human-rights-in-india

"In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence."

"That part of the “Muslim minority” which had voted for Pakistan but had chosen to stay in India, restarted the old game when India was proclaimed a secular state pledged to freedom of propagation for all religions. It revived its tried and tested trick of masquerading as a “poor and persecuted minority”. It cooked up any number of Pirpur Reports. The wail went up that the “lives, liberties and honour of the Muslims were not safe” in India, in spite of India’s “secular pretensions”. At the same time, street riots were staged on every possible pretext. The “communal situation” started becoming critical once again."

"I leave no town or building of the Mussalmans. Those who are taken alive, I order them to be roasted…"

"Afonso Dalboquerque told the captains to reconnoitre the whole of the island and to put to the sword all the Moors, men, women and children, that should be found,. and to give no quarter to any one of them; for his determination was to leave no seed of this race throughout the whole of the: island. And he did this, not only because it was necessary for the security of the land that there should be none but Hindoos within it, but also as a punishment for the treachery of which the Moors had been guilty when he took the city for the first time. And for four days continuously they poured out the blood of the Moors who were found therein; and it was ascertained that of men, women, and children, the number exceeded six thousand."

"In March, 1671, it was reported that a Muslim officer who had been, sent to demolish the Hindu temples in and around Ujjain was killed with many of his followers in the riot that had followed his attempts at destroying the temples there. He had succeeded in destroying some of the temples, but in one place, a Rajput chief had opposed this wanton destruction of his religious places. He overpowered the Mughal forces and destroyed its leader and many of his men. In Gujarat somewhere near Ahmedabad, Kolis seem to have taken possession of a mosque probably built on the site of a temple and prevented reading of Friday prayers there. Imperial orders were thereupon issued to the provincial officers in Gujarat to secure the use of the mosque for Friday prayers."

"There has always been much discussion regarding the question of Akbar’s persecution of the Muslims. ‘Akbar showed bitter hostility to the faith of his fathers and his own youth, and actually perpetrated a persecution of Islam’, says Dr. Smith ‘In the latter part of his life’, says Sir Wolsley Haig, ‘he persecuted its followers and destroyed its places of worship’. These are grave charges and, made by serious students of history, they compel examination..."

"Towards the Mahommedans the attitude of the Portuguese was one of inveterate hostility. Their one idea was to root out the trade of the Moors and to destroy the Mahommedans as a race so far as possible. This was not only due to commercial rivalry, but to a hostility which the Iberian Powers had inherited from their long-drawn out fight with the Moors in Spain and Africa. Whenever a Moor was captured the most barbarous tortures were inflicted on him and he was either killed or made a slave. The whole history of the Portuguese in India is nothing but a commentary on the statement of Barroes that the Moors were the “Enemies of God”."

"I then burnt the city and put everything to sword, and for days continuously the people shed blood. Wherever they were found and caught, no life was spared to any Musalman, and their mosques were filled up and set on fire. We counted 6,000 dead bodies. It was, my Lord, a great deed, well fought and well finished."

"Information has been difficult to come by. Local media are often harassed by the police, and international reporters have struggled to get inside. Authorities barred internet access for several months after Aug. 5. While it returned in March, mostly at lowered speeds, the has once again banned high-speed internet for the next few weeks, ostensibly to curb protests and reporting from the region. A survey of Kashmiri college students found 90 percent were in favor of a complete withdrawal of Indian troops. Kashmiri leaders who have expressed anger over the abrogation remain under house arrest, including former Chief Minister ."

"One year ago, the CPM described the abrogation as “an attack on democracy, secularism and the Constitution”. Equally amusing was the statement of the Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi that “the nation is made by its people, not plots of land”. Really? If so, are not the Kashmiri Pandits, Dalits, tribal folk, municipal workers, people? As one sees the fundamental changes brought about in the two UTs, they remind us of the monstrous failure of the Congress leadership which lacked the courage and confidence to correct these wrongs and hence chose to tout pusillanimity as an act of great statesmanship. As a result, J&K slipped away from the liberal, secular and democratic traditions that India stood for. But that is now a thing of the past. It is now time to celebrate the new beginning."

