Booker Prize winner and Indian human rights activist, Arunadhati Roy has said the Indian government is exploiting COVID-19 outbreak to ramp up suppression of Muslims, comparing the tactic to one used by the Nazis against German Jews.
“This alleged strategy on the part of the Hindu nationalist government would “dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on,” she said in an interview with German TV, DW, adding that “the situation is approaching genocidal.”
“I think what has happened is COVID-19 has exposed things about India that all of us knew,” said Roy.
“We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger,” she said in an apparent reference to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies that are blamed for rise in hate against minorities including Christians and Muslims.
Roy’s comments follow a raft of New Delhi’s policies targeting Muslims including a clampdown in Kashmir in August last year, and enforcement of controversial Citizenship Amendment Act that bars Muslims from regional countries to seek Indian citizenship.
India has confirmed 13,835 infections of the novel coronavirus, 452 deaths, a Johns Hopkins Institute count says.
During the interview, Roay said “this crisis of hatred against Muslims comes on the back of a massacre in Delhi, which was the result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship law.”
“Under the cover of COVID-19 the government is moving to arrest young students, to fight cases against lawyers, against senior editors, against activists and intellectuals. Some of them have recently been put in jail,” Arunadhati Roy said.
Roy said that the government was exploiting the virus in a tactic reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the holocaust.
“The whole of the organization, the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group — Editor’s note] to which Modi belongs, which is the mothership of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using COVID, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to ghettoize them, to stigmatize them.”
Neighboring Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has condemned New Delhi’s inaction and urged the government to take urgent steps to halt the rampant spread of Islamophobia.
Khan renwed his criticism of the BJP Governmentin a tweet for “targeting” the minority Muslim community, describing it as an attempt to divert backlash from coronavirus lockdown, “which has left thousands hungry”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown in late March to contain the spread of the Covid-19. The lockdown has been extended till May 3 at least.
PM Imran said that the deliberate and violent targeting of Muslims is similar to what Nazis did with Jews in Germany.
The deliberate & violent targeting of Muslims in India by Modi Govt to divert the backlash over its COVID19 policy, which has left thousands stranded & hungry, is akin to what Nazis did to Jews in Gerrmany. Yet more proof of the racist Hindutva Supremacist ideology of Modi Govt.
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) April 19, 2020
Indian authorities have blamed the Muslim Tableeghi Jamaat congregation for the spread of coronavirus cases in the country. Some Indian Muslims have also criticized the large congregation at this sensitive time in the country’s fight against COVID-19
But BJP leaders have generally refused to condemn anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the latest criticism of Muslims is seen by many as continuation of the inflammatory stance that many of the followers of the ruling party regularly use in the political narrative.
There is no official breakdown of Covid-19 cases by religion. But many Muslims feel unfairly blamed for spreading the contagious disease after a cluster emerged at a religious gathering in New Delhi last month.
