In the past couple of weeks, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Kuwait government, a royal princess of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as a number of Arab activists have called out Islamophobic hate speech by Indians seen to be accusing the country's Muslims of spreading the novel coronavirus.
A barrage of tweets and statements from individuals and institutions in the Gulf expressing their outrage over the hateful social media posts forced the Indian government to respond, including a Twitter post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which he stressed that "COVID-19 does not see race [or] religion"
It started with right-wing Hindus accusing Muslims of a "conspiracy" to spread the coronavirus after dozens of cases were linked to a congregation of Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary movement, at their headquarters in New Delhi in the middle of March.
Hashtags such as #CoronaJihad trended for days on Twitter and panellists in TV debates called them "human bombs", while many called for a ban on Jamaat. Its New Delhi office has been sealed.
We call on international organizations, especially the United Nations, the Security Council, the Organization of islamic cooperation and all human rights organizations, to intervene immediately to stop the violations committed against our Muslim brothers in India #India
On April 19, India's Ministry of Home Affairs said more than 4,000 of the nearly 15,000 cases detected until that day were linked to the Jamaat, whose chief Mullah Saad Kandhalvi was charged with "culpable homicide" and money laundering and is likely to be arrested.
On Thursday, the total number of coronavirus cases in India was more than 33,000, with more than 1,000 deaths.
Arabs flag hateful posts
Following the Jamaat issue, a wave of Islamophobic posts was unleashed on social media by right-wing Hindus, some of them employed in Gulf countries.
Dubai-based Indian, Saurabh Upadhyay, asked Muslims to "accept they were the source of the pandemic" and called for the death of Jamaat members, describing them as "terrorists". He deleted his tweets after social media users in the Gulf and India called him out.
Anyone that is openly racist and discriminatory in the UAE will be fined and made to leave. An example;
An old tweet by Tejasvi Surya, a young member of parliament belonging to Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also resurfaced, provoking further outrage.
In his 2015 post, Surya had quoted a Canadian-Pakistani writer as claiming that "95 percent of Arab women have never had an orgasm in the last few hundred years".
Such Islamophobic comments are particularly hurtful when originating from individuals who have lived and worked in the Gulf.
"The level of hubris of the Hindutva fascists shocked people throughout the world, changing previously held opinions," Dr Farhan Mujahid Chak, who teaches political science in the Gulf Studies programme at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera.
Princess Hend al-Qassimi, a member of the UAE royal family, warned "openly racist and discriminatory" Indians in the Gulf that they "will be fined and made to leave" the country.
In the past month, at least six Hindus working in the Gulf region have lost their jobs or have been charged for their social media posts.