"The question, however, is whether Modi had any choice in Kashmir and whether, over time, the revocation of an article conceived as temporary breaks the Kashmiri logjam, pries open the stranglehold of corrupt local elites and offers a better future. I think it might. .... “We revoked a temporary constitutional provision that slowed down development, created alienation, led to separatism, fed terrorism and ended up as a deadly national security problem,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the external affairs minister of India, told me. “We know the last 70 years did not work in Kashmir. It has bled us. It would be Einsteinian insanity to do the same thing and expect a different result.”... Modi will not turn back from his elimination of Kashmir’s autonomy. That phase of Indian history is over. Trump and Modi are both forceful, media-savvy politicians. But they are not alike. Modi, a self-made man from a poor family, is measured, ascetic, not driven by impulse. Trump was born on third base. He’s erratic, guided by the devouring needs of his ego. I’d bet on Modi to transform India, all of it, including the newly integrated Kashmir region."

"It is indeed creditable that the government has ensured that all this has been achieved within a span of 12 months. For the first time after seven decades, the Indian Constitution and all the 890 Central laws are fully applicable to J&K.... The question we need to ask is why the leadership of the Congress, Left parties and the state parties did not allow such crucial laws which protect the Dalits and other disadvantaged groups to be implemented in the erstwhile state for all these years. Another discriminatory legal provision, which prevented women in J&K from retaining their rights if they married outside the state, has been put to an end... Apart from these initiatives, the last 12 months have seen several other momentous developments. The first of these is the rehabilitation of the Kashmiri Pandits, who were hounded out of the Valley 30 years ago by militants. The ethnic cleansing of nearly four lakh Kashmiris belonging to the Hindu minority remained a blot on India’s secular credentials. In the year gone by, 4,000 of them have got jobs in the UT and many others are listed for employment. Also, over 20,000 refugees from West Pakistan, who were treated as aliens in their own country and denied all rights, have been given domicile rights and financial assistance of Rs 5.50 lakh per family."

"Most countries have a UCC as a matter of course. But would they support India if it introduces the same thing? Compare with the normalisation of Kashmir's status in 2019. Save for Pakistan, all countries accepted this without any ado. Not only was it an internal matter, but it abolished something that they themselves would never accept either: a separate status for one of their provinces, excluding their citizens from owning property there. Yet, the international media still portrayed it as an anti-Muslim act of oppression, adding to their usual narrative of poor hapless Muslims being constantly persecuted by the ugly vicious Hindus. The issue was not important enough for swaying governments against India, but regarding UCC this may be different. It is likely that both Indian and foreign media will raise a storm if the separate Islamic law is threatened; and that the ruling party is not ready to take this heat."

"Aug. 5, marks exactly one year since New Delhi revoked Indian-administered Kashmir's special status, splitting the state into two union territories— and Ladakh. [...] One year on, where do things stand? While New Delhi's move remains popular among an increasingly nationalistic Indian citizenry, a dispassionate assessment of the decision will show that few of its objectives have been achieved. S. Jaishankar, who argued last year that the old status quo "denied economic opportunities and social gains for the masses," would struggle to make the case today that things have gotten better. A promised summit to encourage investment in Kashmir still hasn't taken place. The coronavirus pandemic has made any reforms difficult to implement, but even before the nationwide shutdown in March, there had been little progress."

"Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think-tanks and institutions of higher learning. They have rarely been set up in order to serve some imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature to justify the treatment of Indians as backwards in need of tutelage. But today, this “native barbarism” has been redefined in terms of human rights. American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s many oppressed categories have been waiting for."

"Most of these 'leftist' human rights organizations, with their predilection for stout defence of the 'human rights' of predator entities, are, more often than not, financed mainly by American sources linked with rightist 'international' American foundations and organizations promoting rightist American agendas. So it cannot basically be a 'left' versus 'right' issue"

"Some folks I know made pretty neat fortunes this way, setting up NGOs and 'think-tanks' ostensibly to study and 'work with' 'oppressed communities', and raked in vast amounts of money from gullible foreign donors. In fact, barring a few really committed souls, a whole host of 'progressives' in the NGO, academic and media world, made their living out of the misery of the 'oppressed', earning in this way not just their daily bread but also the really serious money that they needed to buy their cars and houses and to send their children to the 'best' English-medium schools and then for higher studies to the USA (which they never tired of reviling in public, of course), where they, too, would often sojourn when their 'social activism' became just a bit too tiring, boring or bothersome. Not many of them, who never ceased showing-off their 'commitment' to the 'oppressed' communities and their visceral hatred for 'oppressor' castes, would, I suspect, want to be treated in an Adivasi-run nursing home or to send their children to a Muslim-run school."

