CV NEWS FEED // Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently delivered a speech pitting Christians and Muslims against each other at a rally in the eastern Jharkhand state ahead of the last round of voting in the country’s elections.
At a May 28 election rally in the city of northeastern district of Dumka, Modi took a swipe at local government officials over recent findings that some schools in the Jamtara district, located directly south of Dumka, had switched their weekly day of rest from Sunday to Friday.
“First, they fought with Hindus,” the prime minister said in reference to the minority Muslim population in the district. “Now they are fighting with Christians.”
According to a report from Asia News, however, government officials had originally established Sunday as the official day of rest in 2022, thereby “reversing the decision taken two years earlier by 43 state-run schools to observe Friday as the weekly break.”
Moreover, findings from an investigation later discovered that several schools in Jamtara had not implemented the change, and were still observing their day off on Friday, according to Islamic tradition.
Modi also highlighted claims that the opposition party, INDIA bloc, allegedly planned to grant Muslims certain benefits such as job quotas “on a religious basis” that are currently reserved under Indian law for “disadvantaged groups.”
The prime minister stated:
I want to tell the people of INDIA alliance (sic) that as long as Modi is alive, you will not be able to snatch away the reservation of Tribals, Dalits, backward classes and extremely backward classes and give it to Muslims, to those who do ‘vote jihad.’
As Asia News notes in its report, Modi is notorious in Jharkhand for allowing the unjust imprisonment of a local priest, Fr Stan Swamy, 84, for nine months “on false charges of aiding and abetting terrorism.”
The prime minister reportedly ignored “repeated requests” for Swamy’s release, and the Jesuit priest eventually died from COVID-19.
