Qaisar Mansoor
Under Bharatiya Janata Party’s leadership, India has become one of the most dangerous country for minorities in the world. Human Rights Watch in its annual report has criticized BJP-led government in India for adopting discriminatory policies against minority communities, including Muslims.
Minorities are being persecuted physically, psychologically and economically. US State Department has released its international religious freedom report, which paints a dark picture of the situation for religious minorities in India.
Moreover, Mumbai-based Centre for Study of Society and Secularism and UK-based Minority Rights Group International both have indicated that minority groups in India are increasingly encountering hate crimes, such as lynching, threats, attacks on places of worship and forced conversion. Parsottam Vaghela, Director of Manav Garima Trust said, over the past five years as many as 25 contracted civic workers belonging to Schedule Tribe community have lost their lives working in manholes.
Dalit activist said that the tribal community members are still disconnected from the mainstream society. “They don’t know the laws that protect their rights. Most of them don’t even have identification documents,” he said. “They are easy to exploit and are being exploited”. According to sociologist Sanjay Srivastava, besides being an exercise of power by upper-caste members, sexual violence is also a method used by upper-caste men to show lower-caste men that they were unable to “protect” their women – they use rape as a tool to stage a “contest” among men. Across India, dozens of major incidents were reported, few of them are listed below: –
In Delhi, extremist members of VHP, Bajrang Dal and Karni Sena have made threat calls to death and rape to a Dalit Journalist Meena Kotwal since she posted a video on social media of her burning the Manusmriti on 25 December 2021.
In Utter Pradesh, a 22-year-old Dalit woman was raped several times by an upper caste Hindu in past two months.
In Udaipur, case has been registered against police constable for allegedly molesting and harassing a tribal woman. Accused constable, besides molesting the tribal woman, also assaulted the woman and her father at the police post.
The ongoing probe into Sulli Deals case has revealed that around 30 Twitter handlers were misused of uploading the morphed pictures of Muslim women for their purported auction. It is suspected that at least three to five people were misusing these Twitter handles to put up these morphed and objectionable photos and further exchange comments through alleged “Sulli Deals app”.
In Aurangabad, Maharashtra, owners and employees of an under construction private housing project site has refused to sell a row house bungalow to a lawyer, Mahendra Gandle, belonging to a Dalit family.
The report maintained that the rising attacks on minorities had unmasked the true face of the world’s so-called largest democracy as the fascist Modi was shaping India’s policy according to Hindutva dictates.
Minorities, it said, are living in a perpetual state of fear due to the discriminatory policies of the Modi-led fascist Indian government. The RSS-backed Modi is on a mission to purge India of its minorities, it deplored.
The report said that the world must take notice of the plight of minorities in India and the global community should act to ensure basic human rights to the Indian minorities.
