Weaponising Human Rights

Immediately after the 2+2 dialogue, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US was monitoring concerning developments in India, “including a rise in human rights abuses” by State officials. The State Department also released its annual country reports on human rights practices for 2021. The country report on India flagged what it called the ‘credible reports of a range of human rights violations’. Notorious Congresswoman Ilhan Omar continued her blatant Islamist tirade while alleging, “How much does the Modi administration have to criminalise the act of being Muslim in India for us to say something?”. The social media handles from Pakistan and Afghanistan did not waste time trending the issue of #MuslimGenocide in Bharat. All this happened when Islamists in Bharat went on a rampage to attack the auspicious occasion of Varsha Pratipada (Hindu New Year) and Ram Navami (the birth anniversary of Lord Rama) celebrations. Is it a coincidence that the communal rioting, criminal acts and process of radicalisation by Islamists get a cover in the name of human rights by the Western countries and media?

Let us start with what has happened in Bharat. On April 2, 2002, communal violence broke out in the Hatwara Bazaar area of Karauli in Rajasthan. Islamist miscreants pelted stones at a Hindu bike rally setting more than a dozen shops and three bikes on fire. Forty-three people, including four police personnel, were injured in the mob attack while the procession passed through a Muslim-dominated area. If a letter released in the media is to be believed, a radical, violent Islamist organisation, the Popular Front of India (PFI), had warned the administration about the attack. As per the investigation, one of the Congress leaders, Matloob Ahmad, has been identified as the key conspirator, and it was a pre-planned attack to disturb the communal harmony. The ruling Congress Government did not act strictly against the rioters.

The same pattern continued during the Ram Navami celebrations on April 10, 2022. In Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Karnataka etc., a well-calculated plot was hatched to attack the processions, especially if passing through the Muslim dominated areas or in front of the mosque. The difference is that wherever the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power, the State Governments immediately swung into action against the miscreants.

While analysing the trend of communal violence in the 1920s, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar also pointed out this rioting pattern. Blatant criminal acts have been used to assert the Islamic supremacist ideas rooted in iconoclasm. At the same time, the narrative of ‘Muslim Victimhood’ has been systematically built in the name of minority rights. Unfortunately, the Western media and scholars never understand the historical context of communal riots in Bharat that led to the blood-spattered Partition of the ancient land.

As a muscle-flexing trick during the Russia-Ukraine war, the United States and its allies are using human rights as a convenient tool to pressurise countries. Even though the human rights record of the United States within and outside is abysmal, it tends to impose the self-interest based, selective ideas of human rights and democracy on others. Opportunely, the changed Bharat has given back to the fake narration on human rights in words which the diminishing superpower would understand.

The weaponisation of human rights to shield criminals and terrorists, on the one hand, and simultaneously pursuing larger foreign policy goals through the same is the biggest threat to democracies. Hence, this dangerous trend should be called out and exposed repeatedly.