Harsh Mander: Boycott calls for ethnic cleansing – from Nazi Germany to Modi’s India

The local administration and police in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand stirred a storm by “advising” owners of eateries along the highway of pilgrims of the annual Kanwar Yatra to mount sign-boards in their shops that prominently displayed their names.

Because names in many parts of India are markers of religion and often caste, this obviously a device to identify Muslim-owned establishments. The administration also “advised” Muslim shop-owners to shut down their shops for the period of the Kanwar Yatra, and for Hindu shop owners to send their Muslim employees on forced “leave”.

The Kanwar Yatra is an annual pilgrimage of devotees of Shiva. In this, men dress typically in saffron vests and shorts and walk, often barefoot, hundreds of kilometres to Haridwar to collect water from the sacred Ganga. This they then carry in earthen pots hung from a bamboo stick strung over their shoulders. The water they carry to pour over the Shiva lingam in Shiva temples.

Until the 1980s, this religious performance was undertaken by small numbers of often older men. In recent years, fuelled by massive patronage by Bharatiya Janata Party governments and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers, the numbers of devotees who join the Yatra have swelled to, according to some estimates, two million. This Yatra is second now in scale only to the Kumbh.

Explicit and extravagant state support by BJP governments in recent years has burgeoned, with senior police officials showering petals from helicopters on the Kanwar walkers and chief ministers greeting them with flowers and garlands.

Such mammoth religious gatherings have become not just an opportunity for vote-gathering by Hindutva parties. These also have opened livelihood opportunities for thousands of food stalls, fruit sellers and tea shops that lined the highways on which the Kanwar walkers throng. Shop owners and workers report that in the 15 days of the yatra, they make enough extra money to pay off old debts, to help send their children to private schools and so on. It has never mattered in the past that some food stalls are owned by Muslims, some by Hindus, or that Muslims have many Hindu employees and Hindus Muslim employees.

The sudden new requirement to prominently display the name of the owners of these shops call to mind anxious memories of Nazi Germany, in which Jewish establishments were required by law to paint prominently in yellow and black paint the Star of David on their walls, so that these could be identified – for boycott, vandalisation and forced closure.

It was on April 1, 1933, just over three months after Adolf Hitler took the reins as chancellor of the German nation, that the Nazi Party in Germany called for a national boycott of the German Jewish population. Formally, the German government did not make the boycott call, but its support was visible everywhere. The boycott targeted Jewish businesses and professionals across the land.

More than three quarters of a century later, in another land across the oceans, the largest in the world, governments and civilian militia, inspired explicitly by the ideology and practice of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, have made many similar calls for boycott and targeting of Muslim-owned establishments and the discharge of Muslim employees. The Kanwar Yatra orders are only the latest among these.

Reminiscent of the ways that Hitler’s government in 1933 claimed that it did not order or enforce the boycott of Jewish establishments, and it was the Nazi party workers who did this; the police officials in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand also slyly formally distanced themselves from these unconstitutional orders by not serving these to the shop-owners in writing. They averred instead to media persons that these actions by shop owners were “voluntary”.

Back in 1933, on the day of the boycott, Nazi armed stormtroopers menacingly stood outside Jewish-owned department stores, retail businesses and establishments of professionals such as doctors and lawyers. They held up boycott signs, with words such as “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” The symbol of the Star of David was conspicuously painted in yellow and black paint on the windows and doors of all Jewish outfits, with slogans saying “Don’t Buy from Jews” and “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”.

People attacked and vandalised Jewish properties across the country. The stormtroopers pulled Jewish lawyers and judges out of courtrooms and publicly humiliated them on the streets. Nazi groups forcefully shut down Jewish market stalls and ordered their proprietors to leave the town. Men with clubs “drove out customers, broke windows, and upset counters.” Employers were coerced to pay off their employees and shut their doors. Through all of this, the police rarely intervened to protect the victims of this hate violence.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the boycott “marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign by the Nazi party against the entire German Jewish population”. A week later, the government by law restricted employment in the civil services to “Aryans”. Jewish government workers, including teachers in schools and universities, were sacked.

The call for the economic boycott of Muslim businesses and workers if not new in India. It has remained a central strategy in the ideological arsenal of the Sangh as a vehicle both for ethnic cleansing and enforcing second class citizenship. Archival records reveal that such calls were made by Hindutva organisations as far back as in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired possibly by the Nazi boycott of Jewish establishments. Indeed, since then, the campaign has never gone away. It adopts new guises, new pretexts, new voices, it has its troughs and peaks, but the core is unchanged.

