Hindu Extremists Assault Muslim Family That Refused To Leave Home In Madhya Pradesh State

Indian Paramilitary Shoots Muslim Man, Buries Body Refusing To Give It To Family

Hindus for Human Rights Writes to Department of Education in Support of Anti-Hindutva Academic Conference

Hindu Extremists Attack Muslim Family: The Indian American Muslim Council condemns the attack by Hindu extremists on a Muslim family in a village in Madhya Pradesh state on October 9 (Saturday). Shockingly, the police have filed criminal charges against the Muslim victims themselves on fictitious charges.

The attackers had been threatening the Muslim family for weeks giving them an ultimatum to abandon their home and leave the Hindu-majority village near Indore city. According to reports, the mob chanted Hindu religious slogans and beat the Muslims with iron rods. The Muslim family works as blacksmiths and runs an agricultural repair workshop. It is condemnable that the police have failed to make any arrests.

Paramilitary Kills, Buries Muslim Man in Kashmir: IAMC condemns the murder of a 26-year-old Muslim man, Parvez Ahmed Khan by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district on October 7 (Thursday). While the CRPF have claimed that Khan was shot when a vehicle he was sitting in did not stop for a security check, Khan’s family has rejected that claim. That the CRPF refused to hand over Khan’s body to his family and instead buried him on their own suggests foul play in his killing.

IAMC supports the demand of Khan’s father that the Indian authorities immediately institute an impartial inquiry into the ghastly murder of a man who was the sole breadwinner for not just his wife and children, but also for his younger siblings and older parents. India’s security forces have killed thousands of Kashmiri men and women without cause over years.

HfHR Backs Anti-Hindutva Conference: Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), a US-based progressive Hindu organization that is opposed to Hindu extremism, has written to the US Department of Education opposing the “mis-characterization” of the international conference ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives’—held between September 10 and 12 and supported by more than 50 global universities—and the threats issued to its organizers, scholars and the participants by various US-based Hindutva groups. In a letter addressed to the department’s Office for Civil Rights on October 8, the HfHR opposed the sustained campaign of misrepresenting and discrediting the conference and the Hindu American Foundation’s (HAF) complaint against the University of Pennsylvania for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights, Act 1964.

The HAF had asked the office of civil rights to investigate whether the University of Pennsylvania, one of the co-sponsors of the conference, and its department of South Asia Studies, South Asia Center, “created a hostile environment for students and faculty of Indian and Hindu descent, and whether the same entities and individuals misused any federal funds”. In its letter, the HfHR wrote that the “latest Title VI complaint represents a continuation of this attempt to thwart academic freedom” and asked Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Suzanne Goldberg and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Enforcement Randolph Wills to be “aware that many progressive Hindu and Indian Americans join us in disagreeing with those who have expressed discontent with the conference”.

“Hindutva-aligned groups are opposed to any critical inquiry of Hindutva and have long opposed the conference, labeling it as “anti-India” and “anti-Hindu”. Such a characterization clearly betrays a deliberate conflation of Hindutva ideology with Hinduism perhaps to co-opt the community into falsely believing that the conference is directed against Hinduism. However, such groups cannot claim to speak for all Hindus,” the letter states.