The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is the ruling party of India. Since their victory in the 2014 general election, the BJP have been responsible for an ongoing collapse of civil liberties and human rights in India. This is in large part fueled by their ideology of “Hindutva” or Hindu supremacy—which is dedicated to refashioning India as an exclusively Hindu state, at the expense of other minority groups such as Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis. Over the last decade, India’s Muslim community has suffered from deadly vigilante violence, public hate speech, and active discrimination under the current Hindu nationalist government. Experts like Gregory Stanton, the director of Genocide Watch, are now warning of an impending genocide of Muslims in India. 
 
NCCM has recently put together a list of 13 high-ranking BJP officials www.nccm.ca/bjpfiles who have espoused racist, violent, and often genocidal rhetoric in recent years. Much of the hatred directed at India’s Muslim community can be traced to the mobilizing language of these BJP officials, who have incited riots, called for Muslims to be exiled, and threatened them with retribution. These Islamophobic remarks are rarely made clandestinely, but rather expressed openly at rallies, on social media, and in media interviews.  
 
We are asking the Canadian government, as per the provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, to prohibit BJP leaders calling for ethnic cleansing and communal violence in India from entering Canada.  Our government has previously banned officials from South Sudan and Myanmar from stepping foot into Canada, due to their gross human rights violations. Now is the time to include these 13 officials from the BJP, before the violence in India gets worse.  
 
We are also asking that Canada should not, under any circumstances, participate in the 2022 G-20 conference, taking place in Kashmir. The year’s G-20 is being hosted on the same grounds where India is committing grave human rights atrocities and where genocidal conditions continue to brew. Canada must stand up for international human rights and publicly state that it will not be attending.