NEW YORK, Jan 04 (APP): A leading American newspaper has highlighted “breathtaking rise” in violence in India against religious minorities, with Muslims bearing the brunt of the most brutal physical attacks, saying that that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has kept mum while Hindu radicals have been on a rampage.
“Under Mr. Modi, all pretense at secularism has ceased,” Tunku Varadarajan, a British-Indian journalist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
“Since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, the country has seen a breathtaking rise in violence against religious minorities by groups aligned with his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party, the WSJ article said.
According to it, groups aligned with the BJP have been implicated in attacks against Muslims and Christians, alongside systemic discrimination in employment, education, housing, and access to civic participation.
According to the WSJ, India’s Muslim community — approximately 14 per cent of the population — has borne the brunt of the most severe attacks, facing widespread social exclusion and ghettoisation.
Christians, who comprise just a meagre 2.3 percent of the population and largely belong to economically marginalized communities, have also increasingly been targeted.
The article noted that radical Hindu groups remain fixated on what they describe as the “threat” of Christian conversion, despite the Christian community’s small size and with 80pc of India’s population being Hindus.
It further highlighted that at least 12 Indian states have enacted laws prohibiting religious conversion by “force, fraud, or allurement,” with “allurement” often interpreted so broadly that even peaceful evangelical activity is criminalized. Violence against Christians is frequently justified under the pretext of enforcing these laws.
Noting that Christmas as has been a public holiday in India since independence, along with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh holidays, but pointed out that radical Hindu ideologues—including Yogi Adityanath, BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state—believe it shouldn’t be. His government even ordered schools open on Christmas,the article said.
“Mobs of Hindus assembled outside churches in his state—at precisely the time of Christmas Eve services—and chanted ‘Death to Christian missionaries’ while also screaming Hindu prayers aloud.”
“The prime minister hasn’t said a word against the Hindu radicals who attacked Christians. Some of his defenders argue he can’t control every thug in a vast country. But what stops him from condemning their actions, from saying that their violence is unacceptable in a civilized country?
“I think we know the answer,” the writer commented.