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It is one matter for a BJP chief minister who is not known for choosing his words carefully to criticise former US president Barack Obama’s comments on the need to protect minority rights in India. It is quite another for two members of the Cabinet Committee on Security who have a reputation for mature and sober articulation to do so.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s jibe, “Hussein Obama”, seemed to be part of the crudity of India’s current domestic political discourse. However, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh’s, obviously orchestrated, attacks on Obama’s remarks are directed specifically at Muslims, both in India and abroad, and generally towards an external audience. They are clearly a signal of the government’s determination, so popular with the faithful, to fight fire with fire.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have been unhappy at the timing and the contents of Obama’s remarks. They came in the midst of his US visit and had the potential of spoiling the party. That did not happen because the US has major economic and strategic interests in the India relationship. Biden, therefore, decided to largely ignore Obama and others in the Democratic Party who urged him to strongly raise the human rights situation in India — as they see it — with Modi. Biden did so but only mildly and inoffensively, speaking of a desire to strengthen India-US relations and ground them “in democracy, human rights, freedom and rule of law”.
If Biden was judicious in his choice of words, Obama was completely the opposite. In an interview to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Obama used formulations which were once used by the Western media but were given up decades ago. It was then usual for India and Pakistan to be described as Hindu or Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan. Thereafter, secularism, which lies at the core of the Indian state, began to be acknowledged. Indeed, the charge against the Sangh Parivar is that it is seeking to erode it. In the interview, Obama said that he wanted Biden to mention to Modi that “the protection of the Muslim minority in a majority Hindu India” is needed.
Obama should have realised the absence of the word “secular” to describe India would naturally anger the Modi government for it directly feeds into the narrative, of both Indian and international liberal circles, that the present Indian dispensation is greatly weakening the secular foundations of the Indian state. If this was bad enough Obama’s warning that if “the rights of ethnic minorities in India are not protected there is a strong possibility that India at some point starts pulling apart and we’ve seen what happens when you start getting those kinds of large internal conflicts and that would be contrary to not just Muslim India but also Hindu India…”.
Obama’s warning cannot but be provocative to the Modi government. It would also make many others who do not subscribe to the philosophy of the Sangh Parivar unhappy. If the former US president had stopped at the words “pulling apart” it could be said that he was cautioning against the damage to social cohesion in a secular India. But he went on to talk of the possibility of “large conflicts” which would damage both Hindu and Muslim interests. Again, instead of saying that it would damage a “secular” India, his reference was directly in communal terms. And, given the history of the Indian subcontinent, it could not but raise the spectre, however far-fetched and unrealistic it is, of another partition.
That Obama was out of line in making these comments is unquestionable. The question, though, is if the Modi government has been wise in responding to them in the manner it has or, if it would have been wiser to simply ignore them for two reasons.
The first is that Modi was asked the question of minority rights in his brief joint press briefing with Biden. Modi asserted India’s commitment to democracy is embedded in its DNA as also in its Constitution to which, he asserted, his government is committed. He went on to stress that democracy can deliver, as his government has shown; and, in the delivery process there is no place for discrimination on the basis of caste, creed, religion or gender…”. Emphasising his government’s democratic credentials, he outrightly and comprehensively rejected charges that his government was discriminatory against any section of society or any part of the country.
The second is this: After Modi’s response at the media briefing, did the government and the Sangh Parivar consider that by taking on Obama it was giving oxygen to comments that did not adversely impact Modi’s US visit, the great welcome he received and the trip’s outcomes? Indeed, as seismic changes are taking place in the international order and with the alignments of states shifting, there is little space or time either in international decision-makers, the strategic community or in the boardrooms for the views, however, wise they may be, of a former US president even if the present president served as his vice-president throughout his term of office.
There is another aspect. The Muslim ummah has shown no concern for the political and socio-economic policies being pursued by Modi. There are routine statements by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on the “conditions” of the Muslim minority in India but this process pre-dates the Modi government and is mainly at Pakistan’s instance. The OIC statements have never impacted India’s bilateral ties with Islamic countries. Modi has been personally honoured with their highest civilian awards by many Muslim countries, the latest being Egypt, which he visited on his way back from the US. Thus, there was really no danger of Obama’s comments resonating in the Muslim world.
What has perhaps hurt Modi, who sets great store by his personal relations with world leaders as an instrument of foreign policy is that one who he once considered as friend should have struck him so. But then, in the cruel world of inter-state relations is there really a place for personal ties between leaders?
The writer is a former diplomat
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