Tariq Naqash
DAWN
Published May 23, 2023 
Now India is promoting tourism in the region, with its spectacular mountain scenery and signs at the airport declaring it “paradise on earth”. More than a million Indian citizens visited last year.
But dissent has been criminalised, media freedoms curbed and public protests limited, in what critics say is a drastic curtailment of civil liberties by New Delhi.
Police said last week that security had been beefed up “to avoid any chance of an attack during the G20” meeting, and on Monday soldiers and armoured vehicles were deployed at multiple locations in Srinagar.
But many checkpoints — wrapped in metal mesh and barbed wire — had been dismantled overnight, and some paramilitary police stood hidden behind G20 advertising panels in what appeared to be an effort to minimise the security forces’ visibility.
The People’s Anti-Fascist Front, a new rebel group that emerged in occupied Kashmir after 2019, issued a statement condemning the event and threatening to “deploy suicide bombers”.
“Today, tomorrow or day after. It will come,” it said.
Bilawal bashes India for ‘show of arrogance’
Meanwhile, in an address to the AJK Legislative Assembly today, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari bashed India for its “display of arrogance”.
“India’s continued denial of the rights of the Kashmiri people is a wrongful and illegal act,” he said, stressing that “no amount of diplomatic duplicity or Indian state-perpetrated terror can change this fact”.
He lamented that occupied Kashmir had become an “open prison” today where Muslims were being forced to breathe fear. “This mayhem continues under draconian laws allowing continuity to the Indian occupying forces.”
Bilawal highlighted that New Delhi’s “wretched, systematic and perpetual barbarism not just violates international law but it makes a mockery of the fundamental human rights”.
“How can the world be a bystander when a large country usurps the rights guaranteed by the security council?” the minister asked.
He reiterated that holding the G20 moot in occupied Kashmir was yet another “show of arrogance” on India’s part. “How can India possibly claim that normalcy has returned to occupied Kashmir?
“I wish to remind the Indian leaders that unilateral steps in held Kashmir will neither accord democracy to their occupation nor suppress the true occupation of the Kashmiri people,” he asserted.
“If India wants to be a superpower, then it needs to act like a superpower,” Bilawal said.
He added that his presence in AJK proved the intergenerational support and commitment to the Kashmir cause. “We want good relations with our neighbours, including India, but good relations cannot be achieved through a disputed resolution.”
‘Terrorist-infested places’
The three-day gathering will take place at a sprawling, well-guarded venue on the shores of Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Two Indian government ministers are attending, but several Western nations are sending only locally-based diplomatic staff.
G20 member China, which has its own territorial disputes with India, has refused to attend, and no delegations are expected from Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, questions have been raised over the choice of location.
“Does the Modi government think that tourism can be promoted in closed conference halls next to a scenic lake being patrolled by marine commandos, with surveillance drones overhead?” columnist Bharat Bhushan wrote in the Deccan Herald newspaper.
To visit occupied Kashmir, foreign journalists require special permission, which is not normally forthcoming, though it has been granted for the event.
The permits are valid only for coverage of the G20 meeting itself and limited to the city of Srinagar. Holders are required not to “propagate anti-India narratives”, nor visit “terrorist-infested places without prior permission”.
India holds the G20 presidency for 2023, and has planned more than 100 meetings across the country.
It is locked in a military standoff with China along their mostly undemarcated border in the Ladakh region.
Beijing also claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in full as part of Tibet, and it considers Kashmir a “disputed territory”.
“China firmly opposes holding any form of G20 meeting in disputed territory and will not attend such meetings,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters last week, after Beijing also stayed away from events in both Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.
Last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, said New Delhi was seeking to use the G20 meeting to “portray an international seal of approval” on a situation that “should be decried and condemned”. India rejected the comments.
Residents have chafed under the stepped-up security measures.
Hundreds have been detained in police stations and thousands, including shopkeepers, have received calls from officials warning against any “signs of protest or trouble”, a senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Fascism’s backers
ON the eve of the G7 summit in Japan last week, there was a sudden outburst of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in Australia. Just hours after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had confirmed that Joe Biden would be visiting the country for the chiefly anti-China Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit in Sydney, the US president announced that, sorry, he wouldn’t be able to make it.
