by ANITA JOSHUA
Celebrated thinker Noam Chomsky on Wednesday said the “pathology of Islamophobia”, now growing throughout the West, was “taking its most lethal form in India where the Modi government is systematically dismantling Indian secular democracy and turning the country into a Hindu ethnocracy”.
Chomsky’s comments came in a recorded message to a congressional briefing — the third in a month organised by US-based diaspora organisations on communalism in India.
This time the focus was on “worsening hate speech and violence in India”. Chomsky was to be one of the speakers but sent a recorded message as did activist Harsh Mander of Karwan-e-Mohabbat.
In his short message, Chomsky spoke also on the attacks on independent thought and the education system besides the situation in Kashmir, which he said “is now occupied territory… similar in some ways to occupied Palestine”. He also referred to the situation in Pakistan and the rest of the region.
Mander said: “India finds itself today in a frighteningly dark and violent space of fear and hate.”
He spoke about how modern India’s founding fathers had made the conscious choice not to go the Pakistan way of letting a religion define the country.
On the “Hindutva project”, he said it “requires a radical, violent rupture between India’s Hindus and those of the hated ‘others’ that it constructs: India’s Muslims and India’s Christians”.
Telegraph India for more