Pakistani-American Journalist Questions Modi About Treatment of Minorities in India

[Riaz Haq]

Wall Street Journal's White House Correspondent Sabrina Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American Muslim journalist, got to ask the only question posed by an American journalist to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his recent visit to the White House in Washington, DC. This was the first time in 14 years that Mr. Modi took an unscripted question from any journalist anywhere in the world. In fact, it was his first press conference since taking office as the prime minister of India in 2014. 

Narendra Modi (Left), Sabrina Siddiqui (R)

Sabrina Siddiqui asked the Indian leader about rights groups’ assessments that his government is discriminating against religious minority groups and quashing dissent. She asked," What steps are you and your government willing to take to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?" 

The Islmophobic Indian prime minister feigned “surprise” at the question and said democracy is core to India. He then went to lie in front of the whole world claiming that there's ”absolutely no space for discrimination” in India. 

Cartoonist Mocks Modi's Answer at the White House. Source: Satish A...

Modi’s mendacious answer is in sharp contrast to rising state persecution of religious minorities, including Muslims and Christians, in India.  Modi's BJP-affiliated politicians have called for genocide against Indian Muslims, attacked mosques and churches, and demolished homes, according to The Nation.  The Biden administration has remained silent on these issues, choosing instead to try and strengthen the US-India relationship and deepen the ties between the countries’ military and technology sectors, as a counterweight to rising China.  

For the last four years, the Biden Administration has ignored the USCIRF (US Commission on International Religious Freedom) recommendation to designate India as a “Country of Particular Concern” and impose strategic sanctions on Indian government officials and agencies involved in religious freedom violations. 

Cartoonist Satish Acharya exposed Modi's lie in a cartoon by referring to a statement he made during the protests against the BJP-sponsored discriminatory CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in 2019. "They (Muslims) can be identified by the clothes they are wearing," he said without elaborating.

Even though Modi did not know the exact question that would be posed to him at the press conference, he had a readymade answer regardless. Sabrina Siddiqui's question and Modi's answer illustrated how the BJP's lies are being shamelessly promoted and spread in India and elsewhere in the world. The Hindutva rulers of India are living a lie. 

In a recent interview to CNN, former US President Barack Obama has pointed out the consequences of BJP's anti-Muslim policies. “If the (US) President meets with Prime Minister Modi, then the protection of the Muslim minority in a Hindu majority India is worth mentioning. If I had a conversation with Prime Minister Modi, who I know well, part of my argument would be that if you don't protect the rights of ethnic minorities in India, there is a strong possibility that India would at some point start pulling apart,” Obama had said.

“We have seen what happens when you start getting those kinds of large internal conflicts. So that would be contrary to the interests of not only the Muslim India but also the Hindu India. I think it is important to be able to talk about these things honestly,” said Mr. Obama.

Sabrina Siddiqui is one of many high-profile Pakistani-American journalists. Amna Nawaz is the co-anchor of the popular PBS NewsHour. Zohreen Adamjee Shah is a national correspondent for ABC News. Imtiaz Tyab is a foreign correspondent for CBS News.  Asma Khalid covers the White House for National Public Radio. Wajahat Ali writes columns for New York Times and The Daily Beast.  

Sabrina Siddiqui has an illustrious background. She is a great-great grand-daughter of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in India. She has come under vicious attacks by right-wing Hindu Nationalist trolls since Modi's press conference at the White House. 

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[Riaz Haq]

Manipur: Video shows (Christian) Kuki women being paraded naked by a mob; police confirm FIR filed

https://scroll.in/article/1052938/video-shows-kuki-women-being-para...


‘If you don’t take off your clothes, we will kill you’: Kuki women paraded naked in Manipur
One of them, a 21-year-old woman, was ‘brutally gang raped’, a police complaint says. The police confirm an FIR has been filed.
By Arunabh Saikia

A video of two Kuki women being paraded naked by a mob has emerged from Manipur. Scores of young men can be seen walking alongside as other men drag the distressed-looking women into the fields.

