Sanitizing Modi’s Hindutvadi Fascism is Impious!
By Habib Siddiqui
Last Wednesday (March 4, 2020) the US
Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) convened a hearing about
the intent and impact of India’s amended Citizenship laws and the Rohingya
Muslims’ issue in Myanmar to help develop policy recommendations for the US
government in response to the issues. Members of the commission along with an
invited panel of experts expressed concern over the Citizenship Amendment Act
(CAA), saying that it could result in the “wide-scale disenfranchisement” of
Muslims in the country.
The new Indian citizenship law passed
by the Hindutvadi-dominated parliament in December 2019 offers citizenship to
non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan but
not to Muslims. After the enactment of the law, protests erupted across the
country over fears that the CAA
may marginalize the minority Muslim community.
Hindu American Foundation (HAF), one of the
leading Hindu body in America, has accused the USCIRF of conducting hearings that perpetuate misinformation about the intent
and impact of India’s amended Citizenship laws. Such accusations
of the HAF are simply ludicrous!
The Foundation is long known for promoting
Narendra Modi's Hindutvadi agenda amongst the Indian Americans, and has been alleged by its critics
of raising saffron
dollars that promote bigotry and intolerance - mildly claimed to be Hindu
nationalism - all across India, which has, sadly, made Gandhi-Azad-Nehru's
India unsafe
for the non-Hindus. As a matter of fact, thanks to Modi, as rightly stated by
Shashi Tharoor, it’s safer to
be a cow than a Muslim in India.
Where are the human rights of Muslims
of India whose forefathers believed in the promises made by its founding
fathers? What we witness, instead, is that Muslims are being killed
for just appearing to be Muslim not only by the Hindutvadi
mobs but also by the very police who are supposed to protect and come to the rescue
of the victims of hatred. As we had witnessed nearly two decades ago during the
anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat
when Modi was the chief minister of that state, in recent weeks once again the
Indian police had been a party to the crime by participating in such pogroms
against Muslims.
One may recall that on February
27, 2002, within hours of the Godhra incident, Modi declared that the Pakistani secret
services had been to blame; he then had the charred bodies paraded in the main
city of Ahmedabad; and let his own party (BJP) support a state-wide strike for
three days. What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official
estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies. The vast majority of
those who died were Muslim. Mobs of men dragged women and young girls out of
their homes and raped them. In 2007, the investigative magazine Tehelka
recorded boasts from some of the ringleaders. One, Babu Bajrangi, boasted of
how he slit open the womb of a pregnant woman. As noted by the investigative
journalist, Rana Ayyub, author of the book - Gujarat
Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, such was the
intensity of the crime against Muslims in 2002 that the Supreme Court of India called the
Modi government in Gujarat “Modern
day Neros who looked the other way while young women and children were burnt
alive.”
There is a name for such crimes
- it's not communal riot; it's called pogrom.
And as the latest pogrom in Delhi
once again demonstrated a peaceful protest by progressive
Indians against the ruling BJP government's highly discriminatory and
criminally intended Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was not tolerated by the
BJP and the RSS hoodlums.
Prime Minister Modi himself
fired the first bullet with his trademark toxic innuendo. At an election rally,
he said the anti CAA-protesters could easily be “identified by their
clothes”—implying that they were all Muslim. This was untrue since many
non-Hindus had participated against the CAA. But Modi’s statement gave the license
to Hindutvadi fascists to mark off the population that must be punished and killed.
Not surprisingly, several mosques
were burned including the Qur’an, Muslim women raped, Muslim owned homes and
properties burned and more than 40 Muslims lynched to death.
Home Minister Amit Shah delivered
the most communal speeches during the recently concluded Delhi elections in which
the BJP lost to the Aam Aadmi Party. He asked the voters to press the voting button with such anger that
the (Muslim) protestors at Shaheen Bagh felt the current.
Two days before the latest pogrom began in
Delhi, Giriraj Singh, Minister for Animal Husbandry and Fisheries in Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet said Muslims should have been sent to Pakistan
in 1947 during the partition of India. Shortly after that inflammatory
speech, another legislator from Modi’s BJP, Kapil Mishra, made a provocative
speech in New Delhi standing next to a high-ranking police official, in which
he condemned the Shaheen Bagh protestors demonstrating against the discriminatory
Citizenship Amendment Bill that threatens the existence of the 200 million
strong Muslim population in India. Either the cops must clear them out, he
said, or ‘we will take things into our own hands’.
Within hours, Hindu mobs, some carrying
saffron flags,
vandalized mosques and set fire to properties belonging to Muslims. As reported
in the Time magazine, in one such incident, an 85-year-old woman was burned
alive while the mob outside chanted Jai Shri Ram, a Hindu devotional that has become a racist dog
whistle against Muslims. Videos of police breaking CCTV cameras
and taunting prone and bleeding Muslim men while filming them with their
smartphones circulated on social media.
