“If Modi do not protect India’s minority, India will collapse as a nation” – Barack Obama tells CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Maya K came to the US in 2002. She was born in Hyderabad in India, in a family considered to be untouchable by the upper-caste Hindus.
Castes are the hereditary classes of Indian society, each with its role and status defined in the scriptures of Hinduism. At the top of the ladder are the Brahmins, who claim an exclusive right to perform religious rituals; at the bottom are the Dalits, who were denied the right to education and consigned to the jobs that required hard labour, or were considered impure.
Modi, who is currently on a state visit to the US, has faced criticism during his tenure for the persecution of minorities, the collapse of constitutional institutions, and the imprisonment of government critics in India. His party, critics allege, aims to make India a Hindu nation, where Dalits, Muslims and other minorities are treated as second-class citizens. For some in the US, the repercussions continue abroad, making the pomp and circumstance of a Modi state visit feel personal.
“As Indians have come to this country,” Maya (not her real name), who lives in Washington DC, said, “they have brought this discriminatory mindset with them.”
Caste discrimination was outlawed in India at the time of the country’s independence, but in recent years Hindu mobs have lynched Dalits who try to assert their identity with pride. Earlier this month, in the most recent such killing, a 22-year-old was beaten and stabbed to death in Maharashtra, a state co-ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, for celebrating the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, the Dalit economist and lawyer who wrote India’s constitution.
On Thursday the White House will roll out the red carpet for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to “affirm the deep and close partnership between the United States and India” and “strengthen our two countries’ shared commitment to a free, open, prosperous, and secure Indo-Pacific.” A state dinner and Mr. Modi’s address to a joint session of Congress will crown months of fawning assessments of India by everyone from Bill Gates to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The message couldn’t be plainer: In Cold War II with China, the United States wants India on its side.
As an American of Indian origin, I welcome the economic transformations in India that in my lifetime have slashed the number of people living in extreme poverty, swelled the middle class and modernized infrastructure (though not enough to prevent a devastating train crash this month). I’m glad, too, that the rising profiles of India and the diaspora in the United States have mitigated the ignorance and stereotypes I so often encountered while growing up, when people balked at the spicy food, gasped at the poverty, mixed up the “Hindu” religion and “Hindi” language, and could scarcely place India on a map. Deeper, wider awareness of India in this country is long overdue. The outreach to Mr. Modi — the democratically elected leader of the world’s most populous nation, with polling favorability numbers recent American presidents can only dream of — appears, superficially, to make good diplomatic sense.
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