ISLAMABAD: Three Nobel Prize Laureates have demanded of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to rescind its award to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for blatant basic human rights violations in the Occupied Kashmiri, attacks on minorities in India and his role in horrific massacre of Gujarat.
In their joint letter addressed to Foundation, Mairead Maguire, Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman, and Shirin Ebadi expressed their serious reservations, saying that they were deeply disturbed to discover that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would be giving an award to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi later this month.
“Under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, India has descended into dangerous and deadly chaos that has consistently undermined human rights, democracy. This is particularly troubling to us as the stated mission of your foundation is to preserve life and fight inequity,” they added.
The situation in the state of Assam and Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir were cause for grave concern as well.
“The organization “Genocide Watch” has issued not one, but two alerts for India in these regions. In Assam, 1.9 million Indians have been stripped of citizenship; in Kashmir, since August, 800,000 Indian armed forces have kept eight million Kashmiris without phone or internet service for the last month,” they added.
They further said because of these human rights abuses, children in Occupied Kashmir from Kindergarten to college were unable to attend school.
They also referred to the attacks on minorities, specifically Indian Muslims, Christians, and Dalits.
Since the BJP, Prime Minister Modi’s party, came to power in 2014, the use of organized mobs to respond to alleged sectarian “offenses” with violence has undermined the rule of law so frequently that the Indian Supreme Court warned that these “horrendous acts of mobocracy could not be permitted to inundate the law of the land, they added quoting a report of Human Rights Watch.
The Nobel Laureates further maintained that scholars inside and outside of India had never cleared prime minister Modi of his involvement in the horrific 2002 massacre of Gujarat.
“As a result, Modi was banned from entering the United States, the UK, and Canada for 10 years until he acquired diplomatic immunity by becoming India’s Prime Minister. To be sure, his role in that crisis as the then Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat cannot be ignored,” they stressed.
They requested the Foundation to rescind its award to Modi because by doing so, they would send a clear and powerful message that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took its aim of equity, justice, and human rights for all seriously – and that it was committed to promoting these values in a consistent fashion.
