Or, perhaps more ominously, it’s aping the Hutu-Tutsi violence that played out in Rwanda.
Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan have been laying sovereign claims to Kashmir, respectively, since 1947. This has caused three major wars and numerous skirmishes between them, and spawned a spate of terrorist attacks by Kashmiri separatist groups.
This is why so many pundits feared another major war after India imposed central control over its part of Kashmir in blitzkrieg fashion last August. The apparent aim was to strip the region of its special semi-autonomous status.
Home to more than twelve million people, roughly 1 percent of India’s population, [Kashmir] is the country’s only Muslim-majority state. India’s constitution — specifically Article 370 — for the past seventy years allowed the state to make its own laws.
(Council of Foreign Relations, August 7, 2019)
But India’s aim is turning out to be eerily genocidal. Because its Hindu-nationalist government also seems hell-bent on religiously cleansing Muslims from its part of Kashmir.
Indeed, one could foresee that government displacing Muslims with Hindus, aping the pogromatic way the Israeli government is displacing Palestinians with Jews in east Jerusalem. After all, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long record of discrimination against Muslims rivals in every apartheid respect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s against Palestinians.
Of course, the fear that the pogrom afoot could lead to another war between India and Pakistan is understandable. But here in part is how I dismissed that fear in “Kashmir Is to India as Hong Kong Is to China. Sorry Pakistan.” August 7, 2019:
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[E]ach side would insist that it has only ever engaged in cross-border skirmishes to keep the other side in check. Nothing gives credence to this insistence quite like the Damoclean sword of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which hangs over India and Pakistan as nuclear powers. …
Accordingly, India can be forgiven for expecting Pakistan to deliver nothing more than rhetorical fusillades in retaliation for this decisive political strike. …
Pakistan clearly has no interest in fighting a full-scale war over Kashmir. Nothing betrays this quite like its prime minister, Imran Khan, threatening to “report” India to the United Nations. After all, both India and Pakistan have defied a litany of UN resolutions with impunity. The most Pakistan can or will do unilaterally is to launch pro-forma diplomatic strikes against India.
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Given that, one could hardly blame India’s Hindu-nationalist government for feeling emboldened. Sure enough:
India’s parliament has passed a bill that would give Indian citizenship to immigrants from three neighboring countries [namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan] — but not if they are Muslim. …
Opposition parties say the bill is unconstitutional as it bases citizenship on a person’s religion and would further marginalize India’s 200-million strong Muslim community.
(CNN, December 17, 2019)
More to the point, the fallout (of sectarian violence) not only comes as no surprise but, from a Hindu-nationalist perspective, seems divinely inspired.
India’s capital is grappling with the aftermath of the worst communal violence in Delhi in decades. … Hindu mobs swept through lanes targeting Muslim homes and set up roadblocks looking for Muslims to attack. …
Since winning a landslide reelection in May, Modi has pursued his party’s agenda of Hindu primacy in India amid a dramatically slowing economy.
(The Washington Post, March 2, 2020)
Surely the wonder is that only 46 people have been killed. After all, 1 billion Hindus now seem hell-bent on treating 200 million Muslims the way Hutus infamously treated Tutsis in Rwanda.
For example, in the above-cited article, the Post reports on an incident where police officers barged into a mosque like commandos storming an enemy camp. They sent women and children fleeing for their lives and then nearly beat the life out of the imam and other men they caught worshiping there.
Here is how the wife of one of them bemoaned the fatalism that is reportedly growing among Muslims:
‘We are helpless,’ she said. ‘The government and the police belong to them.’
That’s life in the time of Modi – for Muslims in India. They seem all too aware that their brothers in places like Pakistan and Indonesia can offer woefully little help. And, as indicated above, that help amounts to little more than sounding alarms to draw world attention to their plight.
Meanwhile, you probably recall world leaders vowing “never again” after Rwanda. Specifically, they acknowledged the categorical imperative to intervene to stop genocidal violence anywhere. Yet, since then, they have stood by as genocidal violence raged against the
- Rohingya in Myanmar;
- Nuer and other ethnic groups in South Sudan;
- Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria;
- Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic; and
- Darfuris in Sudan.
This might explain why Muslims in India feel so utterly helpless. Shamefully, consistent with his wont for kicking people when they’re down, this input from the leader of the free world could only have filled them with shock and dismay:
Throughout his two-day visit to India, President Donald Trump heaped praise on the nation’s leader, Narendra Modi, and ignored a spasm of violence against Muslims unfolding on the streets of the Indian capital, New Delhi, prompted by the Indian prime minister’s sectarian policies.
(The Intercept, February 20, 2020)
Except that, given Trump’s infamous attempts to ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States, perhaps nobody should have expected any better of this bird of a similar feather.
Related commentaries:
Rwandan-style violence…
Netanyahu on Palestinians…
Kashmir…
Rohingya genocide…
Kurds…
Darfur..
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