N.P. Upadhyaya, Kathmandu: She is made up of a different political stuff.
She is determined in her convictions and so India’s Godi media attacks her as and when she speaks of the stark prevailing realities which is being summarily denied by the team which in effect controls the entire administration of the former British colony-that is the present day Indian Union born 1947.
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things, which won, as the Wikipedia has recorded, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
Nepali observers began to note her comments seriously when the Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu fundamentalist management created ugly scenes in Delhi in the month of February 2020 this year when the Minority Muslims in India have had to endure the State sponsored violence when they protested the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) brought into force by the Hindu government which has visibly a special sort of hatred for the Muslims of the world and needless to say more so for the Indian Muslims who were in minority in India and have been forced to live a life of third class citizens.
To recall, the famous writer-activist Arundhati Roy appealed, as back as in December 17/2019 the Indian citizens to stand up and protest the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the Modi government in early December last year.
Issuing a statement, the author of “The God of Small Things” and many other acclaimed books had then said, “We are faced with the biggest challenge since independence”.
“It will break the back of our Constitution and cut the ground from under our feet,” said the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy.
Are we going to stand in line once again, obediently, and comply with the policy that eerily resembles the 1935 Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich? Asked Roy in a statement issued in December, as had been reported by the National Herald newspaper December 17 last year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his declared anti-Muslim team defends the law calling it a humanitarian gesture for refugees in India.
Notably, the law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims though.
It is here that the Indian ulterior motive gets unmasked which is to terrorize the minority Muslims so that they all leave India for good and swell Pakistan. But what is the guarantee that Pakistan will throw extend red carpet welcome to the fleeing Muslims from India?
The Muslims if pushed to the wall will in all likelihood enter Pakistan.
However, the Indian Muslims living and born in India since time immemorial even if being persecuted prefer not to leave their motherland. But the State sponsored violence against the Muslim community remains intact.
The fire brand writer-activist Arundhati exploded against the Modi government 19 April/2020 for having targeted the “helpless” minority Muslim community during the current Covid-19 crisis in India.
While talking to the German news-the DW, Roy accused the Modi government in India of exploiting the corona virus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
She told the DW, writes John Silk , that this alleged strategy on the part of the Hindu nationalist government would “dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on,” adding that “the situation is approaching genocidal.”
She then says further that the India’s Modi government has been apparently exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to ramp up suppression of Muslims, comparing the tactic to one used by the Nazis during the Hitler era.
The Bhartiya Janta Party instantaneously rejects the claim made by the veteran activist-Ms. Roy and says that all that Arundhati has been saying is “false” and “misleading.”
“This crisis of hatred against Muslims,” Roy continued while talking to the German news DW and adds that ” it comes on the back of a massacre in Delhi”, which was the result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship law.
“The whole of the organization, the RSS, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group to which Modi belongs, which is in essence the mother ship of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], has long said that India should be a Hindu nation, Arundhati explains to the German News.
To sum up, Ms. Roy accuses Modi government of inflaming tensions between the Hindu and the Muslims and that “The Covid-19 is putting India’s fault lines “on full display”.
The near to paid henchmen of the Indian administration in Nepal too began to insult and take to task the innocent Muslims here to the extent that they were dubbed as the carriers of the Corona Virus.
A well calculated plan that was designed in Nepal under the apparent instructions from the Indian authorities tried to defame the Muslims of Nepal who have had some links with the Delhi-Nijamuddin Tabligi Jamaat.
Some Nepali Muslims were not only insulted but were chased and even beaten alleging that they were the persons who were the carriers of the deadly Corona virus to which they were not.
Yes some Indian nationals illegally entered into Nepal and tried to defame the Nepali Muslims.
Nepali Muslims are the ones who have all along remained loyal to their country of birth and have lived in complete harmony with the dominant Hindus of Nepal.
It would not be out of place to say that Nepali Muslims respect the Hindu religion which is being reciprocated by the Hindus and thus there has been no communal clash so far worth recalling among the Nepali Hindus and the Muslims. India must learn from Nepal on how to live in harmony.
“We have lived for centuries together as Nepali nationals and shared both of our sorrows and happiness like brothers”, say the matured and reasonable Muslims and the Hindus of Nepal.
However, during the ongoing Corona pandemic there has been some instances here and there in Nepal wherein some ugly extraneous forces wanted to create fissures among the Hindu and the Muslim population. Some domestic perverted brains appear to have assisted the alien destructive forces.
India always tries to, as is Nepal’s experienced experience, destabilize Nepal by any means that the Indian administration (through the RAW) thinks to be appropriate.
India is in effect the number one enemy of Nepal. Yet the common Indian nationals are the friends of Nepali nationals.
However they failed in their “divide Nepal mission” on religious lines as the bonds of unity among the Hindus and Muslims is very high and commendable which in fact Nepal’s southern neighbor, India, must copy if the former British colony wants to remain intact as it stands today.
Or else the split is guaranteed should the humiliated population decide to call enough already enough.
“The Pandemic is a Portal.” Arundhati says bluntly that “You have the sense that you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance,” and then she describes how the government of Narendra Modi is using the pandemic to crack down on opponents and dissidents, reports Democracy now, Independent Global news dated April 16/2020.
