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The contrast over U.S. demands to protect Chinese Uighurs and Myanmar’s Rohingya will be an undercurrent in high-level meetings with India this week.
Protests over India’s citizenship bill have taken place across the country.Credit...Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
By Lara Jakes
In Myanmar, the ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims is “deeply abhorrent to our way of life” and displayed “shocking and brutal violence,” according to State Department officials.
But American diplomats have offered only muted public criticism of India’s moves against Muslims, seemingly wary of alienating even an unpredictable ally as the United States confronts China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific region.
The stark contrast over religious protections for Muslims reveals an undercurrent in high-level meetings this week between the United States and India on a range of diplomatic and military issues.
The meetings, in Washington, are scheduled as protests rage across India over the country’s new legislation to fast-track citizenship for migrants of all of South Asia’s major religions except Islam. The unrest follows months of high anxiety in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region claimed by both India and Pakistan; in August, Kashmir was besieged by Indian security forces and saw its decades-long autonomy revoked.
Alice G. Wells, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for issues in South and Central Asia, said last week that the Trump administration was closely watching the situation in Kashmir and continued to call for the release of detainees and for political and economic normalcy to be restored.
“I don’t want to diminish the challenges that we have in the relationship,” Ms. Wells said in a speech previewing Wednesday’s meetings between the two nations’ top diplomats and defense chiefs.
She noted concerns in Congress about India’s citizenship bill and said residents in Kashmir “are entitled to their full rights under the Indian Constitution, which enshrines the respect for religious freedom of all Indians.”
“The message I want to leave with you is that there are challenges,” Ms. Wells said, “but we’re working together to overcome them in ways that would have seemed impossible in the past.”
Representative André Carson, Democrat of Indiana and one of three Muslim lawmakers in Congress, called the citizenship bill “yet another attempt to effectively reduce Muslims in India to second-class citizens.” He said it was the latest attempt by the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to “promote Hindu supremacy” in the world’s most populous democracy.
Under Mr. Pompeo, the State Department has elevated the issue of religious freedom and its role in foreign policy to include for the first time hosting annual meetings of senior foreign diplomats to discuss challenges to faith-based liberty.
“All governments have a duty to protect people from harm regardless of their beliefs, and to hold perpetrators of persecution accountable,” Mr. Pompeo said in August, while the siege in Kashmir was underway. At the time, he cited religious persecution in China, Iran and Myanmar, but not India.
A briefing last month by Sam Brownback, the State Department’s special ambassador for international religious freedom, was notably silent on the plight of Muslims in Kashmir. And in an Oct. 28 speech about Tibetan Buddhism, delivered in India, Mr. Brownback urged governments to protect “religious freedom for all people, everywhere, all the time” — but never once mentioned the anti-Muslim moves by Mr. Modi’s government.
In statements this week, the State Department urged India to “protect the rights of its religious minorities.” It called on authorities to respect peaceful protests against the citizenship legislation and urged demonstrators to refrain from violence. The department also urged India’s government to reopen mosques and shrines in Kashmir that were closed because of the unrest and said it was concerned by restrictions on cellphone and internet access.
Separately, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal body, called the new citizenship legislation a “dangerous turn in the wrong direction” and said that the United States should consider sanctions against India.
The citizenship bill and Kashmir are expected to be raised by the United States at the meetings with India’s foreign and defense ministers. But those issues are not the focus of the discussions.
Continue reading the main story
Trade, defense and counterterrorism efforts, and fostering closer ties through business, education and science top the agenda. But the underlying theme of the talks will be countering China and Russia, and the Trump administration is pulling India closer to offset the other powers’ influence in the region.
Both the United States and India oppose China’s military moves in the South China Sea and what experts describe as its intimidation of India, Japan and smaller states in Asia. They also both oppose China’s Belt and Road Initiative to link the economies of Asia, Europe and Africa — and put Beijing at the center of global trade and enhance its geopolitical ambitions.
Beijing’s increased influence in the Indian Ocean, and is limited in the ways it can forcibly push back against China, with whom it shares a border of more than 2,500 miles.
