Kiren Rijiju expresses his opinion on UK MP's human rights concerns

|HT|

Union minister Kiren Rijiju on Sunday expressed his opinion on the human rights concerns of some UK parliamentarians in the aftermath of Madhya Pradesh's Khargone and Delhi's Jahangirpuri incidents. The Union law minister said the young British MPs are not to be blamed as they are not aware of the reality. "It's the result of the negative campaigns launched by the Tukde-Tukde gang whose only aim is to discredit the huge achievements of @narendramodi Govt. India believes in Rule of Law," the minister tweeted in response to Nadia Whittome's outburst in the UK Parliament. Two women MPs Zarah Sultan and Nadia Whittome have raised the issue of human rights in India linking it to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's visit to the JCB factory in Gujarat and posing with a digger, the same company whose bulldozers were used to demolish 'homes and shops of Muslims'. The women MPs questioned whether Boris Johnson raised the issue of "human rights violation' in India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and whether the PM Johnson accepts that his visit to India has 'helped India legitimise the actions of Modi's far-right government'.

"The BJP (Modi’s governing party) is using JCB diggers to bulldoze the homes and shops of Muslims. Boris Johnson posed with JCB diggers on his recent visit to India, but his minister wouldn't say whether he even raised these demolitions with Modi," UK MP Nadia Whittome said.

Boris Johnson was on a two-day visit to India which held much significance given India's stand on Russia amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. However, a parallel controversy broke out when Boris Johnson visited JCB factory in Gujarat and posed with a JCB digger. When Boris Johnson was asked about the human rights issues, he said, "Our relations with India, and how to deal with questions like human rights or democratic values…of course, we have these conversations. But, the advantage of our friendship is we can have these conversations in a friendly and private way."

Apart from the UK MPs, several other international figures have spoken after the Jahangirpuri incident. Indian-American author Padma Lakshmi and German footballer Mesut Ozil recently condemned the violence against Muslims in India.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)