While America took strong stands to ban its fringe the Ku Klux Klan, in India, the fringe is rising to power and prominence in Parliament.
Indians are Drowning in the Waters of Fascism
How can one fight communalism, and religious and caste wars when top political leaders are clapping it on? Is it because Indian politicians are sympathetic and romanticize India’s extremist groups while the USA could identify the violence in the Ku Klux Klan and remove it? While analyzing the difference between how America and India handled their problems, let us also work on a way how India can do the same. Is a nation of one billion so weak that it would drown in the waters of fascism or will Indians learn to swim against the tide and fight back for freedom of dignity, freedom of speech, freedom to breathe, and freedom to work, live, pray, love and eat? Today, there are over 3.1 million Indian Americans living safely, successfully, and happily in the USA because a movement like Ku Klux Klan was banned.
Journalists and secular Hindu liberals, Dalits, Christians, and Muslims are in the eye of the storm reaching to extents in current India, certain minorities are being muffled and barricaded off from getting jobs and accommodation when they reach metropolitans.
Usually, rural regions were riddled with bigotry but in a strange surging tide, bigotry swelled over to the metropolitans for the first time. In these dark perilous days, with humiliation piled upon insult and injury, will a billion Indians keep silent or will they speak? These extremist groups in India thrive on feeding on the wounds of history and they avenge by violence, stringent laws, blood, or torment minorities to the extent to force them to leave India.
Fahad Maqsusi, a businessman shared “Hijab row followed by halal economics by communal unsocial element’s seems hitting employment in India. As Middle Eastern companies started to pull out multi-billion businesses from Bangalore & shifting it to #Jordan & #Egypt due to rising communal violence against Muslims.” Apparently, Ejada Bank from the Middle East was also pulling out of India as most of the Gulf companies are feeling Karnata’s communal atmosphere is not favorable for business and did not want to rely on India.”
In March 2020, a week after communal riots ravaged parts of the Indian capital Delhi, trade bodies estimated a loss of $34.65 billion.
The fringe is seeping into Parliament to rule the rest with rancor. Fringes are the hinges on the boundaries of terrorism and extremism. Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi shared the alarming nature in which the fringe is invading the mainline today and he put out a post, “Union Pracharak Sangh Commission. India’s Constitution is being demolished, one Institution at a time.” People are suddenly talking about it. We seriously think the PM cannot control the Frankenstein monster he concocted.
The Ku Klux Klan and White Extremist Movements
Centuries ago, after the American Civil War ended in 1865, it ushered in the dawn of the Reconstruction era. The transition to Reconstruction altered the direction of the country, especially the lives of African Americans. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments ended slavery, extended US citizenship to African Americans with equal protection under the law, and established voting rights for African American men.
However, certain white Americans had tremendous resentments seething within with the new freedom of the Black Americans and others. American white supremacist terrorist and hate groups suddenly rose out of the shadows whose primary targets were African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Catholics, Native Americans as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims, and atheists.
Now, if America had ignored these terroristic groups, they would have snaked across the country and destroyed the USA as the Nazis destroyed Germany bringing one of the most powerful nations down to smoke and ruins after World War I and World War II.
The new group called the Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan had rather spooky origins, formed in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 by six Confederate veterans who, bored with civilian life, founded the Klan to mainly play pranks. However, as the Klan spread throughout the South, its members’ intentions became more threatening and violent.
At that time with the new freedom, Black Americans attended school, established their own churches, became politically active, and held political offices at the local, state, and federal levels. They were overwhelmingly members of the Republican Party largely due to Republican support for emancipation and civil rights.
As these dramatic changes were taking place throughout southern society, many White Southerners resented this newfound independence among African Americans and rejected the Republican Party. Some turned towards violence to maintain white supremacy and topple Republican rule in the south. As president, Grant needed to find ways to curb this violence.
KKK members attacked freedpeople exercising their new rights as well as whites who supported the Republican Party. Their methods included burning Black schools and churches, intimidating Black and Republican voters, and even resorting to rape and murder. KKK members often wore ghoulish masks and committed their crimes at night, terrifying their victims.
Worse, the Klan’s plans were supported by many local officials as well as law enforcement, which meant that Klan violence was rarely prosecuted at the local or state level. Klan activities threatened to undermine federal reconstruction efforts in the former Confederacy.
Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. “Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.” They burned crosses to intimidate Black American Christians.
Congress of the USA responded with three “Force Acts
During the tenure of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant of the USA, (1869-1877), he worked with Congress and responded with three “Force Acts” aimed at stopping the violence, especially within the Ku Klux Klan.
