NEW YORK: Islamophobia has taken a “most lethal form” in India, turning some 250 million Indian Muslims into a “persecuted minority, ” said world renowned scholar, author, and activist Noam Chomsky.
“The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — It is taking its most lethal form in India, said Chomsky, who is a Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a video message to a webinar organised by Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), a Washington-based advocacy organization.
Apart from Chomsky, several other academics and activists took part in the webinar on “Worsening Hate Speech and Violence in India”. Chomsky also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist regime has sharply escalated the “crimes” in Kashmir.’
“The crimes in Kashmir have a long history,” he said, adding that the state was now a “brutally occupied territory and its military control in some ways is similar to occupied Palestine.”
Chomsky said the situation in South Asia was painful in particular not because of what is happening but because of what is not happening. There was, however, hope and opportunities to solve South Asian torment but not for long, he added.
Threat to Indian constitution
Annapurna Menon, an Indian author and lecturer at the University of Westminster, urged the international community to focus on the status of press freedom in India under the BJP government as the situation has become a cause of concern.
“The situation on ground is extremely alarming as 4 journalists have already been killed in 2022, simply for doing their job,” Ms Menon said, adding journalists, especially women, have been exposed to all kinds of reprisals including harassment, illegal detention, police violence and sedition charges.
“The situation in Indian Kashmir is even dire, where the journalists routinely face police questioning, ban on reporting, suspension of internet services and financial constraints in line with BJP’s recent ‘media policy’.”
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John Sifton, Asia Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said the greatest threat to Indian constitution was the promotion of majority religion by the Indian government at the expense of minorities. “BJP and its affiliates are making hateful remarks against Muslims to gain Hindu vote around elections,” he said.
The BJP government had adopted laws and policies that systematically discriminate against religious minorities and other groups and stigmatise critics, the HRW official said. Sifton said social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have failed to control hatred. He said the US Congress must weigh on Indian government to convey their concerns on violation of human and minority rights in India.
Muslims portrayed as threat
Angana Chatterji, Indian anthropologist and Scholar at Berkeley University, California, said prejudices embedded in BJP have infiltrated independent institutions, such as the police and the courts, empowering nationalist groups to threaten, harass and attack religious minorities with impunity.
“Hindu spiritual leaders are involved in ethnic cleansing of Muslims,” she said, adding BJP leaders and affiliated groups have long portrayed minority communities, especially Muslims, as a threat to national security and to the Hindu way of life.
“They had raised the bogey of “love jihad” claiming that Muslim men lure Hindu women into marriages to convert them to Islam, labeled Muslims immigrants as extremists and accused them of hurting Hindu sentiment over cow slaughter,” she said.
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Since Yogi Adityanath became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 2017, Ms Chatterji said the culture of violence and impunity has taken root, pointing out that UP police have carried out hundreds of extra-judicial killings of suspected criminals belonging to minorities, particularly Muslims.
By the time protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill spilled out on the streets of UP in December 2019, the police manhandled protestors, behaved in a vulgar manner with women, arrested whoever it wanted and framed prominent activists in criminal cases, she said.
Hate crimes rising
Harsh Mander, a former Indian civil servant and human rights activist, said that while Mahatma Gandhi upheld the principles of non-violence, the Hindu supremacist ideology is being currently been propagated by Indian leaders.
“Hate crimes have increased by a thousandfold during BJP regime,” he said. “BJP stigmatises and openly incites crimes against minorities, even Mother Teresa has been vilified.”
He said Muslims were falsely projected as bigots, unpatriotic, Jihadis and oppressors, adding that even Prime Minister Modi follows some of hate mongers and efuses to denounce them. He deplored that Kashmir was the most militarized region in the world.
