Weakness in Numbers

J.S. Bandukwala is a respected physics professor in the western Indian city of Baroda. On Feb. 26, 2002, Bandukwala—a devout Muslim—delivered an eloquent speech at a local gathering, calling for harmony and dialogue between India’s minority Muslims and majority Hindus. “We have to decide,” he said, “which India we want.”

The next day, Baroda and other cities and towns in Gujarat state were consumed by Hindu and Muslim brutality: many hundreds of Muslims died, along with 59 Hindus.

In Baroda, a small Hindu mob torched Bandukwala’s subcompact sedan, parked in the driveway of his comfortable three-bedroom home.

As the gas tank exploded, the mob cheered. The following day, a group of 200 descended on the professor’s house, shrieking, “Hit Bandukwala! Cut Bandukwala!” They trashed the interior and set it on fire. Bandukwala and his 24-year-old daughter Umaima managed to escape, aided by kind Hindu neighbors.

It was a grim answer to the question Bandukwala had posed in his call for religious harmony. For many Indians these days, there is only one type of country they want: one without Muslims. Today there are 150 million Muslims living across India. And yet there is no strength in such numbers: they have never felt more vulnerable and persecuted. Says Razaqbhai, a retired mechanic in Gujarat: “The government may as well kill us, since there is no place for Muslims in this country any more.”

The plight of India’s Muslims is shared, in varying degrees, by Muslim minorities in other Asian lands: China’s Turkic-speaking Uighurs, the Rohingyas in Burma, Cambodia’s Chams, the disgruntled Muslims of Sri Lanka’s Eastern province. A survey of the region reveals few Muslim minority populations that are, in the words of liberal Islamic scholar Akbar Ahmed, “comfortable and adjusted.” Most often, he claims, “they are resentful and deprived.”

This is, of course, true of other minorities in the continent: in Bangladesh and Pakistan, for example, Hindus have come under brutal attack, while in India, militant Hindu groups have denounced and murdered Christian converts in recent years. When Muslims are persecuted, however, there’s a dangerous difference. They can seek help from the Muslim majority countries—sometimes merely by crossing a border—and bring back a whiff of jihad to their struggle for equal rights, independence or an autonomous state. Meanwhile, fundamentalists in Muslim countries gain inspiration from the sufferings of their minority brothers in other lands. “It is their experiences,” says Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.K. and now chair of the Islamic studies department at Washington, D.C.’s American University, “that are being used by extremists to stoke the fires of the ummah [the global Islamic community] and reinforce this feeling that all Muslims are under attack.”

Ahmed argues that Muslim minorities remain the most vulnerable of religious or ethnic groups, prone to the worst forms of social discrimination and governmental oppression. Ysa Osman, a researcher at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, has spent the past decade investigating the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia’s small Muslim Cham population. Amid the bloodbath that was the killing fields, Osman concludes, a disproportionate number of Chams were killed compared with ethnic Khmers. “Perhaps as many as 500,000 died,” he says. “They were considered the Khmer Rouge’s No. 1 enemy. The plan was to exterminate them all.”

Why? “They stood out,” Osman says. “They worshiped their own god. Their diet was different. Their names and language were different. They lived by different rules. The Khmer Rouge wanted everyone to be equal, and when the Chams practiced Islam they did not appear to be equal. So they were punished.”

Similar prejudices have fueled the crackdown on Burma’s Rohingya Muslims. In this predominantly Buddhist country, the military government in Rangoon has practiced a consistent policy of religious exclusion since seizing power in 1962, labeling the Islamic community from Arakan state as “aliens.” The outcome of this policy is on view at the squalid refugee camps near Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, close to the Burmese border. In 1978 and again in 1991-92, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fled across the border to escape junta-led pogroms. Among the refugees, stories are legion of theft, rape and murder, and of children as young as seven being forced to build roads, bridges and military facilities.

Intensifying such persecution, the Burmese government has convinced many Buddhists in the Arakan region that the Rohingyas are fighting for an independent Islamic state—a goal embraced by radical militant groups in exile in Bangladesh but not by the majority of Muslims living in Arakan. “It’s propaganda,” says Christina Fink, a cultural anthropologist at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. “It’s a way for the regime to divide the Arakanese and make sure the people are less interested in the pro-democracy movement and more interested in driving the Muslims out.”

The United Nations has overseen the return to Burma of more than 200,000 Rohingya refugees. But many have found their houses and land appropriated by Buddhist settlers and their basic rights still denied by the authorities. For example, to qualify for citizenship, says Fink, the Rohingyas must prove that their grandparents on both sides were born in Burma, but “there are very few who can.” Many have abandoned hope and go back to Bangladesh, only to find they are no longer allowed access to the refugee camps, says French anthropologist Chris Lewa, who studies the Rohingya refugees. “Perhaps as many as 100,000 live in slums around Cox’s Bazar,” she says. “They are not wanted in Bangladesh or in Burma. Effectively, they are stateless people.”

Unsurprisingly, militant Islamic groups are recruiting from the refugee camps. Hundreds of Rohingyas have fought with the Taliban and al-Qaeda inside Afghanistan, according to intelligence sources in Bangladesh. And that’s made it worse for ordinary Rohingyas inside Burma, says Lewa: “Ethnic-cleansing policies against the Rohingyas are now presented by the government as an antiterrorism campaign.”

The Uighurs of China’s windswept Xinjiang province have been cast in a similar light. The Uighurs used to account for more than 90% of the province’s population. But Beijing encouraged Han Chinese to migrate westward, and now the Uighurs are a minority in their own homeland. Resentment grew. In the late 1990s, pro-independence Uighurs were responsible for a number of violent events, including the assassination of a pro-Beijing imam in 1998 and a remote-control bomb attack on a convoy of police cars in 1999. Since 9/11, despite an outcry from international human-rights groups, China has intensified its crackdown on Uighurs, according to Hong Kong-based Xinjiang expert Nicolas Becquelin, including detaining thousands of suspected militants, banning the building of mosques and shuttering religious schools. Students now face expulsion from university for keeping unauthorized copies of the Koran in their dorms, and government employees risk losing their jobs if they attend prayers. Some say it’s because the Uighurs are Muslims. “Label them all as terrorists,” says scholar Ahmed, “and you can get away with murder.”

As Professor Bandukwala discovered in Gujarat, hopes for a new era of religious tolerance are little more than a fading dream.