Further paralysis could hit the New Delhi-Washington relationship if the U.S. harbours a deep, even secret, disenchantment with Narendra Modi’s record regarding religious freedom

This week The Hindu published four articles on ‘Modi and the U.S.,’ a series based on State Department cables obtained by the newspaper via a Freedom of Information Act request made in May 2013.

The aim of the exercise was to gain greater clarity on the thought process behind Washington’s 2005 visa ban against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which was imposed under Sections 214 and 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act that required that foreign government officials who were “responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” to be found inadmissible to the country.

The >visa ban emerged once again into the spotlight in May this year after it was effectively reversed by U.S. President Barack Obama, who swooped in with a congratulatory call to Mr. Modi on the same day that the latter won the election, and >invited him to visit the U.S. at a “mutually agreeable time.”

Bilateral implications



The question that was left unanswered was this: To >what extent did this about-turn in a much-debated U.S. policy reflect a genuine ‘change of heart,’ and to what extent was necessitated by the fact that Mr. Modi had risen from being the Chief Minister of Gujarat to the head of the Indian government?

It is possible, even likely, that the answer to this puzzle will not immediately impact >bilateral ties between New Delhi and Washington, especially given the existing momentum in relations under the auspices of the Strategic Dialogue, and cooperation across a variety of economic and multilateral forums.

Yet the >relationship has recently seen an accumulation of ‘downturns,’ owing to everything from the Khobragade diplomatic crisis of late 2013 to festering trade disputes and intellectual property battles — none of which has been brought to happy conclusions.

Not only are these chokepoints in bilateral progress likely to be exacerbated by lingering bitterness within the Modi administration, which could still be stinging from the implications of the visa ban, but further paralysis could hit the relationship if the U.S. in fact harbours a deep, even secret, disenchantment with Mr. Modi’s record regarding religious freedom.

After The Hindu persistently chased the FOIA request for the better part of one year, the first responses containing non-public information on Mr. Modi in connection with the visa ban and the 2002 Gujarat riots, began trickling out from Foggy Bottom via post on May 16, 2014, perhaps coincidentally, the day that the Indian general election results were known.

What the initial tranches of cables and other documents — and there are several more to come over the course of the year ahead — revealed was that U.S. diplomats in India appeared to retain a level of scepticism about whether Mr. Modi in fact enjoyed a “clean chit” regarding his culpability for what happened in Gujarat.

To this end they were systematically sounding out numerous political contacts on the ground and closely tracking the denouement in critical legal challenges facing Mr. Modi, with their investigations encompassing not only the Zakia Jafri-Supreme Court case regarding the 2002 riots but several others too.

These included the controversy surrounding Mr. Modi’s appearance before the Special Investigative Team for questioning; the murky cases of the Ishrat Jahan ‘encounter deaths’ and Haren Pandya whistle-blower assassination in 2003; the pressure that U.S. Congressmen exerted upon the State Department to keep the visa denial in place; and, ultimately, Mr. Modi’s emergence as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate in the 2014 election.

Redacted but revelatory

The cables, which can be viewed on The Hindu’swebsite, were heavily redacted and in some cases entire pages or documents withheld.

Most of them were classified as “ >CONFIDENTIAL ,” “ >NOFORN ,” (restricted non-American readership), “ >SIPDIS ” (for distribution through the SIPRnet, the State Department’s secret network of routers) or “ >SENSITIVE ,” although a few were unclassified (“ >UNCLAS ”).

The excisions made were in keeping with the State Department’s FOIA rules, which allow the federal agency to exempt from disclosure in the interest of “national defence or foreign policy,” any information that falls under the category of “foreign government information”; “foreign relations or foreign activities of the U.S., including confidential sources”; and “Immigration and Nationality Act.”

A further baseline for exclusions that had to be applied to the received materials was the cut-off date for the cables included in the WikiLeaks trove — February 2010.

Despite the redactions and other limitations on the data made available, the cables provided a rich and unique insight into the U.S.’ real-time, on-the-ground monitoring of the evolving legal and political challenges faced by Mr. Modi.

Whether the State Department’s overall assessment of Mr. Modi in this context will impinge upon bilateral ties throughout his time in office will only be known as the rapprochement kicks off in earnest in September, during the Prime Minister’s bilateral meeting with Mr. Obama in Washington.

What is clear, however, is that the baggage of a bitter past will be a necessary encumbrance on this journey.

narayan@thehindu.co.in