Dear Secretary of State Anthony J Blinken
The nobility of your November 17 statement is almost moving.
“The United States will not waver in its commitment to advocate for freedom of religion or belief for all and in every country. …around the world, we continue to see governments harass, arrest, threaten, jail, and kill individuals simply for seeking to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs. This Administration is committed to supporting every individual’s right to freedom of religion or belief, including by confronting and combating violators and abusers of this human right.
Each year the Secretary of State has the responsibility to identify governments and non-state actors, who, because of their religious freedom violations, merit designation under the International Religious Freedom Act. I am designating Burma, the People’s Republic of China, Eritrea, Iran, the DPRK, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern for having engaged in or tolerated ‘systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom’.”
I was almost moved until I reread the names of the usual suspects, my homeland Pakistan being one of them. Defending Pakistan’s present record of its “religious freedom violations” and the steps Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government is taking to ensure that no violation remains unnoticed and unpunished is not the purpose of my writing. I leave that to Pakistan’s official spokespersons.
The unspeakable monstrosity of the December 3, 2021 lynching of Sri Lankan Priyantha Kumara Diyawadanage in Sialkot, Pakistan, elicited a national outrage, uniting government of Pakistan, opposition and religious parties, clerics and secular entities, liberals and conservatives, and right, centre and left Pakistanis into a collective voice of condemnation. A terrible act that is in repudiation of all Islamic teachings regarding human behaviour is a black stain on the moral, social, and legal fibre of Pakistan. Pakistan’s government and people are on the same page about the mind-numbing killing of Diyawadanage: there is no place in our religion and society for murder of any kind, and in particular, a murder so foul.
Prime Minister Khan tweeted on December 3: “The horrific vigilante attack on factory in Sialkot & the burning alive of Sri Lankan manager is a day of shame for Pakistan. I am overseeing the investigations & let there be no mistake all those responsible will be punished with full severity of the law. Arrests are in progress.”
Prime Minister Khan tweeted on Dec 4: “Spoke to Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa today in UAE to convey our nation's anger & shame to people of Sri Lanka at vigilante killing of Priyantha Diyawadana in Sialkot. I informed him 100+ ppl arrested & assured him they would be prosecuted with full severity of the law.”
Prime Minister Khan tweeted on December 5: On behalf of the nation I want to salute moral courage & bravery of Malik Adnan who tried his utmost to shelter & save Priyantha Diyawadana from the vigilante mob in Sialkot incl endangering his own life by physically trying to shield victim. We will award him Tamgha-i-Shujaat.”
This award, Secretary Blinken, is Pakistan’s second highest award given for acts of courage.
What baffles me is not your inclusion of Pakistan’s name in the list of the bad guys who commit crimes in the name of religion, it is the omission—a very glaring one—of one country that is a national, regional, and international headline in the context of its systematic, systemic, and institutionalized harassment, arresting, threatening, jailing and killing of individuals “simply for seeking to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs” –India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 2014-to date.
No longer is the story of Indian Muslims a litany of stereotypes, cliches and self-flagellating activism for Muslims to have the right to just be. What is happening in India is not merely the rewriting of India’s history eliminating Muslims, it is the imposition of laws— “guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent”, “criminalisation of interfaith marriage,” “the Citizenship Amendment Act”, denying Muslims the right to be Indian citizens, which—as Akhar Patel, author, and Chair of Amnesty International India, in his Price of the Modi Years writes—"have conflated vengeance with justice, and the obsession with Muslims has continued to take legal form in laws attacking freedom of religion and freedom of occupation.” Published in The Wire, India, on November 12, 2021.
Muslims’ pariah existence in their homeland is more than a tugging-at-heart-strings trope in a TED speech. The truth of it is etched in the apathy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s dehumanizing narrative against Muslims. It is in the mainstreaming of a new vocabulary. Jews in Nazi Germany were rats, Tutsis in 1990s Rwanda were cockroaches, and Muslims in BJP’s India are termites who, gnawing “at India’s resources, deny Hindus what is due to them in their own land.”
BBC reported in May 2019: “India's Muslims fear for their future under Narendra Modi.” The headline speaks for itself if you don’t have time to read the rest of the report, dear folks at the US State Department.
The India that once proudly wore its inclusivity and pluralism in the vibrant colours of its flag is now a country in which the Muslim minority must become invisible to protect their homes and places of worship or be prepared to be annihilated like their history in the nation.
In March 2020 an Indian journalist wrote in Aljazeera: “Inter-communal incitement has reached such proportions in India under the BJP that it is no longer possible to dial back.”
A year later, in February 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report highlighting “laws and policies that systematically discriminate against Muslims.” In the BJP-ruled India.
On April 9, 2020, another Human Rights Watch’s report had the blood-chilling caption: “Shoot the Traitors”. Who is the shooter and who is the traitor, would you care to indulge in a little guessing game, Secretary Blinken?
On March 2, 2020, Editor in Chief of the Foreign Policy interviewed Ashutosh Varshney, “a Brown University professor and author of the prize-winning Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India”. Varshney commented on the institutionalized persecution of Muslims in the BJP-ruled India: “The most vulnerable Muslim populations are in BJP-ruled states because the role of the police is critical—and the police comes under the state government. If BJP governments in various states of India push the police against the Muslims, then only the bravest police officers would resist, because the authority structure is very clear.”