Scroll has spoken to one of the survivors who said the assault took place near her village, B Phainom, in Kangpokpi district on May 4, a day after clashes erupted between the Meitei and Kuki communities.


After they heard Meitei mobs were “burning homes” in a nearby village, her family and others escaped through a dirt lane, but a mob found them, she said. Her neighbour and his son were taken a short distance away and killed, she alleged. The mob then began to assault the women, she said, asking them “to strip off our clothes”.

“When we resisted, they told me: ‘if you don’t take off your clothes, we will kill you,” said the woman, who is her forties. She said she took off “every item of clothing” only in order to “protect herself”. All the while, the men allegedly slapped and punched her. She said she was not aware of what was happening to her 21-year-old neighbour, because she was some distance away.

The woman alleged that she was then dragged to a paddy field near the road, and asked by the men to “lie down” there. “I did as they told me, and three men surrounded me… One of them told the other, ‘let’s rape her’, but ultimately they did not,” she said.

She added that she was “lucky” they did not go to that extent [of raping her]. “But they grabbed my breasts,” she said.

The police case
A police complaint filed by the relatives of the women states that one of the women was subsequently gangraped. Based on the complaint, the police said a zero FIR has been registered in the Saikul police station of Kangpokpi district on May 18.

While first information reports are usually lodged in the police station under whose jurisdiction the alleged crime has taken place, a zero FIR lets any police station accept and register a complaint and then forward it to the pertinent station.

An official at the Saikul police station said charges of rape and murder, among others, have been pressed against “unknown miscreants” numbering “800-1,000”.

The complaint states that the incident took place on the afternoon of May 4, a day after that violence broke out in the state.

“Some unknown miscreants…carrying sophisticated weapons like AK Rifles, SLR. INSAS and .303 Rifles, forcefully entered our village, Island Sub-Division Kangpokpi District, Manipur,” the complaint states.

The mob then went on to burn and vandalise the houses in the village, said the complaint.

The particular incident, according to the complaint, involves five residents of the village who were fleeing “towards the forest” to save themselves.

The group comprised two men and three women. Three of them belonged to the same family: a 56-year-old man, his 19-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter. Two other women, one 42 years old and the other aged 52, were also part of the group.

On the way to the forest, they were “rescued” by a team from the Nongpok Sekmai police station, the complaint adds. However, they were “blocked on the way by a mob and snatched from the custody of the police team by the violent mob near Toubu”, two km from Nongpok Sekmai police station, the complaint alleges.

The mob immediately killed the 56-year-old, the complaint states, following which “all the three women were physically forced to remove their clothes and were stripped naked in front of the mob”.

[Riaz Haq]

India will soon become third largest economy. Does it matter?Given the depreciating USD, India’s $5tn GDP goal of 2019-20 equals $5.74tn in 2022-23, and at further 3 per cent depreciation, it would need to be $6.65tn in 2027-28. Subhash Chandra Garg

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/india-will-soon-become-third-l...

"When I first visited the US as a Prime Minister, India was the 10th largest economy in the world. Today, India is the 5th largest, and we will be the third largest soon," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, with pride, in his address to the US Congress on June 23

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/india-will-soon-become-third-l...

India, with GDP of $1.86 trillion, was the ninth largest economy in 2013-14, with Brazil ($2.21 trillion), China ($9.57 trillion), France ($2.81 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), the United Kingdom ($2.79 trillion), Italy ($2.14 trillion), Japan ($5.21 trillion), and the United States ($17.55 trillion) ahead.

It was quite a fortuitous coincidence that the GDP of next four countries — Brazil, Italy, France, and the UK in 2013 — was in a $2-3 trillion band, with India quite close behind. Moreover, except Brazil, all the three European countries had attained very high per capita incomes of $42,603 (France), $43,449 (the UK), and $35,560 (Italy) respectively. Brazil’s lower per capita income of $12,259 was also nearly 10 times India’s per capita income of $1,438.