"Responding to these concerns, in 2010, India passed legislation known as the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA), which prohibits the use of overseas funds for “activities detrimental to the national interest.” Criticism was directed at groups such as the Ford Foundation, which, according to the claim, were using the cover of economic development to manipulate Indian culture. Christian aid groups were also suspected of proselytising activities. For example, in March 2017, US-based Compassion International, which funds child development projects in India, was accused of missionary-like activities by the Indian government and has been blocked in its ability to fund projects and placed on the list of organisations requiring “prior permission to bring in funds from overseas” (Mohan, 2017). Similarly, in 2016, the FCRA refused the registration renewal of the Indian Social Action Forum (Insaf), which is funded in part by “Brotfuer die Welt” (a major Protestant aid group) and by a French government “solidarity” organisation."

"In addition to these parallels, Israel and India share the distinction of being targets of political manipulation by powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their funders, which operate outside the democratic process, with no checks and balances. These activities, although often presented in altruistic and moral terms – such as peace, human rights, economic development, and humanitarian aid – are widely perceived in both countries as a form of neo-colonialism. NGO power is also enhanced by an image of altruism and morality (known as the “halo effect”) that protects the organisations and their funders from critical analysis. International journalists, diplomats, and academics give NGOs automatic support, without examining details and hidden agendas, which undermine hard-won national sovereignty and independence."

"It is always easy to blame the state and the men in uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian Pakistani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not spoken out against the religious persecutions in his homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality. The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attitude among sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine."

"Today, the Khanna project is widely seen, as historian Matthew Connolly puts it, as an example of ‘American social science at its most hubristic’… The Khanna study took place in the early 1950s. Its failure – the fact that its results confirmed the exact opposite of what researchers hoped – led the Rockefeller Foundation to distance itself from its methodology, but not from its objectives. In years ahead, the foundation funded numerous anti-fertility programmes in India and elsewhere, earning the growing animosity of physicians and poverty activists who felt that the foundation’s efforts to control population growth ignored the realities of the persistent poverty that makes large families so indispensable to Indian villagers."

"If we open the door [to the Bengali Hindu refugees], we all will sink."

"There was not an inch of space to spare in West Bengal for the refugees from East Bengal."

"Someone is saying we are contemplating sending aid to help the Pakistani refugees. I hope to hell we’re not."

"On humanitarian grounds, it is India’s moral duty to accommodate such people who have no place to go. I want to ask those who talk of minority rights, is it not our moral duty to provide a helping hand to persecuted minorities in our neighbourhood? We are concerned about all minorities who live there… whether Christians, Parsis, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists or Hindus. The atrocities against these minorities are forcing them to flee to India. This has been the situation since 1947. They have no rights. We will have to come up with a solution."

"Provided that any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014 and who has been exempted by the Central Government by or under clause (c) of sub-section (2) of section 3 of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 or from the application of the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 or any rule or order made thereunder, shall not be treated as illegal migrant for the purposes of this Act;[101]"

"“For them (opposition), they are Muslims. For us, they are all Indians. The Act does not affect any Indian.”... “I want to clearly state that with the CAA coming, there will be no impact on any citizen of India, practising any faith. CAA does not affect any Indian, it doesn’t harm minority interests,”... “Pandit Nehru himself was in favour of protecting minorities in Pakistan, I want to ask Congress, was Pandit Nehru communal? Did he want a Hindu Rashtra?” ... [much has been said about Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) by those who] “love getting photographed with the group of people who want ‘Tukde Tukde’ of India.”... “There has been talk of ‘save constitution’. I agree, Congress should say this 100 times in a day. Maybe they will realize their past mistakes. Did you forget this slogan during emergency? When state Governments were dismissed? When cabinet resolutions were torn?”"

"An atmosphere of hate was systematically built up. The whole purpose of it was to suggest that only one community has a veto over decision-making in India."