What has Modi and his fascist
Hindutvadi government done to allay the fears of the minorities? Nothing. His
fascist agenda has been at the heart the problem and not the solution. Not too
long ago, he himself gave the most incendiary speech mocking riot victims,
calling relief camps set up for Muslims, child
producing factories.
So, when such news of
anti-Muslim pogroms are widely documented and confirmed by unbiased, investigative
journalists, it's not misinformation but the attempt to call it as such to
cover the heinous crimes of Hindutvadi fascists is repugnant. Obviously, HAF is
trying to distort the truth and whitewash the crimes of the fascist Modi
government.
We should not be surprised by
such impious and ignoble attempts by the HAF. It is worth noting that in September 2019, the HAF
published a letter, co-signed by what was described as "a record number of
230 Indian-American organizations in the US", asking congressman Ro Khanna to withdraw from the Congressional Caucus on
Pakistan and criticizing him for a tweet where he had stated that "it
is the duty of every American politician of Hindu faith to stand for pluralism,
reject Hindutva, and speak for equal rights for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs,
Buddhist and Christians."
Shame on the HAF for supporting
fascism and its new ‘avatar’ - Modi!
We thought that Modi, the Butcher of Gujarat, would
repent and mend his ways evolving into a real human being, esp. since he was
elected the prime minister of India. But an old fascist never repents, neither
learns nor does anything good for the ‘other’ people. Modi continues to prove
the old maxim. His first term in office witnessed Muslims being lynched to
death under the pretext of preserving the cow while the Hindutvadi murderers
walked free.
The second election win has
simply emboldened Modi to repeat the Gujarat experiment in a much larger scale,
affecting the Muslim minority that
comprise 15 percent of India's population. Muslims are more threatened
than ever before in India’s checkered history of state-sponsored hatred, intolerance
and communalism.
Modi’s repeat victory in India,
once wrongly touted as the largest democracy and model of secularism, proves
that Hindutva has become the new face of India, enjoying popular support. [The
ugly facts, to paraphrase Arundhati
Roy, are: India has neither been a democratic nor a secular state.]
The CAA, much like the highly
discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law of Burma that erased the citizenship rights
of millions of the Rohingya people, provides the necessary backdrop for justifying
anti-Muslim violence in India. We have already witnessed how such fascist Acts enacted
at the highest citadel of power are exploited by criminal regimes to sanction pogroms
that quickly turn into genocide as part of a national agenda to eliminate the
targeted minority. The tell-tale signs of genocide are all there in Modi’s
India for anyone serious to see its all-too-apparent symptoms and stop this
menace before morphing into an eliminationist project, something that is faced by
the Rohingyas of Myanmar.
The HAF propagandists should
know that they cannot sanitize India’s Hindutvadi blood-stained image by condoning
hate crimes and pogroms against minority Muslims. As aptly put by Shashi Tharoor
in his 2015 Lok Sabha speech, India cannot sell itself to the world as a "land
of pluralism, tolerance and Gandhianism while encouraging intolerance, communal
hatred and minority insecurity within the country.”
As surviving victims would tell
us there is nothing worse than the terror generated when a government openly turns on a section of its own
population with all the power at its disposal. Just imagine the impact when the
state pretends to be a democracy, where people choose their elected reps in open
elections. It’s simply worse and traumatic that is not easy for anyone outside the
targeted community to either believe or comprehend!
Rana Ayyub, a survivor of
the Bombay riots of 1992, was only a nine-year old child when Modi’s party BJP
was in power there. She writes
in the Time Magazine (Feb. 28, 2020), “I
was nine, a cripple, when Hindu nationalists came home with swords to select me
and my sister for gang rape. We survived when our Sikh neighbour came to our
rescue. For decades I have been under treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder and a part of various groups to help heal my manic periods of anxiety.
Almost once every month, the nightmare revisits me when I wake up sweating
after a night long of trauma when I reimagine men with swords at my doorstep. But
I am a privileged Muslim from an upper middle-class family, with access to
therapists and the best medical facilities. Those killed and injured in Delhi
come from the lower socio-economic strata where therapy and psychological care
is a luxury they cannot afford.”
There
will be no closure for surviving victims in India as long as fascists and mass
murderers like Modi rules. Shame on India for re-electing such a butcher and
calling it a democracy!
Rather
than trying to defend the indefensible acts of the BJP government and its highly
discriminatory policies that give license to kill minorities (like the Muslims),
the organizations like the HAF should promote pluralism not just in Trump’s America
but also in India where hundreds of millions of non-Hindus (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians,
Buddhists, Dalits and animists) are facing the brunt of
state-sponsored pogroms in the hands of Hindutvadi fascists. The tens of
millions of U.S. dollars that they collect under the pretext of India Relief
Development Fund should not be spent for supporting a pernicious ideology like
the Hindutva, which is the reincarnated version of Nazism and Fascism. The
sooner the better for all humanity!
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