American Islamists are calling to "rescind" an invitation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress scheduled Thursday. The Indian leader is on a three-day state visit to Washington, D.C. this week that includes an official welcome ceremony and state dinner at the White House.
"Modi and his followers adopt tactics reminiscent of the Nazi playbook in their efforts to transform India into a Hindu majoritarian nation," states a Justice for All online petition to Congress to revoke the invitation for Modi's joint address. "We urge the leaders to withdraw this invitation to Modi. The Butcher of Gujarat will perceive it as an endorsement of his repressive and fascist policies, and the United States must not be complicit in any way."
This kind of exaggerated rhetoric coming from Justice for All is no surprise. The organization not only sponsors events featuring jihad supporters, it also supports an initiative to "Save India from Indian Fascists" that pushes alarmist propaganda of a looming genocide of Muslims and other minorities in India.
Justice for All's parent company Sound Vision is an offshoot of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a U.S.-based South Asian Islamist group. Its founders support the ideology of the Sunni revivalist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), and seek to establish "Iqamat Deen" or the Islamic system of life, in North America.
The "Butcher of Gujarat" is a label hurled at Modi by his detractors who blame him for the 2002 riots in the west Indian state of Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Modi was the state chief minister at the time.
The riots were triggered by a violent Muslim mob's burning a train carrying around 1,700 karsevaks (Hindu pilgrims). Nearly 60 karsevaks, including women and children, perished in the attack.
A landmark June 2022 Indian Supreme Court ruling cleared Modi of any alleged role in the riots. Earlier, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up by the Supreme Court to probe nine cases filed in connection with the Gujarat riots did not find any "prosecutable evidence" against Modi and others accused in the conspiracy in its closure report.
"Law and order review meetings were held by Modi and all the things was done to control the situation," the report said, "[and] the Army was called on time to contain the communal violence." It added, "Modi was busy with steps to control the situation, establishment of relief camps for riot victims and also with efforts to restore peace and normalcy."
"The Gujarat narrative that was successfully peddled since 2002 was aimed at making Hindus look small and making the Muslim community over-imagine their sense of vulnerability and victimhood," writes leading Indian journalist and conservative commentator Swapan Dasgupta. "This was a narrative that was also carefully spun by a media that believed—until the outcome of 2014 at least—that it was its sacred duty to prevent a 'polarising' figure such as Modi from becoming prime minister of India."
Modi became India's prime minister in 2014 and won a landslide reelection in 2019.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling clearing Modi of a role in the riots, Islamists and their allies continue to castigate the Indian leader for his "active role" in the 2002 "pogrom" against Muslims.
In a May interview on the Georgetown University-based Bridge Initiative's "Unpacking Islamophobia" program, for instance, Kashmiri Hindu genocide denier Raqib Hameed Naik described the Muslim killings during the riots as "our mini-Rwandan genocide" that had the "seal and approval of Prime Minister Narendra Modi." He claimed "Modi's rise to power in 2014 is a direct result of anti-Muslim policies and politics that he perfected in the state of Gujarat, and his Gujarat model of hate and violence is now the Pan-India model."
Modi's visa to the U.S. was denied in 2005 after Islamists and their supporters launched a vigorous campaign to get the Indian leader barred from the country for his alleged "role" in the riots.
Islamists laud controversial BBC documentary
A controversial BBC documentary released earlier this year advances the Islamist narrative on the Gujarat riots.
The documentary drew condemnation from several quarters, including the Indian government.
"That was a very unfortunate, ill-timed and ill-informed documentary totally based on a handful of people who are anti-Modi," British parliamentarian Lord Rami Ranger told Asian News International (ANI) in a February interview. Indian foreign ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi described the documentary as a "propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative." He also accused it of "bias" and a "lack of objectivity" that reflected a "continuing colonial mindset."
The Indian government imposed a ban on the documentary, a move widely condemned by Islamists and others.
