Genocide of Muslims has already started in India: Experts at global summit

Lynching and anti-Muslim violence has only been increasing and has sort of become a daily routine in the present Narendra Modi-led government.

At a three-day global summit, titled, India On The Brink: Preventing Genocide held virtually, experts said that India is not solely at the brink of genocide but the process has already started.

When hard-line Hindutva priest Yati Narsinghanand issued an open call to attack and kill all the Muslims in India in the month of April, it was not just a run-of-the-mill speech but a definite call for genocide.

“Preventing genocide in the country is difficult as the leaders are both perpetrators and protectors of other perpetrators,” said Christopher Tuckwood, one of the participants and executive director of the Sentinel Project, a Canadian non-profit organisation.

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Witnessing the increasing hostilities and intolerance towards Muslims in the country, the President of Genocide Watch Dr Gregory Stanton, who had predicted the Rwandan genocide, has time and again warned that something similar could happen in India if stern action isn’t taken.

Amidst growing communal tensions in the country over the last few months, with elections ongoing in various states including Uttar Pradesh, incidents of hate towards minorities with specific reference to Muslims have been on the rise. Incidents and reports of hate crimes including speech, acts of violence, etc. have been surfacing on social media.

Veteran human rights attorney Meetali Jain slammed social media giant Facebook for behaving irresponsibly. “We have not seen Facebook taking meaningful action in removing or de-platforming some of the most egregious manifestations of hate speech by others, for example, Hindu priests,” she said.

She said that the recent hijab issue where Muslim girls are being banned from entering colleges and school for wearing a hijab has become a hotspot for hate speech and one can witness similar patterns in the coming future.

Lynching and anti-Muslim violence has only been increasing and has sort of become a daily routine in the present Narendra Modi-led government, said Kaushik Raj, a journalist.” The government’s response was that after one lynching, of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh, they offered jobs to the killers,” he said.

Journalist Alishaan Jafri, who documents anti-Muslim violence in India, said such violence was applauded by the Indian government and its ministers. He pointed out that attacks on Muslims took various forms. At the time of the covid crisis, prominent Muslims were attacked. “There is no dog whistle. People can simply say, ‘I want to kill Muslims and this is how I will kill Muslims,’ and they get away with it,” he said.

Aside from Muslims, Dalit and Adivasis are also being targeted. Nicole Widdersheim of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum said India was “second” at risk for mass killing, as reported in the annual risk report at the Center for the Prevention of Genocide of the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Indian intellectuals on Muslim genocide:

The fear and cautionary tone employed by the experts was echoed by prominent Indian intellectuals like writer Arundhati Roy and activist and Nobel peace prize nominee Harsh Mander. Roy argued that the nationalist fervour of the ruling dispensation will result in the break up of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but as of now genocide is on the rise.

Mander detailed how the genocide would pan out and discussed how online and in public gatherings, a range of other extreme right-wing supporters are even more candid in spouting their hate, openly calling for boycotts and expulsions, mass killing, genocide and mass rape. 

Similar sentiments were echoed by academic and public intellectual Noam Chomsky who argued that the most lethal form of Islamophobia can be witnessed in India currently.

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