Modi Govt Using Coronavirus to Eliminate Muslims: Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy accused the Modi government of exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India.
By Rakesh Raman
Leading writer and social activist Arundhati Roy reveals that the Indian government headed by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi is exploiting coronavirus (COVID-19) to ramp up its suppression of Muslims. She compared the Modi government’s tactic to the one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
“India’s treatment of Muslims amid coronavirus is almost ‘genocidal,’ Arundhati Roy said Friday (April 17) in an interview with German news channel Deutsche Welle (DW).
She accused the Indian government of exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India.
She told DW that the Modi government is using the cover of coronavirus lockdown to arrest and persecute Modi’s opponents who are primarily Muslims.
Ms Roy added that Modi – who behaves as a dictator – had abruptly announced the lockdown on March 24 at just 4-hours’ notice, leaving millions of migrant workers homeless and without food and water.
She said that today millions of Indians are suffering from the crisis of hatred and crisis of hunger while the coronavirus figures being released by the Indian government cannot be trusted.
Although the government claims that there are only about 14,000 coronavirus cases in India, the actual figure can be in millions while thousands would have died. As the Indian mainstream media is highly corrupt, there is no way to know the actual coronavirus cases and deaths in India.
Ms Roy said in the DW interview that Indian media has become genocidal media that blindly supports the Modi government to spew hatred against Muslims, adding that the Indian TV anchors are working as lynch mobs.
She adds that the hatred against Muslims comes on the back of a massacre in Delhi, which was the the result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship laws announced by the Modi government.
She says that when violence against Muslims takes place, Modi stays silent mischievously. And she added that the Delhi carnage took place in February when President Trump was in India. “But Trump did not say anything to Modi,” Ms Roy said, adding that the world needs to open its eyes to see the brutality of the Modi government.
“The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group) to which Modi belongs, has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using COVID, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to get ghettoize them, to stigmatize them,” Ms Roy said in the interview.
“The government’s agenda has been this.”
Author and writer Arundhati Roy spoke to DW about the ‘stigmatization’ of Muslims with the coronavirus illness in India. pic.twitter.com/Z7ML4Yytsm
— DW News (@dwnews) April 18, 2020
During the Holocaust, a primary concern of medical personnel in the ghetto was to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Typhus, in particular, was rampant due to the lack of medicines to treat the disease or supplies to maintain sanitary conditions.
As a result, thousands died slow and agonizing deaths. This deliberate neglect corresponded with the German policy to cause the deaths of large numbers of Jews through over-crowded, squalid living conditions and a lack of reasonable medical care.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of a humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society. He also creates and publishes a number of digital publications and research reports on different subjects.