Justice for All posted on Facebook: "Modi did it. He killed 2,000+ Muslims. But he got away with murder. Now he is killing the BBC documentary which proves that he did it."
Dasgupta explains the rationale behind the ban saying, "this was a signal to others not to undermine India. It was just a way of telling those people where to get off." He also blasted the documentary.
"The central problem with the BBC documentary was not that all the unfiltered explanations were repeated but that the conclusions of the court-appointed Special Investigation Team report and the Supreme Court's rejection of charges of a criminal conspiracy were treated dismissively," Dasgupta wrote. "Indeed, those viewing the documentary were meant to conclude that Muslims in India suffer institutionalised discrimination and are second-class citizens."
Promoting alarmist rhetoric on Muslim persecution
In addition to pushing "Modi's role in an anti-Muslim pogrom," Islamists have alleged widespread persecution of Muslims and other religious minorities under the Modi administration.
"The evidence of Modi's expanding effort to place a boot firmly on the collective heads of India's religious minorities is extensive," states a June 13 Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) action alert. "CAIR has already noted that under Modi his political allies have banned young Muslim women from wearing hijabs at school, ignored widespread lynchings of Muslims, and censored a BBC documentary about Modi's role in an anti-Muslim pogrom."
India's hijab controversy erupted in December 2021 after female students at an all-girls pre-university government college (equivalent to U.S. high school) in Udupi, a city in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka, were denied permission to attend classes wearing the hijab.
In a wildly overblown response to the controversy, Justice for All called on its readers to sign a petition asking the United Nations to "Save India from Fascism."
"Muslim girls in India are facing a deep crisis," the petition said, "[t]hey are being forced to choose between their education and their faith. This is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, as well as the Indian Constitution."
School authorities said that the ban on hijabs in the classroom had been in effect for 35 years without issue. They believed the girls were acting under the "influence" of the Campus Front of India (CFI).
CFI is the student wing of the now-banned radical Islamist Popular Front of India (PFI) that has been implicated in the 2020 Delhi riots that left 53 dead and over 200 injured.
In March 2022, the Karnataka high court upheld the ban on hijabs in state educational institutions on grounds that wearing the hijab is not an essential practice of Islam. But in October the Supreme Court delivered a split ruling on the issue. The case is now with the Chief Justice who may list it before a larger bench to decide.
Muslim women are free to wear the hijab, veils, and burqas (full face and body covering) in public spaces in India.
Interestingly the same groups criticizing the hijab ban were silent when earlier this month a local school in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh generated controversy because Hindu and Jain students were reportedly "forced to follow Islamic religious practices and wear hijab at the school."
CAIR claims Modi "ignored widespread lynchings of Muslims." But it's not Muslims alone who have been lynched by vigilante cow-protection groups; Hindus too have faced lynchings by Islamist and other extremists.
American Islamists have also misreported violence during Hindu religious processions by painting Muslims as hapless victims of attacks perpetrated by Hindus.
"It is unacceptable that some [Hindu] extremists in India are using Hindu festivals to terrorize Indian Muslims," said Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) Executive Director Rasheed Ahmed in an April 3 press release. "It is profoundly alarming that these acts of large-scale violence are premeditated, organized and committed in the presence and full knowledge of the police, who according to numerous video reports, are doing nothing to stop them."
Evidence gathered from news reports and social media videos, however, shows the involvement of Islamist radicals in the violence that is depicted by IAMC and others as one-sided Hindu aggression. A 2022 OpIndia report lists several examples from recent years of violence perpetrated on Hindu religious processions by stone-pelting Islamists.
But American Islamists continue to push a biased portrayal of India's religious strife. The new calls to Congress to boycott Modi's joint address by making over-the-top allegations of "The Nazification of India" and equating "pogrom of Muslims in India" with "pogroms in Nazi Germany" is yet another attempt by them to attack Indian democracy and its legally-elected government by distorting facts and propagating myths.