It’s a sad feeling to know that the leaders of your country don’t like you. To be discouraged because you are a Muslim in what is now a Hindu-first India.
It gives color to everything. Friends, loved for decades, change. Neighbors tune in to neighborly moves — no longer joining in on celebrations, or knocking to ask in moments of pain.
“It’s a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, a writer who lives outside Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.
When he was a film critic for one of India’s major newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, fills his time with cinema, art, music. Work days ended with riding on the back of an old friend’s motorcycle to a favorite food stall for a long chat. Her husband, a fellow journalist, writes about life, food and fashion.
Today, Mr. Salam’s work is reduced to office and home, his thoughts clouded by weightier concerns. The constant ethnic profiling because he is “visibly Muslim” — by bank tellers, by parking lot attendants, by fellow train passengers — is tiresome, he said. Family conversations are darker, with both parents focused on raising their daughters in a country that increasingly questions or even tries to erase the markers of Muslim identity — how they dress, what they eat, even their Indianness as a whole.
One of the daughters, a wonderful student-athlete, struggled so much that she needed counseling and was unable to attend school. The family often debated whether to stay in their mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood in Noida, just outside Delhi. Mariam, their eldest daughter, who is a graduate student, hopes for compromise, anything to make life bearable. He wants to move.
Anywhere other than a Muslim area can be difficult. Real estate agents often ask if the families are Muslim; landlords are reluctant to rent to them.
“I started slowly,” says Mariam.
“I refuse,” answered Mr. Greetings He is old enough to remember when coexistence was more common in a very diverse India, and he does not want to add to the country’s increasing segregation.
But he is also pragmatic. He wants Mariam to move to another country, even if the country is like this.
Mr. Salam clings to the hope that India is in a transitional phase.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, is playing a long game.
His rise to national power in 2014, on a promise of rapid development, swept a decades-old Hindu nationalist movement from the fringes of Indian politics firmly to the center. He has since chipped away at the secular framework and stable democracy that had long held India together despite sometimes erupting religious and caste divisions.
Right-wing organizations began to use the enormous power around Mr. Modi as a shield to try to reshape Indian society. Their members sparked sectarian clashes while the government turned a blind eye, with officials later showing up to destroy Muslim homes and round up Muslim men. Zealous vigilante groups killed Muslims they accused of smuggling beef (cows are sacred to many Hindus). Top leaders in Mr. Modi’s party openly celebrated Hindus who committed crimes against Muslims.
In large sections of the broadcast media, but particularly in social media, bigotry has gone unchecked. WhatsApp groups spread conspiracy theories about Muslim men wooing Hindu women for religious conversion, or even about Muslims spitting on restaurant food. While Mr. Modi and his party officials reject claims of discrimination by pointing to welfare programs that cover Indians equally, Mr. Modi himself is now repeating anti-Muslim tropes in the elections due early next month. He took aim at India’s 200 million Muslims more directly than before, calling them “infiltrators” and implying that they had too many children.
This creeping Islamophobia is now the dominant theme of Mr. Salam’s writings. Movies and music, the pleasures of life, feel smaller now. In a book, he recounted the lynchings of Muslim men. In a recent follow-up, he describes how Indian Muslims feel “orphaned” in their homeland.
“If I don’t take the issues of import, and limit my energy to cinema and literature, I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he said. “What will I tell my children tomorrow – when my grandchildren ask me what you were doing when there was an existential crisis?”
As a child, Mr. Salam lived on a mixed street of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in Delhi. When the sun warms up in the afternoon, the children move their games under the trees in the Hindu temple grounds. The priest will come with water for everyone.
“I was just another kid to him,” Mr. Greetings
Those memories are one reason why Mr. Salute a stubborn optimism that India can restore its secular fabric. Another is that Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism, while cutting across large parts of the country, has been resisted by some states in the country’s more prosperous south.
Family conversations with Muslims there are very different: about college degrees, job promotions, life plans — the usual aspirations.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, often warring political parties are united in protecting secularism and focusing on economic well-being. Its prime minister, MK Stalin, was an avowed atheist.
Jan Mohammed, who lives with his family of five in Chennai, the state capital, said neighbors joined in each other’s religious observances. In rural areas, there is a tradition: When a community finishes building a place of worship, villagers of other religions come with gifts of fruits, vegetables and flowers and stay for a meal.
“More than accommodation, there is understanding,” Mr. Mohammed said.
His family is full of overachievers — the norm in their educated state. Mr. Mohammed, who has a master’s degree, is in the construction business. His wife Rukhsana, who has a degree in economics, started an online clothing business after the children grew up. One daughter, Maimoona Bushra, has two master’s degrees and now teaches at a local college as she prepares for her marriage. The youngest, Hafsa Lubna, has a master’s in commerce and in two years became a manager of 20 from an intern at a local company.
Two of the daughters plan to pursue Ph.D’s. The only concern is that potential grooms will be scared off.
“Proposals are down,” joked Ms. Rukhsana.
A thousand miles to the north, in Delhi, Mr. Salam’s family lives like a foreign country. A place where prejudice has become so habitual that even friendships of 26 years can be broken as a result.
Mr. Salam called a former editor a “human mountain” for his large stature. When they ride the editor’s motorcycle after work in the Delhi winter, he takes care of Mr. Greetings from the air.
They are often together; when his friend got his driver’s license, Mr. Salam was with him.
“I go to my prayer every day, and he goes to the temple every day,” said Mr. Salam. “And I used to respect him for that.”
A few years ago, things started to change. WhatsApp messages came first.
The editor began to pass on to Mr. Salam some staples of anti-Muslim misinformation: for example, that Muslims will rule India for 20 years because their women give birth every year and their men four wives are allowed.
“At first, I said, ‘Why do you want to go into all this?’ I thought he was just an old man who gets all this and passes,” Mr. Salam said. “I give him the benefit of the doubt.”
The breaking point came two years ago, when Yogi Adityanath, a Modi protégé, was re-elected as the leader of Uttar Pradesh, the populous state next to Delhi where the Salam family lives. Mr. Adityanath, who is more outspokenly belligerent than Mr. Modi among Muslims, rules in the saffron robes of a Hindu monk, often greeting large crowds of Hindu pilgrims with flowers, while cracking down on public displays of the Muslim faith.
On the day of vote counting, the friend kept calling Mr. Salam, who was happy with Mr. Adityanath’s lead. Just a few days ago, the friend was complaining about the increase in unemployment and his son’s struggle to find a job in the first term of Mr. Adityanath.
“I said, ‘You were very happy since this morning, what did you get?'” he recalled asking his friend.
“Yogi ended namaz,” replied the friend, referring to the Friday Muslim prayers that often flowed into the streets.
“That was the day I said goodbye,” said Mr. Salam, “and he never came back into my life after that.”
