Featured Paris knife attack suspect is of Pakistani origin, French authorities say
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Pandora
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After fall of Nazi Germany French inherited all their traits whereas Germany became more liberal. French are nothing more than white extremists full of racism and fascism.
PradoTLC
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Really..... so what happened here?
RAW Tried To Woo Canadian Leaders Through ‘Indian Editor’: Report
RAW Tried To Woo Canadian Leaders Through ‘Indian Editor’: Report
“Indian intelligence agencies attempted to use money and disinformation to ‘covertly influence’ Canadian politicians, according to a highly sensitive government document”,says a report in Canada’s Global News.
PradoTLC
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really... and other civilisations like dont do it?...
have you even read a news paper?
PAKISTANFOREVER
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By Rory Sullivan and Ivana Saric, CNN
Updated 6:49 AM ET, Sat September 26, 2020
French firefighters are pictured near the scene of a knife attack in Paris on September 25.
(CNN)The main suspect arrested over a knife attack in Paris on Friday near the former offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is of Pakistani origin, French authorities have said.
France's Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, told France 2 in an interview on Friday that authorities were working to verify more details about the suspect's background after the attack that left two people seriously injured.
The minister also confirmed that the incident was being treated as "an act of Islamist terrorism."
The lead suspect had not been known to police for "radicalization" but was arrested last month for carrying a screwdriver, Darmanin added.
Police say seven people have been arrested over the attack. Five of the arrests were made in an apartment "likely to have been used by the main suspect," a judicial source told CNN on Friday.
Although the victims have not been named, they are both employees of French documentary production firm Premières Lignes, according to the company's founder Paul Moreira.
Moreira said the pair were attacked with a "sort of cleaver" in front of the office. Their lives are not in danger but they are in a serious condition, a police spokesperson said Friday.
In a statement on Facebook, Charlie Hebdo magazine expressed its "support and solidarity" to Premières Lignes and "to those affected by this heinous attack."
Annie Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, tweeted that "it is once again freedom of expression that is targeted," while former Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Twitter that it gave him the feeling of "reliving a nightmare."
The knife attack came during a trial of 14 suspects for their alleged involvement in a series of terrorist attacks over three days in January 2015, which started in the offices of Charlie Hebdo and ended in a kosher supermarket.
A total of 17 people were killed in the 2015 attacks, which were carried out by brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi and their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly. The suspects currently on trial are accused of providing these men with logistical support.
After the knife attack on Friday, Luc Hermann, Director of Premières Lignes, criticized what he said was a "total absence of protection of this building since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo."
CNN's Gaëlle Fournier and Niamh Kennedy contributed to this report.
Paris knife attack suspect is of Pakistani origin, French authorities say
The main suspect arrested over a knife attack in Paris on Friday near the former offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is of Pakistani origin, French authorities have said.www.cnn.com
So what? The French massacred 10s of thousands possibly 100,000s of Brown/Olive-Skinned Algerian Muslims. Is that okay?
PradoTLC
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of course you dont.....we know hindus are tolerant and peace full bunch. Once just has to look at Arnab Gowami
but you do the below just on the basis of their religion or caste
> Sikh riots 1984
> Mumbai riots 1992
> Samjota Express bombing
> Gujrat riots
> Kashmir - mass murder , rape , torture and oppression
PradoTLC
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The Violent Toll of Hindu Nationalism in India
A populist Prime Minister has legitimized India’s more militant groups, and targeted attacks against religious minorities are on the rise.
By Eliza Griswold
March 5, 2019
Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban; Source Photograph from Getty
On April 1, 2017, Irshad Khan, a slight twenty-six-year-old with glossy black hair and the faint shadow of a beard and mustache, helped his eighteen-year-old brother, Arif, and their father, Pehlu, load two cows into the bed of their white Mahindra pickup truck. The Khans were heading from a cattle market in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, to their village of Jaishingpur, a four-hour drive away. Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, or Dalits, live side by side in the village, harvesting mustard from fields of yellow flowers. The village, home to six hundred people, is relatively well-off, and has grown more prosperous, as Delhi has mushroomed into a megacity of twenty-seven million and the price of land surrounding the city has skyrocketed. Some Muslim families in the village, including the Khans, are wealthy traders who transport goods like sand and vegetables to the cities around Delhi.