Consider, for instance, pamphlets that were widely distributed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Gujarat in the wake of the Gujarat carnage of 2002. These exhorted Hindus to “Wake up! Arise! Enforce! Save the country! Save the religion!” And in what ways? “Let us resolve! From now on, I will never buy anything from a Muslim shopkeeper”. The pamphlets continued with many similar prohibitions, like “I will not sell anything from my shop to such elements”. “Neither shall I use the hotels of such anti-nationals. Nor their garages”. “From a needle to gold, I will not buy anything made by Muslims”. “Never work in offices of Muslims. Never hire them”. “Do not let them buy offices in our business premises, nor sell or rent our houses to them”. The list goes on.

What is remarkable is that these harsh and hateful Hindutva embargoes have remained similar in content and even language from the 1930s until the present day. In Gujarat, I observed for many years of my work there among the survivors, the brute power of boycott of Muslims in the aftermath of the 2002 carnage.

An estimated two lakh Muslims were forced to live in relief camps for many months after the carnage, because their homes had been destroyed or they were fearful or prevented from returning. The message from their non-Muslim neighbours of the past was unambiguous. Their preference was that they should never return. But if they did, they would have to live in separate habitations outside the main village, and people would not trade with or employ them.

In recent years, hateful calls for the boycott of Muslims have risen to a new crescendo, raised shrilly by religious and political leaders and members of the myriad affiliates of the Sangh. To cite only one recent example of a hate speech calling for boycott of Muslims from the region in which the latest verbal instructions given to Muslim food stall owners, a saffron-clad Anand Swaroop, president of Varanasi-based Shankaracharya Parishad, declared, “One who reads the Quran becomes a beast, they are no longer human. For those who wish to remain connected to India, they must give up the Quran and namaz. If we start boycotting Muslims socially and economically, they will embrace Hinduism.”

He went on, “We want an army of one crore Hindu youth. We don’t need a Swayamsevak (volunteer workers), we need a swayam-sena (a volunteer militia) now. Pick up swords, guns or whatever you have, war has been declared and it will go on till we have a Hindu Rashtra.”

One major difference between the war on Jewish livelihoods in Nazi Germany and on Muslim livelihoods in Modi’s India is that the Jews at that time were small in numbers but constituted a significant and influential part of German public life – intellectual, cultural and economic. In 1933, Jews numbering about 600,000 were less than 1% of the total German population.

Still, more than 100,000 German Jews had served in the German army during World War 1. Many were decorated for valour during the war. Jews held high office in governments and taught in Germany’s respected universities. Between 1905 and 1936, German writers and scientists won 38 Nobel Prizes. Of these 14 were won by Jews. This means members of less than 1% of the population won 41% of the Nobel awards.

Contrast this with Muslims in India today. They form a significant 14% of India’s population and number 200 million. This is more than the combined population of Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland and Austria. The Sachar Committee established by former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government found that Muslims in India suffer development deficits comparable to India’s other two most dispossessed social groups, the Dalits and Adivasis. Since then, their situation has only plummeted further.

A study by the Indian government in 2013 found Muslims to be the poorest religious group in India. Scholars note that Muslims have become the least upwardly mobile group in India. Similarly, the All India Debt and Investment Survey and Periodic Labour Force Survey released in 2023, show that Muslims “have the lowest asset and consumption levels among major religious groups… they are the poorest religious group in the country [and] over-populate the ranks of the poor in India.” Scholar Christophe Jaffrelot observed that Muslims saw an 8% decline in enrolment in higher education. No other social group has seen such an absolute decline in recent years.

Yet another common thread that binds the Nazi boycott of the 1930s with the contemporary hate campaign against Muslim livelihoods in contemporary India is that both are sought to be justified with fanciful hate conspiracy theories.

On April 1, 1933, when the Nazi party carried out the first nationwide, planned action against Jews with a boycott targeting Jewish businesses and professionals, it claimed this was in retribution for “Greuelpropaganda (fake propaganda of atrocity stories)” allegedly circulated by German and foreign Jews aided by foreign journalists in the international press to damage Nazi Germany's reputation.

The recurring calls for boycott of Muslims in India are also rationalised by charging Muslims with a wide range of crimes and delinquencies. There is first the claim of their chronic disloyalty to India and disrespect to the Hindu faith, evidenced by the alleged destruction of Hindu temples in medieval India.

