India’s COVID-19 outbreak was weaponized against Muslims through state and mob violence.

Evidence

A novel strain of the Hindutva menace was now spreading, capitalizing on national anxiety around a global pandemic that bore the face of a relentlessly persecuted and pummeled people: India’s Muslims. Islam in India was deeply rooted, and the world’s third-largest Muslim population was the target of unhinged pandemic paranoia spread by Modi. … After the lies came the batons, cricket bats, and boycotts. Hindu extremists mobbed and then pounced on Muslims in New Delhi. Muslims were being beaten physically, then financially. “In Punjab State, loudspeakers at Sikh temples broadcast messages telling people not to buy milk from Muslim dairy farmers because it was infected by coronavirus,” and shops owned by Muslims in both big cities and small towns were boycotted as sources of COVID-19 outbreak. “We wanted to pick up our things and leave, go somewhere far away,” shared Abdullah, who owned a store targeted by mobs in New Delhi. Those with money could flee. For poor and working-class Muslims in Delhi, which comprised a sizable segment of its population, there was no exit. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to COVID-era scapegoating patterns documented elsewhere; the reader reads this alongside Iftikhar’s global synthesis. — 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
• SHARE: The Sikh temple loudspeaker boycott of Muslim dairy farmers is a specific, vivid detail worth sending to someone tracking pandemic scapegoating.