"The facts here are very clear, but rest assured that they will be contested. Like most Hindu-Muslim riots, this riot started as a Muslim pogrom on Hindus, with some spectacular killings of Hindu policemen, but then Hindus started striking back, and ultimately the Muslim death toll surpassed the Hindu one. ... Major media have been caught in the act of fabricating fake news... Same manipulation in Wikipedia, which suppressed corrections; or how blatantly fake news was quickly turned into the received wisdom."

"There is nothing anti-Muslim about CAA but it is anti-Hindu not to recognize the suffering and oppression Hindus in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have had to endure, as well as the other religious minorities in these Islamic states."

"While discussing migration from Bangladesh to India, it is politically as well as ethically important to distinguish between refugees, i.e. Hindus, and infiltrators, i.e. Muslims. Circumstances of the 1947 Partition, assurances given by top-ranking political leaders of India to Hindus staying on in Pakistan (including East Bengal), and an uninterrupted squeezing out of Hindus from East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh since 1947 in contrast to the care with which Muslims are safeguarded in the secular-democratic polity of India, a contrast that is even compatible with the appeasement of, or blackmail by, minorities (mainly Muslims) in India—sustain this categorisation of migrants from Bangladesh into refugees and infiltrators."

"I wanted to meet the Sikhs who have come to India from Afghanistan and understand their issues. They have some problems regarding visas and citizenship. We will address the issues that they have discussed with us. Some people are still waiting to get their citizenship. We will provide all possible help regarding citizenship and visas. It is our responsibility to help them out."

"Because of that law (Citizenship Amendment Act) these people had faith that we would come. What would have happened to these people if that law had not been there? Sometimes we politicise everything, this is not a matter of politics but a matter of humanity. Who could have left these people in that situation?"

"Sanjay Hazarika had pleaded: [A]s for the new exodus of Hindus from Bangladesh, they are true refugees, they are not migrants. They are as traumatised, frightened and brutalised as refugees in any other part of the world and this has been seen especially since the new government in Bangladesh took over."

"Needless to say that most of the refugees into Assam from East Pakistan were Bengali Hindus – the persecuted religious minority in Islamic Pakistan ruled by modern and politicised armed forces. The partition made their position extremely vulnerable. ...[T]heir existence with dignity, both actual and perceptional, propelled their movement across the border."

"The Indian prime minister’s secretariat knew that there was sure to be a rush of refugees, likely to overwhelm the local authorities in West Bengal. But the actual scale was a shock: the lieutenant governor of Tripura, an Indian state jutting deep into East Pakistan, alerted Gandhi to “the unexpectedly large influx of refugees.” As one of Gandhi’s senior aides remembered, her government now really began to worry. The expulsions seemed massive and systematic."

"In fact, India is by no means a Hindu state; it was not based on the refusal to co-exist with others, as Pakistan was; and it is not squeezing out its minorities, as Pakistan is. The best refutation is provided by the highly anti-symmetrical migration stream: the constant trickle of Hindu refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh is not matched by a similar trickle of Muslim refugees from India, but by a vast movement of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh illegally settling in India."

"Immigration from Bangladesh is of two types. Firstly there are members of the minority communities fleeing occasional waves of per­secution or the more general sense of being second-class citiz­ens under the Islamic dispensation. Few Hindus would disput­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­e their right to settle down in India. Secondly, there are Mus­lims seek­ing econom­­ic oppor­tunities or sheer living space, which dirt-poor and inten­sely overc­rowded Banglad­esh cannot offer to the ever-larger num­bers of newcomers on the hous­ing and labour market... The BJP argues that refugees from persecution and illegal economic migrants merit a different treat­ment, as is assumed in the arrangements for refugee relief of most countries. But sec­ularists see it differently, for "unlike the BJP, the Congre­ss (I) views both Hindus and Muslim from Bangladesh as in­filtrat­ors". Terminology is a part of the problem here, with secularists systematically describing Hindu refugees as "migrants" if not "infiltrators", and Muslim illegal immigrants as "refugees"... The Hindu population in East Bengal had declined from 33% in 1901 to 28% in 1941. It fell to 22% by 1951 due to the Partition and the post-Partition exodus, and to 18.5% in 1961. By 1971, it had fallen to 13.5%, partly due to the 1971 massacre by the Pakistani Army, partly due to intermittent waves of emigrati­on. The 1981 figure was 12.1%. In 1989 and 1990, due to "large-scale destru­ction, desecration and damage inflic­ted on Hindu temples and religious institutions", "clandestine migrat­ion­­­ by the Hindus to India went up"."