Biden said he would be obliged to rush back from Japan to deal with his country’s debt crisis. Several commentators lamented that his absence would play into China’s narrative that the US is insufficiently engaged with the Indo-Pacific to remain the regional hegemon. Others reassured the public that America remains dedicated to its Asia-Pacific role.
Japan’s prime minister followed Biden’s example, but the fourth component of the Quad decided to carry on. Narendra Modi arrived in Australia late on Monday, and last night was scheduled to address a 20,000-strong crowd — mostly of Indian origin — at the Olympic stadium. There has been resistance, including posters in Sydney — mostly torn down — calling for a citizen’s arrest of the ‘Hindu terrorist Modi’.
The terrorist charge largely harks back to the anti-Muslim pogroms in Ahmedabad in 2002 when Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, decided that the state’s police and firefighters would do nothing to protect the victims. At least 2,000 people were murdered. Modi predictably denied all responsibility for the violence.
Modi’s Western friends turn a blind eye to India’s trajectory.
Back then, the international response was at least superficially more robust than it is today. Modi was effectively banned from travelling to the US or the European Union. However, the West rapidly backtracked as soon as he became prime minister. If anyone had any illusions that he would modify the extremism honed since his youth as a devotee of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), they have steadily been divested of this vain hope.
And if anyone were to wonder why a neofascist pundit might be hailed as the leader of the world’s largest democracy, just look at the new Cold War — which, much like the old one, primarily targets Russia and China. Whatever its motivations may be, the latter appears to be the only power that is keen to end the appalling war in Ukraine. The West is bent upon fuelling the flames. India has refused to disengage from Russia, a source of cut-price oil and gas, but can hardly be categorised any longer as non-aligned. Far more alarming is the West’s consequent insouciance — or cultivated ignorance — about the Modi regime’s proto-fascistic tendencies.
It is not shy of demonstrating them. A report published earlier this year by the North America-based Justice for All organisation, titled The Nazification of India, compares what has been happening with the circumstances in Germany in the 1930s, and many of the parallels are striking — not least that Adolf Hitler struck influential people in Western democracies as an attractive proposition. Until it was too late.
India’s course towards what would have been anathema to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi was set two decades ago when the then chief minister of Gujarat state facilitated a pogrom that claimed at least 2,000 lives in the aftermath of the Godhra tragedy. A recent documentary about the events of 2002 inspired a backlash against the BBC that still carries on. Sadly, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s point of view in the documentary consists of idiotic interventions by Swapan Dasgupta, an old Oxford acquaintance who drifted seamlessly from the left to the far right — a depressing but hardly uncommon phenomenon.
Much more worrying is the Hindutva jihad against the domestic media, supplemented by efforts to rewrite history — as well as other subjects — by trying to erase, inter alia, the Mughal past and Darwinian evolutionary theory. There are numerous other instances of the absurdities being drummed into innocent minds at the behest of the RSS — founded almost a century ago, with its still evident Nazi tendencies honed in the 1930s — and its various offshoots.
With all its hypocritical gibberish about ‘values’, the West sees nothing wrong with India’s trajectory, and its blinkered leaders will trot along to hug Modi when the G20 beckons in September. If India’s drift towards fascism is to be halted, the resistance will have to come from within. The Indian trend is similar to what has been seen elsewhere — not least Pakistan, but also the US, Brazil, Hungary and Israel — of political leaders acquiring a cult following among populations disillusioned by the centrist business-as-usual. That’s understandable but the consequences can be atrocious. One can only hope that the majority of Indians will see the light before it’s too late. The election result in Karnataka was somewhat encouraging, but there’s a long way to go.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2023
MUZAFFARABAD: Activists of Pasban-i-Hurriyat, a Kashmiri refugee organisation, stage a protest demonstration against the holding of G20 meeting in India-held Kashmir, on Monday.—AFP
• Pakistan rejects India’s attempt to convince world occupied territory is its undisputed part
• China, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia stay away from event
• Rallies condemn Delhi’s controversial move
MUZAFFARABAD / SRINAGAR: In sheer violation of international laws and United Nations Security Council resolutions, a G20 meeting got under way in India-held Kashmir on Monday with at least three member countries boycotting it while several western states preferring to send their India-based diplomats instead of allowing delegates from their respective capitals to the event in the disputed region.
