By N. P. Upadhyaya (Aryal)
Kathmandu: Needless to say, the credit must go to Ilhan Omar, Democratic representative leader of the US who raised the untold suffering and the plight of the Muslims residing in the Indian Occupied Kashmir in such a loud manner when she took the guts to visit the capital of Azad Kashmir in the third week of February this year during her what could be taken as “maiden” visit to Pakistan.
Her nerve must be admired that she took to task the declared Islamophobic Indian regime while being in South Asia and that too from the territory of India’s immediate rival Pakistan.
Omar’s visit to Muzaffarabad and her due meeting with the President of the AZK, barrister Chaudhry came as an unexpected “event” for the entire Indian establishment which commented on the sudden visit of the US democratic leader as an “unwarranted” one.
Despite the Indian anger, Omar accomplished her “task” in a befitting manner that was certainly long overdue. In a way, Omar’s visit to Pakistan this time must have opened the so far “closed” eyes of the powerful Western countries which is why leaders, representatives, and parliamentarians across the globe have begun to talk about the Islamophobic Indian establishment.
At least the Western media took note of India’s Islamophobic credentials that it has earned after the advent of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister in India. In Nepal, patriot Nepalese take PM Modi as a South Asian menace of the Himalayan dimension.
Omar while in Muzaffarabad, as stated earlier, held “meaningful” talks with the AJK President Barrister Sultan Mahmood Chaudhry and as per the Tribune Pakistan (April 21), she is learnt to have addressed a press conference also wherein she is believed to have said that the US Foreign Affairs Committee had previously held hearings to investigate the reports of human rights violations in IIOJK and discussed the Modi administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its effects”.
Ms Omar said, “I don’t believe that it is being talked about to the extent it needs to be in Congress and within the administration,” adding that she hoped her visit to AJK motivates more conversations.
“The condemnations and concerns of those who fight for human rights and the question of Kashmir will be included in future hearings within the USA,” Omar assured.
This does mean that the US democratic leader has in advance signaled the US foreign affairs committee to remain prepared to answer her volley of questions on the Kashmiri people’s plight in India occupied Kashmir. The Kashmir issue now is on the US table for discussions, sooner than later.
Omar had voiced her staid concerns in the US Foreign Relations Committee when PM Modi changed the Status of Kashmir on August 5, 2019. Let’s presume that Omar’s February visit to Pakistan must have annoyed India to the hilt which is what Pakistan desired.
Ms Omar is a Somali immigrant and perhaps the lone lady in the US who targets Islamophobic men and the nations like India.
Writes political analyst Asad Ali for the Pakistan Observer (April 29) that the “visit of the US lawmaker to Pakistan and AJK is likely to pave the way for more cooperation between two countries and help Islamabad to make Biden Administration realize how sensitive IIOJK issue is and how India is making the life of Kashmiri people miserable by using unconstitutional and illegitimate tactics”.
Ali adds the visit may help the US in understanding Pakistan’s position regarding the human rights violations in IIOJK by India.
Media outlets claim that IOK is an “open-air jail” for the Kashmiri Muslims which speaks so many things unspoken.
Around the same time when Omar was in Pakistan meeting new executive head PM Shehbaz Sharif and the ousted PM Imran Khan, the world recognized and acclaimed hotheaded critic, author and an Indian Human Rights activist to the core, Ms Arundhati Roy blasted her own Indian government in a far-flung country, the US, wherein she talked on countless political aberrations observed in the functioning of the Indian government after the inaugural of the Modi government in India.
Ms Roy while addressing an academic gathering in the “Sissy Farenthold lecture gathering at the Lyndon B. Johnson auditorium, in the US (April 22) said that to mark the Ram Navami celebrations, violent Hindu mobs armed with swords and staff rampaged through as many as eleven cities.
She further remarked, “led by Swamis and BJP activists, they entered Muslim settlements, dog-whistling outside Mosques, chanting obscene insults, openly calling for the rape and impregnation of Muslim women and the Nar Samhar (genocide) of Muslim men”.
Roy is a noted Indian author best known for her novel “The God of Small Things”, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.
Her recent speech in the US has been noted in various countries more in the European nations which take Indian Prime Minister Modi as their “ideal” person which Modi could never be, take it for granted.
After Omar’s outbursts, some British lawmakers instantly took up the plight of the minority Muslims across India and more so of the Kashmir Muslims who are living under India’s continued oppression.
Of the several MPs from the UK, one Labor Party parliamentarian Ms Naz Shah was the first one to have dazed Boris Johnson’s government when she took to task her own PM and strongly urged PM Johnson to raise the issue of Islamophobia with PM Modi.
Ms Shah, a gutsy lady in her own right, Tweeted, “I ask@BorisJohnson when the alarm bells of genocide, the daily lynching of Muslims, calls for rape of Muslim women & the systematic nature Islamophobia in India is being normalized, as someone who claims to be a champion of human rights, will you raise these issues with PM Modi?”
Unfortunately, Johnson who was on an “India appeasing mission” cleverly skipped raising the issue of India’s increasing Islamophobia for some “understandable” political reasons. This skipping in effect exposed Johnson’s real democratic credentials.
Britain is falsely taken as the “mother of democracy”. But is it? The debate must continue amongst academic circles across the globe.
The British East India Company which ruled mercilessly now independent India for several decades perhaps prefers to be ruled by its own former colony for some “strategic political reasons”.