"Consider also the numbers: of thirty million Muslims in truncated India, four million moved to Pakistan, or less than one in seven; of twenty million Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, seven million fled to India, or more than one in three. Moreover, in the next decade, another four million Hindus fled East Pakistan."

"We want to make sure that future generations remember how the people stood up to the autocratic rule of the BJP and its imposition of an anti-Assamese law."

"The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Congress promises to build a memorial for the anti-CAA movement after winning the election. Assam doesn’t want CAA."

"There were thousands of people standing out in the open here all night in the rain. Women were with babies in their arms. They could not lie down because the water came up to their knees in places. There was not enough shelter and in the morning there were always many sick and dying of pneumonia. We could not get out serious cholera cases to the hospital. And there was no one to take away the dead. They just lay around on the ground or in the water. High pressure syringes have speeded vaccination and reduced the cholera threat, but camp health officials have already counted about 500 dead and an estimated 35,000 have been stricken by the convulsive vomiting and diarrhea that accompany the diseases. Now officials fear that pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis will also begin to take a toll among the weakened refugees."

"Whatever happens, we will not allow them (BJP) to implement the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)."

"Nationalism, far from being reversed, made further headway. The biggest and most frightening setback came in India, where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir – a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship."

"Hindu extremists were unquestionably involved in the attacks against Muslims in Gujarat. Furthermore, the Modi government willfully neglected its duty to protect the rights and lives of its citizens and promoted further communal polarization in a state with already tense communal relations."

"At most periods of her history India, though a cultural unit, has been torn by internecine war. In statecraft, her rulers were cunning and unscrupulous. Famine, flood and plague visited her from time to time, and killed millions of her people. Inequality of birth was given religious sanction, and the lot of the humble was generally hard. Yet our overall impression is that in no other part of the ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, so fair and humane. In no other early civilisation were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient lawbook are their rights so well protected as in the Arthasastra. No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu. In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non-combatants…There was sporadic cruelty and oppression no doubt, but, in comparison with conditions in other early cultures, it was mild. To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilisation is its humanity."

"It is highly regrettable that the Government of Pakistan have never appreciated our genuine feelings and efforts for safeguarding the interest of the minorities in this country. The paternal role which they seek to assume over the minorities in India is not only presumptuous but is also extremely ridiculous. On the contrary, what consideration has been weighing with Pakistan in squeezing out the minorities from their country? Apart from the large numbers of refugees who migrated to India from Pakistan earlier, the influx of nearly 1,80,000 refugees belonging to the different religious groups from East Pakistan to Assam during the period from January, 1964 to January, 1965 is a clear evidence of the oppressive treatment meted out to the minority communities in Pakistan. So far as the minorities in the State of Assam are concerned, I can boldly say that they are quite happy and secure. If the Government of Pakistan continues to indulge in mischievous propaganda with a view to undermining the secular policy of the Government of India while deliberately concealing their lapses in providing securities to the minorities, they will be only doing harm to both the countries. I wish the Government of Pakistan could see reasons and refrained from such malicious propaganda."

"The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act violates India’s international obligations to prevent deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin as found in the and other human rights treaties that India has ratified. The 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities calls on governments to protect the existence and identity of religious minorities within their territories and to adopt the appropriate measures to achieve this end. Governments are obligated to ensure that people belonging to , including , may exercise their human rights without discrimination and in full . Governments also have an obligation to ensure . To the extent that the process has a disproportionately harmful impact on the citizenship rights of women and girls, it also violates the ."

"The citizenship law and verification process are contrary to the basic principles of secularism and equality enshrined in the Indian constitution and in domestic law. Indian authorities should immediately reverse course and adopt rights-respecting laws and policies regarding citizenship. They should also uphold the rights to freedom of expression and to peaceful assembly."

"In the coming months, Guwahati will see a new landmark — a grand memorial in memory of the anti-CAA movement to be built by the incoming Congress government. This will be the state’s message to BJP. No CAA in Assam."