Press Statement By Hena Zuberi – Director, Justice for All, Washington DC

I, or my family have not been able to contact our relatives in India for days. Entire Muslim neighborhoods are empty in Uttar Pradesh, India, fearing mob violence and police brutality. More than 23 people have been killed by police.

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I, or my family have not been able to contact our relatives in India for days. Entire Muslim neighborhoods are empty in Uttar Pradesh, India, fearing mob violence and police brutality. More than 23 people have been killed by police.

Phone calls are being tapped by the government. People are scared to get in touch with relatives overseas.

The last message I received from my cousin. I will not share his name or location for fear of reprisal: pray for humanity. Stand with the truth.

Extremist RSS mobs and police are working hand in hand. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the armed militia which controls India today. This is the militia, which killed Gandhi.

Just last night, when an RSS mob welding sticks and rods attacked students and professors at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) the police stood by instead of stopping the masked RSS members from attacking unarmed people at the most prestigious university in the capital city of India.

Hundreds of Muslims have been threatened with seizure of property by the Hindu nationalist government in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 40 million Muslims over the demonstrations against the Citizenship Act. Arbitrary arrests of thousands of Muslims, torture, combined with unpayable fines have left people in a state of palpable fear.

The rise of fascism in India has affected people in all realms of daily life.
Many Indians are worried, especially the under-privileged, that they will not be able to prove their citizenship under these new laws.

People are frantically trying to get their paperwork in order. However, many do not have access to documents, especially women who are often recognized by the papers of the men in Indian households. A small spelling mistake could deprive one of citizenship.

Having worked on getting the Rohingya genocide internationally recognized, Justice For All fears for Indian Muslims — we know the early signs when we see them.

RSS is a right-wing, nationalist paramilitary, Hindu nationalist organization in India, formed in 1925 and modeled after the Nazi movement in Germany. Ever since its inception, it has been involved in numerous acts of violence and vandalism targeting India’s religious minorities like Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

Gandhi was assassinated by a member of RSS. Members of this group were involved in anti-Sikh Pogrom in 1984 when more than twenty-five thousand Sikhs were massacred all over India. This group also destroyed the historic Babri Mosque in 1992 and after the demolition of that mosque, thousands of Muslims were massacred all over India.

Justice For All and its allies ask the U.S. Secretary of State to designate RSS as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) and demand all funding to RSS, via its various fronts, be stopped from the United States.

We also ask the House and Senate foreign relations committees to urgently visit India on a fact-finding mission since the Indian media is not fully reporting the real situation. Until India allows such a fact-finding mission to visit India, the US should withhold any further trade negotiations with India.

Hena Zuberi
Hena@justiceforall.org
626-354-2367

Justice For All is a human rights organization based in Chicago, with Consultative Status at the United Nations (DPI) and staff and volunteers in Washington DC, New York, Boston, Texas and other locations. The organization advocates for the global strengthening of human rights and has been instrumental in shaping the discourse around the ‘genocide’ debate in the U.S.