Anti-Muslim Citizenship Law Akin To Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, Says Booker Prize Winner Arundhati Roy
India’s most famous storyteller, the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, has said India’s anti-Muslim citizenship law is akin to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nuremberg laws that reduced citizenship rights of the Jews and legalized the persecution of that community, eventually leading to the Holocaust. She also included the National Register for Citizens (NRC), which is a national plan for confirming citizenship status that aims to disenfranchise millions of Indian Muslims, among India’s “Nuremberg” laws.
“The Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the NRC are the same as Hitler’s Nuremberg law. They are anti-Muslim and anti-poor,” Roy said at a press conference on December 15 called to mark the two years since Modi’s police brutally attacked thousands of students, including many Muslims, at three prestigious universities: the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi, and the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh.
“The students at these universities were attacked because they stood up against these laws,” Roy said.
Roy, who is globally renowned as an author and a human rights defender, said the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the 96-year-old Hindu extremist organization that wants to convert India into a Hindu nation, had taken over India’s national institutions.
Facebook Deletes News Portal’s Page That Criticized Modi And Had Over 1 Million Followers
Facebook has deleted the official page of Millat Times, an online news portal that reports on persecution of India’s Muslims and criticizes Hindu extremism. On its Twitter handle, Millat Times said, “Facebook has deleted the Millat Times page. The page had more than 1 million followers and millions of viewers, which the company has deleted without any notification. According to IT experts, the report was made against the page, due to which this happened. We demand from Facebook that this page should be restored because videos and news based on reality and truth were posted here.”
According to Shams Tabrez Qasmi, Chief Editor of Millat Times, the group’s last post on Facebook was about a debate titled “Prohibition of Muslims to offer prayers, permission to people of other religions.” Shortly, the page was shut down on December 13.
Started in 2016, Millat Times now publishes in four languages (Urdu, Hindi, English, and Bangla). It has a website, a YouTube account, a Facebook page, and a Twitter handle. Millat Times also has nearly one million subscribers on its YouTube channel.
There can hardly be any doubt that Facebook’s egregious decision to shut down Millat Times has followed pressure from the Indian government, which has in recent years forced the social media companies, both Facebook and Twitter, to suspend and delete accounts that are critical of it.
Two months ago, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen submitted thousands of internal company documents to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commision that showed how Facebook not only refused to take down Islamophobic content in India but virtually allowed it to mushroom, while targeting critics of the Modi government.
National Human Rights Commission Asks Assam Government To Explain Forced Evictions Of Muslims
The National Human Rights Commission, an autonomous federal panel, on December 13 ordered the state government in the Assam state to respond to a complaint that it is forcibly evicting Muslims from their homes even though they have been included in the NRC as Indian citizens. The petition has urged the Commission to order an independent inquiry into the eviction as well as the immediate rehabilitation of the evictees affected in several villages from the operations in September.
In a video that went viral, it was seen that the police fired upon protesting villagers, killing two males, including a minor. The petition says the state government has failed to provide appropriate compensation or rehabilitation to the uprooted families. The Assam government has to file its response within eight weeks.
