HOW EQUALITY FARES ON INDIA’S GROUND
In 1948, our world’s nations met in Paris, passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and agreed, in the words of UDHR’s second article, that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
If held today, seventy-six years after that historic joint resolution, no world gathering would pass such a declaration. As the year 2024 nears its end, nations feel free to prevent women and men of specific religions or political opinions from speaking freely.
India, sadly, is one of the nations where this is true. Of the great many in India whose freedoms have been affected, let me speak in this column of just two: Nadeem Khan, who was born in 1977 in northern India in the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh or U.P., and Mohammed Zubair, born in 1983 in the southern state of Karnataka. While Nadeem is national secretary of the Association for Protection of Human Rights (APCR), and also a founder of United Against Hate (UAH), Zubair (who enjoys calling himself Zoo Bear) is a founder of the fact-checking website, Altnews.
Made on November 16 this year, a video showing Nadeem at an APCR exhibit in the southern city of Hyderabad brought the police to his door. While the exhibit portrayed hate crimes and hate speeches directed in the last ten years at Muslims and other minorities, the video was posted on X (the former Twitter) by a man with Sinha as his last name.
COURTS HELP AT TIMES
On November 29, the Delhi police searched APCR’s Delhi office. The next day, police officers from Delhi showed up in Bengaluru (the former Bangalore), where Nadeem was at the time, and sought to arrest him for allegedly promoting, through the exhibit, “enmity between groups”. Not shown a warrant, Nadeem refused to go away with the police. A notice was then pasted on the walls of APCR’s Delhi office calling on Nadeem to report for interrogation to Delhi’s police.
Nadeem went instead to the Delhi High Court where, on December 10, that court granted him interim protection. The Delhi High Court also rebuked the Delhi police, which is directly controlled by the centre’s home ministry. “We are in a democratic country,” said the court. “The
harmony of our nation is not so fragile. It is not so fragile” as to be disrupted by “merely one exhibition”.
While Nadeem is evidently free at this point of time, anything could happen to him in the days ahead. For India’s labyrinthine justice system is elastic as well; not every judge is courageous; and those who take offence when persecution is recorded are powerful.
The BBC reports that more than two years after India’s Supreme Court had granted bail and ordered, in 2022, the “immediate release” from prison of Mohammed Zubair, that “leading Indian fact-checker and journalist” is once again back in court.Earlier this month, the Allahabad High Court (which heads U.P.’s judiciary) briefly heard Zubair’s petition as the U.P. police sought his arrest in a fresh proceeding, accusing him of “endangering [the] sovereignty, unity and integrity of India”.
This particular charge appears to be non-bailable, and a conviction could mean seven years or more in jail, plus fine, or even life imprisonment. “I feel I’m being targeted because of the work I do,” Zubair told the BBC. Just 20 minutes into the hearing, the judges recused themselves, and the case will be taken up by another bench.
SOME CAN’T BE CRITICIZED
Described by some as “a thorn in the side for the government because he's single-handedly taking on hate crimes", Zubair’s alleged offence has to do with a post he put out in October on X, underlining the hate speech of a controversial and influential Hindu priest, Yati Narsinghanand, head of the Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad town, adjacent to Delhi. In that post, the priest was apparently shown delivering comments against Prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found offensive.
The 60-year-old priest has often been in the news in recent years for openly calling for violence against Muslims. In 2022, hespent a month in jail. A day after Zubair reported the priest’s latest offensive comments, Muslims protested outside his Ghaziabad temple. The news agency PTI reported that ten people were arrested for allegedly pelting stones during the protest.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dx9gy0k9no
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the feature film The Sabarmati Report, which claims to tell the story of the death in the year 2002 of more than fifty devotees of the Hindu god Ram, who were killed by a fire on the Sabarmati Express train when it stopped close to Gujarat’s Godhra station. The devotees were returning to Gujarat after having taken part in an effort to build a Ram temple on the ground in Ayodhya, U.P., where ten years previously the 16th-century Babri Masjid had been demolished.
In 2002, Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister. Reports of the death by fire of Ram’s devotees were followed by three days of killings across Gujarat that took the lives of about a thousand Muslims.
Although in 2011 a Gujarat court sentenced 31 Godhra-linked Muslims for alleged roles in the 2002 deaths on the Sabarmati Express, those deaths have remained controversial, with some continuing to hold that an accident rather than a conspiracy to kill caused the tragic deaths.
SPONSORING A HATE MOVIE
On the 8th of this month, Modi watched The Sabarmati Report in New Delhi’s Parliament House along with scores of ministers and MPs belonging to the BJP and allied parties who had been invited by him. Emerging from the special screening, Modi shared a moviegoer’s praise of The Sabarmati Report on the social media handle X before adding his own praise.
“It is good,” said Modi, “that this truth is coming out, and that too in a way common people can see it. A fake narrative can persist only for a limited period of time. Eventually, the facts will always come out.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDUAsaA5-8
It appears thatThe Sabarmati Reporthas not attracted large crowds. More pertinent, however, are the following facts. Of India’s 1.4 billion people, 80 percent are Hindus. Muslims, who form 15 percent of the population, are acutely underrepresented in parliament, state legislatures, the judiciary, the police, and the bureaucracy. A feature film that stars well-known actors and shows Muslims burning Hindu devotees to their death is sponsored and boosted at the highest level. And two citizens, Nadeem and Zubair, who wished to record attacks on ordinary Muslims on a website or on the walls of a small hall in one city, are hauled up for fostering disharmony between communities.
