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Category: religious minorities

  • Amnesty Says India and Egypt Must End ‘Unrelenting Assault on Human Rights’



    As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the chief guest at his nation’s 74th Republic Day celebrations, Amnesty International on Thursday led calls for both right-wing leaders to “address the ongoing human rights and impunity crises” in their respective countries.

    Meeting ahead of events commemorating the adoption of India’s constitution—including a military parade in which members of the Egyptian army marched—Modi and El-Sisi agreed to elevate bilateral ties to a “strategic partnership,” while calling for a “coordinated and concerted” effort to combat “terrorism.”

    Modi—who said Wednesday that he and El-Sisi “are in agreement that terrorism is the biggest threat to humanity”—has, like his Egyptian counterpart, been accused of using anti-terrorism laws to crush critics and silence dissent.

    “The current human rights crises in India and Egypt are characterized by entrenched impunity and misuse of counterterrorism legislation to clamp down on civic space and peaceful dissent.”

    “The current human rights crises in India and Egypt are characterized by entrenched impunity and misuse of counterterrorism legislation to clamp down on civic space and peaceful dissent,” Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa research and advocacy director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

    “Both countries show striking parallels in their attempts to harass and intimidate into silence all actual or perceived government critics and opponents. This unrelenting assault on human rights must end,” he added.

    As Amnesty noted:

    In recent years, authorities in both countries have severely repressed the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly and failed to address entrenched discrimination against religious minorities.

    […]

    Human rights defenders, lawyers, political opponents, peaceful protesters, academics, and students, face arbitrary arrests and detention, unjust prosecutions, and other forms of harassment and intimidation solely for their peaceful exercise of their human rights in both India and Egypt.

    “India and Egypt seem to have taken their long-standing bilateral cooperation to a different level where they share tactics to increasingly repress rights and freedoms,” Amnesty International India board chief Aakar Patel said in a statement. “As the leaders of the two countries take the center stage, celebrations of the adoption of India’s constitution 74 years ago should not overshadow the grim reality that the human rights situations in both countries have been on a downward spiral.”

    Leading an open letter from Egyptian and Indian diaspora members published Tuesday by the Canadian alternative news site rabble.ca, Ehab Lotayef, Samaa Elibyari, and Jooneed Jeeroburkhan noted that India’s constitution “guarantees full equality and rights to all Indians and declares the country a secular, socialist republic.”

    “However today’s India is led by a Hindu ethno-nationalist party committed to converting it into a Hindu nation,” the authors continued, and “the government of India has been called out by domestic and international human rights organizations for unleashing and engendering violence and detentions against Muslim, Dalit, and Christian minorities as well as any human rights defenders.”

    “Meanwhile, January 25 marks the start of the 17 days in 2011 which forced one of the region’s longest-serving and most influential leaders, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, from power,” they continued. “We recall that moment of incredible exhilaration as all Egyptians aspired to more democracy and social justice. Unfortunately, on July 3, 2013, then-Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi staged a coup d’état that toppled President Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt, and returned the country to dictatorial rule.”

    “Since his ascent to power through dubious elections, El-Sisi has governed Egypt with an iron fist,” the trio wrote. “Under his direct command, on August 14, 2013, two encampments of protesters in Rabaa and al-Nahda squares, demanding that President Morsi be reinstated, were dismantled by lethal force and more than 1,000 people were killed.”

    “To date, no one has been held accountable,” the authors added. “Since then, all dissenting voices have been silenced and more than 60,000 political prisoners languish behind bars in abject conditions.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Hindu Nationalists Follow International Playbook, Threaten Participants In U.S. Academic Conference 

    Photo by Studio Art Smile on Pexels.com

    On August 13, 2021, this author and Dr. Abusaleh Shariff of the US India Policy Institute published on this blog a discussion of certain anti-Muslim actions taken by the national government of India led by the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which preaches a doctrine of Hindu Nationalism or “Hindutva.” (Shariff and O’Neal, “A Crisis Brews in India, and Not the One You Think”) The crisis we had in mind is having effects closer to home. In the past week, opponents of Hindutva who were scheduled to speak at an academic conference in the United States were subjected to threats and personal attacks in an orchestrated attempt at intimidation. 

    The online conference, entitled “Dismantling Global Hindutva,” was sponsored by more than 53 universities.  According to The Guardian, more than one million emails were sent to universities calling for them to withdraw support for the conference and fire the participants, and the servers at Drew University in New Jersey crashed because of the volume of email traffic. Several speakers and organizers received threats against their families, such as on-line postings of photographs of a speaker’s children with captioned death threats. Also enlisted against the conference was the Hinduvta web site OpIndia, which has published more restrained but highly misleading articles painting the conference as anti-Hindu. OpIndia has frequently been criticized for publishing falsehoods in support of the Hindu Nationalist agenda and often runs pieces that are extravagantly anti-Muslim. For example, in the spring of 2020, when a Hindu teenager drowned in a river in the Gopalganj District, OpIndia ran a series of articles claiming the boy was murdered by Muslims in a ritual killing to consecrate a new mosque, a claim the investigating police repudiated as entirely false.  

    The conference went forward, although some speakers withdrew under the pressure. Nevertheless, this incident is of particular interest because the tactics employed here by the Hindu Nationalists so closely mirror tactics which The Advocates has encountered from opponents of human rights all over the world: partisan web sites that make false or grossly misleading claims, the painting of opponents as religious bigots, orchestrated pressure campaigns seeking to malign and professionally sabotage opponents, and, at worst, threats and in some cases actual violence against those opponents. The Advocates will soon be publishing a report on the use of such tactics to support a backlash against women’s and LGBTQ rights in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These tactics appear globally, wherever there is an intolerant backlash against human rights. 

     The ugly mobilization against an American academic conference should be firmly denounced, by both the Indian and American national governments. This is far from the first time that Hindutva has appeared on this side of the world. Hindu Nationalists are closely networked with ultra-right movements in the United States, as illustrated by the fact that both Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich have been honorary co-chairs of the Republican-Hindu Coalition, which was launched in 2015 to support both Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. Wealthy Indian-American donors in the diaspora are major funders of Modi’s party, which describes India as a Hindu nation despite the guarantee of religious equality contained in the Indian Constitution.  

    Exploitation of religious differences to foment hatred and achieve political objectives has been always with us, but it has been made much easier in the internet era. It must be overcome. It is not anti-Hindu to support the religious equality promised by India’s Constitution and to advocate for the human rights of all people in India, regardless of their creed.  

    By James O’Neal, Board Chair, Advocates for Human Rights 

     
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    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.