Uproar in India as Hindu group files court case over lion named after Muslim emperor

A bizarre court case in India involving a lioness named after a Hindu deity and a lion bearing the name of a 16th-century Muslim emperor has sparked concerns about the rising intolerance of hardline Hindu groups who balk at any perceived religious slight.

To supporters of these Hindu groups, however, the court petition filed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is justified - as Indian authorities have for years placated the country's Muslim community over incidents of alleged blasphemy.

VHP has slammed a zoo in West Bengal state for putting the lioness named after Hindu deity Sita in the same enclosure as Akbar the lion, which shares the name of the Mughal emperor whose reign lasted from 1556 to 1605.

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The Calcutta High Court will hear the petition on Tuesday.

VHP is one of several Hindu nationalist groups who detest anything to do with the Mughals, who ruled over a huge swathe of the Indian subcontinent for several centuries before the arrival of the British and are regarded by hardliners as having enslaved the Hindu majority.

Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014, such groups have been emboldened to demand anything which they claim to have hurt Hindu religious or cultural sensibilities be banned.

In its petition, VHP, which has ties with Modi's ruling BJP, is demanding action against the North Bengal Wild Animals Park in Siliguru, West Bengal.

"Sita cannot stay with the Mughal emperor Akbar," VHP leader Anup Mondal told reporters in Kolkata on Sunday.

The VHP also objects to the lioness being named after a Hindu goddess. "Such naming of animals after the name of religious deities is very much sacrilegious and tantamount to blasphemy," said Dulal Chandra Roy, another VHP official.

Alarmed at the protest, zoo officials have separated the two lions and transferred them to a park in Tripura Zoo in the country's northeast.

Critics say the case is yet another example of how the Modi government has presided over rising religious intolerance and provocative demands for censorship in India, a Hindu-majority country with the world's largest Muslim minority population at some 200 million.

"Members of the ruling party often talk about Hindu slavery under the Mughals and express disgust for anything to do with Muslim culture. This encourages Hindu extremists to keep the pot boiling with confected indignation," veteran columnist Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jnr told This Week in Asia.

Last month, Netflix was forced to remove the film Annapoorani: the Goddess of Food from its website in India after right-wing Hindu groups were angered by the depiction of a woman from the Brahmin caste - the highest ranking social group in India's system of social stratification, who are typically vegetarian - cooking and eating meat. They also took exception to the implication that the revered Hindu god Ram, husband of Sita, might have eaten meat.

In 2020, Netflix also faced a boycott from such Hindu groups over an adaptation of Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy, amid accusations the streaming giant was promoting 'love jihad', a term used by hardliners to describe any relationship between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman.

Owing to India's long history of Hindu-Muslim animosity and sectarian violence, the country has numerous laws targeting acts that cause outrage against "religious feelings" or promote "enmity between different groups".

Hardline Hindu groups have often been quick to invoke these laws and file police complaints as a way of removing any content they dislike.

Muslim comedian Munawar Faruqui became a victim of one such campaign in 2021, when he spent 25 days in jail in the state of Madhya Pradesh after several individuals filed a police complaint against him.

The 32-year-old had been regularly heckled at his shows and online by Hindu radicals who accused him, without evidence, of insulting their deities. He was eventually forced to give up his career as a comedian owing to threats of violence that repeatedly saw organisers cancel his gigs.

"I'm done ... hate won", he announced on Instagram after receiving an average of 50 threats a day.

When asked about such incidents, some extremist Hindu groups say they are borrowing from what they called the "Muslim handbook" - a reference to how India in 1988 banned Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses after the author was accused of blasphemy against Islam.

"The government then was so sympathetic to Muslim sentiments that the book was banned at once. Now it's our turn to protect our religion," 42-year-old Sudhir Narang, a VHP sympathiser in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, told This Week in Asia.

Narang added that when Rushdie was planning to attend a literary festival in Jaipur in 2012, Muslim groups had demanded that Indian authorities deny him a visa. In the end, the author decided not to attend and spoke via a video link instead.

"As I recall, no liberals or lefties spoke out against the unreasonableness of that demand but somehow Hindu demands are always extremist," Narang said.

As a result of these campaigns by extremist Hindu groups and individuals, creatives in India have increasingly chosen to self-censor their works to avoid any potential confrontations.

A relatively well-known Bollywood director, who declined to be named, told This Week in Asia that the possibility of ending up in the cross hairs of such groups was scary.

"It might be a 20-second scene, a sentence or two and that will be two years' work down the drain if it has to be withdrawn. It's not worth it [to antagonise the radical Hindu groups]," he said.

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

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