All 200 million Muslims throughout the nation were singled out and scapegoated as disseminators of the coronavirus in India. A people already accosted by mob and vigilante violence and state policies that equated Muslim identity with foreignness and terrorism, and who were oriented as the very enemy of the Modi regime, were cast—at the height of a global pandemic that carried the "threat of universal extinction" over everybody's head—as the disseminators of its domestic outbreak.

QUESTION: How did this scapegoating translate into concrete state action, and what were the specific policies equating Muslim identity with foreignness?

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 461