M Ghazali Khan

Caravan Daily

LONDON — No matter how forcefully Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemns terrorism and how hard he tries to hide the shenanigans of party leaders like Yogi Adityanath who allows in his meetings as shameful incitement as the attendees being asked, to dig the graves of dead Muslim women and rape them, the world knows the truth.

It was not only in UK that Modi had a bad press and faced humiliating press conference and angry protests—like his visit to US in September— his notoriety followed him in Turkey as well where he had gone to attend the G20 meeting.

Surely unlike UK there were no “Modi not welcome” posters but one of the most popular and leading newspapers Haberturk advised the Turkish government to make necessary “background checks” about the politicians before inviting them.

In his weekly column, one of the most prominent and widely respected Turkish journalists, Fehmi Koru, wrote that he had been keenly following foreign press and was surprised that no publication in Turkey had written anything about the human rights violation of Muslims under Modi.

Referring to reports published in US and British newspapers, specially by  Pankaj Mishra and Aditya Chakrabortty Koru talks about the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, Dadri case and unbridled intolerance being promoted by the ruling party and its affiliates. Koru raised the issue in his TV program as well.

Turkey’s leading English daily Daily Sabah too ran a report, 12 November 2015, sent by Turkish news agency Anadolu. In a long report headlined “Does the UK’s cozying up to Egypt’s Sissi, indicate a state of total confusion about human rights?” Anadolu’s London bureau reports, “This week Britain is getting ready for another high level visit, this time from Indian premier Shri Narendra Modi who also faces harsh criticism as well regarding human rights violations and abused minority rights in one of the two most populated countries of the planet.

“… protests for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit are already underway in the UK capital…” and “the South Asia Solidarity Group, a regional human rights organization, will be ready in front of 10 Downing Street on Thursday with “a good few thousand people,”

“As the protests fell on deaf ears during the visits of the presidents from Egypt and China, the same is expected during the Indian prime minister’s trip here. The U.K. has managed to strengthen business and trade ties with three important partners within the space of just two months, despite activists’ calls to take action against human rights violations.”