By: Kayhan Int’l
For the past dozen days India is in flames. Ironically the fire has been lit by its own elected government, which seems to have decided that the 72-year old democracy should be replaced by despotism through violation of the very constitution that had enabled the BJP to win the parliamentary polls of a secular state and install its Hindu extremist leader Narendra Modi as prime minister.
The picture is pathetic. Peaceful protesters brutally beaten by police in the streets; dissidents arrested; curfews imposed; the press censored; and the army deployed to assist the crackdown on massive rallies all over the country, numbering hundreds of thousands of people, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, who are using their constitutional liberty to object to an unconstitutional bill on citizenship.
Among those arrested is one of India’s most respected historians, Ramachandra Guha, the acclaimed biographer of the Father of the Nation, Mahatama Gandhi. In spite of his grey hairs and bespectacled intellectual visage, the police dragged him like an ordinary criminal while he was clarifying to the press his criticism of the controversial bill.
The point of contention is the anti-secular Islamophobic bill dubbed the "Citizen Amendment Act” (CAA) that grants immediate citizenship to all illegal Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain and Parsi immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but not to the UN-classified "the world’s most persecuted group”, the Rohingya Muslims, some 40,000 of whom have sought refuge in India.
Moreover, the new laws require Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship and turn hundreds of millions into stateless persons, solely on the basis of their religion, despite the fact that Islam has existed peacefully in India for over a millennium.
The protestors, however, are determined to continue their peaceful rallies in the face of police brutalities and the mounting death toll, until the unconstitutional law is repealed.
It remains to be seen whether India, under the BJP and Modi, will save the country’s unity or do the irreparable harm of ripping it asunder through its divisive policies.
Modi, the former controversial chief minister of the state of Gujarat, who five years ago burst on the national scene by winning the 2014 general elections, largely because of the people’s disaffection with the Congress Party, again romped home earlier this year to retain the premiership, but this time, instead of focusing on economic development as he had successfully done during his first term, seems to have succumbed to his narrow religious convictions at the risk of dividing polyglot India.
It was a big blunder by Modi to entrust the crucial Home Ministry (Interior Affairs) to the rabidly anti-Muslim Amit Shah – a person implicated in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2001.
True to his roots in the fascist RSS outfit that was modelled on Hitler’s Nazism and the supposed superiority of the so-called Aryan race over all others, Amit Shah wasted no time in promoting the politics of hatred by adopting hostile postures against the country’s 250-million Muslims.
The first blow to India’s secular democratic stature was pushing through parliament the abrogation of Article 370 of the constitution that had granted autonomy to Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state. This brought euphoria by his supporters who openly exulted in the press of acquiring lands and women in picturesque Himalayan region bordered by Pakistan and China, as conquerors used to do in the medieval era.
Since August, Kashmir has been under lockdown with heavy military presence all around and its politicians under detention. It has virtually been cut off from the rest of the country and the world. With no internet, much of its population has been unable to work and essential medical supplies are scarce.
The next nefarious move was the Supreme Court decision last October, under pressure of the government, to give the 3.7 acre plot on which the magnificent Babri Mosque had stood for 500 years, to a Hindu trust for building a temple, thereby justifying the criminal action of mobs in December 1992 in destroying a revered Muslim place of worship to the One and Only Creator of the universe, built in 1528 on a vacant piece of land in Fayzabad.
Now the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo have bluntly violated Article 14 of the Constitution by bribing parliamentarians (a normal practice in the self-styled largest democracy of the world), to push through CAA – a step which is being likened to the genocidal policies of Myanmar against Burmese Muslims, and the apartheid policy of the illegal Zionist entity against the Palestinian people.
In the mid-1970s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had blundered in imposing the emergency to assume dictatorial powers for which she dearly paid. The question is: Can Modi, who doesn’t measure up to Indira Gandhi’s stature, escape the consequences of his fascist policies, in view of the fact that his recent speech was greeted with chants of "We want freedom” and "The person who walks the path of Hitler will die the death of Hitler!”
The picture is pathetic. Peaceful protesters brutally beaten by police in the streets; dissidents arrested; curfews imposed; the press censored; and the army deployed to assist the crackdown on massive rallies all over the country, numbering hundreds of thousands of people, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, who are using their constitutional liberty to object to an unconstitutional bill on citizenship.
Among those arrested is one of India’s most respected historians, Ramachandra Guha, the acclaimed biographer of the Father of the Nation, Mahatama Gandhi. In spite of his grey hairs and bespectacled intellectual visage, the police dragged him like an ordinary criminal while he was clarifying to the press his criticism of the controversial bill.
The point of contention is the anti-secular Islamophobic bill dubbed the "Citizen Amendment Act” (CAA) that grants immediate citizenship to all illegal Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain and Parsi immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but not to the UN-classified "the world’s most persecuted group”, the Rohingya Muslims, some 40,000 of whom have sought refuge in India.
Moreover, the new laws require Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship and turn hundreds of millions into stateless persons, solely on the basis of their religion, despite the fact that Islam has existed peacefully in India for over a millennium.
The protestors, however, are determined to continue their peaceful rallies in the face of police brutalities and the mounting death toll, until the unconstitutional law is repealed.
It remains to be seen whether India, under the BJP and Modi, will save the country’s unity or do the irreparable harm of ripping it asunder through its divisive policies.
Modi, the former controversial chief minister of the state of Gujarat, who five years ago burst on the national scene by winning the 2014 general elections, largely because of the people’s disaffection with the Congress Party, again romped home earlier this year to retain the premiership, but this time, instead of focusing on economic development as he had successfully done during his first term, seems to have succumbed to his narrow religious convictions at the risk of dividing polyglot India.
It was a big blunder by Modi to entrust the crucial Home Ministry (Interior Affairs) to the rabidly anti-Muslim Amit Shah – a person implicated in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2001.
True to his roots in the fascist RSS outfit that was modelled on Hitler’s Nazism and the supposed superiority of the so-called Aryan race over all others, Amit Shah wasted no time in promoting the politics of hatred by adopting hostile postures against the country’s 250-million Muslims.
The first blow to India’s secular democratic stature was pushing through parliament the abrogation of Article 370 of the constitution that had granted autonomy to Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state. This brought euphoria by his supporters who openly exulted in the press of acquiring lands and women in picturesque Himalayan region bordered by Pakistan and China, as conquerors used to do in the medieval era.
Since August, Kashmir has been under lockdown with heavy military presence all around and its politicians under detention. It has virtually been cut off from the rest of the country and the world. With no internet, much of its population has been unable to work and essential medical supplies are scarce.
The next nefarious move was the Supreme Court decision last October, under pressure of the government, to give the 3.7 acre plot on which the magnificent Babri Mosque had stood for 500 years, to a Hindu trust for building a temple, thereby justifying the criminal action of mobs in December 1992 in destroying a revered Muslim place of worship to the One and Only Creator of the universe, built in 1528 on a vacant piece of land in Fayzabad.
Now the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo have bluntly violated Article 14 of the Constitution by bribing parliamentarians (a normal practice in the self-styled largest democracy of the world), to push through CAA – a step which is being likened to the genocidal policies of Myanmar against Burmese Muslims, and the apartheid policy of the illegal Zionist entity against the Palestinian people.
In the mid-1970s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had blundered in imposing the emergency to assume dictatorial powers for which she dearly paid. The question is: Can Modi, who doesn’t measure up to Indira Gandhi’s stature, escape the consequences of his fascist policies, in view of the fact that his recent speech was greeted with chants of "We want freedom” and "The person who walks the path of Hitler will die the death of Hitler!”
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