Sanitizing Modi’s Hindutvadi fascism is impious!

On March 4, 2020, the 8S Commission on International 5eligious )reedom (8SCI5)) convened a hearing about the intent and impact of India’s amended Citizenship laws and the 5ohingya Muslims’ issue in Myanmar, to help develop policy recommendations for the 8S government in response to the issues. Members of the commission along with an invited panel of e[perts e[pressed 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 nonMuslim religious minorities from Pakistan, %angladesh, 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 )oundation (HA)), one of the leading Hindu body in America, has accused the 8SCI5) of conducting hearings that perpetuate misinformation about the intent and impact of India’s amended Citizenship laws. Such accusations of the HA) are simply ludicrous

The )oundation 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 andhi-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 Must 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 uMarat 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 )ebruary 27, 2002, within hours of the odhra incident, Modi declared that the Pakistani secret services were to blame he then had the charred bodies paraded in the main city of Ahmedabad and let his own party (%-P) support a statewide strike for three days. What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies. The vast maMority 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, %abu %aMrangi, boasted of how he slit open the womb of a pregnant woman. As noted by the investigative Mournalist, 5ana Ayyub, author of the book - uMarat )iles: Anatomy of a Cover 8p, such was the intensity of the crime against Muslims in 2002, that the Supreme Court of India called the Modi government in uMarat “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. The latest pogrom in Delhi once again demonstrated that a peaceful protest by progressive Indians against the ruling %-P government’s highly discriminatory and criminally intended Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), was not tolerated by the %-P and the 5SS hoodlums.

Prime Minister Modi himself fired the first bullet with his trademark to[ic innuendo. At an election rally, he said the anti CAAprotesters could easily be “identified by their clothes” implying that they were all Muslim. This was untrue since many nonHindus had participated against the CAA. %ut 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 %-P lost to the Aam Aadmi Party. He asked the voters to press the voting button with such anger that the (Muslim) protestors at Shaheen %agh felt the current.

Two days before the latest pogrom began in Delhi, iriraM Singh, Minister for Animal Husbandry and )isheries 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 %-P, .apil Mishra, made a provocative speech in New Delhi standing ne[t to a high-ranking police official, in which he condemned the Shaheen %agh protestors demonstrating against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment %ill that threatens the e[istence of the 200 million strong Muslim population in India. (ither 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 -ai Shri 5am, 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 of 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 Mournalists, it’s not misinformation but the attempt to call it as such. To cover the heinous crimes of Hindutvadi fascists is repugnant. Obviously, HA) 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 HA). It is worth noting that in September 2019, the HA) published a letter, co-signed by what was described as “a record number of 230 Indian-American organizations in the 8S,” asking congressman 5o .hanna 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, reMect Hindutva, and speak for equal rights for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, %uddhist and Christians.”

Shame on the HA) for supporting fascism and its new ‘avatar’ - Modi

We thought that Modi, the %utcher of uMarat, would repent and mend his ways evolving into a real human being, esp. since he was elected the prime minister of India. %ut an old fascist never repents, neither learns nor does anything good for the ‘other’ people. Modi continues to prove the old ma[im. His first term in office witnessed Muslims being lynched to death under the prete[t of preserving the cow while the Hindutvadi murderers walked free.

The second election win has simply emboldened Modi to repeat the uMarat e[periment 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, enMoying popular support. The ugly facts, to paraphrase Arundhati 5oy, are: India has neither been a democratic nor a secular state.@

The CAA, much like the highly discriminatory 1982 Citizenship /aw of %urma that erased the citizenship rights of millions of the 5ohingya people, provides the necessary backdrop for Mustifying anti-Muslim violence in India. Such fascist Acts enacted at the highest citadel of power, are e[ploited by criminal regimes to sanction pogroms that turns 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 proMect, something that is faced by the 5ohingyas of Myanmar.

The HA) 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 /ok Sabha speech, India cannot sell itself to the world as a “land of pluralism, tolerance, and andhianism 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. -ust 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

5ana Ayyub, a survivor of the %ombay riots of 1992, was only a nine-year old child when Modi’s party %-P was in power there. She writes in the Time Magazine ()eb. 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 neighbor came to our rescue. )or decades I have been under treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a part of various groups to help heal my manic periods of an[iety. 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. %ut I am a privileged Muslim from an upper middle-class family, with access to therapists and the best medical facilities. Those killed and inMured in Delhi come from the lower socio-economic strata where therapy and psychological care is a lu[ury 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

5ather than trying to defend the indefensible acts of the %-P government and its highly discriminatory policies that give license to kill minorities (like the Muslims), the organizations like the HA) should promote pluralism not Must in Trump’s America but also in India where hundreds of millions of non-Hindus (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, %uddhists, Dalits and animists) are facing the brunt of state-sponsored pogroms in the hands of Hindutvadi fascists. The tens of millions of 8.S. dollars that they collect under the prete[t of India 5elief Development )und should not be spent for supporting a pernicious ideology like the Hindutva, which is the reincarnated version of Nazism and )ascism. The sooner the better for all humanity