Blinken hosted a luncheon in the Indian leader’s honor. The administration’s feting of Modi stretched into Friday at the State Department, where Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Vice President Kamala Harris invoked familial ties to India as she pressed Prime Minister Narendra Modi on human rights in a departure from the Trump administration.
Politics Kamala Harris presses India’s Modi gently on human rights in historic meeting When asked by a reporter about the criticism that his administration was overlooking India’s crackdown on dissent, Biden said the two leaders had a “good discussion” about democratic values. At a news conference that day, the president said universal human rights faced challenges “in each of our countries” but remained vital to both nations’ success. Critics say his warm welcome of Modi undermines his messages about the threats to democracy posed by Trump, his 2020 - and potentially 2024 - Republican opponent.Īt Modi’s welcoming ceremony Thursday, Biden made oblique references to human rights, hailing freedom of expression and religious pluralism as “core principles” for both countries. these legislative efforts that have used government power to censor the diversity and complexity of our own country’s history - something we’ve seen the administration speak out against,” Johnson said.įor Biden, the focus on shared democratic values was an awkward feature of Modi’s visit. “It actually mirrors what we’re seeing here in the U.S. She pointed to the Indian government’s more recent effort to purge textbooks of references to the Muslim Mughal dynasty, the nation’s founding as a secular republic and Gujarat state’s anti-Muslim violence on Modi’s watch.
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“This government has employed a range of tactics to chill free expression,” said Nadine Farid Johnson of PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free expression. Last year, 10 human rights and democracy organizations called out Modi’s government for targeting journalists, saying it had “emboldened Hindu nationalists to threaten, harass, and abuse journalists critical of the Indian government, both online and offline, with impunity.” The same can’t be said for the Indian journalists who have been detained or bullied for scrutinizing the BJP. That reporting led to an onslaught of hate mail and social media harassment, but I was able to return home. I left out my plans to write about the similarities between Modi’s policies and those of then-President Trump. I didn’t tell him I planned to travel to Assam state’s border with Bangladesh to interview some of the millions of Muslims who would be rendered stateless under a citizenship law that would pass in Modi’s second term. in 1965, his life in Chicago as a doctor and my work as a journalist. I recounted my father’s journey from southern India’s Chennai, then known as Madras, to the U.S. As a reporter for BBC News in 2019, I covered his reelection campaign.īefore traveling to New Delhi, I was summoned to the Indian Embassy in Washington, where I sat down for chai with an official from the BJP, Modi’s party, who quizzed me on my family’s background and my plans in India.
I know a bit about the anxieties of reporting in Modi’s India. The government attempted to ban the documentary, labeling it “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” In February, Indian tax authorities raided local BBC offices weeks after the British broadcaster aired a documentary on Modi’s role in anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, when he was the state’s chief minister. Afghanistan, Venezuela and South Sudan rank higher. 161 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, a list compiled by Reporters Without Borders. India has also become an especially difficult place to be a reporter. In April, top opposition leader and vocal Modi critic Rahul Gandhi was expelled from parliament after a court convicted him of defamation for mocking Modi in an election speech. Human rights groups have accused his government of undermining democracy, including by passing a citizenship law that discriminates based on religion and revoking the special autonomous status granted to India’s only Muslim-majority territory, Jammu and Kashmir.
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