US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said that the United States of America was monitoring a rise in human rights abuses in India.
“We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials,” said Blinken.
He was doing a joint press conference with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Foreign Minister of India Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister of India Rajnath Singh.
Although Blinken did not elaborate on his statement but Singh and Jaishankar also avoided commenting on the human rights issue.
Last week, US representative Ilhan Omar, who is from President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, raised a question and said, “What does Modi need to do to India’s Muslim population before we will stop considering them a partner in peace?”
India, in 2019, passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 that excluded Muslim migrants and was meant to grant citizenship only to other nationalities. In the same year, the special status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked. The recent ban by Karnataka state on wearing the hijab in classrooms is another example of minority rights violation in India.
