Religious intolerance in India
Mr DONNELLAN (Narre Warren North) (12:28): I wish to raise two particular issues on behalf of my broad-based multicultural community specifically in relation to the high levels of intolerance which appear to be playing out throughout India in politics, specifically in relation to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the continuing persecution of minority religions, whether it be Islam or another religion in that country. Nowhere has this persecution been worse than in Uttar Pradesh. In May an 18-year-old vegetable seller named Faisal Hussain was reportedly beaten to death by three police officers for violating COVID-19 restrictions. There were a lot of others selling vegetables, his sister said. Why did the police particularly single him out? Would he be dead if he was Hindu? Three months later a Muslim rickshaw driver was beaten and paraded in front of a mob chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’, a nationalistic mantra praising the Hindu god. A video of the attack went viral, showing the driver’s young daughter clinging to her father and begging for the crowd to stop. Later that month a Muslim dosa vendor was assailed after he was accused of concealing his religion from Hindu customers.
This is not the India that I travelled through in the 1990s, a country with enormous levels of tolerance and a country which for hundreds of years had welcomed faiths from all parts of the world. It is greatly concerning that this level of intolerance continues to be reported far and wide internationally.