In June 2020, in an interview to Open Democracy, the celebrated writer Arundhati Roy said: “Over the last couple of years we have had so many instances of mob lynchings and George Floyd-type killings—the difference in India being that Hindu vigilante mobs do the killing and the police, the legal system and the political climate help them to get away with it.” Secretary Blinken, does this fit into your barometer of “designation under the International Religious Freedom Act”?
World Without Genocide stated in its August 2020 report:” India is the world’s largest democracy. It has 1.3 billion people, of whom 80% are Hindu and 14% are Muslim. After centuries of conflict between these two groups, the Indian government, currently led by Hindu nationalists, is violating the constitutional requirement of secularism by systemically discriminating against and threatening the identity of the 138 million Muslims who live in India today.” Any comment would be superfluous here, Senator Blinken.
On August 4, 2020, Council on Foreign Relations commented: “India’s Muslim communities have faced decades of discrimination, which experts say has worsened under the Hindu nationalist BJP’s government.” The evidence piles up, but there is no hope of justice.
A Scroll essay, on January 24, 2021, was achingly stark in its commentary on India for Muslims: “It is now clear that if you are Muslim in Narendra Modi’s new India you can be arrested for selling shoes, taking part in a protest, talking to or walking with a Hindu girl, driving a cattle truck, cracking a joke—or not. If you are a Muslim in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Constitution means little, and the law can be twisted in any manner to imprison you.” Muslims, pariahs in their homeland.
An essay in Independent, UK, on February 28, 2020, had a very dark, very frightening caption: “While Muslims are being murdered in India, the rest of the world is too slow to condemn.” Secretary Blinken, did you or any other world leader pay attention to the fate of Indian Muslims after this essay and countless others on an identical theme—Muslim genocide in India?
On April 2, 2021, a “retired IPS officer, DGP Kerala, ADG CRPF and BSF” wrote an essay in The Wire captioned “Persecution of Muslims is no longer about divisive politics, the real motive is to dehumanize.” The pain of the former Indian government official at what is happening in his homeland spills in his words: “The only plausible explanation is that such incidents are a part of a sinister design to debase Muslims, humiliate them, injure their dignity and self-respect so much that they accept their existence as ‘vanquished people’, if not sub-humans (the Untermensch of the Nazis)—surviving at the mercy of the majority in a land they are ‘historically’ not entitled to stand on.”
The Guardian reported on June 17, 2020 how even foreign nationals, who happened to be Muslim, are not spared in the Modi-ruled India: “British Muslims held for two months in India claim religious persecution.”
Society and Space journal published an essay “Islamophobia in India” on December 7, 2020. The opening paragraph captures the macabre truth of today’s India, please read it with empathy, Secretary of State Blinken: “Islamophobia in India works to enable violence, subjugate, and intimidate Muslims as a threat to the nation, in several different registers—Indian Muslims as suspect citizens; Kashmiri Muslims as emphatically problematic always already terrorist Muslims; Muslim refugees such as Rohingyas as ‘invasive pests’; and the collective neighboring Muslim nation-state of Pakistan as an existential enemy.”
On January 11, 2021, UK Parliament House of Commons Library published a report: “Persecution of Muslims, Christians and minority groups in India.” Surely, that report reached your table, Secretary Blinken?
September 2, 2021, BBC reported the reality of India under Modi: “Unprovoked attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs have become routine in India, but they seem to evoke little condemnation from the government.” I wonder, like many optimistic humans, if the US would ever think of Muslims in India in terms of “supporting every individual’s right to freedom of religion or belief, including by confronting and combating violators and abusers of this human right.”
The New York Times Magazines published an essay on September 15, 2021 that chronicled the fate of those who live subhuman lives in Assam: “The Hindu right has long identified border regions like Kashmir and Assam as places to raise the specter of a Muslim threat. But while Kashmir has often been used to conjure the danger of secession, Assam represents, in the rhetoric of Hindu extremists, a more insidious menace — that of a steady, cross-border influx of Muslims guaranteed to make Hindus a persecuted minority in their own country.”
On October 4, 2021, an article in Time was succinctly titled: “Is India Headed for an Anti-Muslim Genocide?” An eerie reminder of the truth of the Nazi Germany that elicited attention when it was millions of lives too late.
In October 2021, Aljazeera interviewed “US Commission on International Religious Freedom chair Nadine Maenza on deteriorating religious freedom in India and how Biden administration should address it.”
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its report on India: “Religious freedom conditions in India are taking a drastic turn downward, with national and various state governments tolerating widespread harassment and violence against religious minorities. The BJP-led government enacted the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which provides a fast track to Indian citizenship only for non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan already residing in India. This potentially exposes millions of Muslims to detention, deportation and statelessness when the government completes its planned nationwide National Register of Citizens.”
These commentaries are merely a tiny window into what you call ‘” systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom” Modi’s India is for Muslims.
Have a good reading, Secretary of State Anthony J Blinken.
Best
A bemused Pakistani