Modi Administration Imposes USD8 Million Penalty On Amnesty India As Vendetta For Watchdog’s Exposes Of BJP’s Role In Pogrom Against Muslims

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist administration has slapped penalties of nearly USD 8 million on Amnesty International India, a global watchdog, and one of its former officials in a brazen case of governmental vendetta and persecution.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), which has emerged as the government’s main weapon of illegal persecution of the government’s critics, Friday announced a penalty of USD 6.5 million on Amnesty India, and of USD 1.25 million on Aakar Patel, a renowned Indian human rights defender who is a former chair of the organization.

Amnesty has been in the Modi Administration’s crosshairs for two years since it exposed the complicity of Modi’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which is directly managed by Modi’s deputy Amit Shah, in the anti-Muslim violence of February 2020 in Indian capital of Delhi. Shah himself was long accused of masterminding a string of murders of Muslims in his home state of Gujarat, but was let off without trial by a trial judge after his predecessor judge, who refused to free Shah, turned up dead within a week.

The ED’s claim is that Amnesty India and Patel violated the law governing incoming foreign money. After the Indian government made it virtually impossible for many NGOs, including Amnesty, to receive foreign funding, Amnesty had set up a subsidiary company in India. The ED has now said that move was illegal.

Supreme Court Rulings Betray Anti-Muslim Bias, Support For Hindu Supremacists In Two Separate Rulings Given Hours Apart

Justice is blind may be working out in a wholly new way for India’s Supreme Court. In two separate rulings given hours apart, two Supreme Court judges have ruled in opposite ways for a Hindu and a Muslim journalists.

Incredibly, while the Hindu journalist is accused of a lie that he himself has admitted to, the Muslim journalist is accused of the “crime” of exposing a so-called Hindu saint who has openly threatened rape and murder against Muslims.

On Friday, Supreme Court judges Indira Banerjee and J. K. Maheshwari ordered the police not to arrest Rohit Ranjan, the Hindu journalist, who had falsely claimed that India’s main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, had condoned the killing of a Hindu by two Muslim men.

The case against him was brought by the police in Chhattisgarh state, which is ruled by Gandhi’s party, the Congress. When Chhattisgarh police traveled to Uttar Pradesh state to arrest Ranjan where he lived, he immediately tweeted tagging UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, himself a Hindu bigot and supremacist, and sought protection.

The same judges, Banerjee and Maheshwari, imposed stringent conditions on Mohammed Zubair, the Muslim journalist who is the cofounder of India’s most famous fact-checking website, AltNews, barring him from tweeting and leaving Delhi. This order is anyway meaningless as Zubair has been arrested and is in prison, from where he can neither tweet nor leave the city.

Zubair’s only “crime” is that he had tweeted that three self-styled saffron-clad Hindu “saints” who had been openly spewing venom against Muslims were hatemongers.

While in the case Ranjan, the Hindu journalist, the Supreme Court halted action by police in multiple states, they did no such thing in the case of Zubair, the Muslim journalist, who has been made an accused in different cases in UP and in Delhi.

The Supreme Court judges gave a five-day bail to Zubair in the case in UP, but that is essentially meaningless as he is in prison already in the Delhi case.

It is ironic that Zubair has been accused of hate speech for calling Hindu supremacists Bajrang Muni, Yati Narsinghanand and Anand Swaroop “hate-mongers.” The three men have repeatedly called for genocides of Muslims in India.

Bajrang Muni Who Threatened Muslim Women With Rape A ‘Respected Religious Leader’: UP Police To Supreme Court

At the Supreme Court hearing in Zubair’s case, the Uttar Pradesh government bizarrely argued  argued that Bajrang Muni, a Hindu monk who threatened Muslim women with rape in police presence, was “a respected religious scholar.

India’s Additional Solicitor General SV Raju, one of the Modi Administration’s top lawyers, said Bajrang Muni had a “large following” so calling him a hatemonger “raises problems.” By tweeting that Muni was a hatemonger, Zubair had  “outraged the religious feelings of [a] large number of [Muni’s] followers,” the lawyer said.

In April, Muni had threatened Muslim women with rape in police presence. He was  arrested 11 days after he said that he would abduct Muslim women from their homes and rape them in the open if any Muslim man goes after Hindu women.

A two-minute video of his speech on 2 April, where he is heard making rape threats, had gone viral. Muni had made his bigoted comments outside a mosque during the Hindu festival of Ramnavami when Hindu groups carried out violence against Muslims across India.

In Yet More Display Of Pro-Hindu Bias, Uttar Pradesh Court Acquits BJP Leader Of Muslim Man’s Murder During Protests Against Citizenship Law

A local court in Aligarh city of Uttar Pradesh state on Wednesday acquitted three Hindu bigots, including a former leader of the youth wing of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vinay Varshney, in the murder case of Mohammad Tariq Munawwar, a Muslim killed during protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on February 23, 2020.

The 22-year-old Muslim man was shot and killed while standing on the terrace of his house. At that time, local police and BJP leaders were shooting at the protesting Muslims. Munawwar was hospitalized and died three weeks later.

The court’s order is entirely suspect as the weapon used to fire the bullet that killed Munawwar was registered in Varshney’s name. Despite this clinching evidence, the court ruled that Varshney was innocent.