That afternoon, Irshad climbed into the truck alongside his father and brother. Cows are sacred to Hindus but Irshad had made this trip dozens of times since he was a boy. He’d heard rumors of potential trouble for Muslims at roadside checkpoints, where members of a militant Hindu youth group called the Bajrang Dal were intimidating Muslim traders in the name of protecting cows. Still, Irshad wasn’t nervous. “We had no fear at all,” he told me recently. “We were coming from a government-organized fair, and buying and selling cows is a legal business.”
The militant Hindu nationalism that the group espouses is not new. Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi, on January 30, 1948, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a violent right-wing organization that promotes Hindu supremacy. Members of the Bajrang Dal are the movement’s foot soldiers, deployed in instances of mob violence or for targeted attacks against Muslims and other religious minorities. Founded in 1984, the group was part of a movement to destroy the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque located in Ayodhya, India, which was built by the emperor Babur. (The mosque was ultimately demolished during a violent R.S.S. rally in 1992.) Since its early days, the group has formed some twenty-five-hundred cells across the country. I first reported on these cells, called akhadas, in 2005, in Dharavi, Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum, where, in the name of protecting cows, the militants recruited impoverished Hindu boys to their violent cause. Paul Richard Brass, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Washington, has called the Bajrang Dal “a somewhat pathetic but nevertheless dangerous version of the Nazi S.A.”—or the Brownshirts, the Nazi Party’s first paramilitary organization.
For much for the past thirty years, the Bajrang Dal has either been banned or has lurked at the margins of Indian society. But in 2014 Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the B.J.P., a right-wing political party that was an offshoot of the R.S.S., was elected Prime Minister. Since then, the militant group has been legitimized and grown exponentially more powerful. In the past seven years, according to Factchecker.in, an organization that tracks hate crimes, there have been a hundred and sixty-eight attacks by Hindu extremists, in the name of protecting cows, against Muslims and other religious minorities. The attacks left forty-six people dead. “It’s really a very, very bad moment for Muslims in India,” Salman Khurshid, India’s former foreign minister and the author of a forthcoming book, “Invisible Citizens,” on the systematic oppression of Muslims in the country, told me. He laid out several setbacks for Muslims in Indian history. “First, in 1857, the failure of the war of independence,” he said, citing the brutal British repression of a popular uprising, in which Muslim and Hindu soldiers rose up together against the colonialists. Then partition, when British India divided into two independent states, predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan, and more than a million people died in sectarian violence. Khurshid cited the destruction of Babri Mosque as a third example. And then told me, “the next big setback is the rise of this government.” Under Modi, incidents of communal violence rose twenty-eight per cent between 2014 and 2017.
When Irshad and his family got stuck in traffic in Alwar, about halfway home from the cow market, a gang of eight men surrounded the Khans’ truck and demanded to know what was in the back. “Cows,” Pehlu said, and handed one of the men the official papers to prove that the cows were legal. “We’re Bajrang Dal, and we don’t care about these papers,” the man replied, tearing them up and throwing them on the road. Then the men pulled the Khans from the truck and passed them around, angrily asking questions. The Khans had driven by a police station about half a mile back, and they were still almost within sight of it. Irshad thought that if they could just hang on for a few minutes and keep the militants talking, the police would arrive to help them. But the minutes passed, and the police didn’t come. Instead, dozens more men pressed in around them and began beating them; Irshad felt a stinging cuff to his ear, and then the blows became heavier and more regular, drawing blood. Arif fell to the ground and curled into the fetal position. Pehlu, who was dressed in all white and had a small beard, a sign of religious devotion, was beaten unconscious.
Eventually, the police broke up the crowd and carried the Khans to a local hospital. An angry mob of villagers followed and surrounded the building. A kindly doctor locked Irshad and his brother in a room for their protection, and the boys recalled listening to the sound of feet as the villagers clambered onto the hospital’s roof. “We could hear them shouting they wanted to kill all three of us,” Irshad told me. Over the next two days the boys began to recover, but, on April 3rd, Pehlu died of his injuries. When the news of his death spread, the boys said that the mob returned and demanded his body so that they could desecrate it. The doctor hid the corpse in the hospital basement, and a police unit moved the boys to another hospital for their safety. When the brothers were in stable enough condition to go back to Jaishingpur, hundreds of people arrived from their village and neighboring ones to escort them home.
