Some 3,000 members of Islamic groups are set to stage a protest outside the Indian Embassy in Jakarta over blasphemous comments made by a member of the South Asian nation’s ruling party last month.
The protesters, comprising hardline group PA 212 and former leaders of the defunct Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), have said that they will head over to the embassy in South Jakarta’s Rasuna Said after Friday prayers at around 1pm today.
“We will convey our aspirations against the depravity and the savagery and zionism from India, who are racist, fascist, and Islamophobic,” Aziz Yanuar, the chairman of the Islamic Brotherhood Front (also abbreviated FPI and is basically a reincarnation of the defunct hardline group), said yesterday.
“We are calling for an end to Islamophobia in India. Stop the oppression of Muslims in India. Stop the insults and blasphemy towards Islam in India. Or expel India’s ambassador, boycott their products, and deport Indian people [from Indonesia].”
In a televised debate in May, ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) spokeswoman Nupur Sharma — who has since been axed — made inflammatory comments about Prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha, implying an inappropriate relationship as he married her when she was a child. Sharma said she was retaliating against blasphemous comments made by Muslims denigrating Hindu gods.
The comment stoked anger throughout the Muslim world, including in predominantly Muslim Indonesia.
But Indonesia has not issued diplomatic sanctions towards India over the row, only going as far as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressing strong verbal condemnation to India’s Ambassador to Indonesia, Manoj Kumar Bharti.
