 "From Kashmir to CAA: Time for US to shut up and introspect")
On 10 September, 2013, then American president Barack Obama said, “America is not the world’s policeman.”
In a prime-time speech to the nation, he asked Americans to support a military strike against Syria after the Bashar al-Assad regime gassed more than 1,000 people to death in the Ghouta countryside in the ongoing civil war.
However, conflating Assad’s use of Sarin with United States national security, Obama said, “Our ideals and principles … I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.”
Since 1776, the US has intervened militarily 393 times in other nations, according to the Centre for Strategic Studies’ Military Intervention Project, with 114 in the post-Cold War era. Several such strikes were ordered in the name of restoring democracy, American “ideals and principles” and so on, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The interventionist policy is not restricted to military action. The US often comments on internal matters of other nations, especially in Asia, that have no relation to its external or internal security.
Last week’s US comments on “the notification of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019” and close “monitoring” of its implementation is the latest example of American interference.
“We are concerned about the notification of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on March 11. We are closely monitoring this Act and how it will be implemented,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIndia hit back immediately. The US State Department’s statement “is misplaced, misinformed and unwarranted”, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told the media.
Similarly, external affairs minister S Jaishankar criticised the US comment. In reply to US ambassador Eric Garcetti’s statement that America can’t give up on religious freedom and equality, Jaishankar mentioned the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Lautenberg Amendment and Spector Amendment, which fast-tracked citizenships for specific minorities. “If you are saying you are picking some faiths, not others, I will give you many examples from across the world.”
Even the European Parliament tried to poke its nose into CAA by introducing a resolution on 28 January, 2020, terming it “discriminatory”.
US President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, for all his flaws, refused to be dragged into CAA row. During his February 2020 visit, he said, “I don’t want to discuss that [CAA]. I want to leave that to India. That is really up to India.”
Irrespective of the CAA’s merits and demerits, the West, especially the US, isn’t a stakeholder and has no right to comment. Neither the CAA’s implementation will affect Europe’s or America’s external or internal security nor Muslims staying there.
Time for US to shut up
US interference in India’s internal matters in the name of democracy, secularism, religious freedom and human rights in all these decades smacks of hypocrisy. India has its problems, and unless it asks for help solving them, Washington should mind its own business.
If the US is the world’s largest democracy, India is the biggest. In the last 10 years, India’s global image has been boosted by its strong economy, independent and assertive foreign policy and signs of an emerging world power.
India doesn’t need American guidance or morality lectures on internal and external matters. New Delhi is capable of solving its problems, and the US should stay out of it.
The US has a history of interfering in India’s internal affairs irrespective of a Democratic or Republican government. In April 2022, Biden clubbed India with authoritarian regimes while mentioning his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
The State Department’s Religious Freedom Report, 2022, released in March 2023, mentioned several countries, including India, China, Russia and Iran, for ‘targeting’ members of certain communities.
Despite Obama’s statement that the US isn’t the world’s policeman, his predecessors and successors have been delusional about America being the global moral cop. Even Obama targeted India on religious intolerance twice in 10 days in 2015.
US hypocrisy on Kashmir, terrorism
From Kashmir to CAA, which are India’s internal matters, the US doublespeak and interference is highly condemnable.
Since 1948, the US started supporting Pakistan over Kashmir. British and American involvement in the UN Security Council Resolution on January 17, 1948, was visible. To garner Pakistan’s support in the region, the US accepted the view that Kashmir was a disputed territory. The Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement in May 1954 sealed Pakistan’s alignment with the West.
The same year, the Indo-Soviet relationship improved despite then-prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru refusing to get dragged into the Cold War. In September, Pakistan joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, a collective defence alliance. In subsequent years, the US kept the Kashmir issue alive by pressuring India via the UN and started arming Pakistan.
America’s human rights hypocrisy was exposed in the 1971 India-Pakistan War with the Richard Nixon administration sending a carrier task force of the Seventh Fleet that included the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and attack submarine Gurnard to the Bay of Bengal to support Pakistan.
The US conveniently overlooked the genocide perpetrated by then-Pakistani president Yahya Khan and General Tikka Khan under Operation Searchlight, in which more than 300,000 Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan were killed and more than 200,000 raped.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 was a watershed moment in the India-US ties with America backing Pakistan to counter the Red Army. Islamabad allowed planeloads of Stinger missiles on its territory to help the Afghan Mujahideen counter the Soviet Hind attack copters. Gradually, Pakistani started exporting Afghan Mujahedeen to Jammu and Kashmir and training its disaffected youth to trigger terrorism in 1988.