This spring, Modi is up for reëlection, and campaign season in India has sometimes sparked violence between Hindu nationalists and Muslims in the past. The B.J.P. is especially anxious this year, because of a series of unexpected losses in recent state elections. In Rajasthan, India’s first Minister of Cows, who presided over a sanctuary for the animals, was soundly defeated. These electoral losses have little to do with a backlash against right-wing Hindu nationalism. Instead, they reveal growing dissatisfaction with the failure of Modi and the B.J.P. to deliver on the economic development that they promised five years ago. In 2014, most Indians voted for Modi in the hopes that he would lift their economic status. In fact, India’s economy is the fastest growing in the world, and more than two-hundred and seventy-million people have risen out of poverty over the last fifteen years. Yet, under Modi, growth is lower than promised and India is facing its highest rate of unemployment in forty-five years. Over the past several weeks, Modi has announced a new round of economic measures designed to placate frustrated voters, including delivering cash handouts to struggling farmers.
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Some analysts worry that he will try to distract voters from the slowing economy by doubling down on nationalist rhetoric. “With little to show in terms of economy or development, Modi’s only remaining platform is nationalism,” Tanweer Alam, a political analyst, told me. Many critics argue that the rhetoric espoused by Modi and the B.J.P. has also intensified tensions in Kashmir, where the Indian government is struggling to quell a year-long spike in violence. In February, forty Indian soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber, who blew himself up by driving into a paramilitary convoy. The bomber claimed to be a local man named Aadil Ahmad Dar, who, in the past year, had left home to join the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is based in Pakistan. It was the most lethal attack in the region in decades, and Modi responded by threatening “a befitting reply,” and then launched air strikes against northern Pakistan. Pakistan subsequently shot down at least one Indian jet, further heightening tensions.
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The B.J.P.-controlled national government has passed several laws in recent years that have made life more difficult for religious minorities. In several states, local governments have also passed “anti-conversion” laws that make it illegal to forcibly convert people to a new religion. The ostensible purpose of the measures is to shield Hindus from aggressive Christian proselytizing, or to protect them from Islam. But conversion has historically also provided members of lower castes a way out of the caste system’s repressive strictures. The Bajrang Dal also cited the statutes as a justification for attacks against Muslims and Christians. In 2016, in Uttar Pradesh, the Bajrang Dal falsely accused a pastor of forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity, shaved his head, and paraded him through town on a donkey. The United States has generally remained silent regarding the repression of minorities in Modi’s India. In 2015, when Modi was selected as one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people in the world, President Obama wrote a glowing tribute and said nothing of the militant nationalism that helped bring Modi to power. Despite President Trump’s public support of religious freedom, he has not criticized the oppression of religious minorities in India. Modi has made several high-profile visits to the U.S., including a state visit in 2017.
For the international community, the dominant narrative of India under Modi has been a story of economic success, not an account of religious violence and repression. “Do you really think that American businessmen care what is happening here?” Amitabh Kundu, one of India’s leading economists, asked me, in his office in Delhi. “It will take moderate Hindus to push back against this rabid Hindutva.” Kundu is the author of a study, published in 2014, that documents the socioeconomic status of India’s Muslims, who make up roughly fifteen per cent of the population. Kundu has documented that, although caste-based discrimination has fallen considerably in the last few decades, discrimination against Muslims is on the rise. Despite an influx of people into urban centers across India, the rate of Muslim migration to large cities is decreasing, because they are largely shut out of the labor market. Their names are also frequently removed from voter rolls. In 2018, Hindu nationalist groups called for a ban on public prayer by Muslims in parks in Gurgaon, which led to vicious mob attacks in the name of enforcement.
After speaking with Kundu, I visited Sarim Naved, a young Muslim lawyer, in his windowless, basement office in a law firm in south Delhi. Naved works on human-rights cases involving mob killings, and police brutality, against Muslims. He had left a job at a high-profile bank and committed himself to advocacy in part because he had grown up in an era of rising Islamophobia in India. “If you’re a Muslim, you’re born political,” he said. He was a child in 1992, when the Babri Mosque was demolished, and images of its destruction have stayed with him. “People say that there was once a political left in India, but my generation has never seen it,” he said. “We’ve only seen Hindu nationalism.”
