Regardless of the recent meeting that its envoy Nancy Powell held with Narendra Modi, the United States has taken the stand that it is neither going soft on the BJPs’ prime ministerial candidate nor changing its position on the 2002 Gujarat riots.
“I wouldn’t characterise our assessment that way,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said, while responding to queries on the absence of any specific reference to Modi in its latest annual report on the human rights situation in countries across the world. When it was put to her that the department’s reports in the last two years had references to Modi by name but not this time round, Psaki said the US Government continues to express concern about episodes of communal violence across India. “I don’t have any new policy or change in policy or new update to report,” the spokesperson said in respect of the US position on the Gujarat riots.
And in reply to a reporter’s question on the vexed issue of granting a US visa to Modi, she commented she had nothing to convey on the visa status, adding: “We encourage individuals to apply, and those proceedings or processes are private by standard.”
As for Ambassador Powell’s meeting with Modi, Psaki commented: “Obviously, we’re meeting with a range of officials, a broad range of officials. There’s obviously a political season happening, but we’ll meet with a range of officials on the ground, and it’s an indication of nothing more than that.” In its section on India, the “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013” notes, as in previous years, that “the most significant human rights problems were police and security force abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape; widespread corruption at all levels of government, leading to denial of justice; and separatist, insurgent, and societal violence”.
On Gujarat, the report said: “The Government made some progress in cases that seek to hold police and security officials accountable for killings committed during the Gujarat riots in 2002.” It, however, added the line, as in its previous reports: “Civil society activists continued to express concern about the Gujarat Government’s failure to protect the population or arrest many of those responsible for communal violence in 2002 that resulted in the killings of more than 1,200 persons, the majority of whom were Muslim, although there was progress in several court cases.”
The report also has references to last year’s communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, noting that the incident “led to 65 reported deaths, and left 42,000 people displaced, and led to hundreds of injuries”.