Whenever any important engagement takes place between India and the United States, vested interests get active in their attempt to corner India on its supposed poor record of human rights, with activists of varied hues painting the world’s largest democracy as a cauldron of hatred where the minorities face imminent genocide—minorities whose numbers have been burgeoning, with at least one minority group numbering over 200 million in a country of 1.3 billion. India is now supposedly not even a democracy, if some of these busybodies have to be believed; it is now an electoral autocracy. To an extent this was expected, given the rise of the present dispensation, which has never hidden its religious identity to make itself more popular with certain sections—both nationally and internationally. But what has unfolded over the last eight years is a one-sided tirade, an information warfare, which has gone from name-calling the Prime Minister to tarring the majority community as bigoted because they have been voting for him. And this always vicious and often misinterpreted and even concocted narrative has come to define the way India is supposed to be seen by the western world. The problem starts when senior government officials like Antony Blinken have to pay lip service to extremist and Wahhabi elements in his own party and has to be seen to lecturing India on its “poor” human rights record—specifically, “a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials”—with Indian ministers standing by his side, as it happened at the press briefing of the 2+2 meeting. If there was an implicit threat of taking action on Indian “officials”—apparently by sanctioning them to placate the so-called rights lobby—it is hoped that the US has not forgotten the lesson from one of the biggest faux pas it has ever committed by taking action against an Indian “official”—the then Gujarat Chief Minister—on the ground of human rights violation, only to queue up to honour him later as the elected Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy.
It is no one’s case that India is a perfect democracy. Given its humungous population, problems are bound to be there, and then there are immense challenges that it faces. Given such a situation, India is doing rather well, with ample space given to all communities to co-exist and with fully functioning institutions acting as checks against excesses. But then there seems to be a deliberate unwillingness to understand what India is about—that India as a civilizational nation, has democracy and co-existence in its DNA, its burgeoning minority population being a testimony to that fact. Also, in Indian civilizational ethos it is certainly not acceptable for the host to lecture the guest standing next to him on the need to mend its way. It was extremely unseemly on Secretary Blinken’s part to do so, for it amounted to poking his nose into the affairs of another country.
It was again on Tuesday that the State Department came out with a country report flagging “significant human rights issues” in India including “credible reports of unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government or its agents; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by police and prison officials” etc. It is a different matter that the US is guilty of each of these crimes and much more. In fact, US’ own record is like that of a history sheeter when it comes to rights violation. The US suffers from a serious white supremacist problem, with racism still a major issue in many parts of that country, as the Black Lives Matter movement showed it to be. Given such a record, it is too much hypocrisy on the part of the US to lecture India on tackling its problems. And here we have not even gone into the arbitrary killing of civilians the world over during the US’ military misadventures.
India-US partnership has the potential to define the 21st century, but for that to happen, there must be respect for and understanding of each other. India has immense respect for what US is and is ready to walk the extra mile to make the partnership work. Amid this, weaponizing a fake narrative on human rights to put pressure on the world’s largest democracy goes against the goals of any such partnership.
