US lawmaker Ro Khanna, leading a bipartisan Congressional delegation to India, has come under fire for his reported meetings with people with “dented credentials”.
Khanna, the Indian-origin co-chair of US Congress' India Caucus, said on Thursday that he met Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Indian freedom icon Mahatma Gandhi and a prominent critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Khanna after the meeting said that he would “unequivocally stand for pluralism and the human rights of minority populations, including Muslims” in India.
US Aggravating India’s Faultlines, Political Analyst Says
Binay Kumar Singh, a senior research fellow of strategic studies at Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told Sputnik India that US and the western countries have for long tried to “aggravate the faultlines” in the Indian society.
“The US and the western countries have this habit of interfering in the internal matters of developing countries on the pretext of human rights,” Singh remarked.
“It is nothing new. The US uses human rights as a tool to advance its own agenda,” he added.
The Indian analyst said that the security situation in Manipur was far better under Prime Minister Narendra Modi was far better than it was under the previous Indian governments.
He also cited the official statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) bureau to highlight that incident of “religiously-motivated” violence had dropped in India since the BJP-led government came to power in 2014.
Singh said that the US was in no position to preach human rights to India, given its own track record of police violence against African-Americans.
“India never commented on the widespread protests against police brutality in the US after the death of George Floyd in 2020,” he said, adding that it was the US which has a lot to learn from India rather than the other way around.
Singh held up the case of Afghanistan, stating that American “intervention” there led to nothing but chaos and destruction.
“And they left Afghanistan in a state of turmoil and created a security problem for all the regional countries,” Singh said.
‘No Outsider Needs to Preach us Human Rights’, Policymaker Says
Vinit Goenka, a practising policymaker and the former co-convenor of BJP’s Information and Technology (IT) Cell, said that India didn’t want any outsider to “preach human rights” to it.
Goenka said that he was commenting in his individual capacity and his remarks didn’t represent the party line.
“We are matured democracy with not a single bullet fired in decades while power was transferred between prime ministers,” he said. Goenka raised questions on Khanna’s meeting with Tushar Gandhi.
“We Indians respect the contributions of Father of Nation Mahatma Gandhi to the cause of Indian freedom and he is an icon to me. Tushar Gandhi may be his descendant but doesn't represent his legacy,” he said.
Goenka said that the US Congressional delegation shouldn’t be “blindfolded” to the concerns of Indian communities while it met with families of political dissidents.
The US Congress delegation can't be blindfolded to the concerns of Indian communities while they meet families of political dissidents.
“I would be happy if they had met families of sadhus (Hindu ascetics) who was lynched by mob in Palghar, Maharashtra, in 2020. I would be happy if they had met Kashmiri Hindu families who were forced to leave the Valley in the 1990s due to atrocity of extremists and overlook by then govt. I would be happy if they had met the victims of 1984 anti-Sikh riots. I would be happy if they had met nuns who were raped repeatedly by an arch-bishop,” Goenka stated.