India using coronavirus against Muslims as typhus used against Jews: Arundhati

• She said the Indian government was exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims and as a tactic reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
• 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, she said.

ISLAMABAD: Indian novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy while calling Indian treatment of Muslims amid COVID-19 pandemic as genocidal, said India was using coronavirus against them just like typhus was used against the Jews to get ghettoize them.

In an interview with DW Television on Friday, Roy said the Indian government was exploiting COVID-19 to ramp up its suppression of Muslims.

She said the Indian government was exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims and as a tactic reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

She said the whole of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to which Modi belonged, which was the mother ship of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had 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,” she said.

She viewed that the very strategy on part of the Hindu nationalist government would "dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on," adding that "the situation is approaching genocidal."

She said COVID-19 had exposed things about India. "We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger."

India's 1.3 billion people are currently in the midst of a six-week nationwide lockdown. The world's second-most populous nation has so far confirmed 13,835 infections of the novel coronavirus, resulting in 452 deaths, according to figures from the Johns Hopkins Institute. It is often cited as a country where the gap between official numbers and real case numbers could be particularly high.

Arundhati Roy, who in another media interview, had called the ongoing Muslim’s victimisation as Indian version of coronavirus, said the crisis of hatred against Muslims came on the back of a massacre in Delhi, which was the result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship law.

She observed that under the cover of COVID-19, the Indian government was 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, she added.