All high-income countries get into low GDP growth orbit thanks to having attained economic prosperity and falling population, whereas developing countries record higher GDP growth. Unsurprisingly, India, a poor developing country, despite not so impressive growth of about 7 per cent, in current dollars during 2013-2022, moved past these four countries to become the fifth largest. Germany and Japan are also high per capita income countries with declining population.


Germany’s per capita income is $48,438 in 2022, whereas India’s is $2,389. Japan’s case is bizarre. Japan’s GDP was $5.76 trillion in 2010 and only $4.32 trillion in 2022. The IMF projects Germany and Japan’s GDP to be $4.95 trillion and $5.08 trillion respectively in 2027. The IMF projects India’s growth, somewhat optimistically, at 8.72 per cent until 2027-28. If it gets realised, India will move past Germany and Japan that year.

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/india-will-soon-become-third-l...

Excluding small island economies, India’s per capita income of $1,438 in 2013-14 has increased to $2,389 in 2022-23, at a compounded annual growth rate of 5.8 per cent. India’s rank, in terms of per capita income, was the 147th (out of 189) in 2013-14..we have moved to the 141st rank. Since 2014, India has moved ahead of Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Lao PDR. On the other hand, Bangladesh — India’s ‘poor’ neighbour — has overtaken us. Per capita income of Brazil, Italy, France, and the UK, whose GDP India has overtaken, and Germany and Japan, which we will cross, remain far higher for us to even think of achieving. The conclusion is clear. India will prosper and develop when the per capita income of average Indian will grow to reach higher middle-income levels, if not the high-income level — and not when its GDP becomes the third largest.

(Subhash Chandra Garg is former Finance & Economic Affairs Secretary, and author of ‘The Ten Trillion Dream’ and ‘Explanation and Commentary on Budget 2023-24’.)

[Riaz Haq]

What drives Hindutva’s online supporters who defend Narendra Modi and Sangh Parivar no matter what

https://scroll.in/article/1052054/inside-the-psyche-of-hindutvas-on...

Every time Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels overseas, his party faithful work up a cacophony of hyperbole to present it as a diplomatic coup to the Indian public. It was no different for his recent visit to America – except, it did not go all to plan.

Their trolling of The Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui for questioning Modi about his government’s treatment of India’s Muslims drew condemnation even from the White House, while their attacks on former US President Barack Obama for warning about the consequences of mistreating the nation’s minorities made more news than Modi’s visit itself.

This, of course, is not the first time the Hindutva troll army has earned international notoriety. In the past, they have gone after academics Wendy Doniger and Audrey Truschke, activist Greta Thunberg, journalists Mehdi Hasan and Mattew Yglesias.

For someone who has written about the Hindutva movement’s inferiority complex and its messianic reverence for Modi, the reaction of its trolls and even some elected leaders always throws up questions for me about their psyche.

Psyche of a troll
Modi veneration is a cultivated parasocial relationship: a deeply emotional response to his branding as the first pan-India leader who is open about his Hindu exclusionary politics – and, therefore, is the primary victim of all conspiracies against a Hindu India. A parasocial relationship is a one-way relationship, the illusion of a relationship.

As Modi rose on the national political scene, his life story appealed to many Indians who, even with socioeconomic privilege, believed themselves to be working class. The marketing blitz around the so-called Gujarat Model appealed to their material aspirations. To them, criticism of Modi for his communal politics only reinforced his aura as the strongman who had arrived to rid the country of decades of supposedly dysfunctional Congress rule.

Indeed, in the 189 constituencies where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party went head-to-head with the Congress in the 2014 general election, it won 166. That is, nearly 60% of its total seats. In 144 constituencies outside Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where the BJP was not up directly against the Congress, it was competitive in only 56.

