(The writer is a political columnist, a lapsed historian and a committed conservative.)
President Barack Obama's Town Hall speech has, quite predictably, triggered a minor storm. The government side has, not unnaturally, brushed aside suggestions that the eloquent sermon that also touched upon themes such as religious and minority rights was a veiled indictment of the Narendra Modi government. However, both the media and Modi's other critics have gloated over this apparent sting in the tail at the fag end of an otherwise successful visit. They have used Obama's invocation of Article 25 to add to the existing turbulence over religious conversions. Regardless of how the visit of the American president was perceived in the larger public, they have cited the subtext of the Town Hall speech to try and puncture the Modi momentum.
Over time, it has also incorporated facets of the condescension that was a feature of British imperial diplomacy, at least until the Suez debacle of 1956 drove home the end of Empire. A possible reason why this approach has persisted is due to the undeniable fact that national elites, particularly in the erstwhile colonized parts of the globe, have actually internalized the belief in the superiority of the "American way". It is only very recently that this perception has been challenged by first, an ever-rising China, and subsequently, Islamism - neither of which are benign influences.
Thanks to the manner in which Modi's detractors have interpreted the Town Hall utterances, and the debate they have generated, Obama can at least draw satisfaction that one of his domestic compulsions has been met.
Less appreciated is the extent to which Christian lobbies- those institutions that send money to India as opposed to those who see India as a zone of potential profit- provide a non-secular input to the workings of the State Department. During the termof the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government, for example, the US embassy in Delhi was quite active in mobilizing domestic opposition to the sporadic attacks on improvised churches in the Dangs district of Gujarat. Domestic opponents of the BJP (and Modi in particular) have received unending encouragement and patronage from institutions such as the official US commission on international religious freedom.
First, it advised the administration to "integrate concern for religious freedom into bilateral contacts with India". Secondly, it wanted steps to "increase the US embassy's attention to issues of religious freedom and related human rights" concerns. Finally, and in more specific terms, it "urge(d) the Central Indian government to press states that have adopted anti-conversion laws to repeal or amend them to conform with internationally recognized human rights standards".
It is understandable that both the mainstream and social media have picked on these contentious sentences to either berate Modi or denounce the US for being oh-so patronizing. By its very nature, the media in their entirety love acrimony and polemical exchanges. The complicated negations over the civil nuclear partnership was too abstruse for studio brawls; Michelle Obama kept a low profile and didn't provide the much anticipated glamour quotient; and the sheer stodginess of the president's official banquet at an outhouse in the Rashtrapati Bhavan complex couldn't really be pinned on Modi. So, in the end, the largely successful Obama visit boiled down to two contrived brawls: the first over the gratuitous references to India's duty at the Siri Fort auditorium and, finally, over Modi's monogrammed pin stripes. The first allowed the disoriented army of Modi-sceptics to feel that America still cares. The second permitted the pillars of entitlement a snigger or two at the expense of a man they despise but whose popularity remains undiminished.
Source: The Telegraph
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