Hindu-nationalism vs. Amnesty International:

Amnesty International India asks employees to work from home

With protests expected to reach their door step, Amnesty International India has informed their employees to work from their homes on Thursday.

Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which has intensified their protests against the human rights organisations for alleged anti-national slogans raised during a recent programme, was scheduled to gather at Amnesty’s Indira Nagar office. Pre-empting the protest, local police officials requested the office to remain shut - while a large number of police personnel stood guard outside the office. Around 86 employees worked out of the office on Thursday.

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Wikipedia sez this about ABVP:

ABVP is a right-wing all India student organisation affiliated to the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It participates in joint activities with BJP’s official youth wing, Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha.[2][3] It claims to be India’s largest student organisation.[

Over the last week or so I’ve been posting about Hindu extremists attacking beef-eating Dalits, and the accusations that the BJP is not doing enough to counter that.

This time, Amnesty is in the crosshairs, because they have been noting what is going on in Kashmir. And Amnesty is apparently getting under the skin of some Indians:

Sedition charge is silly but Amnesty’s moth-eaten credibility has taken further beating

The row over the sedition charge — an archaic and colonial law that needs to be scrapped without delay — has taken away from the core questions surrounding Amnesty International India’s programme on Independence Day where it sought to flag the Indian state’s human rights violations in Kashmir. This was the first part of a multi-city event designed to draw attention to New Delhi’s alleged excesses in the strife-torn region.

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So what could Amnesty possibly do that was so horrible?

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Amnesty’s shtick is that it is a non-partisan institution. Its entire moral legitimacy stems from that premise. Was it innocent to the response such an event with blatant political overtones might trigger especially at a time when India is battling a secessionist struggle fuelled by an aggressive neighbouring country that uses terrorism as state policy?

While Amnesty is well within its rights to flag reports of excesses by Indian security forces in Kashmir, the Bengaluru event went much beyond that. There was a talk show, video screening, theatre performance and even a performance by a Kashmiri hip-hop artiste.

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Oh dear… a theatre performance and a hip-hop artist.

And look at how this writer develops his argument that what Amnesty did was wrong:

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Amnesty will fool no one if, in this case, it seeks to hide behind the ruse of “freedom of speech and expression”. In the wake of Charlie Hebdo killings, it held that freedom of expression “is not absolute and it may be subject to certain restrictions…”

Patel, executive director of its India chapter, had written in a Livemint column in 2012, Learnt in Godhra, forgotten in Jaipur that “the critical learning was that freedom of speech in India must be regulated” in the context of the Salman Rushdie affair in Jaipur. Elsewhere in the column, he wrote: “The damage is done by a Hindi-medium world view. Trying to fight it with English-medium tools will end in frustration. This is why a debate about free speech here has no meaning. All these things dissolve to nothing in the knowledge that a real price is extracted for this freedom. The men who read Rushdie aloud in Jaipur and fled after lighting the fuse were neither brave nor considerate. Such deliberate mischief has consequences.”

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More collapsing worldviews colliding.