This trend largely continued in 2019, leading the election analyst Neelanjan Sircar to suggest that Modi’s supporters did not vote for him based on issues but rather found issues to rationalise their vote for him.

The result is a cult of Modi in which everyone from top leaders to common devotees sing from the same hymnal. At an event in America in September to celebrate India’s 75th Independence anniversary, foreign minister S Jaishankar asserted that “the fact that our opinions count, that our views matter, and we have actually today the ability to shape the big issues of our time” was because of Modi. Two years earlier, Supreme Court justice Arun Mishra had called Modi a versatile genius and an internationally acclaimed visionary who thinks globally and acts locally.

At the back of the congregation is the Modi fan who celebrates the leader’s birthday by chanting his name nonstop for 24 hours or tattoes his name or likeness on their body. Tying it all together is the mainstream media, which puts Pyongyang to shame in the way it fawns over Modi.

[Riaz Haq]

What drives Hindutva’s online supporters who defend Narendra Modi and Sangh Parivar no matter what

https://scroll.in/article/1052054/inside-the-psyche-of-hindutvas-on...


The online troll, then, is an extension of the Modi cult that exists in the real world.

Creating a schizophrenic republic
Fascism, the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco pointed out, “feeds on humiliation – whether economic, national, gendered, or racialised – and encourages followers to direct their frustration at enemy-others who, through some tenuous logic, turn out to be the source of all society’s problems. By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

Modi has fed the basal instincts of his supporters – and thrived on it. In 2005, when Modi was the chief minister, the Gujarat police murdered a wanted man named Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife in cold blood. The previous year, they had shot dead four people, including a young woman Ishrat Jahan, in a gunfight that was alleged to have been staged.

Criticised for such extrajudicial killings, Modi declared at an election rally in 2007 that Sheikh “got what he deserved”. What should be done, he asked, to a man found with illegal arms? “Kill him,” the crowd shouted, “kill him!”

Modi is also a master of casting legitimate criticism of himself and his political conduct into rousing rhetoric about humiliation and victimhood while fusing his own identity with that of the state. After the 2002 Gujarat carnage, when he was perhaps at his weakest politically, he conducted a statewide campaign called the Gujarat Gaurav Yatra to peddle victimhood.

He has perfected the script since. Whether addressing election rallies or responding to policy challenges like protests against the new citizenship law and the farmers protests, Modi invariably deploys the language of grievance. He recently counted 91 abuses that the Opposition had allegedly thrown at him, and conflated it with denigration of the OBC community, to which he belongs, and India itself.

On the flip side, the rhetoric of perpetual victimhood feeds into Hindutva’s inferiority complex. In this matrix, the Hindu Rashtra is at once a world leader and a fragile nation that everyone can destabilise or destroy at will. Personally for Modi, it chips away at his role as the Hindu Hridaysamrat, the Emperor of Hindu Hearts.

This dissonance has created a schizophrenic republic.

That is why any critical questioning of Modi’s conduct or policies or even an academic review of Hinduism or Indian history is met with ad hominem, strawman or plain abusive attacks.

Trolling as masculine posturing
Hindutva is an adopted ideology. It is founded not on a social or economic ideal like communism or capitalism but on fear and a sense of victimhood. As a consequence, when confronted with a critical argument, its online devotee resorts to a digital form of the masculine display of power. Quite like a man who will not move when walking down a street to compel you to move around them or who talks over you or whistles at you. If you do go around him or shut up or turn your head, he has his victory. That is the power trip.

[Riaz Haq]

What drives Hindutva’s online supporters who defend Narendra Modi and Sangh Parivar no matter what

https://scroll.in/article/1052054/inside-the-psyche-of-hindutvas-on...

Only the online warrior feels more emboldened. Psychological research shows that anonymity, asynchronous communication, and an empathy deficit contribute to online disinhibition.

