A day after external affairs minister S Jaishankar slammed Pakistan at the UN for supporting terrorism, Pakistan’s foreign minister resorted to personal attacks on PM Narendra Modi. Using the language of Indian left-liberals and the Congress party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called PM the‘ butcher of Gujarat’, in response to the Indian foreign minister pointing out how terrorist Osama Bin Laden was found living in Pakistan when US was looking for him everywhere.
In his address at the United Nations Security Council, S Jaishankar reminded the world how Pakistan had hosted Osama Bin Laden and is sponsoring terror activities in India including the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.
“While we search for the best solutions, what are those that we must never accept include the normalisation of such threats. The question of justifying what the world regards as unacceptable should not even arise. It certainly applies to states’ sponsorship of cross-border terrorism. Nor can hosting Osama Bin Laden and attacking a neighbouring Parliament can serve as credentials for sermonizing before this council,” S Jaishankar had said in his address, directly slamming Pakistan for being a pro-terrorism country.
The Indian foreign minister also said that the effectiveness of the United Nations depends on its capacity in facing key challenges of our times – be it pandemic, climate change, conflicts or terrorism.
Pakistan’s foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari addressed a press conference in New York later in the day, where he made personal attacks on the Indian prime minister while responding to a question on S Jaishankar’s criticism of Pakistan. Rejecting that Pakistan is sponsoring terrorism, Bhutto claimed that Pakistan is a big victim of terrorism, and alleged that India is trying to paint all Muslims in the world as terrorists.
Then he went on to respond to the Laden comment by Jaishankar by saying, “I will like to remind the honourable minister of external affairs of India, that Osama Bin Laden is dead, but the butcher of India lives. And he is the prime minister of India. He was banned from entering this country until he became the Prime Minister. This is the Prime Minister of the RSS and the Foreign Minister of the RSS. What is the RSS? The RSS takes inspiration from Hitler’s SS.”
He then went on to says that RSS does not believe in the ideology of Gandhi, adding ‘they hero worship the terrorist that assassinated Gandhi’. He then claimed that terrorism in Gujarat and Kashmir are being engineered by RSS and BJP. Bhutto then also claimed that they have proof that India is behind the Johar Town blast in Lahore in Pakistan.
However, the Pakistani foreign minister denied that he was in a war of words with S Jaishankar, and avoided the question on whether it will escalate the tension between India and Pakistan.
The allegations of Bilawal Bhutto against Modi and RSS are the same as the allegations being made by the Congress party and other non-NDA parties in India for a long time, along with left-liberals. In 2014, TMC had targeted Modi by calling him ‘butcher of Gujarat’. These political parties and left-liberals keep alleging that Modi had asked police to not intervene during the Gujarat riots, to allow Hindus to attack Muslims. Many even make the absurd claim that the Godhra train carnage, which had triggered the riots in 2002, was actually a conspiracy by Hindus to start the riots.
However, in multiple investigations and court cases, all these allegations have been proven false. It has been established that police had controlled the riots in a day, and it has also been proved that the people who said Modi had instructed police to stand down were lying.
In June this year, the Supreme Court of India delivered the final judgement in a crucial case that tried to blame Narendra Modi for the riots, ruling that all the charges against the then Gujarat CM were false. The apex court also said that Islamist activists like Teesta Setalvad had fabricated evidence to frame Narendra Modi in a fake case to seek the death penalty for him.
Following the verdict of the Supreme Court, Gujarat police filed a case for fabricating evidence and arrested Teesta Setalvad and others involved in the conspiracy.
The other allegation of Bhutto, that RSS is inspired by the Nazis, is also completely false and baseless. Nazis had run the holocaust to eliminate Jews and other people they didn’t like, and the holocaust was a massive organised mass killing project undertaken by the Nazis under Hitler. Therefore, RSS, or any other organisation, can’t be compared to the Nazis. It has been already proved that the allegation that RSS leaders were inspired by Nazisim is completely baseless.
The RSS’s dream of establishing a Hindu Rashtra is interpreted by Islamists and left-liberals as the dream of eliminating non-Hindus as the Nazis did. But that is a completely wrong interpretation. RSS maintains that every Indian was Hindu in the past, and they, or their forefathers, had converted to other religions from Hinduism in the past. RSS never talked about eliminating anyone, they just want that as the birthplace of Hinduism, the religion must be protected in the country.
Perhaps Bilawal Bhutto has forgotten that his country was once part of India, and after the partition of India, two Muslim countries were born, adding to dozens of already existing Muslim countries. There is not a single Hindu country in the world, but when someone talks about a Hindu Rashtra, he sees Nazism in that dream. In fact, Hindus and other minorities have vanished from Pakistan, while India has world’s second-largest Muslim population, which shows how baseless Bhutto’s allegations are.
Talking about the US rejecting the visa to Narendra Modi when he was Gujarat CM, it is well known that it was the result of intense lobbying of Pakistani and Indian Muslim groups, including the Indian American Muslim Council. Moreover, when the visa was rejected, Modi was facing cases accusing him of inaction in controlling the riots. But since then, courts in India gave him a clean chit, and the US also granted him a visa, after which he has visited the country several times. There is no relevance to that chapter now.