The Bill Clinton administration pressured India on human rights in Kashmir and refused to recognise the instrument of accession. In October 1993, Robin Raphel the then-US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, said, “We view Kashmir as a disputed territory. We do not recognise the instrument of accession as meaning that Kashmir is forever an integral part of India.”
In fact, in his September 1993 address to the UN General Assembly, Clinton said, “Bloody ethnic, religious and civil wars rage from Angola to the Caucasus to Kashmir.”
In another instance of interference in India’s matters, the Clinton administration said that it was “deeply disappointed” by the May 1998 Pokhran II tests and imposed sanctions on India. The US also tried to pressure India to join the CTBT and the NPT.
In 2009, Obama secretly offered Pakistan to ask India for negotiations on Kashmir if it stopped supporting terrorist groups, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, wrote in his book Magnificent Delusions in 2013. Even Trump offered to mediate on Kashmir five times.
Kashmir and terrorism are India’s internal matter, but the US always looked the other way as long as it needed Pakistan’s support. The Pakistani Army, Inter-Services Intelligence and successive governments have been bleeding India for more than three decades. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, more than 22,200 civilians and around 8,400 security personnel have been killed by terrorists in J&K from 1988 to 2023.
America changed its Pakistan policy only after 9/11 mastermind and Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was neutralised by the Navy SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad on 2 May, 2011.
Even on terrorism, the US supports India publicly but acts otherwise. In a joint statement during PM Narendra Modi’s June 2023 US visit, both leaders “unequivocally” condemned terrorism and “called for the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai and Pathankot attacks to be brought to justice”.
However, India’s request for extraditing 26/11 co-conspirator and Pakistan-origin Canadian businessman Tahawwur Rana from the US has been pending since June 2020. The Ninth Circuit Court had stayed Rana’s extradition in August following his appeal. Both Rana and 26/11 co-accused Dawood Gilani, aka David Coleman Headley, who recced potential targets and attended LeT training camps in Pakistan, escaped jail in India because they are in the US.
The US also supported Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unsubstantiated and unproven allegations of India eliminating Khalistan Tiger Force chief and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a wanted terrorist in India.
Seeking accountability, a “deeply concerned” secretary of state Antony Blinken asked India to cooperate with Canada. “We are deeply concerned by the allegations referenced by Prime Minister Trudeau … we have publicly and privately urged the Indian government to cooperate in the Canadian investigation,” Miller told the media.
The number of attacks on Indian consulates in the US, UK and Canada have increased but these countries haven’t taken action except for issuing statements.
Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the founder of the banned Sikhs for Justice, threatened to target Canadian-Indians, Indian Parliament, BSE and NSE and blow up Air India flights—he issued these threats from US soil.
The US lectures India on human rights, but the CIA has a bloody record of targeted killings, especially in Muslim countries. Since 1947, the CIA has ordered hundreds of assassinations.
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), Obama ordered 563 drone strikes, 10 times more than under George W Bush (57), killing 384-807 civilians in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. From 2002 to 2020, 800-1,750 civilians were killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen from 2002 to 2020.
Discrimination against Muslims in US
Successive US administrations have been concerned about Indian Muslims. But what happens in America’s backyard?
A Pew Research Centre survey conducted among 5,203 adults from November 27-December 3 last year showed that 53 per cent of Democrats and 22 per cent of Republicans were extremely or very concerned about the possibility of more violence against Muslims after the 7 October Hamas attacks.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded 2,171 reports of bias against Muslims or requests for help, 172 per cent more than the 2022 two-month average, after the Hamas attacks.
Islamophobia in the US has become part of US racism after 9/11. Hate crimes against Muslims jumped by 1,617 per cent from 2000 to 2001, according to the FBI.
Even after 22 years, Islamophobia in the US continues to haunt Muslims. It has “taken root and become part of the structure of racism that exists in parts of our country”, according to Hussam Ayloush, CEO of CAIR’s California chapter. “The types of abuses that came out of 9/11 that the government took part in became a part of how Islamophobia evolved.”
According to CAIR, Islamophobia was worse under Trump, who banned Muslims in Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela from entering the US in 2017. Subsequently, 98 per cent of visa applications from these countries were rejected. Now, Trump has vowed to bar Gaza refugees and expand his Muslim travel ban if re-elected.
CAIR recorded a 91 per cent rise in hate crimes against Muslim in the first half of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.
On one hand, the US is deeply concerned about Indian Muslims. On the other, America has bombed 14 Muslim countries since 1980—Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria.
The US still believes in its hegemony and a unipolar world. However, Russia and China have eroded American dominance, which has resulted in a multipolar world. It’s high time for the US to realise that it can’t dictate terms to other countries. India can deal with internal and external problems without American guidance and interference.
The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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