On a recent afternoon, I visited Irshad and Arif, the brothers who survived the mob attack, in their home village with local human-rights activists.They still live in their father’s large compound, which is set in a warren of muddy roads lined with neem trees. In an open courtyard, a buffalo grazed on a tether; a goat and three kids pressed their heads against a wall, trying to warm themselves in the winter sun. Irshad dragged his bed into the sunshine so that we could sit down. Irshad and Arif told me that the attack had ruined their lives, not only because they had grown up wealthy and were now facing poverty but also because of the shame associated with being attacked by a mob. “People look at us with contempt,” he said. Some people had tried to help. Behind him, a green and yellow John Deere tractor, which had been a gift from supporters, sat in the center of the courtyard beyond a patch of spinach. Irshad said he was grateful for the tractor, but the mustard harvest was seasonal, and couldn’t support the family year-round. They had lost their cows in the attack, and their father’s dairy business was now closed. Irshad had abandoned working as a trader. The roads were too dangerous, he said, regardless of what he was transporting. Cows, or a rumor of cows, are now enough to get him killed. He left the village only for work as a driver, when he could find it, earning around seventy-five dollars a month.
Last July, the pattern of killings of Muslims grew so dire—in 2018, there were thirteen fatal cow-related lynchings—that the Indian Supreme Court demanded that the legislature formulate laws against the practice, which it has yet to do. Last month, Human Rights Watch released a hundred-and-four-page report documenting the violence, and the inaction—and abuses—of the government officials charged with investigating the crimes. “Lynching has become a nationalist project,” Mohammad Ali, a prominent Indian journalist who is currently working on a book about the phenomenon, told me. He said few perpetrators are punished, which has created a culture of impunity. Killers are lauded in some quarters as heroes for defending the faith and eradicating Muslims.
The Khans’ case was rare in that Pehlu, who briefly regained consciousness before dying, was able to identify several of his attackers by name, none of whom were charged. Instead, nine other men were indicted for Pehlu’s murder. Although Irshad knew it was dangerous, he decided to return to Alwar to testify at the trial. As he approached the town, he said a car pulled up behind him and masked men inside started firing at his vehicle. They missed, and he escaped, fleeing back to Jaishingpur. He never made it to court, and all nine of the men accused of killing his father were let go on bail. This impunity is especially troubling given the evidence. A video of the attack, recorded by one of the perpetrators, was posted on a YouTube channel related to the Bajrang Dal. It quickly accumulated more than six hundred thousand views.
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At the Khans’ house, Shabnam, Irshad’s wife, walked into the courtyard carrying their third child, an infant son, who screamed at the presence of strangers. She told me that their life had grown more chaotic with Pehlu gone; they missed his income, yes, but also the quiet order that he instilled in the family. “There’s no one to bind the family together now,” she told me. She had first heard of the attack a few hours after it happened. A police officer called from a nearby village to inform her and, soon after, someone sent her the YouTube video.
I asked her if it was still online; she nodded, and one of the local human-rights activists pulled out his phone and brought up the YouTube channel. We scrolled through it, looking for the attack. There were dozens of similar videos showing killings of Muslims, which were deeply disturbing both for their violence and for the obvious pride that the attackers took in being Internet stars. In one, a man wearing white pants and a bright pink sweater beat a Muslim man to death with a stick and sets him on fire, accusing him of committing “love jihad”: falling in love with a Hindu woman. After recording the murder, the attacker turns to the camera and says, “I am appealing to all Hindu sisters that don’t get into the trap of these jihadis. These people will win your heart and satisfy their lust.” In the another, a Bajrang Dal member leans into a truck’s open window. “What is your name?” he shouts, slapping the driver. “Mubarak,” the driver replies. The cameraman slaps him again. “Say ‘Mubarak Muslim,’ ” he demands. Finally, we found the video of Pehlu’s murder. It begins with Pehlu sitting on a curb, his palm upturned as he pleads with someone off camera. Then one of the attackers knocks him backward, and he disappears from the frame.
Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” in 2019.
A populist Prime Minister has legitimized India’s more militant groups, and targeted attacks against religious minorities are on the rise.
