India is viewed as an integral part of a network of security partnerships the US is building to push back against China's influence, say experts. Read more at straitstimes.com.
Human rights defenders this week condemned President Joe Biden’s upcoming state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was once banned from entering the United States for supporting violent Hindu supremacists who massacred Muslims—as part of an ongoing U.S. “whitewash” of the right-wing leader’s extremism.
“For almost a decade now, human rights activists and others have regularly brought to the White House—Democrats or Republicans—that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, it’s right-wing, it’s anti-Muslim, and it’s anti-minority” Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, told Huff Post.
“To fail to note Modi’s violent, anti-minority, authoritarian tendencies, and his corrupt mismanagement of the Indian economy, is not only to ignore the U.S. government’s own findings but a strategic blunder with the potential to jeopardize global stability,” IAMC said.
Human Rights Watch published a letter to Biden ahead of the visit, critizing the disregard for human rights by Modi’s government:
There are numerous areas of concern. Increasingly in recent years, BJP leaders have used toxic and hateful speech targeting religious minorities, inciting violence or discrimination against them. BJP-led authorities have tightened restrictions on free speech while ramping up censorship and using overbroad and vague laws to investigate and prosecute critics. Modi’s government has also demonstrated blatant bias in protecting BJP supporters and affiliates accused in a range of crimes, including murder, assault, corruption, and sexual violence. At the international level, Modi’s government has often proven unwilling to stand with other governments on key human rights crises, abstaining or refraining from condemning grave human rights violations elsewhere.
It should be worrying to people of USA, and the world, to see USA giving platform and support to extremist nationalists and ethnostate-advocates:
Human Rights Watch published a letter to Biden ahead of the visit, critizing the disregard for human rights by Modi’s government: