Islamophobia in Three Asian Contexts: India, Myanmar (Burma) and China​

​Date: December 10, 2020

What is Islamophobia? Serving as conceptual framework for divisive and reactionary politics, the Islamophobic narrative asserts that Islam and Muslims constitute an essential and existential threat both to national security and to national purity. Some scholars have understood this prejudice as arising from an Orientalist power structure, but some of the harshest impacts of Islamophobia exist in Asian nations. Social disruption occurs as each nation struggles with the economic and cultural challenges of adapting to globalization. As Faisal Devji (March 2020) observes, “Increasingly associated with violence in the west… Islamophobia’s brutality is most readily seen in Asia, a continent awaiting its recognition as capitalism’s new home.”

As a human rights advocacy organization, Justice for All advocates for persecuted Muslim minorities with a special focus on the plight of the Rohingya, the Uyghur and the Muslim minorities in India and Kashmir. In each case, a nation’s dramatic opening to new markets has increased opportunities for exploitation. Serving to divide, weaken and exploit a diverse population, those that promote an Islamophobic narrative frequently link it to a securitization framework. Amplifying fears of real and imagined threats, an authoritarian and even paranoid mindset manifests itself both in military force and mob violence.

Therefore, though contributing social and economic factors exist for exclusionary and even genocidal policies in these areas, Islamophobia drives popular support for extreme and destructive social policies, magnified by grassroots social media as well as incendiary speeches by leadership. Thus, Burman Buddhist Supremacist ideology, Han Chauvinism, and the Hindutva movement all serve as tools for elites to manage diverse populations through fear and mutual mistrust.
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While this paper will review the character and impact of Islamophobia in these three Asian contexts, we note that like Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is a global trend. It exists in Europe and in the United States, where it is expressed both in popular stereotypes and in government policies such as the “Muslim Ban,” mass surveillance and counter-terrorism policies that too often conflate religiosity with extremism. However, though the “multicultural” nature of the USA remains contested, and “culture wars” continue to rage, there has been sufficient popular acceptance, economic integration, and legal protection of minorities to withstand the pressure for greater division. With its legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and genocidal displacement of Native Americans, the USA offers complex lessons in the messy business of making “one out of many.” And yet, the formal and informal leadership of India, Myanmar and China will each have to find its own political will to embrace difference, pluralism and coexistence.