Editorial: There is always a cost to pay

NEW DELHI: In the heat of the election campaign, little attention has been paid to two recent American reports on the human rights situation in India. One was the US State Department’s 2023 country report on human rights practices in BJP-led India. The other was a three-page assessment by the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) noting the slide in people’s rights under the current regime.

While mentioning the well-reported cases of infamy—Siddique Kappan, Umar Khalid, the Bhima-Koregaon incarcerations without bail and the extra-judicial killings of Gauri Lankesh and other activists—the State Department enumerates 19 categories of human rights excesses that have proliferated in the past 10 years and concludes that “the government took minimal credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who may have committed human rights abuses.”

The CRS note is largely derived from the State Department report but is notable for two things: its conclusion that “the reported scope and scale of abuses has increased under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, particularly since their reelection in 2019”; and its recommendation to Congress to consider making US foreign aid to India “conditional to improvements in human rights and civil liberties.”

India’s reaction, rendered by Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, was predictably tetchy. Dismissing the State Department report as “deeply biased”, and reflective of “a poor understanding” of the largest democracy in the world, he proffered to the Indian media some gratuitous advice: “We attach no value to it and urge you to do the same.” And, as is now the norm for MEA in the face of any adverse foreign report on India’s internal affairs, he took a ‘physician, heal thyself’ jab at Washington: America will be “judged by what it does at home and not what it says abroad”.

The latter is a pithy retort, and justified too given the Biden Administration’s arms-length complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the nationwide crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests on American campuses. But the MEA reaction shows fuzzy logic. What level of “understanding” might condone the countless human rights excesses Indian citizens have witnessed and the process infirmities that have been exposed in the past 10 years? And why must the Indian media “attach no value” to these excesses and thus be complicit in them?

Human rights are important, not because they may win praise from Western governments, but because they are the constitutionally mandated rights of the Indian people and because India is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While thumbing one’s nose at “foreign interference” might impress the Hindutva right, it is little more than puffery. Even if adverse reports are ignored in India, as advised by MEA, India’s diminishing stature on human rights will carry a cost. Foreign governments, and not only in the West, do use the human rights record as an input in foreign policy and economic collaboration. In the business arena, risk assessment firms include human rights in their calculations; and ESG policies expressly discourage investment in dodgy situations. Progressive lobbies, powerful in the policy sphere of the West, can push adverse legislation or block collaboration programmes on the basis of human rights considerations. And last but not the least, it is useful to remember that liberal-progressive movements in disparate countries conflate internationally as one common cause. What happens in Palestine stirs hearts in India and vice versa. In sum, it’s futile to try to use sovereignty as cover for human rights issues. As with domestic violence, so with human rights abuses, it is quite the business of the village.