G20 member China, which is locked in a military standoff with India along their mostly un-demarcated border in the Ladakh region, refused to attend the tourism working group meeting, and no government delegations are expected from Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
Beijing also stayed away from earlier G20 meetings in Ladakh and in Arunachal Pradesh, which it says are part of Tibet.
Last week, the UN special rapporteur on minority issues, Fernand de Varennes, said New Delhi was seeking to use the G20 meeting to “portray an international seal of approval” on a situation that “should be decried and condemned”.
India rejected the rapporteur’s comments and Pakistan denounced Indian “arrogance” for violating international law by holding the huddle in the disputed territory where, according to the UN resolutions, a plebiscite must be held giving the Kashmiri people the right to self-determination.
In Muzaffarabad, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said that holding a G20 meeting in occupied Srinagar was a sheer violation of the UN resolutions on Kashmir.
Addressing a special session of the AJK Legislative Assembly, he said India was deviously trying to convince the world that occupied Jammu and Kashmir was its undisputed part.
“But history remembers that it was India that took the Jammu and Kashmir dispute to the Security Council as a dispute yet to be resolved. There, the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir was internationally recognised, and it was decided that the final disposition of the state shall be made through a free and impartial plebiscite under the UN auspices,” he recalled.
By holding a G20 meeting in the disputed territory under tight security, India wants to show “normalcy and peace” are returning to the region after New Delhi revoked its limited autonomy in 2019 and took direct control, imposing an extended lockdown. Since then Indian authorities have criminalised dissent, curbed media freedoms and limited public protests in a drastic curtailment of civil liberties.
Both China and Pakistan have condemned holding the event in the disputed territory.
Since the lockdown, the decade-old uprising has largely been crushed — although young Kashmiri men continue to take up arms against Indian occupation — and the annual death toll, once in the thousands, has been on a downward trend, with 253 fatalities last year.
Police said last week that security had been beefed up to avoid any chance of attack during the three-day event, and on Monday soldiers and armoured vehicles were deployed at multiple locations in Srinagar, capital of India-held Kashmir.
Hundreds have been detained in police stations and thousands, including shopkeepers, have received calls from officials warning against any “signs of protest or trouble”, a senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Attempt to hoodwink assailed
Foreign Minister Bhutto-Zardari lambasted India for likening the legitimate struggle for right to self-determination of Kashmiri people with terrorism to hoodwink the international community, but said the diatribe against Kashmiris and Pakistan would never help New Delhi evade the long overdue just solution to the festering issue in accordance with the UNSC resolutions and aspirations of the Kashmiris.
“India is trying to use the terrorism bogeyman to mask the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for the legitimate right to self-determination. It uses the same bogey to blame Pakistan and justify its brutal repression of the Kashmiri people, in what is a complete travesty of justice,” he said, in his address to a special session of the AJK Legislative Assembly.
“There is a clear distinction between terrorism and a people’s genuine quest for freedom. Terrorism cannot be and should not be used as an excuse to deny the Kashmiri people their fundamental rights and their fundamental freedoms,” he added.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari’s address coincided with the G20 meeting in occupied Srinagar.
People in AJK expressed their disapproval of the event by staging rallies and demonstrations and observing symbolic strikes.
The foreign minister emphasised that the Kashmir dispute was the unfinished agenda of the partition of the Sub-continent, when the rights and aspirations of the Kashmiri people were trampled upon by machinations and intrigue.
He regretted that the Kashmiri people had been denied their inalienable right despite the lapse of more than seven decades.
“Today, I ask the world if a country can be allowed to renege on its solemn commitments to the United Nations, break its own promises and blatantly violate international law just because they want to?”
