In 2019, the Narendra Modi government broke the unspoken Code of Omerta that “secular” India will not speak or act on behalf of Hindu (or Buddhist, Jain or Sikh) minorities anywhere else. First, it extended the Indian Constitution fully to Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir by nullifying Article 370, which gave it the option of not following Indian laws; then it enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to fast-track citizenship to persecuted minorities in three Muslim-majority countries in the neighbourhood.
Write R Jagganathan in today’s mint. You can read the entire article here.
Some of the selected excerpts are produced below.
India’s first secretary in the permanent mission to the UN, Ashish Sharma, said: “This august body fails to acknowledge the rise of hatred and violence against Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism also. The shattering of the iconic Bamiyan Buddha by fundamentalists, the terrorist bombing of the Sikh gurudwara in Afghanistan where 25 Sikh worshippers were killed and the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples and minority cleansing of these religions by countries, calls for condemning such acts against these religions also. But the current member-states refuse to speak of these religions in the same breath as the first three ‘Abrahamic’ religions.” The last reference was to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
