Queen’s Speech

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con)]

My Lords, in 2002 young British men we had grown up with travelled from Batley, a small town in Yorkshire, to Gujarat in India for a holiday. Two brothers, their nephew and a friend were being driven back after a tour of the Taj Mahal when their car was attacked by an angry mob. Three were murdered, the driver was set alight and the nephew, despite his injuries, survived. These men became victims of a spate of violence now known as the Gujarat riots in which thousands lost their lives, women and girls were raped, beaten and burnt, and homes and businesses were set alight. The Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat at that time was one Narendra Modi.

A leaked report at the time by the British high commission in New Delhi specifically blamed the violence on Chief Minister Modi and his Government. It led to Narendra Modi being described as the “Butcher of Gujarat”, with travel bans imposed on him by many, including the United States, while we in Britain imposed a total boycott of Modi, refusing to engage with him for a decade. Our collective assessment of and response to Modi was right at the time.

Years later, Modi looked set to become Prime Minister of India, and the US, the UK and others found ourselves having to unban and re-engage, not because we agreed with him nor had any truck with his ideology, but because it was expedient to do so. Indeed, we said as much, making it clear that engagement was not endorsement. Let me say clearly: we are right to engage with the Prime Minister of India, whoever that may happen to be. India is a country of 1.4 billion people, a rising economy, an important trade partner and a secular and diverse nation with an important and valued diaspora in Britain. India is not Modi, but more importantly Modi is not what India was envisaged to be.

The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, preached non-violence and fought for a secular India. Indeed, it was this message that led to his early demise, tragically assassinated at the hands of a right-wing extremist, Nathuram Godse, a follower of a political ideology known as Hindutva. Hindutva is not Hinduism. The great faith of Hinduism, one of the oldest religions in the world, practised for thousands of years and rooted in spirituality, is one that has always co-existed with other beliefs. Hindutva, however, diminishes plural secular societies, is a political violent ideology from the late 1800s, underpins the far-right movement the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, is influenced and inspired by the ideologies of Hitler and Mussolini, and was banned by Indian Prime Minister Nehru. This lays out the tension in today’s India. On the one hand is a diverse, multifaith, secular India and on the other a country where the ideology of Hindutva underpins the politics of power, with the once-banned RSS now playing centre stage, engaged in politics through its political wing, the BJP, and in violence through its mass training camps, led by Prime Minister Modi, an ex-RSS pracharak—a senior propagator.

What we saw play out in Gujarat in 2002 under Chief Minister Modi, we are now, tragically, seeing play out across India under Prime Minister Modi. From lynchings to burnings of homes, lootings to rape, the ideology of Hindutva and its promoters has attracted widespread criticism from Indian civil society, which is committed to a secular state as enshrined in the Indian constitution. Discrimination and harassment of Christian, Muslim, Sikh and Dalit communities, attacks on those in interfaith marriages, the passing of anti-conversion and citizenship amendment laws, targeted killings, burning and bulldozing of minority homes, desecrations of places of worship, boycotts of businesses based on religion and even citing Mother Teresa and her work as a “Christian conspiracy” are now mainstream.

For years, Indian civil society has been sounding the alarm bells. Women’s groups in 2020 accused Modi of encouraging “communal hate and fear-mongering”, making

“women of all communities feel more insecure and threatened”.

Civil servants earlier this year took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter to Modi, accusing the state of being “fully complicit” in the

“frenzy of hate filled destruction”

targeting not just minorities but the constitution itself, criticising Modi’s silence on the violence as “deafening” and arguing that the law, instead of being an instrument for maintaining peace and harmony, had become the means by which minorities were being kept in a state of perpetual fear. They urged Modi to

“call for an end to the politics of hate that governments under your party’s control are so assiduously practising.”

At best, Modi and his senior Ministers never condemn the violence; at worst, their rhetoric, through words on the public record, instigates and feeds it.

I understand that we often have to hold our nose and trade with those with whom we would rather not, but as we move forward with our trade and co-operation agreement with India, let us not forget our fellow citizens who were murdered there and have been denied justice and even the dignity of a burial—Shakeel Dawood and Saeed Dawood, the boys from Batley whose remains have never been returned, and Mohammed Aswat. Twenty years on, I urge my noble friend to meet the Dawood family and ask for the return of their relatives’ remains. It is time to bring them home.