COVID-19 in India was blamed on all 200 million Muslims nationwide

Evidence

However, the ire of the popular media—and of the extremist mobs that ripped through the city that hosted the Muslim conference—found a convenient scapegoat for the domestic spread of COVID-19: Muslims. Not only the organizers of the Tablighi Jamaat conference, and the 2,000 attendees, who were dubbed “super spreaders,” but the whole of the Muslim population in India. … All 200 million Muslims throughout the nation were singled out and scapegoated as disseminators of the coronavirus in India. A people already accosted by mob and vigilante violence and state policies that equated Muslim identity with foreignness and terrorism, and who were oriented as the very enemy of the Modi regime, were cast—at the height of a global pandemic that carried the “threat of universal extinction” over everybody’s head—as the disseminators of its domestic outbreak. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 460

Categorization

• SEED: Potential piece on how pandemics consistently produce minority scapegoating across nations—India’s Muslims during COVID, Jews during plague outbreaks, etc.
• CANDY: The “Corona Jihad” and “human bombs” labels are a grimly striking detail for casual conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Trump scapegoated minorities to deflect COVID-19 blame — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 127