| 摘要 | Could an India that actively discriminates against religious minorities still be a close partner with the U.S.? Many Indians point to their country’s strategic significance and economic heft to argue that it could. They’re mistaken.
Dramatic developments in two Indian states with a large proportion of Muslims—Assam in the northeast and Jammu and Kashmir in the north—raise questions about India’s commitment to religious pluralism. While it would be an exaggeration to say religious tolerance is gone, it isn’t too soon to point out that it’s under strain.
In Assam, a Supreme Court-ordered project to weed out illegal aliens could make around 1.9 million people effectively stateless. Many of them are Bengali-speaking Muslims who, along with a large number of Hindus, allegedly migrated after 1971. Bangladesh is unlikely to take any of them back. And last month the Indian government abruptly ended constitutional autonomy for its only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir. India has split the erstwhile state into two federally administered territories whose rulers will be appointed by New Delhi.
In neither Assam nor Kashmir has New Delhi framed its actions in purely religious terms. Though about four-fifths of the country’s 1.3 billion people are Hindu, India is a secular state with no official religion.
In Assam, supporters of the so-called national register of citizens, a list of those deemed legal residents, describe the immigration crackdown as an attempt to shield a beleaguered indigenous culture from ethnically and linguistically distinct foreigners. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says direct rule in Kashmir is a temporary measure that will improve security, boost investment, create jobs, end dynastic politics and curb corruption.
Nonetheless, a common thread ties Assam and Kashmir. In both, India is diminishing the political rights of disproportionately Muslim populations. It may not end there. Should Parliament enact a proposed national citizenship law, it would offer a reprieve to illegal Hindu migrants in Assam while placing their Muslim counterparts in legal limbo.
Add to this the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s recent elevation of an accused terrorist to Parliament, the collapse of high-profile cases in which Hindu extremists are accused of murdering Muslims, and the sometimes shrill anti-Muslim rhetoric of BJP leaders, and a pattern emerges. India’s Hindu nationalist rulers seem either unwilling or unable to treat the country’s 172-million-strong Muslim minority fairly.
The hyperrealists who dominate discourse in the Modi era tend to shrug off the idea that eroding religious pluralism in India will hurt ties with Washington. The Trump administration doesn’t care about human rights, the argument goes. If the U.S. is willing to parley with the bone-saw wielders of Saudi Arabia and the Chinese overlords of Xinjiang’s persecuted Uighurs, then it will deal with India, too. Besides, the U.S. needs India as a counterweight to China, and American firms cannot afford to ignore the potential of Asia’s third-largest economy.
These arguments make two mistakes: they misunderstand the U.S. and misdiagnose India’s importance to Washington.
The U.S., like any country, weighs strategic and commercial concerns in its foreign relations. At times, this means ignoring human-rights violations. In 1971, at the height of the Cold War, Washington looked the other way as the Pakistani army slaughtered at least 300,000 people in an unsuccessful bid to thwart the creation of Bangladesh. (The Bangladeshi government places the death toll at three million.)
But though the U.S. doesn’t always live up to its own ideals, those ideals still exist. Even in 1971, arguably the low point for U.S. foreign policy in South Asia, a brave foreign-service officer named Archer Blood risked his career by sending the famous Blood telegram, which documented Pakistani atrocities. You cannot imagine a Chinese or Russian diplomat doing that.
The massive size of the India Caucus in the U.S. Congress—it’s among the largest country-focused groupings—cannot be attributed solely to the political influence of the Indian-American community, which is just over 1% of the U.S. population. India’s benign image and 72% approval rating among Americans, according to Gallup, rests on its being seen as a democracy.
India is not a Western country but, to borrow a term from the strategist C. Raja Mohan, it’s potentially a part of the “political West.” Arguably India’s single biggest achievement over the past 70 years has been to nurture Western political principles—universal franchise, equality before the law, the division of powers—on subcontinental soil. This has given it a measure of political stability that few pundits predicted at independence in 1947.
Despite clocking impressive growth rates since the 1990s, India’s economic performance pales in comparison to China’s or East Asia’s more broadly. Last year Indians bought only 3.4 million cars, compared with 23.7 million bought by Chinese. India’s penchant for “strategic autonomy” makes it a less reliable partner for Washington than treaty allies such as Japan and Australia.
In the end, India matters mostly because it offers a model of pluralistic democracy at odds with China’s monochromatic authoritarianism. New Delhi risks this at its own peril. |