“We need like-minded partners,” Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said in New Delhi in August. “That’s why the vitality of the U.S.-India partnership is such an important factor in determining whether China ultimately succeeds in reshaping Asia to its purposes.”
(Mr. Sullivan did not mention Kashmir in his speech, although he cited religious freedom as a value that both India and the United States “hold dear.”)
Pentagon officials are also trying to dissuade India from buying a missile defense system from Russia, offering both an incentive — in the possibility of instead purchasing American-made arms — and a threat of sanctions if the sale with Moscow goes through. Last month, Russia’s chief arms trade executive said India had already paid $800 million for five S-400 missile systems.
Continue reading the main story
Randall G. Schriver, an assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said the United States and India had made great strides over the last two years, syncing lines of communications, holding annual amphibious military exercises and increasing arms sales to India.
“Defense trade has been a very positive area of our relationship,” Mr. Schriver told reporters last week. The two countries have together spent about $18 billion in security cooperation, he said, “starting from basically zero in 2002.”
Despite “complexities” between the United States and India, the meetings on Wednesday could yield significant agreements to expand defense training, military sales and collaboration on security technology, said Ashley J. Tellis, a former diplomat and National Security Council official under President George W. Bush.
But the diplomatic effort is not expected to paper over deep divisions between the two countries, including a trade deal that stalled after the Trump administration stripped India of a special protectionist status. New Delhi retaliated by raising tariffs on $1.4 billion worth of American imports, including almonds, walnuts, apples and finished metal items.
Nor is it likely to change India’s mind about its treatment of Muslims.
Mr. Tellis said the Trump administration had “been very conscious to not do anything publicly that might embarrass India” — which is why, he predicted, the State Department had toned down its criticism of the anti-Muslim actions.
“There is a perception that India is a strategic ally and a partner,” said Mr. Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Whatever their discomfort with the Modi government’s policies are, I think they want to allow the Indian democratic process to work itself out, and see where the country comes out.”
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from New Delhi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/world/asia/india-muslims-state-department.html
Protests over India’s citizenship bill have taken place across the country.Credit...Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
By Lara Jakes
- Dec. 17, 2019
In Myanmar, the ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims is “deeply abhorrent to our way of life” and displayed “shocking and brutal violence,” according to State Department officials.
But American diplomats have offered only muted public criticism of India’s moves against Muslims, seemingly wary of alienating even an unpredictable ally as the United States confronts China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific region.
The stark contrast over religious protections for Muslims reveals an undercurrent in high-level meetings this week between the United States and India on a range of diplomatic and military issues.
The meetings, in Washington, are scheduled as protests rage across India over the country’s new legislation to fast-track citizenship for migrants of all of South Asia’s major religions except Islam. The unrest follows months of high anxiety in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region claimed by both India and Pakistan; in August, Kashmir was besieged by Indian security forces and saw its decades-long autonomy revoked.
Alice G. Wells, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for issues in South and Central Asia, said last week that the Trump administration was closely watching the situation in Kashmir and continued to call for the release of detainees and for political and economic normalcy to be restored.
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“I don’t want to diminish the challenges that we have in the relationship,” Ms. Wells said in a speech previewing Wednesday’s meetings between the two nations’ top diplomats and defense chiefs.
She noted concerns in Congress about India’s citizenship bill and said residents in Kashmir “are entitled to their full rights under the Indian Constitution, which enshrines the respect for religious freedom of all Indians.”
“The message I want to leave with you is that there are challenges,” Ms. Wells said, “but we’re working together to overcome them in ways that would have seemed impossible in the past.”
Representative André Carson, Democrat of Indiana and one of three Muslim lawmakers in Congress, called the citizenship bill “yet another attempt to effectively reduce Muslims in India to second-class citizens.” He said it was the latest attempt by the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to “promote Hindu supremacy” in the world’s most populous democracy.
Under Mr. Pompeo, the State Department has elevated the issue of religious freedom and its role in foreign policy to include for the first time hosting annual meetings of senior foreign diplomats to discuss challenges to faith-based liberty.
