COVID-19 fueling anti-Asian racism and xenophobia worldwide: Human Rights Watch

NEW YORK: The Human Rights Watch has urged governments to take urgent steps to prevent "racist, xenophobic violence, and discrimination" linked to the COVID-19 pandemic while prosecuting racial attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent.

The international watchdog has noted that the discrimination isn't limited to countries such as US, Australia, Russia, UK, but in India and Sri Lanka, where leaders have done little to stem the growing anti-Muslim discrimination in recent years, many apparent COVID-19-related cases of attacks against Muslims have been reported.

In India, hate speech against Muslims — already a "serious and growing problem since the election of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2015" — has surged due to the spread of coronavirus.

HRW said that in April, social media and WhatsApp groups were "flooded" by calls for "social and economic boycotts of Muslims, including by BJP supporters".

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"Several physical attacks on Muslims have also occurred, including of volunteers distributing relief material, amid falsehoods accusing them of spreading the virus deliberately," said the human rights body.

Anti-Muslim sentiment had surged in the country after the BJP-led government announced that a huge number of Muslims has contracted the virus.

The government said that the number pf cases in the country had increased as people had attended a mass religious congregation in Delhi, organised by the international Islamic missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat.

"BJP officials fanned the flames by calling the Jamaat meeting a Talibani crime and CoronaTerrorism. Some mainstream media supportive of the BJP have used terms like #CoronaJihad, causing the hashtag to go viral on social media," the HRW said.

In the wake of such violent incidents, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement of caution, stating that “it is very important that we do not profile the cases on the basis of racial, religious, and ethnic lines.”

The country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not openly deplored hate speech against the community, but tweeted “COVID19 does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language, or borders before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together.”

Meanwhile, the country's authorities at national and local level have not taken "adequate steps" to stem the increasingly toxic atmosphere or conduct adequate investigations of attacks where appropriate, the statement added.