Khameini Jr should look in the mirror before accusing India

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently made comments regarding the treatment of Muslims in India. Khamenei’s remarks, made during the Prophet Mohammed’s birth anniversary, highlighted the alleged suffering of Muslim communities in India, Gaza, and Myanmar. The MEA responded by condemning the comments as “misinformed and unacceptable.” The official statement emphasized that nations should reflect on their own human rights records before making judgments about others. What is surprising about Khameini’s statements is that diplomatic protocol was forgotten or geopolitics took a backseat, with this exchange coming at a time when India and Iran maintain strong bilateral relations, particularly through strategic projects like the Chabahar port.

The Indian government usually doesn’t get into the human rights records of other countries or concerns itself with their “democracy index” – a trademark of the Indian tolerant values, accommodating everything into its ethos. This is the reason, historically it absorbed multiple invasions and conquests and gave refuge to ancient Zoroastrians (Parsis), the Prophet’s family in Sindh, various Balochs, Afghans, Tibetans, and now even Burmese Rohingyas. Despite the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan by the Muslim League and the British, today there are 190-200 million Muslims thriving in the land of their birth.

Yet the global scrutiny is on India’s treatment of its Muslims and other minorities or its democracy index. This is even though millions of Muslims enjoy equal rights as other citizens under the Indian Constitution, downright to having their laws regarding family, marriage, inheritance and custody of children. Or that right now Jammu and Kashmir, after three decades of Islamic Jihad sponsored by terrorism is going for Assembly elections, months after the Lok Sabha polls of 2024, a democratic feat lauded by governments, think tanks and media all over the world. Indians who read, and keep themselves aware of current affairs know that this scrutiny is part of a nexus of anti-India forces, who are focused on the balkanisation of the country with the help of what we term as ‘brown sepoys’ in media or literary circles fraternity, based abroad or domestically collaborating with powers who have vowed to hinder the growth and progress of India.

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This same scrutiny isn’t seen with as much rigour about the treatment of Uighur Muslims in China, or Syrian Muslims being bombarded by a coalition comprising of Muslim-majority countries as well. Or that the terror groups of Boko Haram are regularly massacring Christians and Muslims in the African continent. Or that Pakistan has an abysmal track record of atrocities against Hindus, Christians and ethnic Balochs. The UN and other “human rights” agencies are currently denying that the Islamist groups are targeting Hindus in their home country of Bangladesh and the US-supported interim govt of Mohd Yunus has released the Islamist terrorists and is now giving coverfire to the ongoing genocide of Bangladeshi Hindus.

We seem to be worrying about what other heads of state say about us, true or untrue, or even giving importance to terrorist-designated preachers like Zakir Naik, currently a fugitive, interfering in our internal matters such as the parliamentary debate about the Waqf Bill. I think it is high time to start our scrutiny of how other countries treat their minorities, exploit their fault lines and allege that their so-called democracy is a sham. Let’s start with Khameini Jr’s Iran, whose people have risen in rebellion against the mandatory culture of veiling, the morality police’s brutalities against its people and the enforced disappearances and custodial killings of those who dissent from the regime’s “mad mullahs”.

The Iranian people and the world just marked the second anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s tragic death, which ignited a powerful movement for women’s rights and freedom in Iran – “Women, Life, Freedom” / “Zan, Zendagi, Azadi”. Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in police custody on September 16, 2022, after being detained by Iran’s Morality Police for allegedly violating hijab laws. What followed was horrendous by all accounts and should have produced outrage from global heads of state, media organisations, influencers and celebrities, to those think tanks, and democracy index groups who champion themselves as saviours of the marginalised, the subaltern and the discriminated.

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Following the uprising, Iran imprisoned its female protestors who burnt their scarves in protest. They were sent to the notorious Evin Prison, where the male guards assaulted them before murdering them because the rationale behind this is that if they were virgins, they would go to heaven, which their executioners believed they should not be entitled to. This is part of the lore of the 1980s, when Khomeini, the 1979 Ayatollah wrote his Green Book that has instructions to justify the molestation of babies. Iran even started arresting men who expressed support for the Iranian women in the uprising and held mock trials for them for global TV cameras, denouncing their stand and sentencing them to execution by hanging. Many boxers, wrestlers, and men who had made it to their Olympic team were hanged and still are. Iranian women were also subject to acid attacks, baton charges, and disfigurement for asking for justice for Mahsa Amini, even mothers with babies were not spared.