Taking strong exception to India’s August 5, 2019, move, he said it had opened a new chapter of oppression to accomplish Delhi’s nefarious plan to convert Kashmiris into a dispossessed and disempowered minority in their own land.
“Pakistan rejects these unilateral and illegal steps outright. How can the world be a silent bystander when a large country usurps the rights guaranteed by the Security Council, and instead uses brute force to suppress those rights?” he asked. “India is misusing its position as chair of the G20,” he said.
While paying tribute to the valiant Kashmiri people, he reassured them of Pakistan’s unstinted moral, diplomatic and political support till they achieved their legitimate rights.
Men, women attend rallies
Earlier, hundreds of men, women and schoolchildren paraded through the streets in different parts of the liberated territory to condemn the holding of G20 huddle in Srinagar.
A big rally was held in Muzaffarabad under the aegis of an organisation of post-1989 migrants from occupied Kashmir, with its participants carrying black flags and banners inscribed with slogans against the G20 meeting.
One banner was full of praise for China for its categorical boycott of the Srinagar meeting.
Sixty-year-old Malka Jan, who had migrated to AJK in 1992, said she was yearning for a just settlement of Kashmir issue so that she could return to her native area.
“Instead of participating in meetings under the aegis of oppressor India, world powers should take concrete steps to establish peace and justice in our motherland by granting us our right to self-determination,” she said.
Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2023
• Pakistan rejects India’s attempt to convince world occupied territory is its undisputed part
• China, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia stay away from event
• Rallies condemn Delhi’s controversial move
MUZAFFARABAD / SRINAGAR: In sheer violation of international laws and United Nations Security Council resolutions, a G20 meeting got under way in India-held Kashmir on Monday with at least three member countries boycotting it while several western states preferring to send their India-based diplomats instead of allowing delegates from their respective capitals to the event in the disputed region.
G20 member China, which is locked in a military standoff with India along their mostly un-demarcated border in the Ladakh region, refused to attend the tourism working group meeting, and no government delegations are expected from Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
Beijing also stayed away from earlier G20 meetings in Ladakh and in Arunachal Pradesh, which it says are part of Tibet.
Last week, the UN special rapporteur on minority issues, Fernand de Varennes, said New Delhi was seeking to use the G20 meeting to “portray an international seal of approval” on a situation that “should be decried and condemned”.
India rejected the rapporteur’s comments and Pakistan denounced Indian “arrogance” for violating international law by holding the huddle in the disputed territory where, according to the UN resolutions, a plebiscite must be held giving the Kashmiri people the right to self-determination.
In Muzaffarabad, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said that holding a G20 meeting in occupied Srinagar was a sheer violation of the UN resolutions on Kashmir.
Addressing a special session of the AJK Legislative Assembly, he said India was deviously trying to convince the world that occupied Jammu and Kashmir was its undisputed part.
“But history remembers that it was India that took the Jammu and Kashmir dispute to the Security Council as a dispute yet to be resolved. There, the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir was internationally recognised, and it was decided that the final disposition of the state shall be made through a free and impartial plebiscite under the UN auspices,” he recalled.
By holding a G20 meeting in the disputed territory under tight security, India wants to show “normalcy and peace” are returning to the region after New Delhi revoked its limited autonomy in 2019 and took direct control, imposing an extended lockdown. Since then Indian authorities have criminalised dissent, curbed media freedoms and limited public protests in a drastic curtailment of civil liberties.
Both China and Pakistan have condemned holding the event in the disputed territory.
Since the lockdown, the decade-old uprising has largely been crushed — although young Kashmiri men continue to take up arms against Indian occupation — and the annual death toll, once in the thousands, has been on a downward trend, with 253 fatalities last year.
Police said last week that security had been beefed up to avoid any chance of attack during the three-day event, and on Monday soldiers and armoured vehicles were deployed at multiple locations in Srinagar, capital of India-held Kashmir.
