ISLAMABAD: With the US recently snubbing India on the issue of gross violations of minorities’ rights, particularly those of Muslims, which flared up in the aftermath of ruling right-wing Hindu nationalist party leaders’ blasphemous remarks about Prophet Mohammad (SAW) earlier in June, the Indian media has begun to hold up a mirror to the US on its own human rights violations against people of color.
There is a long list of US apartheid against African-Americans and their killings, and hate crimes against Muslims, Chinese, and Russians, but this has gotten worse in recent years, and in this case, the Indian media is correct to hold up a mirror to Washington and stop it from lecturing other countries on the issue of human rights.
The Indian media went on a tirade over the US human rights transgressions in April of this year soon after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials.”
Blinken’s words come just days after Democratic Party leader and US Representative for Minnesota Ilhan Omar questioned Washington’s reluctance to criticize the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Narendra Modi on human rights.
Since the BJP took power in 2014 with Modi as its prime minister, discrimination against minorities has escalated. The ultra-Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which the BJP is a political wing, launched the Ghar Wapasi (Return to Home) campaign, which used force and money to convert thousands of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism.
According to the Pew Research Center, Muslims are India’s largest minority, with over 213 million people. They are still persecuted by state and non-state actors, with the BJP government’s apparent backing.
However, the US has also a much longer history of apartheid against people of color, particularly African-Americans, who have been mercilessly murdered by white police officers.
Though the US is one of the countries with the highest crime statistics, as the Statista organization has documented over 15.53 million crimes in the year 2020, the actual number is quite high, with people carrying guns everywhere to protect themselves from robberies on the streets.
Although criminals have no nationality, they are detrimental to all societies, but police brutality is rampant in the US, with white police officers frequently targeting black people on suspicion of involvement in crimes.
The comparison of which of the two countries is the worst offender of human rights is extremely tough, but facts of recent US apartheid against people of color and Indian shrinking the space for Muslims to breathe in the country may be elaborated to know which of them is the worse.
– Black Lives Matters
Though the US has a long history of mistreatment of African-Americans, the Black Lives Matter campaign, which began after the brutal killing of black American Goerge Floyad by white police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, forced human rights organizations around the world to highlight the country’s high level of racism.
Floyd was shackled when Chauvin put his knee on his neck, and Kueng held down his torso as Thao stood close and kept a crowd of enraged bystanders at bay. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd said repeatedly before his gruesome murder.
It was utterly inhumane.
The latest in a string of African-Americans killings occurred on the 16th of last month, when 18-year-old Payton Gendron, a white radical and racist, stormed a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, with the intention of killing as many Black people as he could. He fired approximately 60 indiscriminate rounds and killed 10 black people.
During his interrogation, he said he was introduced to neo-Nazi websites and a livestream of the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque killings on the anonymous online message board 4Chan.
While on April 4 this year in Michigan, a white police officer stopped a car and pulled over its driver — Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old Black man — who walked out in front of his home, according to CCTV footage of the incident.
The confused Lyoya, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began running away after being questioned, and after a brief chase, the unnamed white policeman seized him and pulled out his gun. He threw him to the ground and shot him in the head from the back.
On April 11, 2021, police officer Kimberly Potter fatally shot Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop and attempted arrest for an outstanding warrant in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. He was in the car with his girlfriend at the time. After a brief scuffle with cops, Potter shot Wright in the chest once from close range.
On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American woman, was fatally shot in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky state, after at least seven police officers forced entry as part of an investigation into drug dealing operations. White police officers shot Tailor eight times.
The killing of adolescent Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, and many others are examples of white police officers’ inhumane treatment of people of color.
The same America that preaches about human rights, but between 2013 and 2021, US police killed over 9000 people. The count does not extend beyond May 2021.
If comparable instances occur outside of the US, the White House declares a violation of human rights and press justice. This seems that the human rights issue is reserved for other countries, not the US.
– Anti-Asian Racism
There are 23 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US, and according to a new poll, one out of every three has been afraid of being attacked since the pandemic began.
According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, hate crimes overall climbed by 2% in 2021, but hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders increased by 146%.
On March 16, 2021, a shooting spree occurred at three spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area of Atlanta, demonstrating how Islamophobia, Russophobia, and anti-China sentiments have become entrenched in society. Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old man who was purportedly motivated by race and gender, murdered eight people, six of them were Asian women.
