Islamic preacher Zakir Naik has been reaching out to his followers in India and all over the world from Malaysia since 2016. He continues to incite communal violence and also disseminates hatred towards religious sentiments.
On Friday his facebook page released video in which he responding to a question posed by one Indian Muslim who had asked how Indian Muslims should be responding to “harassment and oppression” by the BJP government. Zakir Naik said that there were two categories that they should be put into: as a whole and as individuals. He said that Muslim should stop fighting each other and that they should have a united front against other different political parties and social organisations.
He said that official estimates ‘suppressed’ the number of Muslims by saying that they were only 200 million. He claimed that around 250-300 million Muslims live in India.
He then declared, “Muslims should make another party, exclusively, only for Muslims”. “This political party should join hands with other political parties that are not Fascist and not communal,” he added. Zakir Naik opined that such a Muslim political party should join hands with Dalits, adding “Dalits are not Hindus”.
He went on to say that Indian Muslims have been lacking political leadership and that they should rise to the occasion and form a united political party.
“If you have the means to go to a Muslim-majority country, that should be the best,” Zakir Naik said, adding he did “not expect” all Muslims of India to leave the country. Zakir Naik said Muslims who could not move out of the country could go to another state that is more “lenient towards Muslims”. Naik added that the best state that he could think of was Kerala. Zakir Naik claimed that followers of all three major religions—Hindus, Muslims and Christians—each accounted for about one-third of the population of Kerala.
He also called for the ghettoization of Muslims saying they could consider moving to Muslim majority areas in cities.