At War with Corona-Jihadists - How Threat Metaphors were used to demonise and construct violence against Muslims during the Covid-19 outbreak in India

Abstract

In March 2020, when the world grappled with Covid-19, in India a story about reality surfaced. This story metaphorically constructed Muslims as weaponising Covid-19 in order to infect and kill the Hindu population. These stories, in turn, resulted in violent instances perpetrated against Muslims. The aim of this thesis is to uncover the relations between these emerging stories about reality in India that construct Muslims as the source of Covid-19, and the violent instances that were reported within the same time frame of March until July 2020. Grounded in the realm of social constructivism, this study argues that the meaning given to the Covid-19 outbreak and spread in India, was socially constructed. This thesis, through the combination of a Critical Metaphor Analysis, and conducting semi-structured interviews, studied these representations of Muslims as the culprits of Covid- 19, as well as related ideological performances. By substituting elements of emotions and performances to the analytical frame of ‘framing theory’, this thesis aims to move beyond the ‘cognitive bias’ of classical framing studies. As such, the study aims to provide a more holistic understanding of the complex dynamics of the framing practices central to this case study. The results analysis showed three dominant threat metaphors that construct Muslims as the culprits of Covid-19: Muslims as Covid-19, Muslims as the enemy in the war against Covid-19, and Covid-19 as a form of Islamic bioterrorism. I argue that these threat metaphors were as effective in demonising the Muslim community because they consisted of re-invented long-standing ideas and cultural narratives. Through this process of re-invention, Hindu nationalist parties were able to merge the long-standing emotions related to historical frames, with the newfound emotions arising during the Covid-19 outbreak.