WASHINGTON – India under Prime Minister Narandera Modi is “sliding toward acollapse of humanity and ethics”, says an Indian journalist in her op-edpublished in a leading US newspaper on Tuesday, citing the horrendous rapeand murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl in Kashmir that involved supportersof theruling party.
Writing for the The New York Times, the New Delhi-based journalist MitaliSaran reflected on the country’s state of affairs, saying that India’s“traditional secularism” is now in battle with Hindu chauvinist politicsthat Prime Minister Modi represents.
“Intimidation of religious minorities and violence against them hasincreased since PrimeMinister Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014,”said the op-ed, noting that the charge sheet and other reports stronglysuggested that it was not a random crime but a deliberate act that is inline with the ugly sectarian politics across India.
The op-ed was published a day after the NYT Editorial Board severelycriticized Prime Minister Modi for his silence over the murder of AsifaBano, a Kashmiri innocent girl who was killed in January in a Hindu templeby men who supports BJP.
To make it worst, state lawmakers from the BJP party, which is part of theruling coalition in Jammu and Kashmir took part in a rally in support of aman charged in the gruesome murder and rapeof the little girl.
Detailing the details of the despicable act of barbarity, the Indianjournalist wrote that one of the accused, who is a police officer, hadasked his co-accused not to kill the girl so that he could rape her oncemore.
Exposing the growing hatred towards the Muslim minority in the area,thousands of people, including women, joined a protest rally organized by anewly formed group called Hindu Ekta Manch, or Hindu Unity Forum, insupport of the accused. “So what if a girl died?… Many girls die everyday,” theop-ed wrote quoting one of the two BJP state ministers who took part in therally.
There have been protests in some cities as people also took to the socialmedia to vent their anger and fury over the incident and the complicity ofpoliticians in such horrific crimes against the Indian minorities.
“The sense of national crisis today is because Indians feel a risingurgency to either counterthis ethical collapse or to capitalize on it in the run-up to the nextelection,” the Indian journalist wrote.
The NYT Editorial Board in an article published on Monday said that crimeslike the murderof the Muslim Kashmiri girl was “ part of an organized and systematiccampaign by nationalist forcesthat want to terrorize women, Muslims, Dalits and other underprivilegedcitizens,”.
The Editorial Board also criticized Mr. Modi’s silence over this horrendousact saying that “tweets frequently and considers himself a talented orator.Yet he loses his voice when it comes to speaking out about the dangersfaced by women and minorities who are frequent targets of the nationalistand communal forces that are part of the base of his Bharatiya JanataParty”.