FILE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Press Trust of India photo)
A US court has ordered Prime Minister
Narendra Modi to answer allegations that he failed to stop the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002, as he arrives for his first trip to the United States in over a decade.
The petitioner in the case is the American Justice Center, a non-profit human rights organisation, acting on behalf of two survivors of the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Mr Modi was serving his first term as Chief Minister of his home state when the riots erupted. More than 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims.
The US court has given Mr Modi 21 days to respond.
The civil case before a New York court seeks compensatory and punitive damages from Mr Modi for "crimes against humanity" and extrajudicial killings under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act. "There is evidence to support the conclusion that minister Modi committed both acts of intentional and malicious direction to authorities in India to kill and maim innocent persons of the Muslim faith," the petition said.
After years of being unwelcome in the United States, Mr Modi arrives for a five-day visit on Friday in New York, where he will speak at the United Nations before heading to Washington for talks with President Barack Obama.
The first meeting between the two leaders follows Mr Modi's landslide general election victory in May.
Mr Modi, 64, was denied a US visa in 2005 under the terms of a 1998 US law that bars entry to foreigners who have committed "particularly severe violations of religious freedom".
Critics accuse Mr Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 until this year, of doing too little to stop the riots. He has always denied any wrongdoing and was exonerated in a Supreme Court inquiry in 2012.
A government spokesman was not available for comment while a spokesman for Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party declined to comment.
An analyst said the case was unlikely to have much impact.
"The evidence against him is based on conjecture as the courts in India have found. This case won't make much difference," said Satish Misra, a political analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Mr Modi will draw perhaps the largest crowd ever by a foreign leader on US soil when he takes the stage on Sunday at New York's Madison Square Garden before a crowd forecast to total more than 18,000 people.
Mr Modi is not the first leader to be sued in a US court.
A rights group called Sikhs for Justice had filed a case against Congress president Sonia Gandhi, alleging that she played a role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. That case was also filed in Federal Court of Southern District of New York. The group also filed a similar case against former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.