By Eliza Griswold
March 5, 2019
Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban; Source Photograph from Getty
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On April 1, 2017, Irshad Khan, a slight twenty-six-year-old with glossy black hair and the faint shadow of a beard and mustache, helped his eighteen-year-old brother, Arif, and their father, Pehlu, load two cows into the bed of their white Mahindra pickup truck. The Khans were heading from a cattle market in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, to their village of Jaishingpur, a four-hour drive away. Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, or Dalits, live side by side in the village, harvesting mustard from fields of yellow flowers. The village, home to six hundred people, is relatively well-off, and has grown more prosperous, as Delhi has mushroomed into a megacity of twenty-seven million and the price of land surrounding the city has skyrocketed. Some Muslim families in the village, including the Khans, are wealthy traders who transport goods like sand and vegetables to the cities around Delhi.
That afternoon, Irshad climbed into the truck alongside his father and brother. Cows are sacred to Hindus but Irshad had made this trip dozens of times since he was a boy. He’d heard rumors of potential trouble for Muslims at roadside checkpoints, where members of a militant Hindu youth group called the Bajrang Dal were intimidating Muslim traders in the name of protecting cows. Still, Irshad wasn’t nervous. “We had no fear at all,” he told me recently. “We were coming from a government-organized fair, and buying and selling cows is a legal business.”
The militant Hindu nationalism that the group espouses is not new. Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi, on January 30, 1948, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a violent right-wing organization that promotes Hindu supremacy. Members of the Bajrang Dal are the movement’s foot soldiers, deployed in instances of mob violence or for targeted attacks against Muslims and other religious minorities. Founded in 1984, the group was part of a movement to destroy the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque located in Ayodhya, India, which was built by the emperor Babur. (The mosque was ultimately demolished during a violent R.S.S. rally in 1992.) Since its early days, the group has formed some twenty-five-hundred cells across the country. I first reported on these cells, called akhadas, in 2005, in Dharavi, Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum, where, in the name of protecting cows, the militants recruited impoverished Hindu boys to their violent cause. Paul Richard Brass, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Washington, has called the Bajrang Dal “a somewhat pathetic but nevertheless dangerous version of the Nazi S.A.”—or the Brownshirts, the Nazi Party’s first paramilitary organization.
For much for the past thirty years, the Bajrang Dal has either been banned or has lurked at the margins of Indian society. But in 2014 Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the B.J.P., a right-wing political party that was an offshoot of the R.S.S., was elected Prime Minister. Since then, the militant group has been legitimized and grown exponentially more powerful. In the past seven years, according to Factchecker.in, an organization that tracks hate crimes, there have been a hundred and sixty-eight attacks by Hindu extremists, in the name of protecting cows, against Muslims and other religious minorities. The attacks left forty-six people dead. “It’s really a very, very bad moment for Muslims in India,” Salman Khurshid, India’s former foreign minister and the author of a forthcoming book, “Invisible Citizens,” on the systematic oppression of Muslims in the country, told me. He laid out several setbacks for Muslims in Indian history. “First, in 1857, the failure of the war of independence,” he said, citing the brutal British repression of a popular uprising, in which Muslim and Hindu soldiers rose up together against the colonialists. Then partition, when British India divided into two independent states, predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan, and more than a million people died in sectarian violence. Khurshid cited the destruction of Babri Mosque as a third example. And then told me, “the next big setback is the rise of this government.” Under Modi, incidents of communal violence rose twenty-eight per cent between 2014 and 2017.
When Irshad and his family got stuck in traffic in Alwar, about halfway home from the cow market, a gang of eight men surrounded the Khans’ truck and demanded to know what was in the back. “Cows,” Pehlu said, and handed one of the men the official papers to prove that the cows were legal. “We’re Bajrang Dal, and we don’t care about these papers,” the man replied, tearing them up and throwing them on the road. Then the men pulled the Khans from the truck and passed them around, angrily asking questions. The Khans had driven by a police station about half a mile back, and they were still almost within sight of it. Irshad thought that if they could just hang on for a few minutes and keep the militants talking, the police would arrive to help them. But the minutes passed, and the police didn’t come. Instead, dozens more men pressed in around them and began beating them; Irshad felt a stinging cuff to his ear, and then the blows became heavier and more regular, drawing blood. Arif fell to the ground and curled into the fetal position. Pehlu, who was dressed in all white and had a small beard, a sign of religious devotion, was beaten unconscious.
