The Empowered Supremacists in the USA and India
By Habib Siddiqui
Abu Hurayrah (RA) reported that Prophet Muhammad (S) said: ''By Him in
Whose hand is my soul, a time would come upon the people when the killer would
not know why he killed and the victim would not know why he was killed.'' [Sahih
Muslim]
There is carnage everywhere these days from one part of our globe
to another. Hardly any place is immune from mindless violence against innocent
civilians. Are we witnessing that age of carnage, prophesied some 14 centuries
ago? Or, are the current disturbing events a precursor to a much worse evil
that awaits us all?
Last weekend (Aug. 3-4, 2019), within
24 hours two mass shootings took place: the first one in El Paso, Texas, and
the second in Dayton, Ohio. Thirty-one lives were lost at the hands of two individuals
motivated by hate and having access to military grade rifles. On Thursday,
Aug. 8, Police arrested a heavily armed white man in body armor, a loaded rifle
and 100 rounds of ammunition when he walked into a Walmart store in Springfield, Missouri.
Thanks to President Trump and his
white supremacist and bigoted supporters, America is under attack by domestic
terrorists. Americans are no longer safe in their places of worship, schools, workplaces,
movie theaters and shopping centers.
According to a
government document, prepared by New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security
Preparedness, dated April 15, 2019, white supremacists were responsible for all ‘race-based’ domestic
terrorism incidents in the USA in 2018.
Although such white terrorism did not
start with Trump and may not end with him, but, surely, he is viewed as their
champion whose administration has emboldened them. It is, thus, no accident
that his hateful rhetoric (e.g., the USA is threatened by ‘Hispanic invasion’)
against the non-whites provides the necessary backdrop for recent events of
White/Christian terrorism.
Like many budding fascist leaders of
our time, Trump has been against immigration from non-white continents. Two
Muslim congresswomen are afraid of their lives because of his hate-filled
tweets and speeches in campaign rallies. He has used very disparaging remarks
about the immigrant community, which according to a new study, released by The New American Economy Research Fund, has actually founded 223 of the
Fortune 500 companies (i.e., 101 companies founded directly by foreign-born
individuals and another 122 were created by the children of immigrants). Those companies collectively
generated $6.1 trillion in revenue in 2018 — which is bigger than the GDP of
countries like Japan, Germany, and the UK — and employed 13.5 million people.
A separate study by the National Bureau of
Economic Research found that immigrant-owned technology firms in the U.S. were
found to be more innovative than the U.S.-born firms.
But such hard facts won’t deter
racists who see themselves as foot-soldiers to ‘make America great again’ from
unleashing their terrorism against the immigrant community!
As Muslims prepare for Eid-ul-Adha, tens of
millions of Muslims in many parts of our world – devastated by violence of all
sorts from mob lynching to state-orchestrated pogroms and wars – will not be
able to celebrate it this year.
Thanks to popular Hindutvadi supremacist agenda,
millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims of the Indian Administered state of Assam
have recently been made stateless in their ancestral land. Much
like the indigenous Rohingyas of Arakan (Rakhine) state of today’s Myanmar, they
are falsely accused of intruding to Hindu India after 1971 when independent Bangladesh
emerged.
Under the pretext of protecting cows, the lynching of Muslims in India has now
become the discernible face of the so-called largest democracy on earth. Not
too long ago, Tabrez Ansari, 24 years
old, Muslim youth was tied to a pole in Saraikela, Jharkhand and lynched by a
mob which demanded that Ansari chant “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Hanuman”,
which are blasphemous for any Muslim to utter. Ansari succumbed to his injuries
four days after the lynching when the police didn’t give him the necessary
life-saving medical care. Unfortunately, this act of vigilantism by a mob in
complete disregard for rule of law is not an isolated incident in Narendra
Modi’s India.
On April 7, 2019, a Hindu mob suspected 68-year-old Shaukat Ali of selling beef in Assam's
Biswanath Chariali where such sales are not yet prohibited. Yet, they thrashed
him and also proceeded to force feed him pork.
