NEW YORK: An alarming report in The New York Times said on Tuesday that calls across India for anti-Muslim violence — even genocide — are moving from the fringes to the mainstream, while Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top leaders keep silent.
The hate speech is stoking communal tensions in India where small triggers have incited mass-death tragedies, the report written by a team of Times’ reporters said, pointing out that Hindu monks’ agenda already resonates with increasingly emboldened vigilante groups.
Vigilantes have beaten people accused of disrespecting cows, dragged couples out of trains, cafes and homes on suspicion that Hindu women might be seduced by Muslim men; and barged into religious gatherings where they suspect people are being converted, Times’ correspondents — Mujib Mashal, Suhasini Raj and Hari Kumar — wrote.
Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, a nonprofit group, who raised similar warnings ahead of the massacres in Rwanda in the 1990s, told a US congressional briefing that the demonizing and discriminatory “processes” that lead to genocide have been well underway in India.
In an interview with the Times, he said Myanmar was an example of how the easy dissemination of misinformation and hate speech on social media prepares the ground for violence. The difference in India, he said, was that it would be the mobs taking action instead of the military. “You have to stop it now,” he said, “because once the mobs take over it could really turn deadly.”
The Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh state, where Yati Narsinghanand is the chief priest, is peppered with signs that call to prepare for a “dharm yudh,” or religious war, the Times report said. One calls on “Hindus, my lions” to value their weapons “just the way dedicated wives value their husbands.” The temple’s main sign prohibits Muslims from entering, it was pointed out.
The monks’ anger, according to the report, is rooted in a sense of internalized victimhood that dates to the founding of India’s republic after independence from British rule in 1947.
“When Pakistan was carved out of India in a bloody partition that left hundreds of thousands dead, the Hindu right was incensed that the founding fathers turned what remained of India into a secular republic.”
They celebrate a Hindu hard-liner’s assassination of Mahatma Gandhi — a renowned symbol of nonviolent struggle, but to them a Muslim appeaser, the report said adding that Pooja Shakun Pandey, a monk at the Haridwar event, has held re-enactments of Gandhi’s assassination, firing a bullet into his effigy as blood runs down.
The forces that shaped the ideology of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, had slowly risen from the fringes to dominate India’s politics, it said. Modi, the prime minister, spent decades as a mobilizer for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the century-old right-wing organization to which Godse belonged, and his party saw the group as the fountainhead
of its political ideology and had relied heavily on its vast network of volunteers to mobilize voters and secure victories.