Eventually, the police broke up the crowd and carried the Khans to a local hospital. An angry mob of villagers followed and surrounded the building. A kindly doctor locked Irshad and his brother in a room for their protection, and the boys recalled listening to the sound of feet as the villagers clambered onto the hospital’s roof. “We could hear them shouting they wanted to kill all three of us,” Irshad told me. Over the next two days the boys began to recover, but, on April 3rd, Pehlu died of his injuries. When the news of his death spread, the boys said that the mob returned and demanded his body so that they could desecrate it. The doctor hid the corpse in the hospital basement, and a police unit moved the boys to another hospital for their safety. When the brothers were in stable enough condition to go back to Jaishingpur, hundreds of people arrived from their village and neighboring ones to escort them home.
This spring, Modi is up for reëlection, and campaign season in India has sometimes sparked violence between Hindu nationalists and Muslims in the past. The B.J.P. is especially anxious this year, because of a series of unexpected losses in recent state elections. In Rajasthan, India’s first Minister of Cows, who presided over a sanctuary for the animals, was soundly defeated. These electoral losses have little to do with a backlash against right-wing Hindu nationalism. Instead, they reveal growing dissatisfaction with the failure of Modi and the B.J.P. to deliver on the economic development that they promised five years ago. In 2014, most Indians voted for Modi in the hopes that he would lift their economic status. In fact, India’s economy is the fastest growing in the world, and more than two-hundred and seventy-million people have risen out of poverty over the last fifteen years. Yet, under Modi, growth is lower than promised and India is facing its highest rate of unemployment in forty-five years. Over the past several weeks, Modi has announced a new round of economic measures designed to placate frustrated voters, including delivering cash handouts to struggling farmers.
ADVERTISEMENT
Some analysts worry that he will try to distract voters from the slowing economy by doubling down on nationalist rhetoric. “With little to show in terms of economy or development, Modi’s only remaining platform is nationalism,” Tanweer Alam, a political analyst, told me. Many critics argue that the rhetoric espoused by Modi and the B.J.P. has also intensified tensions in Kashmir, where the Indian government is struggling to quell a year-long spike in violence. In February, forty Indian soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber, who blew himself up by driving into a paramilitary convoy. The bomber claimed to be a local man named Aadil Ahmad Dar, who, in the past year, had left home to join the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is based in Pakistan. It was the most lethal attack in the region in decades, and Modi responded by threatening “a befitting reply,” and then launched air strikes against northern Pakistan. Pakistan subsequently shot down at least one Indian jet, further heightening tensions.
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A Farmworker Who Sees His Family Only Once a Year
The B.J.P.-controlled national government has passed several laws in recent years that have made life more difficult for religious minorities. In several states, local governments have also passed “anti-conversion” laws that make it illegal to forcibly convert people to a new religion. The ostensible purpose of the measures is to shield Hindus from aggressive Christian proselytizing, or to protect them from Islam. But conversion has historically also provided members of lower castes a way out of the caste system’s repressive strictures. The Bajrang Dal also cited the statutes as a justification for attacks against Muslims and Christians. In 2016, in Uttar Pradesh, the Bajrang Dal falsely accused a pastor of forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity, shaved his head, and paraded him through town on a donkey. The United States has generally remained silent regarding the repression of minorities in Modi’s India. In 2015, when Modi was selected as one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people in the world, President Obama wrote a glowing tribute and said nothing of the militant nationalism that helped bring Modi to power. Despite President Trump’s public support of religious freedom, he has not criticized the oppression of religious minorities in India. Modi has made several high-profile visits to the U.S., including a state visit in 2017.
For the international community, the dominant narrative of India under Modi has been a story of economic success, not an account of religious violence and repression. “Do you really think that American businessmen care what is happening here?” Amitabh Kundu, one of India’s leading economists, asked me, in his office in Delhi. “It will take moderate Hindus to push back against this rabid Hindutva.” Kundu is the author of a study, published in 2014, that documents the socioeconomic status of India’s Muslims, who make up roughly fifteen per cent of the population. Kundu has documented that, although caste-based discrimination has fallen considerably in the last few decades, discrimination against Muslims is on the rise. Despite an influx of people into urban centers across India, the rate of Muslim migration to large cities is decreasing, because they are largely shut out of the labor market. Their names are also frequently removed from voter rolls. In 2018, Hindu nationalist groups called for a ban on public prayer by Muslims in parks in Gurgaon, which led to vicious mob attacks in the name of enforcement.