The Hindutva troll is especially susceptible to empathy deficit. He cloaks the inferiority complex inherent to his ideology in victimhood. Since victimhood sells politically, the troll is convinced of his victimhood and, naturally, seeks to defend his tribe against all manner of conspiratorial enemies. Trolling then is an act of convincing himself that he can assert power over the enemy, real or imagined. If the enemy is annoyed, scared or shuts up, the troll has done his duty.

More often than not, the troll’s political positioning is an inherited tribal loyalty to ethnic, familial or religious worldviews that he fuses with his national identity. The inherited worldview could be Christian in the US and Hindu in India, but the common thread is a deep suspicion of anyone that he does not identify as his own. That is why calling the former US president Barack Hussain Obama or pointing to Siddiqui’s Muslim heritage seems an acceptable retort to him. That is simply how he sees the world.

It is also why he easily dismisses a Hindu who opposes him or his ideology as a secret Muslim or a paid Muslim agent. He simply cannot conceive of a member of his tribe coming to a different conclusion about the world. No wonder engaging with a troll often feels like talking to someone who speaks an alien tongue.

Getting away from a cult
One way to cure this malaise is to expose the would-be troll to a different social context, an out-group. That is how most people break away from a faith or a cult. The phenomenon is known as Contact Hypothesis. Sharing space with people from varied backgrounds and worldviews makes a degree of liberalism necessary just to get by.

Indian spaces, however, are deeply segregated and becoming more so, which is driving communities further apart and contributing to religious strife like the Delhi carnage of 2020.

It will do this country good to recognise that our trolls are a reflection of our society, that for an Indian to truly believe in universal brotherhood means for him to break down social, parasocial, emotional, and familial barriers. That is not easy to do. Most of us, George Orwell warned in 1984, prefer happiness over freedom. And so the trolls continue to chant war is peace, ignorance is bliss, freedom is slavery.

Raj Shekhar Sen is an Indian writer and podcaster who lives in the US. His Twitter handle is @DiscourseDancer.

[Riaz Haq]

Dr. Namrata Datta (Singa Pen), PhD
@DrDatta01
Here we have saffron draped Pramod Singh (Leader of #Meitei) boasting that “We will wipe out #Christian #Kuki"
He further said Kukis will not be able to defend themselves.
The Indian state promotes and enables such hate.
#MANIPUR #bjp #rss #Hindu

https://twitter.com/DrDatta01/status/1682274613508861953?s=20

[Riaz Haq]

Modi’s India is moving in an illiberal direction | Financial Times


Martin Wolf: The Modi government rides the tiger of politicized religion toward what it hopes is the destination of a modern, prosperous and strong India. The question is not just where it will end up, but whether it can avoid being eaten on its journey.

https://www.ft.com/content/bf591089-6e9d-4cf9-ac80-8c63e3b12f42


His government has taken huge risks in riding the tiger of politicised religion



Today’s India is an “illiberal democracy”. Freedom House, the US think-tank, puts it at the same level as Hungary, whose leader, Viktor Orbán, invented that phrase. But it rates the components differently: political rights, notably electoral politics, are healthier in India than in Hungary, but civil rights are weaker. Worse, the latter have deteriorated substantially under BJP rule since 2014. India’s ratings on democracy are still far higher than those of, say, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Turkey. But it is not a “liberal democracy”: Freedom House simply labels the country “partly free”.


Yet, as India’s polity has become less liberal, its government has become more effective. World Bank indicators show that “political stability and absence of violence”, “control of corruption”, “regulatory quality” and “government effectiveness” have improved since Narendra Modi became prime minister. But “voice and accountability” and “rule of law” have worsened. His government is more repressive and more effective than its predecessors



As Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University notes in “India’s Democratic Longevity and Its Troubled Trajectory”, the country’s vigorous democracy was an anomaly. It should not have lasted in an agricultural country with a significant rate of illiteracy. Yes, this democracy was imperfect, with high levels of corruption and violence, not to mention Indira Gandhi’s “emergency” in the mid-1970s. But it worked.



