No Justice, No Peace: Impunity in India

Speech at CAA/NRC protest outside San Francisco Indian Consulate

In 1984, the Indian government slaughtered thousands of Sikhs in the streets of Delhi.

The killers included politicians, political party leaders, and even the police.

Yet almost no one was ever held accountable. Instead, they were rewarded.

Today, for instance, Kamal Nath is a chief minister — even though, as a member of parliament, he led a mob that torched a Gurdwara and burned Sikhs alive.

Impunity for the 1984 Sikh Genocide set the stage for impunity for future massacres.

In 1992, L.K. Advani instigated the destruction of the Babri mosque and the pogroms that followed it — then he became Deputy Prime Minister.

In 1999, Pratap Sarangi headed the Bajrang Dal in Odisha when that group burned alive Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two children — a savage murder that set the stage for the anti-Christian pogrom in Kandhamal. Now Sarangi is a Cabinet Minister.

And we all know how Modi became the “Butcher of Gujarat” after he presided over the massacre of thousands of Muslims in 2002. Now he is Prime Minister of India.

Indeed, everywhere one looks in India, the only punishment the powerful receive for orchestrating the grossest of atrocities is promotion to ever higher positions of power.

We’re here today because of a new atrocity.

Modi is ramming through his own saffronized version of the Nuremberg Laws — that infamous legislation that stripped Jews of citizenship in Nazi Germany. Modi is laying the foundations for a Hindu nation ruled by his violent paramilitary, the Nazi-inspired RSS.

Modi has plunged India into chaos.

There is no peace in India today. There is no peace because there is no justice, and there is no justice because there is no liberty.

But — I haven’t even given you the bad news yet!

The bad news is that, here in America, a country where we as citizens pledge to uphold liberty and justice for all, we have politicians who are licking the boots of the tyrants in India.

From California, we have Congressman Ami Bera, who denies the Sikh Genocide and calls Modi’s vision “inspirational.”

From Illinois, we have Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, who shares the stage with the chief of the RSS.

From Hawaii, we have Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, whose congressional career was financed by American affiliates of the RSS in exchange for her help whitewashing Modi’s fascist forces in India. Now she’s running for president!

These American politicians do not care that, under Modi’s iron-fisted regime, Christians, Dalits, Muslims, Sikhs, and every Hindu who disagrees with the hate, violence, and supremacy of the RSS lives in fear of their lives.

That’s why I’m here today.

I’m here to remind those American collaborators what the great Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

I’m here to name the perpetrators of injustice and those who collude with them, whether they are in India or right here in America.

I’m here… to spark a raging fire of righteous, burning anger — anger against injustice, anger against complicity, and anger against tyranny.

I’m here to hold high the flaming torch of liberty.

I’m here to declare: “No justice, no peace!”