After speaking with Kundu, I visited Sarim Naved, a young Muslim lawyer, in his windowless, basement office in a law firm in south Delhi. Naved works on human-rights cases involving mob killings, and police brutality, against Muslims. He had left a job at a high-profile bank and committed himself to advocacy in part because he had grown up in an era of rising Islamophobia in India. “If you’re a Muslim, you’re born political,” he said. He was a child in 1992, when the Babri Mosque was demolished, and images of its destruction have stayed with him. “People say that there was once a political left in India, but my generation has never seen it,” he said. “We’ve only seen Hindu nationalism.”
On a recent afternoon, I visited Irshad and Arif, the brothers who survived the mob attack, in their home village with local human-rights activists.They still live in their father’s large compound, which is set in a warren of muddy roads lined with neem trees. In an open courtyard, a buffalo grazed on a tether; a goat and three kids pressed their heads against a wall, trying to warm themselves in the winter sun. Irshad dragged his bed into the sunshine so that we could sit down. Irshad and Arif told me that the attack had ruined their lives, not only because they had grown up wealthy and were now facing poverty but also because of the shame associated with being attacked by a mob. “People look at us with contempt,” he said. Some people had tried to help. Behind him, a green and yellow John Deere tractor, which had been a gift from supporters, sat in the center of the courtyard beyond a patch of spinach. Irshad said he was grateful for the tractor, but the mustard harvest was seasonal, and couldn’t support the family year-round. They had lost their cows in the attack, and their father’s dairy business was now closed. Irshad had abandoned working as a trader. The roads were too dangerous, he said, regardless of what he was transporting. Cows, or a rumor of cows, are now enough to get him killed. He left the village only for work as a driver, when he could find it, earning around seventy-five dollars a month.
Last July, the pattern of killings of Muslims grew so dire—in 2018, there were thirteen fatal cow-related lynchings—that the Indian Supreme Court demanded that the legislature formulate laws against the practice, which it has yet to do. Last month, Human Rights Watch released a hundred-and-four-page report documenting the violence, and the inaction—and abuses—of the government officials charged with investigating the crimes. “Lynching has become a nationalist project,” Mohammad Ali, a prominent Indian journalist who is currently working on a book about the phenomenon, told me. He said few perpetrators are punished, which has created a culture of impunity. Killers are lauded in some quarters as heroes for defending the faith and eradicating Muslims.
The Khans’ case was rare in that Pehlu, who briefly regained consciousness before dying, was able to identify several of his attackers by name, none of whom were charged. Instead, nine other men were indicted for Pehlu’s murder. Although Irshad knew it was dangerous, he decided to return to Alwar to testify at the trial. As he approached the town, he said a car pulled up behind him and masked men inside started firing at his vehicle. They missed, and he escaped, fleeing back to Jaishingpur. He never made it to court, and all nine of the men accused of killing his father were let go on bail. This impunity is especially troubling given the evidence. A video of the attack, recorded by one of the perpetrators, was posted on a YouTube channel related to the Bajrang Dal. It quickly accumulated more than six hundred thousand views.
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At the Khans’ house, Shabnam, Irshad’s wife, walked into the courtyard carrying their third child, an infant son, who screamed at the presence of strangers. She told me that their life had grown more chaotic with Pehlu gone; they missed his income, yes, but also the quiet order that he instilled in the family. “There’s no one to bind the family together now,” she told me. She had first heard of the attack a few hours after it happened. A police officer called from a nearby village to inform her and, soon after, someone sent her the YouTube video.
