India’s chequered track record with Muslim minorities, political opposition and independent journalism under Narendra Modi is unlikely to feature on the agenda when US President Joe Biden hosts the Indian leader during a state visit to Washington next week, according to observers of US-India relations.
“By definition, a large-scale official visit like this is going to be a success. It has to be a success for both sides, and that means that there is a real reluctance to introduce difficult topics in this context,” said Donald Camp of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
“You want bonhomie, you want grand success to come out of this because the two heads of government are depending on that,” said Camp of the high-level meeting. “My guess is that human rights will not be much of a focus of the conversation.”
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The White House has drawn criticism from human rights organisations in the US on “what is happening in India under the Modi government”, he added.
Biden, who has described America’s great-power rivalry with China as an ideological battle between like-minded democracies versus autocracies, will receive Modi during the prime minister’s three-day US visit.
Biden and Modi will meet on June 22, and the Indian leader is due to address a joint session of Congress. The day will culminate in a state dinner at the White House.
The two last met at the Group of 7 summit in Hiroshima in May.
Ahead of next week’s visit, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both global human rights advocacy organisations, have invited policymakers and journalists to a June 20 screening in Washington of a BBC documentary on communal riots that erupted in 2002 while Modi served as the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat.
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The violence resulted in the deaths of at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.
Titled India: the Modi Question, the film was banned by the Modi government in January. The Indian foreign ministry condemned it as a “propaganda piece, designed to push a particular discredited narrative”.
Soon after the ban, BBC offices in India were raided by government authorities for alleged tax violations.
Advocacy groups have been raising concerns about the persecution of minorities in the country as well as the treatment of critical voices and journalists under Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government.
A report this year by Freedom House, a US government-funded non-profit organisation, described India as a “partly free” for the third year in a row, adding that “democratic rights in India remain under pressure, particularly for marginalised groups”.
India scored 51 out of 100 on internet freedom, according to the report, placing the South Asian country alongside Bangladesh, Libya, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Nicaragua.
On Monday, Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, said the Modi government had threatened to shut down the social media platform and raid its employees if it did not remove tweets and accounts linked to a 2020 anti-government farmers’ protest. Dorsey claimed Twitter was asked to censor journalists critical of the government.
The Indian government has rejected the allegations as “an outright lie ... perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.”
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Dorsey quit as Twitter’s CEO in 2021, and the company was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.
Some experts have noted the selective nature of the Biden administration’s value-based diplomacy, which focuses on human rights and democracy.
Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Centre, another Washington-based think tank, recently observed that Biden has shunned countries like Bangladesh, run by Sheikh Hasina – the country’s longest-serving prime minister and long accused of autocratic practices – as an example of his values-based foreign policy.
Yet Washington has said little publicly about “democratic backsliding” in New Delhi, Kugelman said.
After viewing each other with suspicion for decades, Washington and New Delhi have aligned more closely as China’s military might and economic influence expand.
US-India ties constitute “a new kind of relationship, trying to break new ground, and in some ways ... moving a little bit faster even than we do with traditional allies”, according to Richard Rossow, also of CSIS.
The US had already become India’s largest defence exercise partner, topping US$20 billion in total US defence sales to India, he noted, with American companies hoping to secure additional sales during Modi’s visit.
“I suspect next week is going to be chock full of announcements big and small, related to furthering US-India security ties, and a lot of that is going to be focused on not just operational issues, but actually helping India through co-development of new defensive weapons systems,” Rossow said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday described Modi’s visit as “historic” and poised to “solidify what President Biden has called the defining relationship of the 21st century”.
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Blinken made the remarks while addressing a meeting of the US-India Business Council in Washington.
In a veiled message to Beijing, America’s top diplomat said Washington regarded the US-Indian partnership as important based on its “shared commitment to address regional and global challenges promoting health security, working with our Quad partners to build a free, open, secure, prosperous Indo-Pacific, where people, goods, ideas can travel freely, and rules are applied fairly”.
Among the four US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue members, India is the only one that shares a land border with China, and it fought a war with the Asian giant in 1962.
The bloc, originally formed in 2004 to coordinate humanitarian aid following the Indian Ocean tsunami, includes Japan and Australia and gained new prominence in 2017 under the Donald Trump administration to counter China’s growing regional clout.
Revived by Trump as a group of democracies offering an alternative vision to an “autocratic” China, the alliance has since been embraced by Biden as part of his Indo-Pacific strategy.
But analysts caution against expecting a full-fledged defence and security alliance from New Delhi, such as in the event of a conflict involving China and Taiwan.
“India has never let us think that there would be any kind of alliance,” said Camp of CSIS. “Anyone who thinks that India will become a treaty ally is simply wrong.”
India prizes its strategic autonomy, Camp added, noting that despite a long-running border dispute with China, New Delhi has cooperated with Beijing as a member of the China-led, regional security-focused Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
India is also a founding member of the BRICS bloc, an association of five major emerging national economies that includes Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa.
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Given New Delhi’s extensive cooperation with Beijing, India “cannot afford to have China as a committed enemy”, Camp said. “That will always be high on their list of strategic priorities”.
Meanwhile, American enthusiasm for US-Indian relations has reached a fever pitch.
Eric Garcetti, America’s newly installed ambassador to India, declared on Monday that “it is so clear that Indians love Americans and Americans love Indians”.
Hours after Garcetti spoke and thousands of miles away in New Delhi, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan intimated that Modi’s state visit would yield promising dividends. Sullivan, meeting his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval to finalise deliverables for the Indian leader’s trip, said: “We are just getting started.”
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