New Delhi: Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma tweeted this on social media in response to a question on former US president Barrack Obama’s remarks on minority rights in India that the Assam police will “prioritise taking care of” the many “Hussain Obamas” in India.
“If President (Joe Biden) meets with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi, the protection of Muslim minority in a majority Hindu India is something worth mentioning,” reportedly said former American President Barack Obama on Thursday.
Obama was responding to a question by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview, on how Biden should engage with leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and PM Modi, who is considered “autocratic… illiberal democrat”
Himanta’s tweet was a banal response to social media being flooded with ex-US President Obama’s timely reminder. Obama’s comments were made against the larger background of Prime Minister Modi’s first US state visit and the growing clamour around it on the necessity to hold him accountable for human rights violations in India.
A woman journalist, Rohini Singh had earlier taunted, “Has an FIR been filed in Guwahati yet against Obama for hurting sentiment? Is Assam police on its way to Washington to get Obama offloaded from some flight and arrest him?” Singh tweeted. Singh has tweeted asking if Himanta’s line is the “official position of India.”
Assam Police is notorious for making arrests in cases where opposition leaders have been critical of Modi, against ‘defamation’ FIRs. Singh’s tweet could have been an apparent reference to an incident in February this year, police of the state deplaned senior Congress leader Pawan Khera and arrested him for allegedly using objectionable words targeting Modi. In 2022, Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani was similarly arrested over a tweet.
In response, Himanta appeared to suggest that the Assam police will “prioritise taking care” of “Hussain Obama”s in India. This apparent invocation of an Islamic first name came unprompted.
“There are many Hussain Obama in India itself. We should prioritize taking care of them before considering going to Washington. The Assam police will act according to our own priorities,” he wrote.
Himanta is the head of the North East Democratic Alliance, the coalition of parties in the northeast headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. In this capacity, he was recently sent to Manipur, which has seen brutal ethnic violence, and reported to Union home minister Amit Shah in New Delhi after the trip. In Assam, Himanta has spearheaded a series of initiatives which many activists believe and news reports say targets Muslims alone. He has also of late, since 2021, been associated with a series of Islamophobic hate remarks against the Muslim minority. His government has also launched selective drives against land encroachment and other ‘social ills.’
Himanta’s tweet came on the same day when PM Modi, in response to the only open question he has taken from a journalist in eight years, said at the White House that “there is absolutely no space for discrimination” in India.
“…[I]n India’s democratic values, there’s absolutely no discrimination neither on basis of caste, creed, or age, or any kind of geographic location,” Modi said.
The Telegraph carried a timely reminder of a timeline of Prime Minister Modi being held accountable for his government’s poor human rights and minority rights record.
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