British Labour MP for Nottingham East, Nadia Whittome, has called upon Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to address the issue of persecution against Indian minorities during the ongoing G20 Summit.
Nadia has also advocated for the suspension of India-U.K. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), denouncing it as “anti-labour.”
“Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, and the wider Hindu nationalist movement it is part of, are promoting ethnoreligious division and hatred. At the same time, they are gutting democratic institutions, aggressively suppressing not only resistance but dissent – increasingly often through incarceration without trial – and pushing through attacks on workers’ rights and social provision in the interests of the rich. India’s ranking in the various global democracy indexes falls continuously, while in 2021 it’s top 1% owned 40.5% of its wealth,” read a statement by Nadia which is released by the MP along with India Labour Solidarity.
ILS is a new initiative to promote solidarity between trade unions, and labour movements in the UK and India.
“Some states in India have been particularly gripped by violence stemming from the far-right Hindu nationalist movement. In India’s eastern Manipur state, the minority Kuki-Zo community are being brutally persecuted. Hundreds of people have been killed and there has been widespread sexual violence, which has shocked millions of people across India. In Haryana state, as well as in other parts of the country, vicious anti-Muslim progroms have been launched, with businesses ransacked, mosques destroyed and people murdered. It is working people, oppressed castes and religious minorities whose homes and livelihoods are being destroyed and who are paying the price of the divisions being fostered,” it added.
“Despite this human rights crisis, our Conservative government maintains its friendship with the BJP and continues to push for a neoliberal anti-worker UK-India Free Trade Agreement. We call on the UK government to immediately halt these negotiations and raise human rights violations in India at the G20 summit in Delhi,” it said.
