October 17 , 2014
Modi in America
After being a persona non grata for 10 years, Prime Minister Modi was welcomed in the US.
The International Religious Freedom Act, enacted by Congress in 1998 in response to concerns that Christians were being persecuted in China and Sudan, established a government investigative commission. Stung by criticism that it would favor protecting Christians over other persecuted religious groups, the commission held a hearing on June 10, 2002, on the 2002 rampage by Hindu mobs in Gujarat that killed more than 1,000, mainly Muslims. Among those killed was parliamentarian Ehsan Jafri who, according to his widow, Zakia Jafri, had made numerous telephone calls to government officials for police intervention. Modi was then Chief Minister of Gujarat. According to the Wall Street Journal of May 2, 2014, the commission, struck by Modi’s inaction, recommended that he be denied entry to the US. In 2005, the Bush Administration revoked Modi’s visa under the International Religious Freedom Act, as a foreign official who “was responsible for or directly carried out particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” That ban remained in effect for nearly 10 years.
Alongside his UN speech conveying affinity with the West on terrorism, and urging a permanent veto-carrying seat for India on the UN Security Council, Modi visited the September 11 Memorial in Manhattan and met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
That he gets away with this is a stark failure of Pakistani policy-makers.
This failure is reminiscent of the crushing ineptness of the Arab Establishment in not highlighting the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli Prime Minister Sharon. As Israel’s Defense Minister, in 1982 he permitted Phalangist militias in Lebanon to attack the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and carry out what Noam Chomsky called “a horrifying massacre” of up to thousands of civilians, including many women and children. An Israeli investigative panel found Sharon “personally responsible” for the massacre.
30 years earlier, on the night of October 14-15, 1953, Sharon led a commando force to the village of Qibya, Jordan, resulting in the massacre of 69 civilians. The attack was corroborated by UN officials who rushed to the scene, finding evidence that “the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them” as detailed in a report presented at a meeting of the UN Security Council by the Chief of Staff of the Truce Supervision Organization (S/PV.630, 27 October 1953), resulting in an international outcry and adoption, on November 24, 1953, of UN Security Council Resolution 101 strongly censuring Israel’s action.
Modi, in Washington, invoked the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. A great irony – in that Modi has been a lifelong member of the Hindu extremist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose ideological predecessors plotted and carried out the assassination of Gandhi in Delhi on January 30, 1948.
What then accounts for Modi’s appeal in the United States? The influential neo-con lobby in America sees Modi as a strategic asset heading a huge anti-Muslim constituency.
Inaction of Pakistan and the Arab Establishment enabled Modi now, and Sharon before, to seize the initiative and capture the high ground.
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