Hundreds have been detained in police stations and thousands, including shopkeepers, have received calls from officials warning against any “signs of protest or trouble”, a senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Attempt to hoodwink assailed
Foreign Minister Bhutto-Zardari lambasted India for likening the legitimate struggle for right to self-determination of Kashmiri people with terrorism to hoodwink the international community, but said the diatribe against Kashmiris and Pakistan would never help New Delhi evade the long overdue just solution to the festering issue in accordance with the UNSC resolutions and aspirations of the Kashmiris.
“India is trying to use the terrorism bogeyman to mask the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for the legitimate right to self-determination. It uses the same bogey to blame Pakistan and justify its brutal repression of the Kashmiri people, in what is a complete travesty of justice,” he said, in his address to a special session of the AJK Legislative Assembly.
“There is a clear distinction between terrorism and a people’s genuine quest for freedom. Terrorism cannot be and should not be used as an excuse to deny the Kashmiri people their fundamental rights and their fundamental freedoms,” he added.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari’s address coincided with the G20 meeting in occupied Srinagar.
People in AJK expressed their disapproval of the event by staging rallies and demonstrations and observing symbolic strikes.
The foreign minister emphasised that the Kashmir dispute was the unfinished agenda of the partition of the Sub-continent, when the rights and aspirations of the Kashmiri people were trampled upon by machinations and intrigue.
He regretted that the Kashmiri people had been denied their inalienable right despite the lapse of more than seven decades.
“Today, I ask the world if a country can be allowed to renege on its solemn commitments to the United Nations, break its own promises and blatantly violate international law just because they want to?”
Taking strong exception to India’s August 5, 2019, move, he said it had opened a new chapter of oppression to accomplish Delhi’s nefarious plan to convert Kashmiris into a dispossessed and disempowered minority in their own land.
“Pakistan rejects these unilateral and illegal steps outright. How can the world be a silent bystander when a large country usurps the rights guaranteed by the Security Council, and instead uses brute force to suppress those rights?” he asked. “India is misusing its position as chair of the G20,” he said.
While paying tribute to the valiant Kashmiri people, he reassured them of Pakistan’s unstinted moral, diplomatic and political support till they achieved their legitimate rights.
Men, women attend rallies
Earlier, hundreds of men, women and schoolchildren paraded through the streets in different parts of the liberated territory to condemn the holding of G20 huddle in Srinagar.
A big rally was held in Muzaffarabad under the aegis of an organisation of post-1989 migrants from occupied Kashmir, with its participants carrying black flags and banners inscribed with slogans against the G20 meeting.
One banner was full of praise for China for its categorical boycott of the Srinagar meeting.
Sixty-year-old Malka Jan, who had migrated to AJK in 1992, said she was yearning for a just settlement of Kashmir issue so that she could return to her native area.
“Instead of participating in meetings under the aegis of oppressor India, world powers should take concrete steps to establish peace and justice in our motherland by granting us our right to self-determination,” she said.
Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2023
India’s G20 tourism meet in held Kashmir begins without China, Saudi Arabia and others
Published May 22, 2023
Delegates attend the G20 tourism meeting in Srinagar on May 22, 2023. — AFP
A G20 tourism meeting began on Monday under tight security in occupied Kashmir as New Delhi seeks to project an image of normalcy in a region wracked for decades by violence.
Both China and Pakistan have condemned holding the event in the occupied valley.
India wants to show that what officials call “normalcy and peace” are returning to the region after New Dehli revoked its limited autonomy and took direct control in 2019, imposing an extended lockdown.
Since then, Kashmiri fighters have largely been crushed — although young men continue to take up arms — and the annual death toll, once in the thousands, has been on a downward trend, with 253 fatalities last year.
Delegates attend the G20 tourism meeting in Srinagar on May 22, 2023. — AFP
A G20 tourism meeting began on Monday under tight security in occupied Kashmir as New Delhi seeks to project an image of normalcy in a region wracked for decades by violence.
Both China and Pakistan have condemned holding the event in the occupied valley.
India wants to show that what officials call “normalcy and peace” are returning to the region after New Dehli revoked its limited autonomy and took direct control in 2019, imposing an extended lockdown.