Varshney’s hypothesis is that political ideology played a central role in first creating the democracy and now weakening it. The founders of independent India believed in democracy. Over time, as its politics became more fragmented, politicians thought democracy was in their interest, too, since it allowed them hope to fight another day. But today’s Hindu nationalists have a different point of view: for them, a true Indian must be a Hindu. Their critics are “anti-national” and so inherently treasonous.

This perspective justifies administrative and legal action against independent voices in universities, think-tanks and the media. The government can now designate any individual a terrorist based on personal writings, speeches, social media posts, or literature found in their possession. According to Rahul Mukherji, close to 17,000 civil society organisations have been denied registration or renewal since 2015. Moreover, minority rights, especially of Muslims, are under attack, not just through the law or administrative decrees, but also through vigilante violence.



All this is clearly illiberal. But is it also undemocratic? Majoritarians argue that they are entitled to do what they wish because they won. But a dictatorship of the majority is still a dictatorship. Moreover, without freedom of association and opinion, an opposition cannot function. Rahul Gandhi, a leading opposition politician, has been sentenced to two years in prison for remarks he has made on Modi. Such intimidation makes a competitive democracy infeasible. Moreover, as is too often the case in first-past-the post multi-party elections, the BJP won a huge majority of seats in 2019, despite winning fewer than 40 per cent of votes. This is hardly a true majority.

[Riaz Haq]

Modi’s India is moving in an illiberal direction | Financial Times


https://www.ft.com/content/bf591089-6e9d-4cf9-ac80-8c63e3b12f42

Yet we must remember that democratic rights do not of themselves fill empty stomachs or produce good jobs. Encouragingly, a recent report from the UN Development Programme argues that between 2005 and 2021, 415mn people were lifted out of “multidimensional poverty”, and the incidence of poverty declined from 55 per cent to 16 per cent. The most rapid declines occurred in the poorest states and union territories. The Modi government must take a good part of the credit for this.



At the same time, as Ashoka Mody notes, the employment record of India is persistently poor. A crucial failure is India’s low (and falling) female participation rate. Moreover, the growth rate has not accelerated under the BJP. Even today’s “India stack” of universal digital access and the successful direct distribution of welfare payments derives from the unique identity system created by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, when Manmohan Singh was prime minister. Moreover, strong and centralised government can make big mistakes. Demonetisation in 2016 was such a mistake. Another was the Covid lockdown in March 2020, which forced some 40mn migrant workers to return home, many of them on foot. Moreover, such governments frequently have over-close relations with business cronies. This one seems to be no exception.



For someone who has long admired the vigour and diversity of Indian democracy, this growing illiberalism is depressing. It is particularly depressing given India’s rising role in the world. I can see no good reason why a predominantly Hindu society should not tolerate minority faiths. I can see no reason either why it has to assail a diverse civil society. Yet that is where the Modi government seems to be going.



Those who worry about this will be reminded that Hindus are highly tolerant. According to a 2021 study of religious attitudes by the Pew Foundation, 85 per cent of Hindus (who are 80 per cent of the population) believe that “respecting all religions is very important to being truly Indian”. Unfortunately, the 15 per cent who do not share this view are 90mn adults. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of Hindus say it is very important to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian. Thus the politics of religious identity carry dangers for both freedom and stability even in India.



This government rides the tiger of politicised religion on what it hopes to be a long journey towards the destination of creating a modern, prosperous and strong India. The question is not just where it will end up, but whether it can avoid being eaten on its journey.

[Riaz Haq]

Derek J. Grossman
@DerekJGrossman
“The reflexive American response to perceived democratic backsliding—a mix of high-minded lectures & threats of sanctions—infuriates Indians, whose skepticism about American virtue has deep roots…


https://twitter.com/DerekJGrossman/status/1686399119496200192?s=20


----------------

The Delicate U.S. Task of Courting India
The two very different democracies are only partially united by a common language.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-delicate-us-task-of-courting-india...

by Walter Russell Meade

With India slated to pass Germany and Japan to become the world’s third largest economy by the end of this decade, getting India right has become a critical task for American policy makers.

