Remember Rwanda, Act on India
A Call to Action by Hindus for Human Rights, USA
Hindu nationalist leaders have issued an open call for the extermination of all Muslims in India. In ignoring their ominous call to arms, President Biden would be making the same mistake as President Clinton did on Rwanda.
President Bill Clinton has more than once expressed deep regret for failing to halt the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, saying that he didn’t “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” (Foreign Policy)
However, according to the Foreign Policy report, U.S. officials in Rwanda had been warned more than a year before the slaughter began that Hutu extremists were contemplating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis.
Twenty-eight years later, President Biden, who campaigned on the promise of defending human rights across the world, is making the same mistake by ignoring the spiraling anti-minority violence by Prime Minister Modi’s party and his Hindu nationalist supporters.
In a recently concluded conclave of Hindu religious leaders in the holy city of Haridwar, speaker after speaker is heard calling for all Hindus to pick up weapons and ‘cleanse’ Muslims from India.
The conclave was led by an extremist Hindu priest Yati Narasinghanand, who has been making similar calls on social media for some time now, attracting tens of millions of viewers to his Facebook posts. Numerous complaints about his hate-filled posts have been ignored by Facebook, presumably in its eagerness to please Modi and to protect its largest user base.
The Haridwar conclave also included leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Hindu Mahasabha, the precursor to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which had first mooted the idea that all Muslims and Christians are ‘outsiders’ and could only remain in India as second-class citizens.
Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi, was associated both with the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, and he is now being openly deified by Hindu nationalists under Modi’s rule.
Unlike President Clinton, however, Biden can’t plead ignorance of what is happening in India. His own State Department as well as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) have documented the violence in detail in their annual reports. In fact, USCIRF has called on the administration to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for two years in row – a recommendation recently rejected by Secretary Blinken.
It would seem that the Biden administration is willing to completely ignore the Modi government’s violent march towards a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu state) and is more interested in their Quad partnership with him. We strongly feel that America will come to regret this misplaced priority and hope that the administration will change course before it is too late.
Biden’s Democracy Summit will turn out to be a vacuous exercise unless the dire situation for minorities In India is part of the agenda.
For those who may be too young to remember, there are many parallels between the environment of polarization that led to the Rwanda genocide of minority Tutsis in 1998, and the situation of religious minorities in India under the BJP: A majority government building on the “divide and rule” tools put in place by colonial powers, e.g. ethnic ID cards in the case of Rwanda and sedition laws in India; constructing a rhetoric of “Us vs Them” through domination of the media; deliberately conflating minority citizens with aggression from across the borders (cries of “Go back to Pakistan”); exploiting historical events to create insecurity among the majority population and inciting the feeling that they are the ones facing an existential threat from the minorities (“Hindu khatre mein hain” – Hindus are in danger), and so forth.
The danger of a genocide in India is real. We can not ignore it and pretend that Hindu nationalists are not capable of doing what the Hutus did in Rwanda.
You can help stop the march of madness in India by acting today:
Tell Your Congressional Representatives to Speak Out Against Calls for Genocide in India
I am writing as your constituent and as a supporter of Hindus for Human Rights, a 501(c) US-based nonprofit advocating for pluralism, civil rights, and human rights in South Asia and North America.
I am calling on you to publicly condemn increasing calls for genocide against the Muslim minority population in India, a close strategic partner of the United States.
Just a few days ago (Dec. 17-19, 2021), Hindu extremist leaders organized a Dharma Sansad ("Religious Parliament") in the city of Haridwar. Notably, politicians from India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, were in attendance. Videos and reporting from the event revealed that many of the Hindu leaders present issued explicit calls for genocide against Muslims:
"Like in Myanmar, the police here, the politicians here, the army and every Hindu must pick up weapons and we will have to conduct this cleanliness drive (safai abhiyan). There is no solution apart from this.” - Swami Prabodhananda Giri, president, Hindu Raksha Sena
“Nothing is possible without weapons. If you want to eliminate their population then kill them. Be ready to kill and be ready to go to jail. Even if 100 of us are ready to kill 200,000 of them (Muslims), then we will be victorious, and go to jail." - Sadhvi Annapurna, General Secretary, Hindu Mahasabha; Mahamandaleshwar, Niranjani Akhara
"If the governments do not listen to our demand (for a Hindu state), we will wage a war far scarier than the 1857 revolt." - Swami Anand Swaroop Maharaj
We need our elected officials to take action.
Please issue a Tweet and/or statement condemning these calls for genocide in India: "I am deeply disturbed by calls for genocide against Indian Muslims made at the Dharma Sansad in Haridwar from Dec. 17-19. As a close strategic partner of the U.S. and as a secular democracy, such calls for violence are unacceptable. The Indian government must take action."
Call on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to condemn the genocidal and anti-Muslim statements made in the presence of officials from India's ruling party.
Call on U.S. Senate members to Advance the Combating International Islamophobia Act by establishing a special envoy office at the U.S. State Department to monitor and combat international Islamophobia.
In 1998, four years after the Rwandan genocide, U.S. President Bill Clinton declared his greatest regret, that "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices ... who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
We can't repeat the mistakes of the past. Surveys show that the majority of Indian-Americans believe that Hindu nationalism poses a serious threat to India. We hope you will speak out before it is too late.