The state-wide boycott of Muslims in the wake of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 was claimed as revenge for the “terrorist” burning of a train compartment in Godhra which took around 60 lives. The calls for boycott of Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh after the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 centred around unproven claims that a Jat girl was “teased” by a Muslim youth, and that crimes soared in settlements with high Muslim concentrations.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the conspiracy theory spread like wildfire that Muslim fruit and vegetable vendors deliberately contaminated the fruit and vegetables they sold with their infected saliva to infect Hindu residents, and this led to countrywide boycotting of Muslim vendors. The conspiracy of “thook jihad” or saliva jihad continues, weaponising prejudice and hate even against Muslim eateries with wild claims that Muslims spit into food sold by them.

The communal clash in 2023 in Nuh, neighbouring Gurugram, led to massive retrenchment of Muslim workers and domestic workers in retaliation. Karnataka under the BJP saw a rash of boycott calls against Muslim fruit-sellers, mango wholesalers, scrap dealers, tour operators, cabbies and meat shop owners.

Even BJP chief ministers and senior ministers stoke boycott calls with fake hate conspiracies. A serial offender is the chief minister of Assam, Hemanta Biswa Sarma. When prices of vegetables in the capital city of Guwahati escalated, he blamed Miya Muslims (of Bengali origin) of the state for this, and called on young Assamese to organise their boycott.

The summons for public boycotts are often the fronting of a thinly disguised project of ethnic cleansing. In Uttarakhand, an allegation of “love jihad” that was proved to be a hoax became the pretext to call for residents across the state to refuse to rent shops and homes to Muslims and to buy their wares. Crosses were marked outside Muslim properties, eerily reminiscent of the yellow Star of David outside Jewish properties in Nazi Germany.

Often, appeals for boycotting or shutting Muslim shops are dressed up as necessary to defend Hindu religious sentiments. Karnataka saw a medley of campaigns by Hindutva formations against Muslim vendors operating near temples, although this has been the norm for generations. The Hosa Mariguda Temple in Udipi was the first in Karnataka to ban Muslim traders near the temple, followed by the Mahalingeshwari Temple in Bappanadu and the Sri Durgaparmeshwari Temple in Dakshin Kannada.

Hindutva activists went so far to demand that shoe shops run by Muslims close to the Sri Anjaneya Temple in Bengaluru be shut because they somehow desecrated the temple’s sanctity. The concerned minister claimed to media persons to be helpless as he refused to intervene to uphold the constitutional right of people to trade anywhere they choose.

However, even amid the darkness of hate boycotts that threaten to erase the livelihoods of vulnerable minorities and vintage traditions of peaceful shared living, light still pierces through the cracks. Many historians of Nazi Germany I spoke with told me that a significant act of silent resistance against Nazi hate was to continue to purchase your groceries from the Jewish store in your neighbourhood. They told me that this was not rare.

In India, too, some light shone through in recent weeks. Judges ruled unequivocally against divisive hate targeting Muslims, their properties and businesses. The Supreme Court intervened a day before the Kanwar Yatra began to prohibit orders in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand requiring shops to display the names of the shop-owners and workers.

This is not the only instance of judicial defence of constitutional rights and pluralism. The campaign for economic boycott and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Uttarakhand had begun with claims by local Hindutva activists that two men, one of them Muslim, tried to kidnap a 14-year-old Hindu girl in the ruse of “marriage” in a conspiracy of “love jihad”. Activists demanded that Muslims leave the hill town: at least 41 evacuated the town almost overnight, and six never returned.

The campaign spread to other parts of the hill state, encouraged by Chief Minister Prakash Singh Dhami who described the incident as a “crime” that was “part of a larger conspiracy” and declared that “love jihad will not be tolerated”. The two men were jailed, but 19 hearings later, judge Gurubaksh Singh acquitted them. The evidence before the court revealed that the entire story was a hoax, as even the teenaged girl testified to having been tutored to report against the two men.

Even more significantly, light shone when, across the route of the Kanwar Yatra, both Hindu and Muslim owners and workers of eateries testified how inextricable were their bonds. Hindu owners often employed a majority of Muslim workers and testified to their skills and diligence. Likewise many Muslim owners employed Hindu workers. Each valued each other. In their bonds in work, and outside it, the differences in their religious identities mattered little.

Harsh Mander, writer, peace and rights worker, researcher and teacher, leads the campaign Karwan e Mohabbat for justice and solidarity with survivors of hate violence. His latest book Fatal Accidents of Birth is in book stores.

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