The U.S. State Department on Thursday condemned “offensive comments” about Islam’s Muhammad made by two officials from India’s ruling BJP party.
The State Department had nothing to say about the violent protests unleashed by Indian Muslims after the comments in question or about the insulting comments made against the Hindu religion during the televised debate that touched off the crisis in India.
The question asked of State Department spokesman Ned Price by a Pakistani reporter was:
A few weeks ago, members of Indian ruling party BJP made demeaning comments about Prophet Mohammed. On this, there are protests going on in India, while the houses of protesting Muslims are being bulldozed. Would you like to say something about these hate crimes committed by Indian Government against Muslims and other minorities?
Price’s response implicitly endorsed the “anti-blasphemy” protests and briefly applauded the Indian government for “condemning” the remarks:
Well, this is something that we’ve condemned. We condemn the offensive comments made by two BJP officials, and we were glad to see that the party publicly condemned those comments. We regularly engage with the Indian Government at senior levels on human rights concerns, including freedom of religion or belief, and we encourage India to promote respect for human rights.
The Secretary [Antony Blinken] said when he was last in New Delhi, last year, that the Indian people and the American people, we believe in the same values: human dignity, human respect, equality of opportunity, and the freedom of religion or belief. These are fundamental tenets, these are fundamental values within any democracy, and we speak up for them around the world.
BJP did more than just “condemn” the remarks – it suspended one of the officials involved for six years and sacked the other. This did not mollify BJP’s critics. Muslim protests have been escalating steadily over the past two weeks, including violence and vandalism.
As Price mentioned, the Indian government’s response to the protests has been escalating as well, including what critics denounce as “bulldozer justice” – destroying the homes of protest leaders.
Quite a few non-Muslims in India are uncomfortable with the bulldozer tactic, as the Associated Press (AP) reported on Thursday:
“The demolitions are a gross violation of constitutional norms and ethics,” Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a specialist on Hindu nationalist politics and biographer of Modi, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, 12 prominent people, including former Supreme Court and High Court judges and lawyers, sent a letter to India’s chief justice urging him to hold a hearing on the demolitions, calling them illegal and “a form of collective extrajudicial punishment.” They accused the Uttar Pradesh government of suppressing dissent by using violence against protesters.
The BBC on Thursday reported “millions” of views for a viral video that showed Indian police using rods to beat a group of nine Muslim prisoners, who scream in pain with every audible impact of the cudgels:
Police documents said the detainees were charged with “rioting, instigating violence, voluntarily causing hurt to deter a public servant, and endangering life.” No disciplinary action against the officers has been announced. The video went viral because a BJP member shared it, describing the beating as a “return gift for rioters.”
Other videos of Indian police using abusive tactics against Muslim protesters are making the rounds on social media:
The Hindustan Times noted that Muslim governments “including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iran” have officially denounced the comments about Muhammad made by the two BJP officials, Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal. The Indian government pushed back against some of these denunciations, especially from its rival Pakistan and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Largely forgotten in this spiral of denunciation and destruction are the details of the original incident, which occurred on an Indian talk show three weeks ago. The televised discussion of a complex dispute over the reported discovery of an ancient Hindu religious sculpture inside a Muslim mosque devolved into the Hindu and Muslim guests saying some rather insensitive things about each other’s religious beliefs.
There does not seem to be much international condemnation for the unkind comments made about Hindus during this raucous debate, only Muslim outrage over BJP spokeswoman Nupur Sharma sarcastically quoting the passage from the Quran in which Muhammad’s bride Aisha states she was six years old when she married the fifty-something prophet, and nine years old when the marriage was consummated.
“What Nupur Sharma said was due to constant provocation from Muslim speakers during a TV debate, and her remarks were made in the heat of the moment, but Muslims do not have the right to threaten her and call for her murder,” a BJP spokesman said on Thursday, alluding to the death threats Sharma and Jindal have reported receiving.
Muslim protesters burn an image of now suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma during a protest against the comments made by her on Prophet Muhammad, at Park Circus Seven points crossing on June 10, 2022, in Kolkata, India. (Samir Jana/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
As for Jindal, he was fired from his media position with BJP for a now-deleted Twitter post several days after Sharma’s interview, which he described as “asking a question to those attacking and insulting Hindu deities.” His question was, in essence, “Why are you Muslims making fun of my religion when your prophet Muhammad married a child?”
Jindal said he wrote his tweet after receiving thousands of taunting and goading messages from “Muslim radicals” in the wake of Sharma’s TV appearance. He said he apologized and deleted his tweet when he saw the outraged response.
“I was tagged and targeted by Muslim radicals for five days after Nupur’s incident took place. Every day, I was tagged more than 300 times. And the dirtiest of things were said about Hindu gods and goddesses. Who can tolerate it? I could not and issued a rebuttal in a refined language,” he said in a June 9 interview.
In another interview, Jindal suggested he has been targeted by an international Islamist conspiracy since he was “not a famous person on social media,” but his tweet was quickly translated into Arabic and spread among Muslims. He also said his tweet was deliberately mistranslated to make it “appear worse and abusive.”