Muslim women in Kolkata protest in solidarity with Karnataka’s Muslims against hijab ban Photo Maktoobmedia
Johannesburg – The treatment of Indian Muslims during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule has been nothing short of “lethal” and “is systematically dismantling Indian secular democracy,” said Prof. Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals and Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and sixteen other reputable organisations held a Congressional Briefing on February 9. The briefing focused on the intensifying hate speech and violence occurring in India.
“The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the west, taking its most lethal form in India, where the Modi government is systematically dismantling Indian secular democracy and turning the country into a Hindu ethnocracy, with almost 250 million Muslims becoming a persecuted minority,” Chomsky is heard saying in a widely circulated video from the briefing.
“The assault is taking other forms as well, including a general attack on independent thought and the educational system primarily directed against Muslim victims, but by now expanding beyond. That’s apart from India’s terrible crimes in Kashmir, those crimes have a long history. They’ve been sharply escalated by Modi’s right wing Hindu nationalist regime.”
While Chomsky’s support is welcomed on the matter, his stance on Kashmir being a genocide has not changed in the slightest. This, according to Mary Scully – a long-time activist, has “aggravated the problem’’.
“The character of genocide has been completely obfuscated, equivocated, and mangled with legalisms by the UN and its controlling nations to justify inaction against oppressive regimes. When genocide is happening, UN officials engage in hand-wringing and whimper that a genocide ‘may be’ going on but take no sanctions against regimes. Regrettably, Chomsky and other leading figures on the left have aggravated the problem for their own political reasons from equivocation to outright genocide denial and countless activists are schooled in parsing whether persecution, even those involving slaughter and concentration camps, can be called genocide.”
Scully believes this outright denial of genocide leaves victims voiceless, even when innumerable evidence pointing to a genocide exists.
“The voices of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, Uyghur, Indian Muslims are drowned out or shouted down when only they can cut through the obfuscations, lies, and propaganda. The oppressed define what genocide is and when Kashmiris and others say they are sustaining genocide they can document that claim with statistics, photos, testimony from those who were imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, disfigured, and injured, assaulted, raped, and sexually assaulted, extrajudicially executed and framed as terrorists.”
While these persecutions continue to take place, India’s media houses seem oblivious to what is happening, but Scully believes the lack of accurate reporting on what is really going on in the country is part of a broader tactic to support the Modi regime and its Hindutva agenda and the genocide.
“It will not accurately portray the genocide against Indian Muslims, the oppressed castes, and others opposing Indian repression but will instead employ ‘war on terror’ rhetoric to support the genocide.”
As the calls for the hijab ban grow in Karnataka state, Scully believes this could be the “initial steps to much more extreme violence against Muslims” as Hindu mobs will try to implement the ban in their own ways.
“As a feminist it is odious to me that women would be used to justify the so-called ‘war on terror’ but that has proven an effective strategy used by the US and European governments to justify war, occupation, genocide against Muslims defending themselves. Banning the hijab and niqab are initial steps to much more extreme violence against Muslims as we see being played out now in Karnataka state with Hindu mob violence against Muslims.”
The persecution of Muslims under Modi rule has been lethal as Chomsky said. There seems to be no end in sight, only an increase in the violence towards Muslims. The international community needs to put a stop to this before it escalates to something even more violent and deadly. Scully is of the opinion that sanctions, particularly on the sale of weapons and military equipment, need to be imposed on India until these acts against Muslims are stopped.
“If we define the ‘international community’ as the international forces for human rights, we should work tirelessly to build a united global movement in solidarity with Indian Muslims and with Kashmiris. That requires rebuilding a principled anti-war movement, most importantly advocating for the development and mobilization of an anti-colonial movement in India.”
Many Hindus in India believe they are doing the right thing and accept the Hindutva agenda and act on it without hesitation. They feel, in a way, justified about what they are doing. Scully explains that media, in all its forms, as well as Bollywood, “demagogues” and other resources are used to “whip up hysteria against Muslims’” and likened it to the campaign run against the Black community in the US.
“It’s comparable to how that is done in the US against the Black community. After the gains of the 1960s civil rights movement, beginning in the 1980s, we were inundated with media and cinematic presentations of out-of-control Black narco-terrorist young people engaged in drug trafficking and other crimes. That was an entire political fabrication to justify martial law in the Black community and the incarceration of thousands of Black kids for minor offenses. When I investigated this in the early 1990s and refuted the claims by showing the violence was police against Black kids, I was mocked as a conspiracy theorist or a liberal do-gooder. But in investigating, I saw how perniciously and consciously such panics are fostered and made to appear real.”
Throughout the ages India has been ruled by different people and cultures. At one point, Muslims ruled the country, and during that time, Muslims posed no harm to Hindus. The Muslim Indians are being portrayed as a threat to the Hindu people.
“Muslims are scapegoats in India, as they are all over the world. The persecutions and pogroms against them have existed for a long time, even preceding the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’, but they are given new oxygen by ‘war on terror’ ideology. One of the reasons it is so imperative to scapegoat and vilify Muslims is that in fact they are leading the major opposition to war, occupation, genocide all over the world, starting with the glorious Arab Spring uprisings which have been defeated for the meanwhile.”
Some believe the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) is losing the support of the public and their support of the Hindutva agenda is a way to gain that support back. Although Scully admits she does not know their electoral prospects, she did say this could be the reason for the current situation but also questioned why other parties have not tried to stop the BJP.
“What I would like to know is why the massive left parties in India do so little to counter the BJP, especially by building a massive anti-colonial movement.”
As time goes on, the persecution of Muslim Indians grows violent. It is now up to the international community and countries to help forcefully put an end to this.
