Modi’s ruling BJP ramps up anti-Muslim attacks as campaign strategy
(Washington D.C., 8/3/2023) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim associations, strongly condemns the savage mob mosque-murder of 19-year-old scholar Maulana Saad and the torching of the Anjuman Jama mosque, where he served as an imam, on August 1.
President Narendra Modi’s ruling extremist Hindu nationalist RJP party has cynically incited anti-Muslim pogroms in the city of Gurugram outside of New Delhi and across India as part of a virulently chauvinist Hindutva identity campaign, strategically scapegoating Muslims, and Christians, in contested districts, before the expected April 2024 general elections.
A rampaging horde of at least 50 mostly young extremists, aligned with Modi’s governing ultra-right Hindutva Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) reportedly set fire to mosques, destroyed Muslim businesses, and beat Muslims in their increasingly aggressive demand to outlaw Islam’s Friday Congregational prayers.
“Every major humanitarian watchdog agency in the world has been flagging India for years as among the likeliest ruling parties to carry out a genocide, specifically against Muslims,” said Oussama Jammal, Secretary General of the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest umbrella group of Muslim organizations in America. “I think we’re no longer in the ground-laying stage. We now stand on the threshold of a genocide too catastrophic even to imagine.”
India’s 214 million Muslims total just under 15 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people, with Hindus comprising nearly 79 percent. These staggering numbers and profound disparity have set Modi and India up to dwarf the evil of Hitler and Nazism, an ideology on which the Hindutva movement and its Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ultra-nationalist Hindu movement – whose political wing is the current ruling BJP – directly and self-referentially based itself.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s March 2022 announcements and recent analysis warned:
“India ranks second in this year’s Early Warning Project Statistical Risk Assessment, marking its highest risk and rank to date. For four of the last five years, India has ranked in the top 15 highest-risk countries in the world.”
“The international community can wait no longer,” said Jammal. “It must confront, intervene, and directly block Modi, the BJP, and the RSS and their impending Muslim genocide.”
In light of this grave danger, USCMO leaders call for the following:
1. The Biden Administration and U.S. Department of State, and the international community must demand that India prosecute and punish all perpetrators of violence against minority communities using the highest political and economic leverages available to these governments, as they have done with Russia regarding Ukraine.
2. The international community should formally commence judicial action against India’s BJP and its officials in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and all appropriate international judicial forums to hold it accountable for crimes of mass persecution of minorities regarding:
a. Its 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that specifically and exclusively disenfranchises Muslims apart from all other minority groups in India.
b. Its illegal forced revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy and its announced plan to forcibly remove its Muslim majority.
c. The Indian government’s covert formation and endorsement of militias and paramilitary groups to commit mob violence with impunity – in the name of forced mosque destruction and replacement with Hindu gurudwara temples, banning of Muslim religious rights such as Friday Congregational Prayer, Eid Al-Adhah rituals of sacrifice, and widespread so-called “cow vigilantism” preventing Halal slaughter.
d. The international community should create judiciary monitoring agencies of human rights for Dalits, the “defiling” under-caste in the Hindu caste system, and Christians who are currently being massively persecuted and women gang-raped in the northeast state of Manipur.
3. The international community should hold India’s BJP accountable for restoring media and judiciary independence and freedom from journalist prosecution for critical reporting and requiring India’s BJP to institute judiciary safeguards against its increased politicization,
4. The U.S. and EU in particular must create specific agencies for reporting on India’s human atrocities with set political and economic punishments set in place for violations and failings to prevent and prosecute, with all levels of trade, security, and political partnerships at stake. The U.S. must cease basing its foreign policy with India almost exclusively on counterbalancing China. The Biden Administration must carry through on its promise to set its foreign policy with all nations, including India, on human rights performance.
We pray that God grant Maulana Saad admission to Paradise as a martyr, and that He console his family, and that He blesses all the murdered at the hands of Hindu nationalists the same. We ask God to protect India’s Muslims, Christians, and other persecuted minorities from every harm and that He send them a champion of their rights and security.
We urge the nations of the world to act now to prevent the massive genocide of Muslims rising in India.
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