EDITORIAL: US Commission for International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF) Commissioner Stephen Schneck hit the nail on the head when he described the Indian government’s alleged involvement in the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and a plot to kill another Sikh activist, Gurpatwani Singh Pannun, in the United States as “deeply troubling”.
The religious freedom watchdog has been pressing the US government to label India a country of particular concern, a designation under the 1998 US Religious Freedom Act, every year since 2020. And it called on the Biden administration to do so again last Friday, even as New Delhi flatly denied any involvement in either case.
There can be no denying that Indian minorities have had a rough ride, to put it very mildly, in the last decade of BJP rule. Worse still, the Modi administration has never had any qualms about not only not condemning anti-minority hostility, but also periodically fanning it; especially against Muslims.
But if allegations of targeted assassinations of Sikh leaders are true – and there is compelling evidence if you believe the Canadian and American governments – then the India government, especially its premier intelligence agency, has taken this game to a whole new, completely unacceptable, level.
That New Delhi would go out of its way to hunt down Sikh leaders, when their separatist movement has long run out of steam, seems odd at first. But, seen in perspective, BJP’s carte blanche to Hindutva extremists as they stamp their xenophobic religious intolerance across the country makes it entirely plausible that the government would continue looking the other way as RSS’s foot soldiers tie loose ends.
But taking this obsession to other countries, where freedom of expression allows people to rally all sorts of political opinions, and involving the intelligence machinery in their dirty work, changes everything. Hence the pushback.
Yet even though Canada has taken a very firm stand on this matter, it’s unlikely that the US will do the same. India became the central pillar of Washington’s Pivot to Asia policy, to counter China’s growing influence, during the Obama presidency. And it’s no coincidence that it has been getting away with all sorts of human rights violations since then. Most likely, the best that can be expected is a private snub, far away from the glare of the media, with US officials advising Indians to keep their dirty work confined to their own borders.
It’s a shame that the same human rights outfits – and in this case an arm of the US government – that western democracies hype when they peddle convenient narratives are so readily ignored when they put the spotlight on issues that question some of the superpower’s own policies.
The American constitution demands the administration distance itself from countries that illegally occupy territories and send hit squads after irritating political leaders. But everybody knows that even the world’s strongest democracy will readily hide behind politically correct excuses whenever its own rules demand action against some of its best friends.
Pakistan knows this side of India only too well, of course, and reminds the international community when it can about the eastern neighbour’s many excesses. But so far that’s done little to loosen Delhi’s stranglehold on Kashmir or its obsession with eliminating political actors it doesn’t agree with. And if America’s blind support for Israel, despite its genocidal blitzkrieg in Gaza, proves anything, it is that India might at best get a slight slap on the wrist, that too in private. That is not nearly going to be enough to check its “deeply troubling” posture.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023