– US War Crimes
Although US President Joe Biden has blamed Russia for war crimes and genocide in Ukraine, the country and its leadership, claiming to be champions of world peace, give lectures to other nations while closing their eyes to its false claims of Iraq having a weapon of mass distraction and destroying the country, which is still reeling to regain normalcy after even 20 years.
It also ignores a long list of innocent people killed in Afghanistan, supported al-Qaeda in Libya, allegedly helped ISIS/Daesh in Syria, and encouraged opposition groups for regime change in countries where the leadership is currently bowing to US interests.
The US has committed numerous war crimes in the Middle East and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Despite the fact that the US forces were humiliated in August of last year when Taliban fighters forced American troops to leave the Bagram Airfield in the dark by shutting down power for several hours in the surrounding provinces, including Kabul, and without informing then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
Later, the embarrassment of American troops was exacerbated by the hasty pullout of US forces and nationals ahead of schedule after the Taliban captured Kabul, which also forced Ghani and his cabinet members to flee the country.
The US has a long litany of war crimes in Afghanistan, as around 500 innocent civilians were killed in the first five days of the attack against the first Taliban regime on October 7, 2001.
On October 13, the Pentagon confirmed that American forces inadvertently dropped a 907-kilo bomb on a residential area near Kabul airport after missing a military chopper they were targeting. The Pentagon stated that “a US Navy F/A-18 Hornet missed its intended target and inadvertently dropped a 2,000-pound GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) in a residential area near Kabul airport, Afghanistan.”
On August 31 last year, just one day before withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan, the US army fired a bomb from a drone on an NGO worker in Kabul, killing him and nine other family members, including seven children.
Similarly, the US launched an attack on Iraq in 2003, claiming that Saddam Hussein, the country’s then-president, possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Despite the fact that the US administration eventually apologized for destroying the country on false claims, no court has counted civilian deaths caused by American soldiers, resulting in infrastructural damage that is still bleeding after Washington divided the country along ethnic lines.
Every man detained at the Iraqi jail of Abu Ghraib and the US detention camp of Guantanamo Bay speaks volumes about US war crimes.
– Indian Police Brutality
Followers of the government’s Hindutva ideology – everybody in India must follow the Hindu way of life – were seen in a video circulating on social media since June 12, in which the police were shown severely beating Muslim young men who participated in a rally against BJP leaders’ blasphemous comments about Prophet Mohammad (SAW).
The latest surge of anti-Muslim animosity began when BJP spokeswoman Nupur Sharma outraged Muslims around the world by uttering the blasphemy in a TV debate. Naveen Kumar Jindal, another BJP politician, eventually came out in favor of her.
Despite the fact that most Muslim countries, particularly those in the Middle East, summoned Indian envoys to officially register their strong protest and many groups called for boycotts of Indian goods, the BJP government later announced Sharma’s suspension and Jindal’s dismissal from the party.
On June 10, Muslims in India staged rallies to protest BJP leaders’ anti-Islam remarks, prompting authorities to launch a manhunt for those who took part in the protests.
In addition to arresting over 300 Muslims for attending a rally in Uttar Pradesh, the administration, with the help of local police, demolished the homes of some of the rally’s participants, which was shown live on most television networks, fanning anti-Muslim sentiment in the country.
– Hijab Ban In Educational Institutions
In January 2022, a government college in the Udupi district of Karnataka state banned girls from entering their classrooms, bringing the issue of hijab prohibition for Muslim students to the fore. As a result, the issue extended to other educational institutions in the state.
In a video extensively shared on social media in February this year, Muskan Khan, a college girl wearing a headscarf, was harassed by a mob of men wearing saffron shawls, a color recognized as a Hindu emblem but also connected with the ruling rightwing BJP.
Later, the court upheld the state’s ban on hijab at educational institutions, denying a large number of students, including Muskaan, attendance to their annual exams.
A meeting at Haridwar, Uttarakhand state, in 2021 urged the use of guns for the genocide of Muslims in India. No charges were brought against the speakers, including a journalist, for committing a heinous hate crime and instigating people to commit mass killings.
The 2020 Delhi riots were prompted by protests over a citizenship reform that many critics saw as anti-Muslim and part of Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda. More than 53 people were killed and hundreds were injured, mostly Muslims.
Other issues include Hindu extremists’ demand that Adhan, or prayer calls, be prohibited from mosques in Goa state, the lynching of over a hundred Muslims in the name of Gao Raksha, or cow protection, and the brutal murders of several prayer leaders by saffron-clad men wielding daggers and swords if they refuse to say Jay Raam.
