United Nations Secretary General while lamenting bigotry stated that “We’ve seen a surge in Covid-19 related anti-Muslim attacks”. Most of these attacks are taking place in India under the patronage of government. Right now, India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is following overtly racist and sectarian policies. Modi’s actions are not only eroding India’s own secular structure but creating a threat to regional peace and security. India is taking advantage of the world’s preoccupation with the COVID-19 crisis to further push its “Hindutva” agenda.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has in its annual report for 2019 recommended that India be placed on religious freedom blacklist. “In 2019, religious freedom conditions in India experienced a drastic turn downward, with religious minorities under increasing assault,” the report said. Lowering of ranking for India amounts to a stark show of disapproval of India’s divisive new citizenship law, which the United Nations has called “fundamentally discriminatory”.
The commission recommended that the State Department designate India as a “country of particular concern,” said Nadine Maenza, commission’s vice chair, because it “tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The most “startling and disturbing,” she said, was India’s passage of a citizenship amendment act that fast-tracks citizenship for newcomers who belong to six religions but excludes Muslims. This potentially exposes millions of Muslims to detention, deportation and statelessness when the government completes its plan for a nationwide national register. Tony Perkins, the commission’s chair, called the law a “tipping point” and voiced concern about a registry in the northeaster state of Assam, under which 1.9 million people failed to produce documentation to prove that they were Indian citizens before 1971, when mostly Muslim migrants flowed in from Bangladesh. Perkins told an online news conference that “You could potentially have 100 million people, mostly Muslims, left stateless because of their religion.
The Commission said India should join the ranks of “countries of particular concern” that would be subject to sanctions if they do not improve their records. India last received a similar rating from the watchdog in 2004, also a period of heightened concern over a Hindu nationalist government’s treatment of religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians. In 2002, more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in three days of pogrom in the state of Gujarat encouraged by Narendra Modi, who was then Chief Minister of Gujarat.
The commission said Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, “allowed violence against minorities and their houses of worship to continue with impunity, and also engaged in and tolerated hate speech and incitement to violence.” It pointed to comments by Home Minister Amit Shah, who notoriously referred to mostly Muslim migrants as “termites.” It highlighted the revocation of the autonomy of Kashmir, which is India’s only Muslim-majority state, and pointed out that Delhi police turned a blind eye to mobs who attacked Muslim neighbourhoods in February this year. The 104-page report chronicled the progress and failures on religious freedom in 29 countries. India has rejected the report as “biased”.
A recent analytical report released by the Research Section of Kashmir Media Service, said that since the BJP won power in India in 2014, lynching of the country’s minorities have surged. Quoting Human Rights Watch, the report said that at least 44 murders took place due to lynching between May 2015 and December 2018. Similarly, according to a Reuters report, a total of 63 cow vigilante attacks had occurred in India between 2010 and 2017. In these attacks between 2010 and June 2017, 24 Muslims were killed and 124 injured. Also, India’s news website The Quint has recorded 113 killings between September 2015 and September 2019 in spates of lynching targeting minorities, especially Muslims in India.
New citizenship legislations introduced by the RSS-backed communal government were aimed at stripping the Muslims of their citizenship rights. Fascist Modi government is working on the agenda of converting India into a Hindu Rashtara. BJP and RSS have never accepted Muslims as Indians and they are now on a mission to purge India of its minorities.
According to India’s new domicile law under which an Indian citizen who has lived in occupied Jammu and Kashmir for 15 years can call the territory their place of domicile. Such changes “represent another opportunistic move by the RSS-BJP dispensation to advance their sinister aim of effecting a demographic change in the occupied territory.
On May 03, the administration in India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJ&K) decided to treat the entire Kashmir region as well as three districts in Jammu as Covid-19 red zones, or hotspots. This has been done to perpetuate curfew like restrictions on Muslim majority areas. Continued communications restrictions and lack of unfettered access to medical and other essential supplies are compounding the Covid-19 situation for the Kashmiris in IOJ&K. India’s belligerence continues to imperil peace in the region. Reportedly in Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOJ&K), the authorities are not handing over the bodies of the youth, martyred by Indian troops during cordon and search operations, on the pretext of coronavirus risk. Director General of Kashmir Police, Dilbag Singh in a media interview in Srinagar said the bodies are not being handed over to their families to ensure physical distancing. “The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, through a letter, advised that bodies of youth not be returned,” Singh told the newspaper in an interview. However bodies of routine coronavirus civilian Indian patients are being returned to their heirs. The actual reason is to prevent huge participation of the local population in the funerals of the martyrs whom they consider as their heroes.
Extremist Hindus have been emboldened by BJP government’s support to unleash terror on members of minorities. Muslims, Christians and low-caste Hindus are treated as second class citizens in the so-called largest democracy of the world and their persecution has increased manifold. Modi is shaping India’s policy according to Hindutva dictates.
Muslims and other minorities are living in a state of fear. Even senior officials from Modi’s BJP are making inflammatory speeches against Muslims, who are the main target of extremists affiliated with Hindutva forces. Narendra Modi and his ministers are encouraging violence against Muslims and other minorities.
Interestingly, President Donald Trump had declined to criticise the law during his February visit to India, where his meeting with Modi was punctuated by the worst violence in decades in New Delhi, in which 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.
Hopefully, Trump would value the report of USCIRF and direct the State Department to implements its recommendations. Also, it is time for the UN to move beyond mere lip service and constitute a Commission of Enquiry to ascertain the facts and impose relevant sanctions on India.
