the wholesale murder of children as potential future enemies?” he wrote.
He criticised India’s media and politicians for ‘dehumanising’ Pakistanis so that ‘madmen’ could wreak ‘arbitrary, unpredictable and senseless death’ on them.
“This dehumanisation is symptomatic of deep-seated insecurities within us because we somehow need to deny someone else’s humanity to affirm our own… Those who sit at home and call for war are cowards because it is not their sons and daughters who have to go to battle,” he wrote.
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Wave of anti-Muslim sentiment
While the Indian economy, estimated at $3.7 trillion, has grown at roughly seven percent a year in the last decade to become the fifth largest in the world, the country sank deeper into the cesspool of Hindu populism with every passing year.
Religious minorities, especially Muslims who constitute about 15 percent of the total population in one of the world’s most diverse countries, have become a routine target of religious persecution.
The Pew Religious Restrictions Index — which tracks the levels of persecution and religious restrictions in 198 countries — shows India registered a notable deterioration under Modi’s rule.
Demolitions of mostly Muslim homes and places of worship in what came to be known as bulldozer justice went unpunished. BJP supporters as well as government officials have “advocated hatred and violence against religious minorities with impunity, particularly Muslims” under the Modi government, according to Amnesty International.
India’s Supreme Court has ordered authorities to immediately stop the acts of “bulldozer justice”, but the directive has fallen on deaf ears.
The number of Muslim members of the 543-member Lok Sabha of 2024 is only 26, down from 27 in the 2019 legislature. It means less than five percent of parliamentarians belong to the Muslim faith, even though their share in the population is nearly 15 percent.
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Allegations of misogyny
Mahmudabad was arrested days after the Haryana State Commission for Women took exception to his comments about Colonel Qureshi and summoned him for disparaging women officers in the Indian armed forces and promoting communal disharmony.
Mahmudabad denied the charge, saying there was “nothing remotely misogynistic” in his comments that could be construed as anti-women.
The public letter by Indian scholars demands that the Haryana State Commission for Women revoke its summons and apologise to Mahmudabad.
It also calls on Ashoka University to stand by the academic, “especially during this time when he has done nothing except carry out his duties as a teacher, a citizen and a person who believes in harmony and peace”.
The case of Mahmudabad’s arrest has drawn the attention of the Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice BR Gavai, who has listed it for hearing on May 20.
