The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57 Muslim nations, has pulled up India on what it believes is the “unrelenting and vicious Islamophobic campaign in India maligning Muslims for (the) spread of #COVID-19.’’

According to a number of reliable media reports the statement has been tweezed out of the grouping on the back of sustained lobbying by a group of human rights activists in India, Pakistan’s government and through Chinese diplomatic back channels.

It is not at all surprising that Pakistan and China have leveraged their influence over the OIC to get the grouping to target the Indian state for not, in the groupings own words, insulating Muslims from a ‘’malignant campaign’’ blaming it for the spread of Covid-19. First, it allows Pakistan and China to sow the seeds of long term social dissonance in Indian society. A divided India is undeniably to their advantage. Second, it gives them a handle to draw a false equivalence between their own odious record of defending minority rights and India in international forums. Lowering secular democracies into the gutter of bigotry makes them look comparatively better.

But what should be of real concern is the persistent campaign launched by a group of self-styled rights activists, self-proclaimed thought leaders and some political parties in India to portray the country under Modi as a living hell for minorities, especially Muslims. The phrase ‘’Hindutva bigots’’ is most often used to describe a section of Indians either sympathetic to or then directly linked to the RSS and the BJP.

Lobbying the OIC is just the latest spoke in this strategy of internationalising the minority question in India. This strategy draws heavily from the Kashmir separatist model that has looked to third-party mediation as a solution to delivering Muslim-dominant Kashmir from the alleged bias of the Indian state.

Till now the only ones to have fallen prey to this misinformation campaign by the influential self-styled Indian rights lobby have been left-leaning media outfits and the odd rights panel set up by parliamentary bodies in some countries. Their barely disguised biased resolutions or commentary targeting the Indian state haven’t required a concerted diplomatic response from the Indian government.

But with the 57-member grouping of Islamic countries lecturing India, a hard look needs to be taken at the actions of their collaborators on Indian soil.

This attempt to turn Gulf countries against India goes beyond activism. The countries that are being rallied are primarily non-secular theocracies. Invoking their help to fight the Indian state is an attempt at galvanising the Ummah (the whole community of Muslims bound together by religion) to mediate in the internal affairs of a constitutional secular, liberal democracy.

The attempt at referring the issue to a ‘higher authority that is directed by the word of Allah’ is to create the impression in Muslim minds that they can only ever hope to secure justice from an Islamic state and not the Constitutionally mandated judicial system of a Hindu-majority India. Without oversimplifying or overstating the case, the last time such a sustained campaign to sow seeds of Muslim disaffection was launched in the sub-continent was in the early part of the 20th century. That campaign culminated in the partition of India.