WASHINGTON, Nov 3 (APP):Religious-based hate violence has spiked in India since the pro-Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, with Muslims being the victims overwhelmingly and Hindus the perpetrators, according to a front-page story carried out by the Washington Post on Friday.
The most violent year recorded was 2017, but 2018 is on track to set a new record, and Muslims were reported to be the victims in most of the cases and Hindu perpetrators, the report said citing data by IndiaSpend, which tracks reports of violence in English-language media.
There is no official data available on hate crimes as the government of India does not record religious-based crimes as separate offenses, the report said that the government does monitor incidents of communal violence and its data showed that such incidents rose 28 percent between 2014 and 2017.
Violence against Muslims has been on the rise since Mr. Modi took over. Many liberal Indians, mostly intellectuals and academia have spoken openly about it. Most of this violence is centered on cows as violent “cow vigilante†groups patrol the roads, beating and killing those suspected of smuggling beef.
While, Mr. Modi has said that state governments should punish these vigilantes, the report citing his critics said that his party has emboldened Hindu extremists across the country, and the data supports the trend.
More than half of the cases reported this year through October came from three states in northern India — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand — where Modiodi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, enjoys strong support, the WP report said, referring to the communal cases involving Muslims.
In 2014, Modi’s BJP came to power. The number of hate crimes reported by news outlets has steadily increased since and, according to the report, 2018 is on track to set a new record.
The WP report cited the case of Mr. Ansari who had been on the hit list of vigilantes. He was one day carrying beef in his van to a market when vigilantes, acting on a tip, stopped him. They pulled him out of the van and started beating him with bamboo sticks.
A video of the scene showed the mob jeering, kicking and slapping Ansari, who set his vehicle on fire and beat him to death. Mr. Modi hit the limelight in 2002 when he, as the Chief Minister of the state of Gujrat, was accused of failing to do enough to stop the Hindu-Muslim riots, in which more than 1,000 people, majority of them Muslims, were killed.
The then US administration denied a visa t Mr. Modi on religious-freedom grounds, making the trip only after he became prime minister in 2014. According to the report, he showed little regret of what happened in Gujarat during an interview with the Washington Post.
Now, in a string of incidents, his party members have been accused of supporting or even inciting violence against Muslims, leaving many in the country’s Muslim community of 172 million — thhe third largest in the world — fearful, the report said.&nnbsp;