A grim specter exists for genocide of Muslims in Kashmir and Assam, Dr. Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch told an audience on the Capitol Hill while finding parallels between the BJP Government in New Deli and Nazis during WWII.
Stanton, a top American expert and creator of Ten Stages of Genocide, said in an ominous warning Muslims in the two places – are just one step away from extermination.
“Preparation for a genocide is definitely under way in India,” Stanton noted, according to Indian American Muslim Council, which was among three organizations that received a briefing from exports on the Hill.
Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory – has been in virtual lock down since August 5 revocation of its autonomous status while enactment of Citizenship Act has alienated Muslims in Assam.
According to Dr. Stanton, persecution of Muslims in Assam and Kashmir “is the stage just before genocide.”
“The next stage is extermination — that’s what we call a genocide,” , Dr. Stanton told an audience of Congressional and Government officials.
The Congressional briefing, “Ground Reports on Kashmir & NRC”, where Dr. Stanton spoke, was organized by three U.S.-based civil society organizations, namely, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Emgage Action, and Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR).
Assam is witnessing the “construction of a pretext for expulsion (of Muslims),” Dr. Stanton said the perilous situations in both Kashmir and Assam was a “classic case” and followed the pattern of the “Ten Stages of Genocide”.
The first stage was “classification” of “us versus them”. The second stage, “symbolization”, named the victims as “foreigner”. The third stage, “discrimination”, “classified [the victims] out of the group accepted for citizenship” so that they had no “human rights or civil rights of citizens” and were “discriminated against legally”.
The Indian American Muslim Council reported Dr. Stanton’s explanation in a news release:
The fourth stage, dehumanization, “is when the genocidal spiral begins to go downwards. You classify the others as somehow worse than you. You give them names like ‘terrorists’, or even names of animals, start referring to them as a cancer in the body politic, you talk about them as a disease that must be somehow dealt with.”
The fifth stage was creating an “organization” to commit the genocide: the role played by the “Indian army in Kashmir and the census takers in Assam”.
The sixth stage was “polarization”, which is achieved by propaganda. The seventh stage was “preparation”, and the eighth “persecution”, where Assam and Kashmir currently were.
After the ninth stage of “extermination”, comes the tenth stage of “denial”, Dr. Stanton said.
“[Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s regime has all the hallmarks of an incipient Nazi regime,” he said.
“Nationalism taken to its extreme is fascism and nazism.”
