Twenty one years ago, massive anti-Muslim violence broke out in India’s Gujarat state.
Although a complete death tally has never been completed, an estimated 2,000 predominantly Muslim Indians were killed. It was one of the worst anti-Muslim pogroms in the history of independent India — and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat, allowed it to happen.
“[A]llow Hindus to vent their anger,” Modi allegedly told police officers in a secret meeting, as violence engulfed Gujarat. Independent investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the U.K. government all found Modi centrally responsible for the violence, and for eight years, the United States and the United Kingdom denied him visa privileges in retaliation for his role in the pogrom.
Modi rode the fame of this incident all the way to the prime minister’s office, where he has continued to pursue a vision of India in which many Hindu citizens are privileged above Muslim, Christian, Dalit (lower caste) and Adivasi (Indigenous) peoples. He continues to remain silent as members of his political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, routinely call on Hindus to shoot and burn Muslims.
Far from being banned from U.S. soil, Modi is now poised to attend a state dinner with President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., on June 22. He is also scheduled to give an address to a joint session of Congress.
Despite the prime minister’s record, members of the Biden administration and leading media figures have recently praised Modi. For example, although the Indian government recently censored a BBC documentary that exposed Modi’s culpability for the Gujarat pogrom, Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, gushed over his “respect for the freedom of the press in India”.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also described Modi as “unbelievable,” “visionary” and “the most popular world leader for a reason” last May. Walter Russell Mead, a foreign policy columnist for The Wall Street Journal, applauded Modi and his ally Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk turned chief minister of India’s most populous state, who has so aggressively pursued demolition of Muslim and Christian homes that his supporters call him “Bulldozer Baba.”
The Modi regime’s reversal of political fortunes in his relationship with the United States can be explained by the Biden administration’s desire to partner with India as it seeks to contain China’s global influence. But the U.S. government’s own findings are relentlessly critical of Modi’s human rights and democracy record. For years, the State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom have reported that Modi’s BJP has targeted Muslims by encouraging hate speech, mob violence and Hindu supremacy.
The Biden administration’s embrace of Modi will help to legitimize his suppression of civil and political liberties and strengthen Hindu extremism in the United States, whose proponents are already fundraising for the destruction of churches in India and parading anti-Muslim hate symbols through New Jersey.
As a champion of democracy around the world, it is the responsibility of the United States to hold India accountable by publicly condemning Modi’s downward spiral toward authoritarianism.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Safa Ahmed is a second generation Indian-American activist from Raleigh, North Carolina. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