On July 26, 2019, C P Singh, Jharkand’s urban development minister from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was seen on national TV brazenly asking Irfan Ansari, a Muslim
MLA from the Congress Party, to chant 'Jai Shri Ram', insisting he was a
"Ram wala" and that "Babur or Timur Lang", the medieval era
Muslim conquerors, were not his ancestors. If this be the attitude of a
Ram-bhakt Hindu Minister to a Muslim MP, what can ordinary Muslims expect in
India?
As hinted above, the BJP, under Narendra Modi, is
driven by a Hindutvadi supremacist ideology in
which non-Hindus have no place in India. Thus, they peddle myths and call it
history. BJP’s election win in 2014 saw renewed efforts to rewrite Indian history so as to legitimize Hindu nationalist ideology. According
to historian
Romilla Thapar, “These efforts had begun when the B.J.P. first governed India between 1999
and 2004. Under Mr. Modi’s government and various state governments run by his
party, the attempts to change history have taken many more forms, such as deleting chapters or passages from public school textbooks that
contradicted their ideology, while adding their own make-believe versions of the past.”
BJP’s solid reelection victory this spring (2019) gave
it the power to bring about controversial and fundamental changes in Indian
politics and justify them as a matter of national security and as a rectification of the “past mistakes” of the Indian National
Congress.
Thus, the latest government decision to abrogate
the Article 370 of the Indian Constitution (which guaranteed autonomy to Jammu
and Kashmir), and of Article 35A (which protected
indigenous society from possible demographic transformation in the name of
development, equality, and national unity) should not surprise anyone, except
perhaps the timing. Keen observers believe that Trump’s willingness to be a
mediator between Pakistan and India may have contributed to this sudden
proclamation. [True to her innate reluctance to part with Kashmir, Indian
leadership has always rejected any third-party mediated negotiation to resolving
the long-standing Kashmir problem peacefully.]
As rightly noted by Professor Dibyesh
Anand of University of Westminster, London, in the Foreign Policy magazine
(dated Aug. 8, 2019), Modi’s decision should be seen as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the BJP’s main
agenda—the conversion of India from a secular pluralist democracy to a Hindu
Rashtra (state). He writes, “From political sloganeering “Hindustan mein rehna hai to hindu ban kar
rehna hoga” (If you want to live in India, you have to be a Hindu)
to the crackdown on religious conversions into Islam and Christianity to inclusion
of various anti-Muslim agendas in party manifesto to celebrating anti-secular
supremacists as national heroes, the BJP is remaining true to the explicit
agenda of Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations linked to the far-right
paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.”
“The Hindu nationalism
that fuels the BJP portrays Hindus—who make up 80 percent of the population—as
involved in a long-term battle against numerous enemies: Muslims, Christians,
communists, and secularists. Modi is imagined as a conquering leader who will
overcome these foes, avenge humiliations suffered by the supposed Hindu nation
over centuries, and rebuild a strong Hindu India where the threat of communism
is extinguished; religious minorities are domesticated, expelled, or exterminated;
and pluralist secularism is rejected as “minority-appeasing pseudo-secularism”
while the acceptance of Hindu supremacy in India is seen as real secularism,”
Anand writes.
The long-disputed
territories of Jammu and Kashmir (with 77% Muslim population) have long played
a critical part in this mythology. Just as the BJP’s cause had received a boost
from the destruction of the historic Babri Mosque in 1992 in Ayodhya, the Hindu
supremacists saw Kashmir as the next holy cause
that would empower their nation.
According to Anand,
“Experiments during the previous administration—including demonetization,
lynching in the name of cow protection, and new exclusionary
citizenships—showed the Indian public’s sadomasochistic fascination for drastic
action and even violence so long as the primary victims were minorities; the
time was ripe for the implementation of a Hinduization plan for Jammu and
Kashmir.”
