Getting Away with Murder

Ashok Chakra adorns the India’s national flag. It is also the state emblem and India’s highest peacetime non-military award. The symbol’s 24 spokes symbolize principles like tolerance, love and righteousness. It manifests Ashoka’s transformation from war and violence to peace and inclusion. India prides itself as the birthplace of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism; four religions whose core belief is ahimsa - non-violence.

Fallaciously publicized as a tolerant democracy, India has morphed into Modi’s dystopia riven with atrocities and gross human right violations. Occupied Kashmir remains the largest internment camp on this planet whereas India’s minorities face state-sponsored pogroms. Despite irrefutable evidence, the West continues to pander to India for trade benefits and to prop it up as a counter to China’s influence. This criminal culpability prevails despite Chairman Genocide Watch Dr Gregory Stanton’s warning that India ticks all the boxes of a Muslim genocide.

It was NATO’s provocative endeavour of extending NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep that shoved Ukraine into a devastating war. Now India, along with the US, Australia and Japan have formed the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to form a bulwark against China’s influence. The inherent danger in this adventurism remains the Quad’s major focus on a NATO style military alliance. In recent months, the Quad’s military forces have conducted joint military exercises with their government’s inking several security agreements.

The Quad is also carrying out provocative forays in the South and East China Seas. This is evident from The Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier trespassing into Chinese territorial waters near the Nansha Islands in July last year. Similarly, the USS Benfold, a guided missile destroyer, entered Chinese territorial waters off the Xisha Islands and had to be warned off by Chinese forces.

Experts and analysts within the Quad countries have strongly criticized these extreme provocations and warn of ramifications that could thrust Asia into a devastating war. Sudheendra Kulkarni, former Chairman of the Mumbai-based think-tank Observer Research Foundation, asserts that “The Quad’s hidden agenda is to create an Asian NATO which is dangerous for Asia and the world”.

Despite these warnings and India’s ever so faster slide into Hindutva-inspired genocide, a criminally complicit West callously chooses to remain India’s partner. This, in turn, is taken as a carte blanche by India. An emboldened Modi now wants India to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Addressing the 75th UNGA session, this misplaced sense of entitlement was evident as he demanded: “How long will India, with its unique contribution to the UN, be kept out of its decision making structures?”

Just in the mid of April, viewers around the world were horrified to see the brutal murder of two brothers Atiq and Ashraf Ahmed on live TV while in police custody. The murderers can then be seen shouting Hindu slogans after the gory incident. Soon after the murders a UP minister tweeted “paap aur punya ka hisaab isi janam mein hota hai” (sin and virtue are accounted for in this lifetime) while another called it “a cosmic decision.” Just three days before Atiq’s murder, Asad, his 19 year old son and his aides were also murdered in an alleged shootout with the police.

BJP’s modus operandi has been to rule by fear. In UP this has become a norm since Yogi Adityanath, a rabid Hindutva proponent, took over as Chief Minister. There has been an alarming escalation of such incidents where police and vigilantes mete out death and destruction of property on people based on religion and caste. Another extremely provocative statement earlier this month epitomized this extremist mentality. Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, a prominent Hindutva priest, called on Hindus around the world to unite and conquer Makkah describing the holy Kaaba as a converted Hindu temple. The Modi fostered madness of hate and bigotry knows no bounds.

Prominent media channels and newspapers have detailed Modi’s gruesome excesses. The BBC recently tried to air India: The Modi Question, a documentary about Modi’s direct role in the 2002 Gujarat massacre. The Indian government blocked it followed by a spate of raids on BBC’s offices in India. “Getting Away with Murder”, a report by journalists Geeta Seshu and Urvashi Sarkar, tabulates 198 attacks on journalists in the last five years. Some 40 journalists including Modi critics Gauri Lankesh editor of Lankesh Patrike and Shujaat Bukhari editor Rising Kashmir were murdered. Recently, Modi’s multi-billion dollar crony Gautam Adani took over NDTV, the Modi critic news broadcaster. The hostile move saw NDTV founders Prannoy and Radhika Roy leave the management board and its president Suparna Singh resign along with other senior members.

International oversight agencies have repeatedly urged both the US and Australia to question India about its serious human rights violations. Washington, its Quad allies and Europe prefer to remain oblivious to this. Before Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to India, Human Rights Watch wrote to him asking him to convey human rights concerns to Modi. In India, Blinken’s statements were a display of oxymoronic hyperbole praising India while calling for “the world’s two biggest democracies to uphold values for human rights and religious belief.” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese too, in his recent visit to India, ignored Asia Director of Human Rights Watch Elaine Pearson’s advice to “be unequivocal in raising human rights concerns with Modi during his visit to India.” Instead, the Australian PM chose to shower praise on India declaring it “a top tier defense partner.”

This mollycoddling of India has translated into ever-increasing miseries for India’s minorities. In 2022, Hindu mobs in New Delhi killed 40 Muslims and injured hundreds. At the same time Australia’s Trade Minister Simon Birmingham was leading a trade delegation there. He kept praising India while discussing ways and means to enhance mutual trade. This dichotomous infatuation was also evident when Australian High Commissioner Barry O’Farrell visited the RSS Maharashtra headquarters. As he met the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, O’Farrell was profuse in applauding RSS activities.

In July 2019, German Ambassador Walter Lindner also visited the RSS office. There, he proudly posed before a wall adorned with the photos of RSS founders Hedgewar and Golwalkar, both declared and devout admirers of Hitler and Nazism.

This criminal carte blanche emboldens India to continue its atrocities with impunity. Political psychologist Ashis Nandy called Modi a “Nazi Gauleiter who shamelessly presided over the Gujarat riots and acted as its chief patron.”

Dubbed internationally as “the butcher of Gujarat”, Modi declared he “regretted the suffering of Muslims as he would that of a puppy run over by a car.” He also labelled Muslim relief camps as “baby-making factories”. Ashok Singhal, International President of the VHP, ominously termed the Gujarat carnage as a successful experiment and warned that “it would be repeated all over India.”

This, in essence, is the gruesome record of what is touted as a secular and democratic India. Prominent Indians have returned their national awards as a protest. They assert that “Hindutva is the end of Hinduism” to which Yogi Adityanath retorts: “The word secular is the biggest lie since Independence”. A protégé of the West, Modi’s dystopia is a paradox that is morally flawed and the worst violator of human rights.

Rudyard Kipling, Bard of Empire, famously said, “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”. The twain is bound today in a symbiotic relationship of unabashed duplicity. India, its Quad partners and the West, tread a path wrought with immensely dangerous ramifications. A recipe for disaster, it is as implosive for India as it is a security nightmare for the whole world. Given NATO’s grim role as an enabler of the Ukraine war, provocations of the Quad with India as the region’s agent provocateur, could tragically lead to a conflict which shall pale the Great War in ambit, death and destruction.