Response to Obama proved his case

It is unfortunate that the critical views of former US President Barack Obama about the Narendra Modi government’s policies have provoked a concerted attack on him, mounted in crude and inappropriate ways, by members of the government and the BJP at various levels. Obama said in an interview with a journalist that if “the rights of ethnic minorities in India are not protected, there is a strong possibility that India at some point starts pulling apart.” He said the issue of the protection of the Muslim minority in India was worth being mentioned by President Joe Biden to Prime Minister Modi, who was on a state visit to the US then. One may debate whether a former US President should have expressed these views while the current President was feting the Indian PM as the leader of a strategic partner. But Obama is a free person and has the right to express his views.   

The uninformed, personal, and abusive responses to Obama from India show the government and the BJP in a very poor light. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Obama had as President ordered bombing of six Muslim countries, implying that he had attacked Muslims and so had no right to speak for them. She ignored the fact that the bombings were in pursuit of terrorists and not attacks on Muslims as a religious community. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh repeated the statement. That two senior-most ministers in the government made the statement even makes it a government response. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma made a crude communal comment, referring to Obama’s middle name ‘Hussein’ in a deliberate insinuation, only further confirming the fear that Obama had expressed. There was also an avalanche of abuses, online and from other fora, directed at Obama, from a troll army. Such attacks only go to confirm the charge of intolerance of criticism, and they draw more international attention to it. The right response to Obama, whom PM Modi considered a friend, would have been to introspect why he made those comments. The ‘wolf warrior’ response, instead, does no credit to Modi or his government, and will affect diplomatic relations.

The same mindset was seen in the online attacks and targeting of Sabrina Siddiqui, the American journalist who asked Modi about the rights of religious minorities and freedom of speech in India at the joint press conference with Biden in the White House. She was also viciously trolled and abused. The White House has condemned the attacks and said that they were anti-democratic and unacceptable. The Prime Minster had said in reply to her question that India was a democracy like the US. He should also condemn the attacks on her to validate his assertion.