To prepare that ground for Hinduization, Modi’s Government
first issued a presidential order replacing the words "Constituent
Assembly" with "Legislative Assembly." However, for the past
year Jammu and Kashmir has been ruled by a governor appointed by New Delhi
after the ruling BJP pulled out of an alliance with a local Kashmiri party and
dissolved the Legislative Assembly in June 2018. Since there is no state
government, or state legislative assembly, the central government and
Parliament then took power to remove the Article. Following the release of the
presidential order, the BJP-majority Parliament introduced a resolution
recommending that the president abrogate Article 370. It also had a bill passed
to downgrade Jammu and Kashmir into a union territory instead of a state and
turn a third region of the state, Ladakh, into a separate union territory.
As I noted elsewhere back in 2011, the Indian
leaders have been deceitful from the day one of the crisis, denying the people
of the Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) their right to decide their fate. Once their
insincerity towards the UN-mandated plebiscite was exposed, non-violent protests
broke out, which sometimes morphed into armed resistance by Kashmiri youths. To
quell such protests, IOK was turned into the most militarized zone in our time:
there is one armed Indian soldier for every ten Kashmiris.
The statistics below from just the
last three decades of Indian occupation is enough to get a glimpse of the
suffering of its violated people:
·
Kashmiris
Killed by the Indian army: 94,479;
·
Disappearances
of Kashmiris at the hands of Indians: 10,125;
·
Gang
rapes by Indians in Kashmir: 10,283;
·
Kashmiri
women widowed: 20,005;
·
Kashmiri
buildings destroyed: 106,071;
·
Kashmiri
children orphaned: 20,080.
Suffice it to say that with the revocation of the
Article 370, the situation is bound to become worse. Kashmir has been turned
into the largest prison on earth affecting the lives of some 15 million inhabitants
who are locked down in their own homes for the last few days with the Indian army being ordered to shoot
them on sight if they step out. [Note:
Curfew was briefly lifted for Friday’s Jum’ah prayer. After prayer when Muslims
rallied in protest, police fired upon them
injuring many who are treated in Srinagar’s hospitals.] Some 38,000 heavily armed military
officers with tanks have been brought into Kashmir in the last few days. India
has closed down all media in Kashmir; all cell phone and landline services are
shut down; Internet service in Kashmir has been blocked; all tourists have been
evacuated; hotels, guest houses, private and government buildings have been
converted into makeshift jails in Kashmir with as many
as 400 politicians, aides and separatist leaders being put under arrest.
Former Chief Minister
Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti are put in separate cottages in Hari Niwas.
The latter told the BBC she felt there was a "sinister design" to the
decision. "They just want to occupy our land
and want to make this Muslim-majority state like any other state and reduce us
to a minority and disempower us totally."
Kashmiri leaders are appealing to the world to
stop the imminent genocide of the Kashmiris. Genocide Watch in Washington, DC
has already issued a Genocide Alert for India because it has cancelled
citizenship of four million Indian citizens, mostly Muslims. This reflects the
early stages of a genocide in process. [Note: The experts on genocide
studies concur that Burma’s 1982 Citizenship Law, which made the Rohingya
stateless, is the forerunner to its genocide!]
Sadly, the widespread Hindu support for this latest
act of constitutional vandalism shows that there is little hope of checking the
BJP on other divisive domestic issues, such as the building of a grand temple
to the Hindu god Ram on the site of the former Babri Mosque and taking away the
existing rights of religious minorities to be governed by distinct personal
laws on family matters including marriage and inheritance. As noted by regional
experts like Professor Anand, the Kashmir Valley will now face demographic
transformation and settler colonialism. If Kashmiri Muslims resist Hinduization
of their land, they will be the targets of yet more brutal state violence and
be represented as Islamist terrorists. Violence and not peace will become the
new norms, thus, adversely affecting regional stability and security.
If conscientious human beings of our planet are
serious about genuine peace, they cannot allow India to stonewall Kashmir. They
must demand that India allow the United Nations, international media, the
International Red Cross, and Human Rights Watch free access to Kashmir. India
must allow an international investigation of human rights violations in Kashmir as
asked for by Human Rights Watch. The world must grant Kashmiris what the UN
promised, and Indians and Pakistanis agreed to back in 1948: A right to self-determination; Kashmiris must be
allowed a vote to decide if they want to remain in India, join Pakistan or
become an independent nation.
The sooner the better!
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