“All governments have a duty to protect people from harm regardless of their beliefs, and to hold perpetrators of persecution accountable,” Mr. Pompeo said in August, while the siege in Kashmir was underway. At the time, he cited religious persecution in China, Iran and Myanmar, but not India.
A briefing last month by Sam Brownback, the State Department’s special ambassador for international religious freedom, was notably silent on the plight of Muslims in Kashmir. And in an Oct. 28 speech about Tibetan Buddhism, delivered in India, Mr. Brownback urged governments to protect “religious freedom for all people, everywhere, all the time” — but never once mentioned the anti-Muslim moves by Mr. Modi’s government.
In statements this week, the State Department urged India to “protect the rights of its religious minorities.” It called on authorities to respect peaceful protests against the citizenship legislation and urged demonstrators to refrain from violence. The department also urged India’s government to reopen mosques and shrines in Kashmir that were closed because of the unrest and said it was concerned by restrictions on cellphone and internet access.
Separately, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal body, called the new citizenship legislation a “dangerous turn in the wrong direction” and said that the United States should consider sanctions against India.
The citizenship bill and Kashmir are expected to be raised by the United States at the meetings with India’s foreign and defense ministers. But those issues are not the focus of the discussions.
Continue reading the main story
Trade, defense and counterterrorism efforts, and fostering closer ties through business, education and science top the agenda. But the underlying theme of the talks will be countering China and Russia, and the Trump administration is pulling India closer to offset the other powers’ influence in the region.
Both the United States and India oppose China’s military moves in the South China Sea and what experts describe as its intimidation of India, Japan and smaller states in Asia. They also both oppose China’s Belt and Road Initiative to link the economies of Asia, Europe and Africa — and put Beijing at the center of global trade and enhance its geopolitical ambitions.
Beijing’s increased influence in the Indian Ocean, and is limited in the ways it can forcibly push back against China, with whom it shares a border of more than 2,500 miles.
“We need like-minded partners,” Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said in New Delhi in August. “That’s why the vitality of the U.S.-India partnership is such an important factor in determining whether China ultimately succeeds in reshaping Asia to its purposes.”
(Mr. Sullivan did not mention Kashmir in his speech, although he cited religious freedom as a value that both India and the United States “hold dear.”)
Pentagon officials are also trying to dissuade India from buying a missile defense system from Russia, offering both an incentive — in the possibility of instead purchasing American-made arms — and a threat of sanctions if the sale with Moscow goes through. Last month, Russia’s chief arms trade executive said India had already paid $800 million for five S-400 missile systems.
Continue reading the main story
Randall G. Schriver, an assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said the United States and India had made great strides over the last two years, syncing lines of communications, holding annual amphibious military exercises and increasing arms sales to India.
“Defense trade has been a very positive area of our relationship,” Mr. Schriver told reporters last week. The two countries have together spent about $18 billion in security cooperation, he said, “starting from basically zero in 2002.”
Despite “complexities” between the United States and India, the meetings on Wednesday could yield significant agreements to expand defense training, military sales and collaboration on security technology, said Ashley J. Tellis, a former diplomat and National Security Council official under President George W. Bush.
But the diplomatic effort is not expected to paper over deep divisions between the two countries, including a trade deal that stalled after the Trump administration stripped India of a special protectionist status. New Delhi retaliated by raising tariffs on $1.4 billion worth of American imports, including almonds, walnuts, apples and finished metal items.
Nor is it likely to change India’s mind about its treatment of Muslims.
Mr. Tellis said the Trump administration had “been very conscious to not do anything publicly that might embarrass India” — which is why, he predicted, the State Department had toned down its criticism of the anti-Muslim actions.
“There is a perception that India is a strategic ally and a partner,” said Mr. Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Whatever their discomfort with the Modi government’s policies are, I think they want to allow the Indian democratic process to work itself out, and see where the country comes out.”
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from New Delhi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/world/asia/india-muslims-state-department.html
