In UN, India is vocal on ‘anti-Hindu phobia’.

India flags ‘anti-Hindu phobia’, ambassador to UN says global terror strategy is selective.

India Today Web Desk | New Delhi | Jan 20, 2022:: India’s ambassador to the United Nations TS Tirumurti has urged the world body to recognise ‘Hinduphobia’ along with religious hatred against Buddhism and Sikhism in the global fight against terrorism. Tirumurti said the United Nations’ latest Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) adopted last year was flawed and selective.

Delivering a keynote address at the virtual conference of the Delhi-based Global Counter-Terrorism Centre (GCTC), Tirumurti said, “Emergence of contemporary forms of religiophobia, especially anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh phobias is a matter of serious concern and needs attention of the UN and all member states to address this threat.”

Tirumurti was referring to the seventh review of the GCTS passed by the UN General Assembly in June 2021. He said only religious phobias against Islam, Christianity and Judaism found place in the global terror strategy.

He said, “In the past two years, several member states, driven by their political, religious and other motivations, have been trying to label terrorism into categories such as racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism, violent nationalism, right wing extremism, etc. This tendency is dangerous for several reasons.”

Tirumurti said the UNSC should be “guard against new terminologies and false priorities that can dilute our focus”.

He said, “Terrorists are terrorists. There are no good and bad ones. Those who propagate this distinction have an agenda. And, those who cover up for them are just as culpable.”

At the GCTC, Tirumurti said he was speaking as India’s ambassador to the UN and not in his capacity as chairperson of the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) for 2022. India became the CTC chair earlier this month and the tenure ends in December this year.

This is not the first time that India has flagged ‘Hinduphobia’ urging the UN to take note of religious hatred against Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. In October 2021, Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan told the UNSC, “We are witnessing how member-states are facing newer form of religious phobias.

“While we have condemned anti-semitism, Islamophobia and Christianophobia, we fail to recognise that there are more virulent forms of religious phobias emerging and taking roots, including anti- Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh phobias.”

Earlier in December 2020, India’s first secretary in the permanent mission to the UN Ashish Sharma said, “This august body [UN] fails to acknowledge the rise of hatred and violence against Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism also.”

“The shattering of the iconic Bamiyan Buddha by fundamentalists, the terrorist bombing of the Sikh gurudwara in Afghanistan where 25 Sikh worshippers were killed and the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples and minority cleansing of these religions by countries, calls for condemning such acts against these religions also. But the current member-states refuse to speak of these religions in the same breath as the first three ‘Abrahamic’ religions.”

This “selective” concern for phobias against the “Abrahamic religions” Judaism, Christianity and Islam was raised by Tirumurti in his speech once again at the GCTC conference.

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Courtesy: India Today.