Creeping Genocide In India

Alarming reports of attacks against Muslims in various parts of India, their houses and places of worship being demolished illegally and Muslim men and women being subject to much violence, documented on video by the perpetrators themselves, or Muslims prevented from selling their wares in traditional marketplaces and Hijab-clad young women being denied education point clearly to genocidal intentions on the part of some members of the majority community, with state entities looking the other way or even colluding.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, which India is a state party to, defines the term as follows:

“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

…”

Apart from ‘b.’ above, note ‘c.’:  Preventing indigent Muslim vendors from selling their wares in some spots in Karnataka state (population 65 million) in southern India and elsewhere where they had usually done for long would amount to denial of their livelihood, inextricably linked to their right to life.

Preventing Hijab-clad young Muslim women from attending schools and colleges would be covered under ‘b.’ as well as ‘c.’, in as much as acquisition of educational qualifications is generally expected to lead on to jobs, i.e. livelihood.

And thus, might not denying education to them and preventing Muslim street-vendors from plying their trade, amount to the deprivation of their Right to Livelihood, which the Supreme Court of India held in Olga Tellis and others Vs Bombay Municipal Corporation and others (1985, regarding the evictions of pavement dwellers) to be an integral part of the right to life?

An excerpt from that judgement – incidentally, studied around the world by human rights law scholars – authored by the then Chief Justice of India, Y.V. Chandrachud:

“The sweep of the right to life conferred by Article 21 (of the Constitution of India on the Right to Life) is wide and far reaching. It does not mean merely that life cannot be extinguished or taken away as, for example, by the imposition and execution of the death sentence, except according to procedure established by law. That is but one aspect of the right to life. An equally important facet of that right is the right to livelihood because no person can live without the means of living, that is, the means of livelihood. If the right to livelihood is not treated as a part of the constitutional right to live, the easiest way of depriving a person of his right to life would be to deprive him of his means of livelihood to the point of abrogation. Such deprivation would not only denude the life of its effective content and meaningfulness but it would make life impossible to live. And yet, such deprivation would not have to be in accordance with the procedure established by law, if the right to livelihood is not regarded as a part of the right to life. That, which alone makes it possible to live, leave aside what makes life liveable, must be deemed to be an integral component of the right to life.”

In India’s caste-ridden society, it is most likely that once the genocidal juggernaut gets going, it would turn against many of its own, i.e. members of the ‘lower caste’ Hindus and Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’).

During the Rwandan genocide of the minority Tutsis in 1994, when more than 800,000 people were massacred, large numbers of ‘moderate’ Hutus too lost their lives. Rwanda’s, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines then led the Hutu hate machine against the minority Tutsis. In India now, a slew of television channels owned by billionaires close to the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, have been stoking right-wing and anti-Muslim hatred.

India’s Hindu majority ought to ponder over what might be unleashed once a full-scale genocide gets going.

More than 14 percent of India’s nearly 1.4 billion population is Muslim. The real possibility of a Rwanda being repeated stems from the fact that blood-curdling calls have been made by prominent Hindu leaders such as Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati.

An Indian-Canadian, Ron Banerjee, was recently filmed saying: “Hinduism is the way. I am hardcore Hindu nationalist. I would have Modi ruling India as well as this country (Canada). He kills Muslims and Sikh terrorists. It is awesome what Modi is doing.”

Hindu supremacists have received backing from people such as the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the jailed Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who massacred 77 people in 2011 and who has said he was in part inspired by Hindu nationalism.

Genocide Watch founder and director Gregory Stanton has said: “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India,” noting that there were early “signs and processes” of genocide in the Indian state of Assam and Indian-administered Kashmir.

Adding his voice to the warning sounds, the US ambassador at large for international religious freedom Rashad Hussain said in late June that there was a high risk of mass killings in India.

“We have had attacks on churches, demolitions of homes; we have had the ban on hijab; we have got rhetoric that is openly being used that is dehumanising towards people so much to the extent that one minister referred to Muslims as termites,” he noted.

It was, however, salutary reading a few former judges’ and senior lawyers’ letter to the Supreme Court of India earlier this month, urging it take suo motu cognizance of recent incidents of violence and repression by northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state authorities.

“The coordinated manner in which the police and development authorities have acted lead to the clear conclusion that demolitions are a form of collective extra judicial punishment, attributable to a state policy which is illegal,” said the letter signed among others by former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court and former Chairman of the Law Commission of India, Justice A.P. Shah.

In southern India’s Karnataka state, 75 prominent citizens, including India’s former ambassador to UNESCO, Chiranjeev Singh and noted historians Ramachandra Guha and Janaki Nair and former Advocate General of Karnataka State, Ravivarma Kumar wrote to the Chief minister saying: It is, “… alarming and distressing that some people in responsible positions, including several who hold office having taken an oath to uphold and abide by the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India, now openly violate that solemn pledge and demonise members of certain minorities. They also appear to validate, support and even promote intimidation, vigilantism, violence, forcible takeover of property, as well as social and economic boycotts, all aimed at rendering them second class citizens who can no longer expect to enjoy their Constitutional rights”.

At the national level some 90 former senior civil servants, including former Indian foreign secretary and former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon wrote to the Chief Justice of India saying, “… the idea of ‘bulldozer justice’, of inflicting brutal punishment on citizens who dare to protest lawfully or criticize the Government or express dissent by using ostensibly legal instruments, is now becoming the norm rather than the exception across many Indian States”.

Three United Nations special rapporteurs – for housing, minority issues and freedom of religion – too have written to the Indian government denouncing the demolition of Muslim houses. One of them, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, said: “We are talking about the demolition of multiple homes across multiple [Indian] states… it is not a coincidence that it is happening across different states, and affecting, disproportionately, families of Muslim communities.

Genocidal calls or attacks against Muslims and actions deemed to be genocide-intentioned are not confined to India. China is alleged to have put more than a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. Over the past many years there have been brutal attacks on, and exiling of, Muslims in Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

After the September 11, 2001 attack in the United States, there have been a slew of killings of Muslims as well as turban-wearing Sikhs ‘mistaken’ for Muslims.

Today, well-funded sections of Indian media are fomenting anti-Muslim hatred, but they can be overnight turned against Hindus too of certain castes. 

The executive, the legislature and the judiciary have done precious little to curb these genocide-intentioned attacks thus far, despite repeated appeals such as those cited above. 

Those machines knocking down Muslim homes or practices such as denial of education or jobs to people of certain denominations in parts of India, as well as outright calls for killing peoples of some denominations, might well come calling where and when unexpected.

As the poet John Donne wrote: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”