BJP using COVID19 against Muslims as Nazis-like tactic: Arundhati Roy

Renowned Indian novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy compared the BJP government with Nazis and said the Indian government was exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

In an interview with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), she said the strategy employed by Modi-led Hindu nationalist government would “dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on”.

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“The situation is approaching genocidal,” she warned, adding that the coronavirus pandemic was putting India's fault lines on full display.

“I think what has happened is COVID-19 has exposed things about India that all of us knew," said Roy. "We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger."

Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, in an interview with DW, has accused Modi's government of using the COVID-19 crisis to incite hatred towards Muslims, saying the situation is 'approaching genocide.' pic.twitter.com/cOIhb7GW9j

— DW News (@dwnews) April 17, 2020

"This crisis of hatred against Muslims,” she continued, "comes on the back of a massacre in Delhi, which was a result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship law. Under the cover of COVID-19 the government is moving to arrest young students, to fight cases against lawyers, against senior editors, against activists and intellectuals. Some of them have recently been put in jail."

Roy said the government was exploiting the virus in a tactic reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

“The whole of the organisation, the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to which Modi belongs, which is the mother ship of the BJP, has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using COVID, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to get ghettoize them, to stigmatize them.”