<![CDATA[Coronavirus outbreak at Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi spurs Islamophobia in India]>

Hafiza Sheikh, a homemaker in Greater Noida in India's Uttar Pradesh state, was suddenly flooded with anti-Muslim messages on social media on Tuesday morning. Some of these called Muslims "illiterate" while others labelled them as "carriers" of the coronavirus infection.

Confused about the reason for these Islamophobic messages, she checked a news site and found out that 24 Muslims who recently attended an event organised by missionary group Tablighi Jamaat had tested positive in New Delhi.

"The entire community became the target of right-wing propaganda machinery," Sheikh said. "Just once again."

Muslim pilgrims wait in bus that will take them to a quarantine facility from the Nizamuddin area of New Delhi, India. Photo: AP

Social media users expressed anger at the organisation for holding an event in early March as the coronavirus pandemic was already raging across the world. A similar gathering by the same group in Malaysia's Sri Petaling mosque complex in February, with 16,000 attendees, resulted in hundreds of infections across Southeast Asia.

The government has declared New Delhi's Nizamuddin area, a neighbourhood of narrow, winding lanes where Tablighi Jamaat has its international headquarters, as one of the country's 10 coronavirus "hotspots".

Authorities said people kept visiting the five-storey building from other parts of the country and abroad, and that the group had delivered sermons to large groups of people despite government orders on social distancing.

Hundreds of people were crammed into the building until the weekend, when authorities began taking them out for testing. More buses arrived on Tuesday to take them away to quarantine centres in another part of the city.

But the online criticism soon snowballed into anger against Muslims in India, with a new hashtag #coronajihad dominating on Twitter and posts suggesting that Muslims were the main carriers of Covid-19 in India.

One person tweeted "#CoronaJihad" is more "dangerous" than coronavirus while another said that both "Corona virus and Quraan-e-virus" are harmful for humanity, making a reference to the Islamic holy book.

Members of Tablighi Jamaat were called "despicable creeps" for "spitting out of windows" of the bus which was taking them to hospital for treatment.

Delhi Minorities Commission chairman Zafarul Islam Khan said linking Muslims with coronavirus is part of the systematic ostracisation of the country's 201 million Muslims that has been taking place since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government took power in 2014, with the latest example being the Delhi violence that killed at least 40 Muslims in February. He stressed that Tablighi Jamaat members were "wrong and insensitive" to organise an event at such a sensitive time but to blame all Muslims for spreading the infection is "vindictive".

Seven people who attended the event along with visitors from Covid-19- affected countries including Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, have reportedly died of coronavirus in other states.

In a statement, the organisation said it had informed the police that many attendees were living in its headquarters and they could not leave because of the nationwide lockdown. On Tuesday, authorities sealed off the building and lodged a police complaint against the organisers for negligence after people staying there tested positive for Covid-19 and 300 more displayed symptoms.

This gave another reason to many Hindu right-wingers to troll Muslims. One video on social media showed a man pulling out a skull cap and wearing it when a passer-by asked him to wear a mask, while another showed young Muslim men defying medical advice not to shake hands because Islam said shaking hands will strengthen love and not spread the infection.

A woman wearing a protective mask leaves after attending the Friday prayers at the Jama Masjid (Grand Mosque) in the old quarters of Delhi, India, on March 20. Photo: Reuters

Delhi-based political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy pointed out that the anti-Muslim content on social media was largely "manufactured by the Hindu right-wingers to vilify Muslims" to fit into the current "anti-Muslim rhetoric". Since many questions on coronavirus remain unanswered, Gudavarthy said calling Muslims the carrier of the infection was "simple, easy and acceptable in today's India".

Some videos have even been used out of context to target Muslims. For example, a video showing Muslims licking utensils to spread coronavirus that went viral on Tuesday was discovered by fact-checker Alt News to be an old video showing a custom followed by Bohra Muslims in which they lick leftovers to avoid wastage.

Amid reports that the attendees of the gathering had spread the coronavirus infection to other states across the country, Pratik Sinha of Alt News observed that anti-Muslim content will dominate the social media ecosystem in the coming days.

Looking at the "pattern of misinformation and propaganda" of similar kind that he has fact-checked in the past, Sinha said that there will be an attempt to "delegitimise" the community through such content.

Many "liberal" non-Muslims and Muslims called the organisers "ignorant", saying they should have been mindful as many attendees at the recent event in Malaysia had spread the infection to different countries. Some also emphasised that Muslims were aware of the risks linked to mass gatherings and had stopped mass prayers in mosques long before the lockdown.

Others pointed out that many Hindu temples across India welcomed large gatherings until mid-March but nobody is questioning them. People also shared a video of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath taking part in a religious ceremony on March 25, defying the nationwide lockdown.

But Sheikh said it would be difficult to convince hatemongers who now had "more fodder" to troll Muslims. "This vilification of us won't end any time soon," she feared.

Additional reporting by Reuters

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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