Internationally acclaimed expert Dr Greggory Stanton has raised his concerns about possible mass extermination of Muslims while briefing the US Congress on situation in Kashmir and Assam. Dr. Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, addressed an audience of Congressional and government officials at a briefing on Ground Reports on Kashmir and National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Washington DC last year, where he said, “Preparation for a genocide is definitely underway in India”.
He said persecution of Muslims in Assam and Kashmir “is the stage just before genocide”, adding, “The next stage is extermination — that’s what we call a genocide”. In this context, Dr Stanton articulated “Ten Stages of Genocide’ as a presentation to the US Department of State where he had worked earlier in 1996.
According to Dr Stanton, the 10 stages of genocide are: classification of “us versus them”, “symbolization”, naming the victims as “foreigner”, “discrimination” “classified (the victims out of the group accepted for citizenship” so that they have no “human rights or civil rights of citizens” and “discriminated against legally”, dehumanization, “when the genocidal spiral begins to go downwards, clarifying the others as worse than them, giving names like “terrorists” or even names of animals, stating referring to them as cancer in the body politic, talking about them as a disease that must be somehow dealt with”.
Other stages involve creating an “organization” to commit the genocide like the role of Indian army in Kashmir and the census takers in Assam”, sixth stage being “polarization” achieved by propaganda, the seventh stage “preparation” followed by “persecution” where Assam and Kashmir currently are, the ninth stage being “extermination”, and the tenth stage “denial”.
Dr Stanton is known to have drafted the UN Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda and the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, the two countries where genocide had occurred. Dr. Stanton is a former President of International Association of Genocide Scholars, whose research on genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and of the Rohingyas is recognised worldwide.
Others who briefed the US Congress included Dr Angana Chatterji, a scholar with UC Berkeley and a Jammu and Kashmir Journalist Raqib Hameed Naik. It was stated that the NRC in Assam is being used to subvert human rights there. None of the guidelines and standard operating procedures to carry out NRC exercise has been followed.
Such exercise is flawed and violative of the Constitution of India. It was also stated how the Citizenship (Amendment) Act intended to bring untold sufferings to people across the country and damage fundamentally and irreparably the nature of the Indian Republic. This is why citizens of conscience demanded to not betray the Constitution. It was also explained a wide scale repression was going on in Kashmir since August 5, 2019. The US Congressional briefing was organized by three US based civil society organisations, Engage Action, Hindus for Human Rights, and Indian American Muslim Council.
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