The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

Amb. Stephen Rapp on How the Ground Is Being Prepared for Ethnic Cleansing in India

“The non-stop incitement and conduct of anti-Muslim violence, in the absence of any accountability for perpetrators, has resulted in the normalization of persecution.”

Screenshot of a now-deleted Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) video showing Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma aiming a gun at Muslim men with a caption ‘POINT BLANK SHOT.’

Anti-Muslim violence in India is not a recent phenomenon. However, since 2014, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power with a strong mandate, the systematic and widespread targeting of Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, has assumed alarming proportions. Muslims are being beaten and lynched. Their homes and shops are being bulldozed and their livelihoods destroyed. Their way of living, cultural and religious practices are being systematically undermined. Muslims are routinely dehumanized even by top political leaders, who publicly incite violence against them. Laws have been enacted to strip Muslims of their Indian citizenship.

Worryingly, the violent, widespread, and systematic targeting of Muslims is being orchestrated with the active support of state institutions. As the recently released Report of The Panel of Independent International Experts to Examine Information About Alleged Violations of International Law Committed Against Muslims in Assam and Uttar Pradesh, India—2022–25 noted, there is “credible evidence of widespread and systematic human rights violations against Muslims, and reasonable grounds to believe that international crimes, including persecution, torture, and deportation as crimes against humanity, may have been committed.”  The study, which focused on the situation in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, pointed out that the chief ministers of these two states could be preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing.

Stephen Rapp, one of the three members of the Panel that carried out this study, told The Diplomat’s South Asia editor, Sudha Ramachandran, that the hate speech and persecution of Muslims may amount to a crime against humanity. A former chief of prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; chief prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, Rapp drew attention to the “normalization of anti-Muslim violence in India, where everyday violence and open calls to violence have become routinized.” India can draw lessons from the Balkans, he said, where “the descent into mass violence” began not with the war but with “narratives, and with the gradual normalization of the idea that coexistence was no longer viable.”

The report says that persecution of Muslims in the states of Assam and Uttar Pradesh may constitute apartheid, preparation for ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.  Could you throw light on the situation in these two states?

From the material we have examined, Assam and Uttar Pradesh have witnessed the most serious abuses by state actors. These include extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and torture and ill-treatment of Muslims. Across these states, authorities are also reported to be resorting to various reprisals as collective punishment against minorities and dissenters, on various pretexts. These states are also the hotbeds of anti-minority incitement and violence, with Hindu militant groups aligned to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — including groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), recently recommended for sanctions by USCIRF, and its affiliates, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Congress) and Bajrang  Dal (the Army of Hanuman) and various “cow protection” gangs — holding much sway and working in tandem with local authorities to target Muslims and other minorities.

Uttar Pradesh has been ruled by the BJP since 2017. Its government is led by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu supremacist and a monk, who has a long history of anti-Muslim baiting, including inciting hate and violence, founding violent groups, and mobilizing Hindutva actors to target Muslims and other minorities. In Assam, it is again the state Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP, in power since 2021, who plays that role, having made anti-Muslim targeting the core of his polarizing politics.

These men have used their leadership of state governments to implement the BJP’s Hindu-first ideology, with a range of discriminatory laws, policies, and programs. This has effectively licensed widespread violations and abuses of the human rights of Muslims by both public and private actors, including through physical violence.

How are the chief ministers of Assam and Uttar Pradesh preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing?

The series of public statements by Assam Chief Minister Sarma raises sufficiently serious concerns under Article III(c) of the Genocide Convention and Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute to warrant further independent investigation. Direct and public incitement is an inchoate crime, punishable even in the absence of a completed genocide, and requires public and direct encouragement of the destruction, in whole or in part, of a protected group, accompanied by specific intent that the group be destroyed in whole or in part.

The material we have reviewed indicates that, across multiple speeches and public communications, Sarma repeatedly portrayed Bengali-speaking Muslims as “infiltrators” and an existential threat, invoked imagery of setting “fire,” framed events as a “last battle of survival,” and called for conditions to be “explosive” while facilitating arms licenses for Hindus in predominantly Muslim areas. Delivered at rallies, to the press, and through mass media, these statements were public in nature and direct in form, and would readily be understood by their intended audience as referring to Bengali-speaking Muslims. When assessed against the broader context documented in this report, it is clear that the content of the speeches meets the threshold required for the crime of direct and public incitement to genocide.

It is less clear whether Chief Minister Sarma can reasonably be regarded as displaying genocidal intention (that the targeted group be destroyed in whole or in part), though his words do expressly support ethnic cleansing. While the Panel does not find specific intent in relation to genocide, we emphasize that India’s erga omnes obligation to prevent genocide is both salient and extremely urgent in these circumstances – warranting urgent measures to hold the chief minister accountable and stop such violence-inciting speech in the future.

Do you find a similar pattern at the national level?

By focusing on Assam and Uttar Pradesh, we wanted to highlight how government practices, laws, and majoritarian mobilization — in sum, majoritarian governance — have advanced the furthest in the two states, amidst similar trends setting in other BJP-ruled states, nationally. The focus on Assam and Uttar Pradesh is also important because the two states are central to the situation of Muslims in India.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath, September 23, 2023.Wikimedia/Prime Minister’s Office

Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest province; Muslims (44 million, 2011 Census) make up close to 20 percent of its population, the largest Muslim population in the country. Likewise, Muslims in Assam, at some 11 million (2011 Census), constitute close to 35 percent of that state’s total population, with Muslims forming a majority in 11 out of its total 27 districts.

How do your findings in the latest report compare to those in the previous report that was published in 2022?

Since the publication of the Panel’s 2022 report, human rights abuses against Muslims in India seem to have continued apace and arguably worsened. In the three years since, Muslims have been reported suffering widespread targeting by militant Hindu groups and frequent crackdowns by authorities, especially in BJP-ruled states — including extrajudicial killings, torture, and arbitrary detentions. There also seems to be a pattern emerging of large-scale targeting of Muslims for physical destruction, often in reprisal as collective punishment, in the form of arbitrary demolition of homes and businesses, mass evictions, and removal from........

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