Since then, Kashmiri fighters have largely been crushed — although young men continue to take up arms — and the annual death toll, once in the thousands, has been on a downward trend, with 253 fatalities last year.
Now India is promoting tourism in the region, with its spectacular mountain scenery and signs at the airport declaring it “paradise on earth”. More than a million Indian citizens visited last year.
But dissent has been criminalised, media freedoms curbed and public protests limited, in what critics say is a drastic curtailment of civil liberties by New Delhi.
Police said last week that security had been beefed up “to avoid any chance of an attack during the G20” meeting, and on Monday soldiers and armoured vehicles were deployed at multiple locations in Srinagar.
But many checkpoints — wrapped in metal mesh and barbed wire — had been dismantled overnight, and some paramilitary police stood hidden behind G20 advertising panels in what appeared to be an effort to minimise the security forces’ visibility.
The People’s Anti-Fascist Front, a new rebel group that emerged in occupied Kashmir after 2019, issued a statement condemning the event and threatening to “deploy suicide bombers”.
“Today, tomorrow or day after. It will come,” it said.
Bilawal bashes India for ‘show of arrogance’
Meanwhile, in an address to the AJK Legislative Assembly today, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari bashed India for its “display of arrogance”.
“India’s continued denial of the rights of the Kashmiri people is a wrongful and illegal act,” he said, stressing that “no amount of diplomatic duplicity or Indian state-perpetrated terror can change this fact”.
He lamented that occupied Kashmir had become an “open prison” today where Muslims were being forced to breathe fear. “This mayhem continues under draconian laws allowing continuity to the Indian occupying forces.”
Bilawal highlighted that New Delhi’s “wretched, systematic and perpetual barbarism not just violates international law but it makes a mockery of the fundamental human rights”.
“How can the world be a bystander when a large country usurps the rights guaranteed by the security council?” the minister asked.
He reiterated that holding the G20 moot in occupied Kashmir was yet another “show of arrogance” on India’s part. “How can India possibly claim that normalcy has returned to occupied Kashmir?
“I wish to remind the Indian leaders that unilateral steps in held Kashmir will neither accord democracy to their occupation nor suppress the true occupation of the Kashmiri people,” he asserted.
“If India wants to be a superpower, then it needs to act like a superpower,” Bilawal said.
He added that his presence in AJK proved the intergenerational support and commitment to the Kashmir cause. “We want good relations with our neighbours, including India, but good relations cannot be achieved through a disputed resolution.”
‘Terrorist-infested places’
The three-day gathering will take place at a sprawling, well-guarded venue on the shores of Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Two Indian government ministers are attending, but several Western nations are sending only locally-based diplomatic staff.
G20 member China, which has its own territorial disputes with India, has refused to attend, and no delegations are expected from Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, questions have been raised over the choice of location.
“Does the Modi government think that tourism can be promoted in closed conference halls next to a scenic lake being patrolled by marine commandos, with surveillance drones overhead?” columnist Bharat Bhushan wrote in the Deccan Herald newspaper.
To visit occupied Kashmir, foreign journalists require special permission, which is not normally forthcoming, though it has been granted for the event.
The permits are valid only for coverage of the G20 meeting itself and limited to the city of Srinagar. Holders are required not to “propagate anti-India narratives”, nor visit “terrorist-infested places without prior permission”.
India holds the G20 presidency for 2023, and has planned more than 100 meetings across the country.
It is locked in a military standoff with China along their mostly undemarcated border in the Ladakh region.
Beijing also claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in full as part of Tibet, and it considers Kashmir a “disputed territory”.
“China firmly opposes holding any form of G20 meeting in disputed territory and will not attend such meetings,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters last week, after Beijing also stayed away from events in both Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.
Last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, said New Delhi was seeking to use the G20 meeting to “portray an international seal of approval” on a situation that “should be decried and condemned”. India rejected the comments.
Residents have chafed under the stepped-up security measures.
