India is under increasing pressure to take action after comments by top officials from the country’s ruling party sparked fury in the Muslim world, riots at home and threats from Al Qaeda.
Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal, both spokespeople for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, made speculative remarks that were seen as insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and his wife, Aisha.
A complaint was filed against Sharma, who commented on the prophet’s private life in a recent TV debate, for “inciting people on divisive lines,” Delhi Police said Thursday on Twitter. Filing a complaint, the first step in any police investigation in India, is typically followed by an interrogation of the accused.
Following her TV appearance, Sharma said on Twitter that her comment about the prophet had been in response to “continuous insult and disrespect” toward a Hindu god and that she had withdrawn her statement. But the BJP suspended her that day, anyway.
Jindal, whom the party also expelled Sunday over comments he made about Islam on social media, said on Twitter that he was not against any religion.
But their comments had already drawn accusations of blasphemy in some Middle Eastern countries, leaving New Delhi struggling to contain the fallout.
As calls for a boycott of Indian goods surfaced on social media, several countries — including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar — lodged official protests against India.
And after a letter attributed to Al Qaeda was circulated among Indian media groups this week warning of Islamist attacks to avenge the remarks, the government tightened public security.
Protests were also held this week in Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and other major cities.
After several days of protests about the remarks, thousands of Islamists from the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan party also rallied and briefly scuffled with police in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, on Thursday.
Were countries like Saudi Arabia to cut ties with India, it “would undoubtedly jeopardize the crucial inflow of foreign capital,” Taushif Kara, a research associate at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge, said in an email Thursday.
India’s trade with the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, which is made up of Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, stood at around $90 billion in 2020-21. Millions of Indians live and work in GCC countries, and New Delhi depends on oil-rich Gulf Arab states to power its energy-thirsty economy.
India’s foreign ministry said the offensive tweets and comments did not, in any way, reflect the views of the government.
But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule, India’s 200 million Muslims “have been systematically targeted and are now increasingly depicted by the BJP as an existential threat to the nation,” Kara said.
“This is not only the sustained persecution of a minority but a radical remaking of the very idea of India,” he added.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also accused Modi’s party of looking the other way and sometimes enabling hate speech against Muslims, who are 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people.
The State Department alleged in its annual report to Congress about international religious freedom this month that attacks on members of minority communities, including killings, assaults and intimidation, took place in India throughout last year.
Modi’s BJP party denies the accusations, and as it struggles to contain the condemnation abroad, it also faces anger from some of its own supporters, for a different reason. Many Hindu nationalists posted comments in support of the spokespeople on social media, saying the government was buckling under international pressure.