I asked her if it was still online; she nodded, and one of the local human-rights activists pulled out his phone and brought up the YouTube channel. We scrolled through it, looking for the attack. There were dozens of similar videos showing killings of Muslims, which were deeply disturbing both for their violence and for the obvious pride that the attackers took in being Internet stars. In one, a man wearing white pants and a bright pink sweater beat a Muslim man to death with a stick and sets him on fire, accusing him of committing “love jihad”: falling in love with a Hindu woman. After recording the murder, the attacker turns to the camera and says, “I am appealing to all Hindu sisters that don’t get into the trap of these jihadis. These people will win your heart and satisfy their lust.” In the another, a Bajrang Dal member leans into a truck’s open window. “What is your name?” he shouts, slapping the driver. “Mubarak,” the driver replies. The cameraman slaps him again. “Say ‘Mubarak Muslim,’ ” he demands. Finally, we found the video of Pehlu’s murder. It begins with Pehlu sitting on a curb, his palm upturned as he pleads with someone off camera. Then one of the attackers knocks him backward, and he disappears from the frame.
Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” in 2019.
Ajay Ghatak
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Not motivated by "offended due to comedy".
Yeah, right 1946. Sure! Also, not motivated by "offended due to comedy".
Ditto
Ditto
Taimoor Khan
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How bloody convenient that when Pakistan is raising issue of Islamophobia and willful incitement of hate, these turds came out with this drama and found someone of Pakistani origin. Pathetically scripted drama by french. Get your house in order your morons.
PAKISTANFOREVER
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@waz @The Eagle @krash @Arsalan @Foxtrot Alpha @jaibi
@Kambojaric
Please go through page 6 of this thread and see the severe anti-Pakistani racism by the usual suspects.
@Kambojaric
Please go through page 6 of this thread and see the severe anti-Pakistani racism by the usual suspects.
Taimoor Khan
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Entire world? Lol. You Indians have this Bollywood disease to stretch things to extreme.
American Dragon
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Entire world is against Pakistan?!?
That’ll be news for the Turks, Malays, Indonesians, Bosnians, etc. and many Muslims in the west.
Even if the whole world was against Pak, so what? Pak is enough for the whole world! What did the whole world do in Afghanistan...fall on its knees.
Let ‘everybody’ [read zionists] conspire against us. We know their dirty tricks all too well now. Fake terrorists attacks is one of them.
Brothers!
Let’s ban all French products! Don’t buy at Carrefour! Don’t buy any perfume/cologne before checking it’s not made in France.
Sisters need to do the same with makeup.
The disrespectful French are an arrogant bunch.
IsThisNameAvailable
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Why the heck are some getting pissed at the origin of the attacker being disclosed??
Why should it be hidden?
Several ISIS recruits were from Kerala. No Indian ever objected for their "Indian identity" being declared openly.
The mass murderer of NZ, which NZian ever objected to his identity being hidden?
More often than not, naming & shaming does work in civilised societies.
Ofcourse it does NOT work in few cases. Thats the problem those specific categories, nationalities, communities, ideologies have to address themselves.
Why should it be hidden?
Several ISIS recruits were from Kerala. No Indian ever objected for their "Indian identity" being declared openly.
The mass murderer of NZ, which NZian ever objected to his identity being hidden?
More often than not, naming & shaming does work in civilised societies.
Ofcourse it does NOT work in few cases. Thats the problem those specific categories, nationalities, communities, ideologies have to address themselves.
bahadur
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so you support your brother .
waz
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Ah come on, not quite as large as the feathers you guys accumulate for India.
Here from some months back;
A U.S. Indian Health Service doctor was indicted Thursday on charges of sexually abusing his Native American patients at a health center in South Dakota, deepening a crisis over the handling of sexual misconduct that has consumed the federal agency for a year.
Office of Inspector General meanwhile identified the additional women who complained about Dr. Ibarra-Perocier’s conduct in the exam room.
They allege he caused his patients “to engage in a sexual act by threatening and placing [the victims] in fear,” and coerced them into sexual contact.
The new allegations aren’t the first about Dr. Ibarra-Perocier, some of the people familiar with the matter said. At least two nurses accused him internally of workplace sexual harassment in past years,
U.S. Indian Health Service Doctor Indicted on Charges of Sexual Abuse
A U.S. Indian Health Service doctor was indicted on charges of sexually abusing his Native American patients at a health center in South Dakota, deepening a crisis over the handling of sexual misconduct that has consumed the federal agency for a year.
www.wsj.com
You guys should praise his likes i.e. he's only doing what your prime minister also did by congratulating the savages who mass raped Muslim girls in Gujarat.
This filth was also raping minorities.
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