Several groups of Indian Americans have planned to stage protest rallies during India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled to visit the U.S. this month, who is scheduled to address the Indian community at NRG Stadium in Houston on 09/22/19 and the United Nations in NY on 09/28/19.
Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) has pointed out that Modi’s government has been orchestrating a pogrom of hate, violence, and religious persecution against Christians, Muslims and Dalits in India. The Modi regime is also rapidly amending existing laws to expand its powers in an unprecedented fashion, from designating individuals as terrorists without trial, to doing all it can to weaken India’s federal system. Most recently, the Modi government resorted to unconstitutional and undemocratic means in order to change the constitutionally mandated special status of Jammu and Kashmir, split it into two, and brought both under the central government’s direct control.
It did this by sending tens of thousands of additional military personnel to the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley, placing Kashmiri political leaders under house arrest, blocking all phone and internet connectivity, and imposing a complete lockdown. It has curbed free reporting by journalists and human rights’ activists, while its forces continue to brutalize the population.
“We call upon all people of conscience in the US to join us in protesting Modi’s visit and exposing the retrograde, near-fascist politics of Modi’s government,” the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), in a statement here, while urging all those who care about justice and human rights in India, in the United States, and in the world at large to express their condemnation of cruelties against Minorities in India.
.Modi, his party the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and their affiliates – including the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal – have a long history of indulging in politics of violence and hate. They are adherents of an ideology called Hindutva, distinct from Hinduism, that openly extols Hitler and Aryan supremacist views. This virulent ideology’s stated objective is to make India a homeland of Hindus and those who profess other faiths can live in the country only at the sufferance of Hindus. Modi and BJP pursue the Hindutva ideology of pushing attrition, bigotry, and religious persecution of minorities as state policy.
In 2002, as Chief Minister, Modi oversaw riots that targeted Muslims in Gujarat – over two thousand people were killed; thousands more were forced to leave their homes and businesses, and Muslim women were raped. Since Modi came to power in 2014, India, a pluralistic and multi-ethnic democracy, has seen a sharp escalation in religious violence, lynchings, and denial of fundamental rights. Violent mobs, mostly inspired by the atmosphere of hate perpetrated by the BJP, now attack and lynch Muslims, Christians, and Dalits on a daily basis with complete impunity. Criminals in all these cases have not been punished thanks to the complicity of the ruling party and its machinery.
The U.S. Department of State, USCIRF, U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, have noted that Mr. Modi’s Hindu extremist BJP party encourages sectarian violence, and the BJP’s federal and state governments provide impunity to perpetrators, pushing bigotry and religious persecution as part of state policy, the organiers of the protests rally pointed out.
