BJP govt targeting Muslims in garb of Covid-19: Imran

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has said the “deliberate and violent targeting” of Muslims in India by the Narendra Modi-led government is similar to the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany, after the coronavirus outbreak led to widespread Islamophobia in the country.

“The deliberate and violent targeting of Muslims in India by Modi Govt to divert the backlash over its Covid19 policy, which has left thousands stranded and hungry, is akin to what Nazis did to Jews in Germany,” Khan said in a tweet on Sunday. “Yet more proof of the racist Hindutva Supremacist ideology of Modi Govt.”

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)’s Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission too added their voice to the criticism. In a series of tweets, the body condemned the “unrelenting vicious Islamophobic campaign in India maligning Muslims for spread of Covid-19 as well as their negative profiling in media subjecting them to discrimination and violence with impunity”.

The body also urged New Delhi to “take urgent steps to stop the growing tide of Islamophobia in India and protect the rights of its persecuted Muslim minority as per its obligations” under international human rights laws.

The comments come days after Indian novelist Arundhati Roy told German television channel DW that the Indian government is exploiting Covid-19 to ramp up its suppression of Muslims. She, too, compared the tactic to one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

She told DW that “the situation is approaching genocidal”. “I think what has happened is Covid-19 has exposed things about India that all of us knew,” said Roy. “We are suffering, not just from Covid, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger. This crisis of hatred against Muslims.”

Roy added: “The whole of the organisation, the RSS — to which Modi belongs, which is the mother ship of the BJP — has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using Covid, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to ghettoise them, to stigmatise them.”

Roy’s warning highlighted a pattern of Islamophobia in India. On Sunday, The Indian Express reported that a pregnant and bleeding Muslim woman who came to a hospital in the Indian state of Jharkand was allegedly accused of spreading the coronavirus, asked to clean up her blood and turned away — events which led to the loss of her child. “I was abused on the lines of my religion and was asked to wipe the blood. I could not because I was shivering. I was beaten up with slippers. I was shocked and rushed to a nursing home. There it came out that my child had died,” she alleged in a letter to chief minister Hemant Soren.

On Thursday, Al Jazeera citing a story in The Indian Express, reported that a government-run hospital in the Indian state of Gujarat had segregated Muslim and Hindu coronavirus patients, claiming the order came from the government.

On April 12, The New York times reported that the Indian health ministry repeatedly blamed the Tablighi Jamaat for spreading the coronavirus — and governing party officials spoke of “human bombs” and “corona jihad”, leading to a spree of anti-Muslim attacks in the country.

Meanwhile, President Arif Alvi referred specifically to the Indian treatment of Kashmiri Muslims. “The dirty priority of the Indian Govt is to suppress the people of Indian Occupied Kashmir. Their soldiers have carried out this primary task through heinous brutalisation, torture and suppression. With more than 95,000 innocents killed since 1989 these numbers shout out to the world.”

He then shared some grim statistics. “Indian occupied Kashmir has 1 ventilator for every 71,000 people; 1 doctor for every 3,900 people; 1 armed soldier for every 9 people. Let that sink in.”