But a week of talks with political, religious and business leaders aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has reminded me how difficult this relationship can be. The U.S. and India are both democracies. They are both eager to offset Chinese power in Asia without war. But the differences between the two societies are profound. It will take skill, patience and understanding to make the relationship work.

There is much about India that most Americans don’t understand, and few Americans know India well enough to explain it to the rest of us. Indian democracy is even more complicated and messier than the American variety, and elements of Indian life, ranging from communal violence to reflexive suspicion of both capitalism and the U.S., anger, puzzle and frustrate Americans trying to engage.

Under the current BJP government, Indian authorities have taken some controversial steps. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was deprived of his parliamentary seat following a relatively minor legal finding. Indian officials have used tax laws to harass critics ranging from a well-known think tank (Centre for Policy Research) to the BBC and limited the ability of Indian nongovernmental organizations (including Christian groups) to receive money from abroad. Authorities have at times been slow to respond to complaints by religious minorities about violent attacks or discriminatory state legislation.

Government and party officials argue that Indian realities are complicated. They claim Mr. Gandhi’s forced exit was a judicial matter, that state rather than federal authorities are responsible for many of the decisions that trouble international human-rights groups, and that past governments under the BJP’s political rivals have done the same or worse. They make some valid points, but the chorus of criticism from American human-rights organizations continues to grow.

Unless handled intelligently on both sides, problems like this could throw a wrench into diplomatic relations. The reflexive American response to perceived democratic backsliding—a mix of high-minded lectures and threats of sanctions—infuriates Indians, whose skepticism about American virtue has deep roots. No Indian government can afford to be seen bowing to foreign demands.

Indians are sometimes right about American hypocrisy and arrogance; Americans are sometimes right about misguided Indian policies. Even so, the two countries must work together. We need to find ways to address sensitive issues in order to keep the focus on the larger interests that unite us.

This is where the scarcity of real Indian expertise in America creates problems. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans have lived and studied in China over the past 30 years, but a relative handful went to India. An even smaller number studied Indian languages. While many educated Indians speak English, a large majority do not comfortably read or write in it, and without access to the vernacular press and public, American ideas about Indian politics and culture are inevitably skewed.

[Riaz Haq]

The Delicate U.S. Task of Courting India
The two very different democracies are only partially united by a common language.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-delicate-us-task-of-courting-india...


Building the U.S.-India relationship will take at least as much work. While India already sends hundreds of thousands of students to American universities, and the Indian-American community operates effectively as ambassadors and interpreters between the two cultures, a much broader engagement is needed.


Government can do its part. Washington should step up funding for the study of Indian languages and history. It should simplify the process for issuing visas to Indian scholars, journalists and businesspeople and work with Indian officials to promote cooperation between universities and other civil-society groups in the two countries.

During the Cold War, Americans and our principal allies understood that the Atlantic Community and the U.S.-Japan relationship needed people-to-people ties to become enduring and strong. Governments funded language-study programs and promoted exchanges. Civil-society groups ranging from Rotary clubs and local chambers of commerce to universities and foundations joined in a prolonged effort to build the West into a community. This wasn’t always easy in the wake of World War II—American relationships with Germany and Japan were not exactly love matches.

But government action alone won’t be enough. A generation of young Americans needs to study and live in India, learning local languages and cultures. Programs bringing young Americans to India to teach English while learning about Indian culture and history would help both countries. Businesses should invest in deepening the ties that will enable the economic relationship between the two countries to reach its full potential. Philanthropy needs to make the relationship a priority, providing universities and think tanks with the resources to build up their India-focused programs.

Deepening our relationship with India enhances American security and promotes American economic growth. Investing in that relationship should be one of our highest national priorities.