Sajeda Haider

India’s Prime Minister is under fire from international human rights groups over his acceptance of open incitement to the genocide of Muslims. Narendra Modi’s deafening silence and inaction against Hindu religious and political figures urging for the annihilation of Indian Muslims, has stoked anti-Muslim bigotry, hate speeches and a mock online ‘auction’ of hundreds of vocal Muslim women.

On January 12, experts from Amnesty International USA and Genocide Watch, leading global human rights watchdogs and Indian diaspora groups in the US, told a Congressional Briefing in Washington, DC that Modi’s inaction was pushing India towards mass violence and massacres of its 200 million plus Muslims.

Monks from all over India gathered in the Hindu holy city of Haridwar in the northern state of Uttarakhand were filmed urging followers to kill Muslims in order to establish a Hindu nation.

The incendiary decrees were delivered between December 17 and 19, 2021, during a religious assembly (Dharma Sansad). A top religious leader of the Hindu Mahasabha openly called for raising an ‘army’ of Hindus to “kill two million Muslims”.

Leaders publicly urged Hindus to emulate the violence perpetrated against Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar Government, which forced a mass exodus of the community to Bangladesh. “There is no more time. The case now is that either you prepare to die or get ready to kill, there’s no other way. This is why, like in Myanmar, the police here, the politicians here, the army and every Hindu must pick up weapons, and we will have to conduct this safai abhiyan (cleanliness drive). There is no solution apart from this,” said Swami Prabodhananda Giri, President of the Hindu Raksha Sena (Hindu Protection Army).

A few days later videos from another event in Delhi showed leaders of Hindu Yuva Vahini – an armed militia formed by Yogi Aditynath, a leader of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Chief Minister of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh – getting hundreds of young men to pledge an oath to “fight, die and kill” in order to establish a Hindu nation. In another video, schoolchildren were recorded taking similar oaths and making Nazi salutes.

Rather than condemning the hate speeches, BJP politicians have deflected and defended the right to incite violence against Muslims. When, on January 10, Keshav Prasad Maurya, Deputy Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, was asked by BBC Hindi about the calls to kill Muslims, Maurya, 52, dismissively said that religious leaders are free to say whatever they want before cutting off the interview, asking for the deletion of the footage and accusing the journalist Anant Jhanne of behaving like an enemy agent.

While Modi and his ministers have remained quiet on the subject, there has been condemnation from civil society. Academics, retired civil servants, veterans of the armed forces, lawyers, actors and civil rights groups have all called on Prime Minister Modi to condemn the speeches as his silence betrays acquiescence and creates an atmosphere of impunity – but the Prime Minister has not said a word on the subject.

A group of 76 Supreme Court lawyers wrote to the Chief Justice of India urging him to take suo motu cognisance of the hate speeches which “amount to an open call for the murder of an entire community”. The letter pointed out that no effective steps had been taken by the Government in earlier cases of hate speeches and “thus, urgent judicial intervention is required to prevent such events that seem to have become the order of the day”.

Veteran Indian film actor Naseeruddin Shah said those calling for the genocide of Muslims are in effect calling for a full-scale civil war.

Despite phenomenal provocation from the far-right Hindu groups and the Hindu Nationalist Modi Government, Muslims in India have shown great restraint in the last eight years, waiting for the law of the land to protect their rights. “Two hundred million of us are not going to get wiped out that easily. Two hundred million of us are going to fight back… I’m certain that if any such movement begins, it will be met with massive resistance and a massive amount of anger,” Shah told The Wire website.

The founder of Genocide Watch, Dr Gregory Stanton, who predicted a genocide in Rwanda years before it took place in 1994 has warned of an impending genocide of Muslims in India, comparing the situation of the country under Modi’s Government to events in Myanmar and Rwanda.

He cautioned that “genocide is not an event” but “a process”, noting that Modi had a long history of presiding over mass violence against Muslims, beginning with the pogroms of 2002 in the western state of Gujarat when he was the Chief Minister and continuing into the present day.

“Under the BJP’s policies, Modi has used anti-Muslim, Islamophobic rhetoric to build his political base,” Dr Stanton told the Congressional briefing on January 12. “What the Myanmar Government did against the Rohingya… we’re now facing in India, a very similar plot… and the victims are the 200 million Muslims who live in India,” he added.

Since genocide is a process, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an Early Warning Project which states “that there is a 14.4 per cent, or approximately one in seven chance of new mass killings beginning in India in 2021 or 2022. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has ranked India second-highest among 162 countries at risk of mass killings.

The US Commission for International Religious Freedom – which has for the last two years asked the state department to place India on the list of ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ – is likely to have a hearing on the genocide calls. According to Dr Stanton, Genocide Watch in Europe and in The Hague would try to get the European Parliament to adopt similar resolutions condemning genocide calls in India.

Photo: Narendra Modi (L), the PM of India, has defied international calls to condemn Hindu monks, such as Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath (R), who have called for the mass killing of India’s Muslims. Adityanath, who was appointed chief minister in 2017 after a successful anti-Muslim election campaign, is also the founder of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, which rallied youths to pledge to kill Muslims to form a Hindu nation in India.
(Credit: Prime Minister’s Office (GODL-India)