The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing increasing international criticism over its discrimina...
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing increasing international criticism over its discriminatory policies and actions. Asked recently if India was losing friends over its decisions, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar said, “Maybe we’re getting to know who our friends really are.”
Other BJP leaders have likewise failed to condemn violent and abusive actions by party supporters. After communal clashes and retaliatory mob attacks by BJP supporters in Delhi in February led to the death of at least 53 people, most of them Muslim, Nitin Gadkari, a senior party leader, did not criticise his party colleagues accused of inciting violence. He said only that “some of the sentences are misunderstood” and instead blamed the media that want to “create more quarrels”.
An official spokesman described allegations that the Modi government’s decisions had inflamed religious violence as “factually inaccurate and misleading”.
Supporters of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist government need to come to terms with the reality that the criticism, including from international friends, is neither misleading nor inaccurate. The government’s divisive policies and acts of violence by its supporters have indeed resulted in severe human rights abuses.
Since the Modi government first took office in 2014, its supporters have targeted Christians, Dalits, Adivasis and members of civil society. But it is Muslims that have been...
