Videos showing Hindu religious leaders in India calling for genocide against Muslims have sparked outrage and prompted demands for action.
Indian police said on Friday they had launched a hate-speech investigation into last week\u2019s event in Haridwar, in northern Uttarakhand state, in which participants called for the mass killings and use of weapons against Muslims.
A speaker at the gathering told the crowd that people should not worry about going to jail for killing Muslims, according to a video that went viral.
\u201cEven if just a hundred of us become soldiers and kill two million of them, we will be victorious \u2026 If you stand with this attitude only then will you able to protect \u2018sanatana dharma\u2019 [an absolute form of Hinduism],\u201d the woman said.
The meeting was attended by at least one member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party stands accused of encouraging the persecution of Muslims and other minorities by hardline Hindu nationalists since coming to power in 2014, allegations it denies.
Prominent Muslim MP Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted that the inflammatory comments in the video were a \u201cclear case of incitement to genocide\u201d.
Modi\u2019s government has not commented on the event.
The woman in the video reportedly added that Indians should \u201cpray to Nathuram Godse\u201d, the Hindu hardliner who assassinated Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.
Another delegate, Prabodhanand Giri \u2013 the head of a hardline Hindu group who is often photographed with senior BJP members \u2013 called for a \u201ccleansing\u201d and for those present to be \u201cready to die or kill\u201d.
\u201cLike Myanmar, the police, politicians, the army and every Hindu in India must pick up weapons and do this cleansing. There is no other option left,\u201d he is heard to say.
A military crackdown in Myanmar on the heavily persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority has killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.
A third speaker is heard saying that he wished he had killed Modi\u2019s predecessor, the main opposition Congress party\u2019s Manmohan Singh, who was the first Sikh prime minister of India.
Another said he had asked hotels from his state not to allow Christmas celebrations. The statement was met with cheers from the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Deafening silence\u2019 Videos showing Hindu religious leaders in India calling for genocide against Muslims have sparked outrage and prompted demands for action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c102-muslim-minorities"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/strong>The BJP denies accusations that its agenda is to turn officially secular and pluralistic India into an ethnic Hindu nation.
The police chief of Uttarakhand state, Ashok Kumar, said such incidents would not be tolerated. He added that a case had been registered under a section of Indian law that prohibits promoting enmity among different groups on grounds of religion. Such offences can get a jail term of up to three years.
Kumar said the case was registered as soon as a formal complaint was made. The case names only one person, a former Muslim who converted to Hinduism, and other unknown people.
Al Jazeera\u2019s Pavni Mittal, reporting from New Delhi, said none of the other leaders in attendance, despite the evidence, have so far had any cases registered against them.
\u201cAll of this is on tape, the speeches went viral, so the police have evidence but nothing else has actually been done,\u201d she added.
Many in the Muslim community say they have been increasingly subject to attacks and threats since Modi, a lifelong member of a hardline Hindu group, came to power.
The president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, India\u2019s largest socio-religious Muslim organisation, accused the government of turning a blind eye to the hate speech against the Muslim community.
In a letter to various officials, Maulana Mahmood Madni demanded \u201cstrong actions\u201d against the offenders. \u201cThey have posed threat to the peace and communal harmony of the country,\u201d he said.
Michael Kugelman, from the Wilson Center, hit out at the Indian government over its silence.
\u201cNot a peep, much less a condemnation, from the gov\u2019t. Sad truth is that this deafening silence isn\u2019t the least bit surprising,\u201d he tweeted on Thursday.
Christians have also been subject to violence and harassment, with the BJP government in the southern state of Karnataka this week becoming the latest to introduce legislation outlawing \u201cforceful\u201d religious conversions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"