Iran’s misogynist rule goes back to the 1979 revolution which brought hardline Islamists to power. This era is best depicted in Iranian cinema by the movie The Stoning of Soraya M, the true event of the stoning of Soraya Manutchehri in 1986 on fabricated adultery charges. The director of the movie too is jailed currently. The global “human rights” Orwellian eye also does not take into account the 40-year-old rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, over the ownership and gatekeeping of Islam, a rivalry which produced a “Black Wave”, enveloping regions as far as Kashmir valley where the Wahhabi/Salafist interpretations reduced Islam to mandatory veiling and skullcaps and beards. This 40-year-rivalry that has taken countless lives of Muslims and non-Muslims is written by Kim Ghattas, a prominent Lebanese journalist and author, known for her critically acclaimed book, “Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East”.

Yes, Indian Muslims are suffering in two ways – from far-right Hindu traditionalists who defend political Hinduism as their birthright and often justify lynching of innocent Muslims for cow-smuggling and consumption of beef. But they also suffer from backwardness and lethargy, stuck in their Mughal past of an 800-year rule over Hindus and post-colonial complacency which came with India’s freedom from the British and the creation of East and West Pakistan. While there are innumerable Hindus who condemn the lynchings, be they left liberals from Hindu heritage or rationalists from the right wing too, the Muslim elite intelligentsia (civil society, authors, historians, journalists, fact-checkers, politicians and ulema) have chosen to keep the 190-200 million Muslims complacently backwards with the narratives of Islamophobia and demonising political Hinduism which is generally known as Hindutva.

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This is an opportunity to correct the misnomer Islamophobia, a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood in the West to shield legitimate criticism of regressive practices in Islam and legitimise the victimhood of Muslim politics anywhere in the world. The correct term for discrimination against Muslims should be Muslimphobia or anti-Muslim bigotry. There are many practices in Islam which deserve criticism, such as mandatory veiling, child marriage, instant triple talaq, FGM, halal and muta marriages, gender apartheid, unequal inheritance rights of children, etc. There are also supremacist political agendas of Muslims which deserve criticism such as resistance to the 1937 Shariat Act which gives personal laws for Muslims, land grabs in the name of Waqf properties, justification of the Muslim supremacist Articles like 370 and 35a, etc.

Also, the various subsects within Indian Islam – the Deobandis, Barelvis, Tablighis, etc do produce jihadis like Khameini’s proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon, despised by the Lebanese people, once in a while. This forces the secular state of India to deal with the internal insurgencies these jihadists and Islamists create to balkanise India and hence the narrative of “Muslim persecution” in India, that the global anti-India watchdogs love to push into mainstream and legacy media.

Khameni Jr should brush up on the history of India’s struggle for Independence and the role that Aligarh Muslim University played in the creation of the first Islamic state in the region or a New Medina, if you will. This same University has had internal struggles in reconciling Islam with modernity since its days in the 1800s when its founder was declared an apostate for modernising the education of Muslims – considered blasphemous then, and even now 79 years later in lower-income Muslim ghettos across the country. Khameini Jr, before becoming the saviour of millions of Muslims worldwide, should look in the mirror and start looking for escape routes for the time when his people rise and probably lynch him from those very cranes that he uses to hang the differently-oriented Muslim dissenters.

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Baiting the Prophet’s birthday was not a smart move, pious Muslims object to politicising Islam or its Prophet, a trend which was developed centuries after his death. Indian Muslims understand the core message of Islam the best, as is evident in the syncretic kind of Islam that has developed in the Indian subcontinent since its advent – by the sword, trade or proselytising. India/Bharat/Hind is home and the safest country for Muslims where not only do they have the right to practice their faith but also the freethinkers of Islam have a right ‘from’ religion as well, under the Constitution of India, hailed as the most secular and democratic one globally.

The Iranian people are the descendants of Cyrus, the Great and like the Ahmedis who thrive in India, the ancient Iranians and their sacred fire have been absorbed into the ethos of India. Khameini needs to wash his mouth before uttering the name of Bharat.

The columnist is a Fellow of the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research (FIHCR)