The diplomatic anger of more than a dozen Muslim countries has forced the Indian government to apologize. In a heated television debate two Thursdays ago, the ruling party’s spokeswoman, Nupur Sharma, turned the artillery on the Muslim minority, as is her custom.
This time, however, he crossed a red line for some, dismissively referring to “Muhammad, who fell in love with and married a six-year-old girl, according to the Koran.” Another spokesman, Navin Kumar Jindal, nailed down Sharma’s remark more offensively with a tweet.
Already a week ago, these allusions to Aisha, revered in Islam, already sparked riots in Kanpur, northern India, with Muslims bearing the brunt.
When Narendra Modi’s BJP believed that the controversy was going down, it has acquired a threatening international dimension, forcing him last Sunday to suspend his two spokesmen from militancy and to issue a statement “condemning any insult to religious personalities”.
Too late for the Indian vice president, Venkaiah Naidu, who was in Qatar and chose to suspend his press conference. This was the first country to summon the Indian ambassador, but throughout Monday the list did not stop increasing.
Meanwhile, a supermarket in Kuwait was emptying its displays of Indian products, and these images encouraged non-Arab Muslim countries to join in the condemnation.
India is on a tightrope because millions of its fellow citizens, of all religions, work in the Persian Gulf. The campaign of these countries joins the criticism of another kind from the West, because India has multiplied by 22 its purchases of Russian oil.
From the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, to which India sent its first delegation on Thursday, the Taliban called to “contain the fanatics.”