On May 3, 1871, Grant issued a proclamation warning that terroristic acts of violence would not be tolerated by his administration. Grant appealed to the people of the South. “I do particularly exhort the people of those parts of the country to suppress all such combinations [lawlessness] by their own voluntary efforts,”, “and to maintain the rights of all citizens of the united states and to secure to all such citizens the equal protection of the laws.” Continuing, the President warned that “I will not hesitate to exhaust the powers thus vested in the executive, whenever and wherever it shall become necessary to do so for the purpose of securing to all citizens of the United States the peaceful enjoyment of the rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and laws.”
When the Klan remained defiant against the President’s warning, he utilized the Third Force Act. President Grant suspended habeas corpus (the right of a detained person to request help from a court to determine if their imprisonment is lawful) and declared martial law in nine mostly upstate South Carolina counties.
The military and US. Marshals then rounded up suspected Klan members for trial. The military then worked with the Department of Justice and Grant’s Attorney General, Amos Akerman, to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members suspected of engaging in terroristic violence. The Department of Justice had recently been established under the Attorney General’s authority after President Grant asked Congress to pass a law establishing the office, which was done on June 22, 1870. The Justice Department aimed to protect the rights of newly-freed African Americans and serve as the federal government’s enforcement mechanism for the various laws described above.
These efforts had mixed success. During the period of martial law, many Klan members went into hiding or fled. Akerman resigned as Attorney General at the end of 1871, ending the federal government’s most vigorous period of enforcement. Many convicted KKK members were given light sentences. Later, the increasing takeover by the Democrats of state and local governments made the Klan less relevant because White supremacists gained control of the laws in the South. But Grant’s strong action temporarily reestablished law and order in the South allowing African Americans and those who supported them some relief from the horrendous brutality surrounding their communities.
The American Media Fought the KKK as well, and Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing “his editorials against gangsterism, floggings, and racial and religious intolerance”.
Because of this premise, Former President Donald Trump gave an open speech rejecting the violence in Capital Hill executed by white supremacists, proving that the fringe could not be accepted in the political arena.
On May 25, 2020, George Perry Floyd Jr., an African-American man was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Derek Chauvin, one of four police officers had knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, killing him. After his murder, protests sparked over America against police brutality, especially towards black people, quickly spread across the United States and globally. His dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry.
Interestingly, most of the protests done were by White Americans, standing in support of Black Americans. Floyd’s family got $27 million. Chauvin was convicted on two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter on April 20, 2021, and on June 25, 2021, was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison. The other three officers at the scene were also later convicted of violating Floyd’s civil rights. Banning the Ku Klux Klan helped people to identify extremism and made America greater, and faded away extremist elements in their society to restrict them to the fringe who are under check today because it is unlawful.
The Main Difference Between America and India
America’s President Grant and Media and other Republicans worked hard to denounce the KKK and brand it as a terror organization. However, in India, our politicians are romanticizing the extremist terror outfits, such that Indians cannot dare to call it “terror”. Many extremists spewing genocidal speech are called nationalists!
The Americans know the power of their first and second amendments with the security of the state, and the courts to cocoon them.
On speaking to make laws against hate speech because it provokes genocide, there are some nations, such as Finland which feel that genocide is extinct in the world and a thing of the past because their systems have cleaned up rampant riots and killing, how did they do it? Perhaps it is in their laws and way of thinking and focuses in life?
What India Needs to Do Now
India must take the country back from the Media, which has monopolized and betrayed the citizens by deceiving them by hiding the truth, who are either paid parrots or jellyfish swirling in the seas of fear.
As a nation, India has to draw in powerful lawmakers to push for strong laws to ban terror outfits that seek to suppress the people. Secular voices, liberal Hindus, journalists, media, and minorities are their targets that they seek to crush and suppress, sometimes even kill. Indians have to lose their fear and unite to speak out.
Indians must not fight on open streets with sticks and stones that break the bones, but with the power of unity, law, peace marches, and many other measures and flow in a powerful movement against hate initiated in all metropolitan cities to catch the country’s eye, spark up candlelight marches drawing in the public to combat the nefarious vibes of hate and not stop until hate stops.
If one million big influencers in India lose their fear and speak for one billion, India would be revolutionized to flow for positive change, freedom, and prosperity. Leaders of all opposition political parties have to unite for the fight and forget about positions and the throne, forsake the idea of their own little power pockets, and fling out all efforts to protect the Indian Constitution and democracy.
America’s President Grant made laws and banned the KKK, Media and journals vigorously denounced the noxious movement which diminished its strongholds.
India too needs a revived new Indian Media to speak strongly against this hate, it needs lawmakers to powerfully push for laws to ban terroristic fanatical organizations and it needs Indians all over to reject this hate in a powerful movement…A democratic nation of one billion surely deserves more than a fringe oppressing, bullying, and blocking everything good for the country. India is a multi-source civilization, multi-cultural, and multi-religious civilization for centuries and cannot afford intolerance to anyone. India is the homeland of people of multiple religions. Everyone has to feel safe.
Rita
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