But one of her sharp critique Rakesh Sinha Tweets April 18 and rebukes Roy’s allegations saying that the government of PM Modi has been tirelessly working to save Indians from Corona crisis but the useless idiots, like Arundhati Roy, are trying to pour communal poison in public discourse. People know gutter intellectuals and their intentions”.
In the meantime a Swedish Professor of Indian origin Ashok Swain also has made some piercing comments in the Gulf News, April 22/2020 on how India’s Modi government has been targeting the Muslims at a time when the country is in the mid of the Corona-19 pandemic.
Look what this Professor Ashok Swain says, in his own words, (sic), “Islamophobia has reached its peak in India with the increasing rise of corona virus crisis.
This is not just a primordial reaction of society but a very well planned and finely executed political project of Narendra Modi and his party-BJP.
This Swedish Professor Ashok Swain in his article then emphatically asserts that “Narendra Modi eyes votes in communalizing corona virus pandemic and hounding Muslims”.
Having talked of Arundhati’s observations on Modi and his biased administration, let’s now talk on what the Arab world thinks of the present day Indian government that is under the Modi’s fascist regime, as it is taken right inside India also by her own academicians/intellectuals.
The so called friendly nations of India in the Arab world, for example, the Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and other countries in the vicinity (in the Gulf region) too have, better late than never, come to senses and have now begun to take logical interest on how their Muslim brethren in India were being humiliated, treated and harassed, embarrassed, insulted and behaved as second class citizens of the Indian union.
The Indian atrocities on Muslims appear to have been taken note of in the Arab world.
Seemi Pasha for The Wire, April 21/2020, writes on the bias being visibly observed in the Godi media for the Indian Muslims which also speak volumes of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party’s attitude towards the Muslims of India in particular and for the Arabs women in general.
Needless to say, the Godi media-a classic example of pet media has already given the religious color to the Coronas Pandemic whose impressions could also be seen in Nepali media and the men who control the near to the heavily tilted and influenced media in Nepal.
A sort of polarization between the religions could be seen due to the perverted brains housed in the BJP whose utterances are all aimed at spreading communal hatred in the South Asian region and much beyond. Nepal is once again the Indian media’s target.
If a communal conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims erupts by chance in Nepal then that would be solely due to the fanaticism of some BJP stalwarts in India for which PM Modi would and should be held accountable.
For instance, Amrit Malviya, a BJP man associated with the IT cell, on April 1/2020 Tweeted. He said “Delhi’s dark underbelly is exploding. Last three months have seen an Islamic insurrection of sorts, first in the name of anti-CAA protests from Saheen Bagh to Jamia, Jaffarabad to Seelampur. And now the illegal gathering of the radical Tabligi Jamaat at the markaz. It needs a fix”.
The hatred against Muslims continues. Look what the next BJP functionary has to say:
Devendra Fadnvis, the former high flying politician of Maharastra takes the Muslims associated with the Tasbligi Jamaat as “Human bombs”.
Doesn’t all these lead us to think that these strident comments were all targeted against the Muslims? Certainly yes.
Frustrated by all these ugly comments made against the Indian Muslims and by extension to the Muslims across the globe, the Organization of the Islamic Countries (OIC) and the IPHRC issued a warning of sorts sounding the Indian establishment that they were not that happy with the manner the Muslims were being treated in India.
And this is how they have reacted April 19/2020.
“The OIC/IPHRC urges the Indian government 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 HR law”.
Notably, the OIC has used the word persecution which means harassment, oppression, maltreatment and discrimination.
It appears that the Organization is angry with the Indian Prime Minister Modi and his fanatic party-the BJP.
However, will this anger last for long or some “commercial interests” shall blunt the Muslim world anger?
And here is the climax of it all. Look what the BJP high flying functionary Tejasvi Surya in the year 2015 had ventilated his inner hatred/anger/ for the Arabian Muslim Women when he shamelessly tweeted which read like this: “95% Arab women have never had an orgasm in the last few hundred years. Every mother has produced kids as act of sex and not love’.
The BJP man Surya hurriedly deleted his offensive tweet but unfortunately for the young BJP leader the damage had already been done. A screenshot of his tweet was picked up by activists like Abdur Rahman Nassar from Kuwait, who have a large following on social media, and circulated, so write Seemi Pasha for the Wire as stated earlier.
Her article is titled “India’s Coronavirus-Related Islamophobia Has the Arab World Up in Arms.
Surya hurriedly deleted his offensive tweet, writes Seemi, but unfortunately for the young BJP leader the damage had already been done. A screenshot of his tweet was picked up by activists like Abdur Rahman Nassar from Kuwait, who have a large following on social media, and circulated.
Nassar’s retaliation came as saying that the “expats from 53 Muslim countries remit $120 billion annually to India”.
Similarly, an infuriated Kuwaiti national Mejbal Al Sharika, a lawyer and director of International Human Rights who upon reading the insulting and repulsive posting from the BJP man Tejsvi Surya, wrote directly to the Indian Prime Minister which reads like this: ‘Respected Prime Minister, India’s relation with the Arab world has been that of mutual respect. Do you allow your parliamentarian to publicly humiliate our women? We expect your urgent punitive action against @Tejasvi_Surya for his disgraceful comment’.
How the Indian PM Modi took the Tweet from the Kuwaiti lawyer is not known.
But what is known to all and sundry that the Hindutwa government of India led by PM Modi has been pushing the Muslims to the walls. What will happen if the Indian Muslims retaliate with full force hinting that enough had now been enough? That’s all.