OBSERVER REPORT
JED DA H The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s human rights body on Sunday condemned the “unrelenting vicious Islamophobic campaign in India maligning Muslims for spread of Covid-19”, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. In a statement issued Sunday, the OIC’s Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission condemned the “negative profiling [of Muslims in India] in media subjecting them to discrimination and violence with impunity”. The international body called upon the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government to take notice of and “take urgent steps to stop the growing tide of Islamophobia in India”. The Indian government should “protect the rights of its persecuted Muslim minority as per its obligations” under international human rights laws, it added. A New York Times report earlier this week said the outbreak of coronavirus in India had triggered a series of attacks against Muslims across the country, with the health ministry of Modi’s Hindu nationalist government claiming that Muslims were spreading the virus. “Young Muslim men who were passing out food to the poor were assaulted with cricket bats. … Other Muslims have been beaten up, nearly lynched, run out of their neighbourhoods or attacked in mosques, branded as virus spreaders,” the paper said. It highlighted that Hindu extremists were scapegoating the country’s entire Muslim population for deliberately spreading the virus through “corona jihad”. Earlier, Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy had told Deutsche Welle the New Delhi government was trying to instigate communal rifts as it was exploiting the coronavirus issue against its minority Muslim community. The author had said “the situation is approaching genocidal”, telling the foreign publication that the coronavirus pandemic had laid bare the facet of India that “all of us knew”. “We are suffering, not just from Covid, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger,” she had said, adding that the world needs to keep its eyes on the matter of anti-Muslim hatred in India. Linking the fresh wave of singling out Muslims during the pandemic to the recent Delhi riots, she had said it began with people protesting against the antiMuslim citizenship law. Under the guise of Covid19, the Hindu nationalist government was arresting young students and fighting cases against lawyers, media personnel, activists, and intellectuals.
