The Biden administration is enabling India’s human rights abuses | Opinions

On November 17th, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken put 10 countries on the US government’s official list of the world’s worst violations of religious freedom. India was a notable oversight.

The announcement comes in response to recommendations from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan and autonomous federal body. For two consecutive years, USCIRF has recommended that India be listed as a Country of Very High Concern (CPC) along with 13 others.

Last year, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to include India on that list. This year again, Blinken did not accept USCIRF’s recommendation on India.

It is no secret that the US views India as a critical ally. The US State Department website reads: “The United States and India have common interests in promoting global security, stability and economic prosperity through trade, investment and connectivity.” India is America’s “main defense partner” and the two nations would have “deepened cooperation in the areas of maritime security, interoperability and information exchange”.

However, being a critical ally has not kept Saudi Arabia off the CCP’s list in years. The State Department says the UK has a “longstanding security relationship” with the US and is “its largest foreign military seller (FMS) with more than $ 100 billion in active FMS cases”. So why can’t India be labeled a CCP and specifically sanctioned against its authorities and officials as recommended by the USCIRF for its serious human and religious rights violations?

Blinken’s refusal to label India a CPC contradicts and is inconsistent with his own position on India. Just seven months ago, he published the US State Department’s Global Religious Freedom Report, indicting India with serious religious persecution. It contained scathing close-up reports that members of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his supporters of the 96-year-old Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were involved in the persecution of religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians.

Indeed, the State Department’s open coverage of India has failed year after year. In March Blinken published a global human rights report that identified “significant human rights problems” in India, including extrajudicial police killings, torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions, violence against minorities, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship and blocking of websites .

Yet just weeks after taking office, President Joe Biden selected Modi as one of the world’s first leaders to meet. It is ironic that barely days before this virtual meeting of Biden-Modi, the research organization Freedom House published a report in which it documented the decline in democracy in India from “free” to “partially free”.

A week later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew to New Delhi on his first overseas visit to discuss “common goals” with Modi, but made no mention of India’s human rights violations. In July Blinken visited India to claim that “the US and India share a commitment to democratic values; this is part of the foundation of our relationship and reflects India’s pluralistic society and history of harmony. ”Again, no mention of India’s appalling human rights.

In September, then-US executive director Atul Keshap, an Indian-American, met with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, who does not hold a government position but leads India’s superstructure of religious persecution and calls for India to be transformed into a Hindu nation. They discussed “India’s tradition of diversity, democracy, inclusivity and pluralism”.

In October, weeks after the unexpected conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban, Blinken’s Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, landed in New Delhi and promptly welcomed India and the United States as “thriving” democracies.

State Department officials claim that the US is “privately” raising human rights issues with India. They refer to Biden’s appeal to Mahatma Gandhi’s “message of non-violence, respect, tolerance” at his meeting with Modi at the White House in September, and Vice President Kamala Harris urged Modi to “protect democrats” in the United States and India.

But Biden, Harris, Austin, Blinken, Sherman and Keshap all failed to have a substantive dialogue about India’s attack on democracy in their meetings with Modi, his foreign and defense ministers, his national security adviser, top diplomats and Bhagwat.

Modi is expected to join the Biden government’s “Summit for Democracy” on December 9-10, where he will no doubt falsify his records of the persecution of religious minorities, human rights defenders, critics, lawyers, journalists, students and politicians.

The State Department’s own reports show that India’s democratic decline is putting the summit’s agenda of “Defense Against Authoritarianism; Fighting and fighting corruption; and promoting respect for human rights ”.

The emphasis on human rights at this summit may provide an opportunity to make the Biden government’s objections to the unacceptable persecution in India clear, publicly and clearly, so that the Indian government will understand the point. We expect the President to be more forceful and less opaque in his criticism, given the stated aim of the conference.

America’s refusal to state clearly that India’s escalating repression runs counter to its longstanding commitment to the ideals of rights, freedoms and freedoms must not continue. Our own credibility as a democracy will be undermined if we help the largest democracy in the world become the second largest and most autocratic society in the world after China, which of course renamed Blink the CCP.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own views and do not necessarily reflect the editorial positions of Al Jazeera.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/12/5/the-biden-administration-is-enabling-indias-human-rights-abuses