China will boycott upcoming G20 meeting in Kashmir, conditions in the region described as “Guantanamo”
China has announced that it will boycott the upcoming G20 meeting to be hosted by India in Kashmir, which remains under brutal military control.
“China firmly opposes holding any form of G20 meeting in disputed areas and China will not attend such a meeting,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Webin.
India’s control over the region has only tightened ahead of the G20, says Kashmiri politician Mehbooba Mufti.
“To tell you the truth, if you visit Kashmir today you will see that the place which was converted to an open-air prison [following the abrogation of Article 370] has been converted to ‘Guantanamo’… Even houses have been taken over. Homes have been taken over. There is three-, four-, five-tier security… Everything at homes is being turned upside down,” Mufti said.
The G20 meeting is the first international event to be held in Muslim-majority Kashmir since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stripped the region of its semi-autonomous special status, which had been provided by Article 370 of the Indian constitution.
Activists have slammed this meeting as a way for the Indian government to sanitize its ongoing human rights abuses against Kashmiris. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, also criticized the G20 meeting.
In a statement, Varennes said that the G20 is “unwittingly providing a veneer of support to a facade of normalcy” in Kashmir at a time when “massive human rights violations, illegal and arbitrary arrests, political persecutions, restrictions and even suppression of free media and human rights defenders continue to escalate.”
Karnataka Deputy CM blasts police force for internal Hindu supremacy
Karnataka state’s new Deputy Chief Minister, D.K. Shivakumar, put the state’s police officials on blast during a meeting for normalizing Hindu supremacy among the police force and colluding with the previous BJP government to provide immunity to Hindu extremists.
“Are you all set to saffronize the police department? We will not allow it under our government,” Shivakumar stated while addressing the meeting of high-level police officers.
Saffronizing is another term for normalizing Hindu supremacy.
“We know how police officers came to the police station wearing saffron shawls,” Shivakumar said, referring to the trend of Hindu supremacists wearing saffron shawls to protest against Muslim women’s right to wear the hijab.
“You have destroyed the honor, dignity of the department,” he added. “You danced to [the BJP’s] tunes and colluded with them… We will not carry forward hatred. We don’t believe in it. You change yourself and start the work afresh and give peace to people.”
Under the BJP, the Karnataka law enforcement and judiciary dropped prosecution of 182 criminal cases relating to anti-Muslim hate speech, cow vigilantism, and communal violence between 2019 and 2023. The move to drop these cases resulted in more than 1,000 Hindu extremists and hate mongers being freed.
Hindu extremists claim Muslims are lacing biryani sold to Hindus with contraceptives
Nine Twitter handles run by Hindu extremists have been booked for claiming that Muslim biryani vendors lace food sold to Hindus with contraceptives as “biryani jihad.”
“Biryani is cooked in separate vessels for Muslims & Hindus. The Biryani for Hindus is laced with tablets that makes one impotent,” one tweet read, including a doctored image of white tablets in a pot of biryani rice. “Beware! They’re getting at you in every possible way.”
The false news caused “biryani jihad” to trend on social media platforms.
