The spiraling Indo-US dispute that exploded last month after the Justice Department charged an unnamed Indian official and an Indian drug trafficker with allegedly attempting to assassinate a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist with dual American citizenship on US soil just entered a new phase. The “United States Commission on International Religious Freedom” (USCIRF) put a religious spin on everything to press its claim that minorities are just as unsafe in India as they are in Afghanistan.
They’ve been recommending that the State Department designate India as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) on par with that one since 2020, but this year they were able to exploit that aforesaid dispute through these means to imbue their policy request with a renewed urgency. The USCIRF’s report comes right after Biden snubbed India’s invitation to participate in its Republic Day celebrations next month and following the joint statement by the “Samosa Caucus” that was critical of that country.
The first move suggested that ties at the leadership level are fraying over this dispute while the second confirmed that Indian American representatives are being used to lend credence to the latest charges. All three unfriendly developments should remove any doubt among observers that the US’ liberal–globalist policymaking faction is hellbent on destroying bilateral relations with India for ideological reasons but perhaps also as part of their country’s incipient thaw with China as was explained here.
Those observations are beyond the ambit of the present piece, however, which is focused on why the USCIRF’s religious spin on those two’s dispute is dishonest. As was recently argued in response to Bloomberg’s Mihir Sharma, “The Anglosphere, Not India, Is To Blame For Troubled Bilateral Ties”. In short, the religion of those Delhi-designated terrorists-separatists isn’t the issue, but only their illegal anti-state activities. Those who host them for “human rights” reasons are responsible for what they do.
For instance, the individual at the center of the Indo-US dispute threatened India’s national airline and even its parliament in the months after the allegedly attempted assassination, during which time he was presumably still under federal protection per protocol in such cases. Their religion is irrelevant to the threats that they made and is solely relied upon by them for mobilizing others against India. In other words, the situation is entirely security-centric and doesn’t reasonably have anything to do with religion.
By falsely suggesting otherwise, however, the USCIRF wants to impugn India’s international integrity in parallel with creating the pretext for likeminded liberal-globalists to promulgate possible sanctions at a later time. What’s essentially happening is that this particular faction is making tangible progress on “decoupling” the Indo-US Strategic Partnership that was forged over the past three decades. Bilateral ties likely won’t recover to their pre-dispute “golden age” if India is designated as a CPC.
It’s therefore incumbent on their conservative-nationalist policymaking rivals to intervene in order to prevent that from happening so as to save their hard-earned relations, though the liberal-globalists’ gains over the month mean that observers shouldn’t get their hopes up. The future of Indian-American relations is the latter’s to ruin since Delhi is adamant about preserving all that they’ve achieved thus far, so it’ll ultimately come down to which of these two factions comes out on top in their fierce struggle.
