London, January 20, 2023 (PPI-OT):The Member of British Parliament, Imran Hussain, has said that the UK must come clean on what it knows about Gujarat Massacre. During the Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) session in the House of Commons, the Labour MP from Bradford East highlighted the claims made in the first part of the BBC documentary titled India: The Modi Question, and said that the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) were aware of the “extent of Narendra Modi’s involvement” in the riots that claimed at least 1,000 lives.
Today I raised the serious issue of Islamophobia at the top of the Conservative Party.
I was silenced in Parliament, but they can’t stop me speaking out against this Government’s disgusting racism – so I ask here:
If you can’t call out Islamophobia at #PMQs then where can you? pic.twitter.com/jcV7uCtB5d
Imran Hussain MP (@Imran_HussainMP) February 23, 2022
He confronted the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and said that the BBC revealed that the FCDO “knew the extent of Narendra Modi’s involvement in the Gujarat massacre that paved the way for the persecution of Muslims and other minorities that we see in India today.” Hussain also pointed out that several senior diplomats reported that the violence could not have taken place “without a climate of impunity.” He also claimed to quote the FCDO and said that Modi was “…in the FCDO’s words, ‘directly responsible’ for the violence.”
He then raised a pointed question to Rishi Sunak and asked, “Given that hundreds were brutally killed and that families across India and the world, including here in the UK, are still without justice, does the Prime Minister agree with his Foreign Office diplomats that Modi was directly responsible?” The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to defend the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in the British Parliament, saying that he disagreed “with the characterisation” of his Indian counterpart in the BBC documentary on 2002 Gujarat riots.
The BBC documentary claimed that the UK government conducted an inquiry into the Gujarat riots when Jack Straw was British foreign secretary, under the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. The release of the first part of BBC’s two-part series on the anti-Muslim riots has sparked outrage, triggering a sharp response from India. The documentary questions the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the communal clashes.
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