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Hindutva mascot Modi prepares for UK
visit
But Human Rights lobby is set dead against it
WSN Network
 LONDON/AHMEDABAD: Even as focussed and Supreme
Court-supervised investigations into killings of Muslims in
Gujarat in 2002 are
increasingly bringing out the role of the Narendra Modi
administration, the Gujarat Chief Minister seems to be readying for
a visit to Britain sometime in May, a move that is likely to shock
human rights activists all over the world.
Modi, it is learnt, is planning to attend the 'India Summit
2009' scheduled for May 19-20, 2009, despite the fact that earlier,
the United States had rejected his visa in 2005 due to his
involvement in mass massacres of Muslims and has since not relented.
Modi had been assiduously trying to cultivate western governments
and industry tycoons to wash off the stigma but at the same time, he
has also been keeping up his anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The
Gujarat genocide of Muslims was widely compared to the massacre of
hundreds of Sikhs in
Delhi and elsewhere in 1984, and just as the
RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal leaders led the killer mobs in
Gujarat, so had the
Congress leaders done in Delhi. Indian courts, which are infamously
slow and often apathetic, are still pursuing some of the cases,
thanks to the doggedness of a few good men and women. The story in
Gujarat is no different.
But a visa to Modi by the
United Kingdom and
a visit to London will harm the cause of the human rights
everywhere, experts and activists now argue. They had hoped that
London will refrain from sending such signals, particularly after
the attacks on and killings of Christians in the BJP-ruled Orissa
where some 1000 Churches were demolished or burned down, nuns were
raped, men were burnt alive and others murdered or forcefully
converted to Hinduism.
The world was outraged at this act and the European Union
alongside the French and the Pope openly expressed their opposition
and disgust at what occured and what is occuring within
India.
Large sections of the South Asian community in
Britain itself
maintain that they can do better than see Modi on the British soil.
They say community relations between South Asians, Muslims,
Sikhs,Christians, who have all been victims of Hindutva, with the
Hindus will come under strain as the shrill and noisy segment of the
Hindutva forces appropriates to itself the sole right to speak on
behalf of the Hindu community.
Britain based Dal
Khalsa has already demanded that Modi be stopped from entering the
country as it will give a blow to the
UK's
image internationally. "If he does attempt to enter the UK at any
time, he should be arrested on the spot and tried in an
international court of law for his crimes against humanity," the Dal
Khalsa said in a statement.
25
February 2009
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