The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) will take a final view on an article written by Subramanian Swamy where he advocated disenfranchisement as a punishment for Muslims refusing to acknowledge their Hindu ancestry. The NCM had taken suo moto notice of the article at its meeting on July 19. The article appeared in the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) on July 16 – three days after the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai.
NCM chairperson Wajahat Habibullah reportedly said that while the NCM found the article offensive in the extreme, a final decision on the commission’s response would be taken when the full bench reconvened on Tuesday. He said the NCW will go by legal advice it had procured from within the government: “There are no two opinions that the article is highly offensive and violative of the law. I’m fairly clear about the course the NCM should follow, but the decision has to come from the full Bench.”
Since its publication, Dr. Swamy’s article has been hotly debated on Twitter and Facebook, and last week it raised a storm in Harvard, where he taught Economics in the 1960s. In an online petition, students and faculty members demanded that Harvard end its association with him. The petition said: “While free expression and the vigorous contest of ideas are essential in any academic community, so too are respect and tolerance for human difference. By advocating measures that would grossly violate freedom of religion and the unqualified right to vote for different religious groups, and by aggressively vilifying an entire religious community, Swamy breaches the most basic standards of respect and tolerance.”