The British PM for his somewhat erratic acts was taken to task by some hard-hitting parliamentarians and some critical media in Britain like the Guardian.
PM Johnson thus gave a clean chit to the erratic Indian establishment whose “democratic backsliding”, as per the UK’s Guardian Daily is taking its toll, the minority Muslims and the Dalits know this better. Sensible people in Nepal say that India under PM Modi is already a theocratic state.
The recent sad happenings in India wherein the minority Muslims are being brutally targeted, vandalized, Muslim houses and Mosques bulldozed by some “fanatically deviated Hindus” could all be summed up in a sentence, quoting the Sikh writer of eminence Khuswant Singh who in his widely read book “The End of India” says, we repeat it once again, in his own words, (sic), “Unless a miracle saves us, the country will break up”.
He says further that, “it will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri”.
Well after Ms Naz hitting hard her own UK government, it was the turn of the argumentative British MP, Zarah Sultana who had abundantly criticized (April 26) PM Johnson for having visited the JCB factory, as stated in our previous article, the day after reports its vehicles were used to destroy ruthlessly the Muslim homes and businesses houses in Delhi. It was a chaotic scene which was shown in the Idiot Box the world over at a time.
Opposition MPs raised concerns over human rights in India after the PM said on a visit last week that the UK hopes to have a trade deal worked out with India by October. Sultana said B. Johnson’s visiting the factory was a blunder.
As if it were not enough, enters yet another British MP Nadia Whittome who said in her recent Tweet, “the BJP (Modi’s governing party) is using JCB diggers to bulldoze the homes and shops of Muslims. Johnson posed with JCB diggers on his recent visit to India, but his minister wouldn’t say whether he even raised these demolitions with Modi”.
MP Whittome asked, reports the WIRE (April 29) “whether Johnson questioned Indian PM Modi about the targeting of Muslim properties, and if not, why not. “Local governments in several other Indian states have also carried out similar demolitions,” she said. “So I ask again, did the PM raise this with Modi? If not, why not? And does the minister accept that the PM’s visit to India has helped to legitimize the actions of Modi’s far-right government?”
PM Boris is already back and thus Nadia’s questions have by now evaporated in the ethereal medium. MP Nadia is a Labor Member of Parliament for Nottingham East and is taken as UK’s youngest MP.
Looking at the increase in the communal and religious violence in India, lady journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani Tweeted (April 29), “Time for secular forces to stand up against the communal hatred”.
While this story is being written, attention has been drawn to a Tweet posted by Swedish Professor Ashok Swain (April 30), “India’s police are not protecting Muslims in riots! India’s police leading the riots with Hindu Right-wing against the Muslims”.
The video clip that this professor of Indian origin has posted should open the eyes of those who for multiple political and strategic reasons express their happiness in having excellent ties with India under PM Modi. The picture tells everything untold about PM Modi as to how he is up against the “annihilation” of the minority Indian Muslims and the Dalits.
The champions of Human Rights across the world perhaps conclude that “Good or Bad…Our Modi is perfect for strategic-political reasons”. The concerns expressed by several UK parliamentarians like Naz, Sultana, Nadia Whittome, Khalid Mahmood and many others appear to have jolted the office of the European Union’s Human Rights officials.
Without wasting time, one top EU human rights official held official meetings with National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and also with the Minister of Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi who had, to recall, rebuked the concerns expressed by some UK MPs over the Jahangirpuri Bulldozer calculated event by stating that “every citizen of India, including the minorities, is safe and secure”.
Minister Naqvi had dismissed the MPs’ allegations that Muslims in India are being harassed, killed, lynched, their houses destroyed and shops bulldozed.
However, with the sudden arrival of one top European Union HR Official in Delhi who raised several concerns during official meetings with the Muslim Minister Naqvi, let’s presume that the Minister in charge of the minority must have been taken aback.
The EU Human Rights official is learnt to have talked of increasing communal violence in India and, interestingly, the EU official who was concurrently the European Union Special Representative of Human Rights “Eamon Gilmore” and had come to Delhi as one of the guest speakers at India’s foreign ministry sponsored Raisina Dialogue held in the recent days in Delhi.
More than interesting is that the Eamon meeting with Minister Naqvi that the EU representative did raise the issue of the situation in Jammu & Kashmir, and the condition of religious minorities.
To recall, Gilmore in February was in Pakistan wherein he held a meeting with the then foreign minister Qureshi who urged the visiting EU dignitary to take note of grave human rights violations in India occupied Jammu and Kashmir at the hands of Indian security forces.
Asad Ali writes in the Pakistan Observer (April 29) that the “visit of US lawmaker to Pakistan and AJK is likely to pave the way for more cooperation between two countries and help Islamabad to make Biden Administration realize how sensitive IIOJK issue is and how India is making the life of Kashmiri people miserable by using unconstitutional and illegitimate tactics.
Asad adds that the visit may help the US in understanding Pakistan’s position regarding the human rights violations in IIOJK by India.
Meanwhile, Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, secretary-general of Washington based World Kashmir Awareness Forum, has said (April 28) that the US has a moral obligation, as a world power, to impel India to bring an immediate end to its systematic atrocities in IoK and across the South Asian countries.
A May 2 Tweet posted by an unknown person has a photograph wherein Hindu supremacists place a saffron flag on a mosque in Rajasthan, India a day before Eid. How the Muslim minority react to this (mis)adventure will have to be watched. Perhaps late Khuswant Singh was correct in his statement on India for multiple reasons. That’s all./ peoplesreview
