Md Jubair: Pm Modi’s team made all efforts to fly to Ferozepur in India’s Punjab for a BJP public rally to announce widescale development projects, knowing what awaited them on the ground. Their best laid plans failed because of the weather, which didn’t allow them to fly to Ferozepur. The cavalcade of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reluctantly took the road to reach Ferozepur, from Bhatinda airport, but their worst fears came true when the protesting farmers of Punjab not only blocked the road leading to the Ferozepur public rally, but also forced the mighty Prime Minister of India, alongside his entourage, to take a U-turn, and go back to where they had started.

It wasn’t just an ordinary incident but termed a major security lapse by the central government, on part of the Punjab government. It was also an indication of the deep-rooted issues faced by the Hindutva regime in India, which is faced with twenty-two different separatist movements of varying sizes, in the entire breadth and width of India.

The idea of India was carefully crafted by the founding fathers of the nation, post partition in 1947, based on the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. By far the most famous Prime Minister of India: Mr Jawahar Lal Nehru, shaped post-partition India into the fabric of secularism, manifesting the same ideals of Gandhi, which were based on inter-faith harmony and state secularism. This fabric of secularism shielded the fascist face of the Hindu left in India which was responsible for killing Gandhi himself.

To say that the current Hindutva fascism we see now in India instantly manifested, would be wrong. This fascism which surfaced on the mainstream with PM Modi’s regime, and was unleashed on the minorities in India, had always existed. Modi’s regime only succeeded in tearing apart the illusion of secularism in India, that was created by the founding fathers of Hindustan, and with it died the idea which was once called India.

Modi’s regime started by attacking the Indian Muslims, and later progressed to the Christians. The Sikh’s seem to be the latest victims of Hindutva fascism. On September 2, 2021, in its lead story, BBC, by Geeta Pandey stated: “Unprovoked attacks on Muslims, by Hindu mobs, have become routine in India, but they seem to evoke little condemnation from the government”. She further reported that: “In 2019, a fact-checker website, that counted ‘hate crimes’ in India, reported that more than 90 percent of victims in the past 10 years, were Muslims.”

Various international media outlets reported the Indian state sponsored violence by the Hindu mobs against the Christians. A feature by Varsha Torgalkar for the TRT World on December 10, 2021, stated that: “At least 305 incidents of attacks on churches and Christians have been reported, during the first nine months of 2021 alone.”

Not long after the assassination of Indra Gandhi on October 31, 1984 by two of her Sikh bodyguards, anti-Sikh riots by Hindu mobs erupted. They continued in some areas for several days, killing more than 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi and an estimated 8,000-17,000 Sikhs in total were killed across 40 cities in India. Justice has not been served to date for that violence. With the international Sikh referendum to create the state of Khalistan, and the ongoing farmers’ protests, which forced the Indian Prime Minister to take a U-turn on his way to a public rally in Punjab, the underlying tensions among the Punjabi Sikh community in India are quite evident. It is also common knowledge that the Sikhs afforded support to the Kashmiri freedom fighters and vice versa. This has also given the left wing an excuse to hate and attack the Sikh community.

The greatest question that arises is, how long can a Hindu Fascist majority rule over a large proportion of India’s minorities by force? If history was taken into consideration in this analysis, fascism has always failed to secure the geographical frontiers of a nation, as was evident in the case of the USSR. India’s fate also seems similar, where the country would be forced to revert to the principles of its founding fathers or be split into different countries and cease to exist as the India that is seen today.

India is a huge consumer market, which is forcing global powers to ignore the drastic human rights tragedy under the current fascist regime in India. The state of India’s human rights violations can be perfectly described in the words of Upton Sinclair, who stated: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.” The world, especially the Western world, with its double standards, is accepting this form of fascism where it suits them, whilst watching this genocide in silence.