Activists Testify in Congress on Violence Against India’s Minorities (Sikhs)

File photo of human rights activist Angana Chatterji, who testified at a congressional hearing. (Get

• IndiaSeveral Indian American activists denounced the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat and mass killings in Kashmir and Orissa at a Mar. 21 congressional hearing before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.
  
  Approximately 70,000 residents have died in Kashmir, including through “fake encounter” executions, custodial brutality, and other means, noted human rights activist Angana Chatterji, also alleging that another 8,000 have been “involuntarily disappeared.”
   
  Civil rights lawyers have reportedly filed 15,000 petitions since 1990, inquiring, largely unsuccessfully, into the location and health of detainees and the charges against them, she said.
   
  “There is urgent need for supporting the human rights of the affected civilian population as they live with the effects of the conflict, and holding all parties to the conflict (state and non-state) accountable in accordance with international standards,” said Chatterji, a former professor of humanities at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Calif.
   
  Kashmir has the distinction of being the most heavily militarized zone in the world, with one soldier for every 10 residents, according to reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have monitored the region and documented human rights violations by Indian military forces there.
   
  Last year, a special investigation team in Jammu and Kashmir reported the discovery of 2,730 bodies dumped in unmarked mass graves around the region.
   
  “For years, Kashmiris have been lamenting their lost loved ones, their pleas ignored or dismissed as the government and army claimed that they had gone to Pakistan to become militants,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in August 2011, after the police team’s report was made public. “But these graves suggest the possibility of mass murder. The authorities should immediately investigate each and every death,” she said.
   
  Chatterji also denounced the mass-scale violence against Christian minorities in Orissa in 2008, when thousands of homes and churches were torched, and 92 people murdered.
   
  “The violence was planned, premeditated, and that the police had prior knowledge of them,” she alleged, also noting in her congressional testimony the violence against Sikhs following the 1984 murder of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
  Najid Hussain, president of the Ahsan Jafri Foundation, named for his father-in-law who was killed in the 2002 Gujarat riots, testified that violence against religious minorities has become something of a norm in the mindset of modern India, attributable to a rise in Hindu nationalism – Hindutva.
   
  MP Ahsan Jafri was killed in the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat that began when a Muslim mob Feb. 27 attacked a train returning from Ayodhya, and killed an estimated 60 Hindu pilgrims. A wave of anti-Muslim violence set off across the state, killing an estimated 2,000 people in its wake, and left 10,000 displaced, according to a U.S. State Department report (I-W, Mar. 7). Civil rights organizations have long alleged that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was not only aware of the violence but himself complicit in the attacks. Modi was denied a U.S. visa in 2005.
   
  “For the riots that followed the coach-burning, killing more than 2000 innocent Gujarati Muslims, not even a handful of arrests been made,” alleged Hussain. 
   
  Hussain urged Congress to use its influence to have India bring justice to the victims of the Gujarat riots and provide relief to those left homeless by the violence.
   
  Rep. Keith Ellison Mar. 1 introduced legislation in the House denouncing the Gujarat riots. HR 569, a non-binding resolution, has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
   
  The commission, named for the late, long-time Congressman Tom Lantos, is co-chaired by James McGovern, D-Mass., and Frank Wolf, R-Virginia.
   
  Meanwhile, the Hindu American Foundation had protested the invitation to Chatterji to speak at the hearing for her “virulently anti-Hindu and anti-India positions,” according to its press release. "
   
  Chatterji is not a credible witness due to her connections to organizations that are counter to American foreign interests," said Samir Kalra, HAF's San Francisco, Calif.-based director.