COVID-19 deaths, banning inter-faith marriages and spying on journalists in India
COVID-19 deaths in India: more than 4 million, not 400,000
So far, more than four million have likely died from COVID-19 in India, at least ten times higher than the official 418,000 figures. This finding, based on three different sources of fatality and excess deaths data, was published in a Center for Global Development (CGD) report this week.
“Understanding and engaging with the data-based estimates is necessary because in this horrific tragedy the counting—and the attendant accountability—will count for now but also the future,” the report states.
CGD is funded by foundations, governments, corporations and individuals.
Banning inter-faith marriages to prevent “Love Jihad.”
The government of Jammu & Kashmir is being lobbied to pass a law banning inter-faith marriages. This comes after the recent marriage of two Sikh women to Muslims in the state.
In November 2020, Uttar Pradesh passed a law that makes religious conversion by marriage an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The state is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, B.J.P., which rules India with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.
The law is aimed at preventing what right-wing Hindu groups call "love jihad." This is a baseless conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of seeking to make Hindu women fall in love with them and converting them to Islam, the BBC reported.
The B.J.P government in Madhya Pradesh passed a similar law. Gujerat and other B.J.P. ruled states are also working on passing laws prohibiting inter-faith marriages.
So far, 162 people in Uttar Pradesh have been arrested under the new law, although few have been convicted, The New York Times reported.
Spying on Journalists, even as major media supports government?
The phones of at least 40 journalists from nearly every major media outlet in India were selected as potential targets for spying between 2017-2021, including as recently as last month.
Among the 13 iPhones examined in India, nine showed evidence of being targeted, of which seven were successfully infected with the Pegasus spyware.
The spyware sold by NSO, an Israeli company, has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world, according to an investigation into the leak of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets.
The investigation is being conducted by the Pegasus Project, a collaboration by more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations in 10 countries, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung and, from India, The Wire.
The project is coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media non-profit, with Amnesty International conducting forensic tests on mobile phones to identify traces of the spyware.
Journalists from India account for nearly a quarter of the 180 journalists selected for potential targeting. India, along with Azerbaijan, Hungary and Morocco, are “countries where crackdowns against independent media have intensified,” noted Amnesty International.
The spyware is “a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists and crush dissent, placing countless lives in danger,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, said in a statement.
Rohini Singh, who is on the spyware list, had published stories about the business affairs of a home minister’s son and a businessman close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Singh told The Wire, where she is a contributor, that the Indian government is “not even criticized as much by many journalists in mainstream media and I think that’s the unfortunate part.”
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