Critics on social media reacted quickly — praising Trump for addressing the issue, but wondering why it took so long.

“Finally, Trump condemns the hatred in Kansas and elsewhere. Finally,” author Anand Giridharadas said in a tweet.

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Trump’s high-profile denunciation came after nearly a week in which several prominent former State Department officials and others criticized the White House. Among them was the former U.S. ambassador to India, Richard Verma, and Nisha Biswal, the former assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia.

On Tuesday, Biswal thanked the president for “doing the right thing” by condemning this “act of terror.”

“Now stop the policies and rhetoric that fuel this hate,” she said in a tweet.

Yet the “sound of his silence” has already spoken volumes, the Kolkata writer Sandip Roy wrote in a column for the Huffington Post shortly before the president’s speech. He noted that Trump was quick to denounce terrorist acts in Paris and Florida but also said nothing when a white supremacist attacked a mosque in Canada.

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On Tuesday, more than 200 people attended the cremation service for the slain computer engineer, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, after an emotional day for the slain man’s family. His weeping mother told The Washington Post that she had begged her other son not to return to the United States, where he also lives, and politicians turned up waving signs that said “Down With Trump.” The attack has stoked fear among Indians that thousands of friends and relatives living in the United States are not safe, given its racially charged political climate of recent months.

Kuchibhotla was shot and killed by a drunken attacker in an Olathe, Kan., bar who shouted “Get out of my country” and may have mistaken him for an Iranian, authorities have said. Another Indian national was wounded in the attack, as was an American who tried to intervene.

Now, the pressure may build for India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to comment, as well. The prime minister was quick to tweet about last year's Orlando nightclub massacre, the opinion website DailyO noted in an opinion piece, but he has remained “eerily silent over an issue that directly relates to the well being of Indians residing in Donald Trump’s America.”