“How a nation treats its women is a barometer”: Cardin.
AB Wire
Maryland Senator Ben Cardin – the ranking democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee – has lambasted India for alleged human rights violations, in a speech at the University of Chicago Centre, in Delhi, on Wednesday.
Cardin said while the US is looking forward to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit next week, India needs to address issues like extra judicial killings, religious intolerance and human trafficking, reported NDTV.
“How a nation treats its women is a barometer,” Cardin said, making the case that women are particularly vulnerable to human rights violations.
He quoted from the 2016 Global Slavery Index released yesterday, that said India’s trafficking record was poor primarily because of the rise forced labor in the last three years, which now involves around 18 million people.
His comments also come just weeks after the State Department supported US Commission on International Religious Freedom report charged India with increasing incidents of religious violence and a deterioration of religious freedoms in 2015.
India has rejected those findings, saying the commission lacked any understanding of Indian society or culture.
The Washington Post reported Cardin’s speech followed a contentious hearing last week on Capitol Hill, when Cardin, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) and other senators pressed a State Department official, Nisha Desai Biswal, on India’s human rights issues, including human trafficking, its crackdown on non-government organizations receiving foreign funding such as Greenpeace and the Ford Foundation, rising intolerance, and the recent decision to bar investigators from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom from traveling to India.
Corker said in that hearing that the United States had not been “brutally honest” with India, while Kaine spoke of the several dozen artists and writers who had returned their national awards as a protest against intolerance after a Muslim man was beaten by a mob allegedly for eating beef.
“Absolutely we are being candid,” Nisha Biswal, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, countered at the time. “But there is a long way to go. It would be increasingly incumbent upon India to advance the rule of law to all aspects of the society.”
India’s ambassador to the United States, Arun K. Singh, was quoted by the Post as saying on Wednesday, “I don’t think there’s any society that’s perfect. We don’t believe that any society has the right to preach to another society. We’re happy to discuss.”