Hundreds have been detained in police stations and thousands, including shopkeepers, have received calls from officials warning against any “signs of protest or trouble”, a senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Fascism’s backers
Published May 24, 2023
ON the eve of the G7 summit in Japan last week, there was a sudden outburst of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in Australia. Just hours after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had confirmed that Joe Biden would be visiting the country for the chiefly anti-China Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit in Sydney, the US president announced that, sorry, he wouldn’t be able to make it.
Biden said he would be obliged to rush back from Japan to deal with his country’s debt crisis. Several commentators lamented that his absence would play into China’s narrative that the US is insufficiently engaged with the Indo-Pacific to remain the regional hegemon. Others reassured the public that America remains dedicated to its Asia-Pacific role.
Japan’s prime minister followed Biden’s example, but the fourth component of the Quad decided to carry on. Narendra Modi arrived in Australia late on Monday, and last night was scheduled to address a 20,000-strong crowd — mostly of Indian origin — at the Olympic stadium. There has been resistance, including posters in Sydney — mostly torn down — calling for a citizen’s arrest of the ‘Hindu terrorist Modi’.
The terrorist charge largely harks back to the anti-Muslim pogroms in Ahmedabad in 2002 when Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, decided that the state’s police and firefighters would do nothing to protect the victims. At least 2,000 people were murdered. Modi predictably denied all responsibility for the violence.
Modi’s Western friends turn a blind eye to India’s trajectory.
Back then, the international response was at least superficially more robust than it is today. Modi was effectively banned from travelling to the US or the European Union. However, the West rapidly backtracked as soon as he became prime minister. If anyone had any illusions that he would modify the extremism honed since his youth as a devotee of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), they have steadily been divested of this vain hope.
And if anyone were to wonder why a neofascist pundit might be hailed as the leader of the world’s largest democracy, just look at the new Cold War — which, much like the old one, primarily targets Russia and China. Whatever its motivations may be, the latter appears to be the only power that is keen to end the appalling war in Ukraine. The West is bent upon fuelling the flames. India has refused to disengage from Russia, a source of cut-price oil and gas, but can hardly be categorised any longer as non-aligned. Far more alarming is the West’s consequent insouciance — or cultivated ignorance — about the Modi regime’s proto-fascistic tendencies.
It is not shy of demonstrating them. A report published earlier this year by the North America-based Justice for All organisation, titled The Nazification of India, compares what has been happening with the circumstances in Germany in the 1930s, and many of the parallels are striking — not least that Adolf Hitler struck influential people in Western democracies as an attractive proposition. Until it was too late.
India’s course towards what would have been anathema to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi was set two decades ago when the then chief minister of Gujarat state facilitated a pogrom that claimed at least 2,000 lives in the aftermath of the Godhra tragedy. A recent documentary about the events of 2002 inspired a backlash against the BBC that still carries on. Sadly, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s point of view in the documentary consists of idiotic interventions by Swapan Dasgupta, an old Oxford acquaintance who drifted seamlessly from the left to the far right — a depressing but hardly uncommon phenomenon.
Much more worrying is the Hindutva jihad against the domestic media, supplemented by efforts to rewrite history — as well as other subjects — by trying to erase, inter alia, the Mughal past and Darwinian evolutionary theory. There are numerous other instances of the absurdities being drummed into innocent minds at the behest of the RSS — founded almost a century ago, with its still evident Nazi tendencies honed in the 1930s — and its various offshoots.
With all its hypocritical gibberish about ‘values’, the West sees nothing wrong with India’s trajectory, and its blinkered leaders will trot along to hug Modi when the G20 beckons in September. If India’s drift towards fascism is to be halted, the resistance will have to come from within. The Indian trend is similar to what has been seen elsewhere — not least Pakistan, but also the US, Brazil, Hungary and Israel — of political leaders acquiring a cult following among populations disillusioned by the centrist business-as-usual. That’s understandable but the consequences can be atrocious. One can only hope that the majority of Indians will see the light before it’s too late. The election result in Karnataka was somewhat encouraging, but there’s a long way to go.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2023
SEE
No comments:
Post a Comment