A journalist called Sabrina Siddiqui from the Wall Street Journal, which is a business newspaper, asked India’s prime minister if his government was treating India’s minorities badly. He said no. The matter should have ended there. But the journalist has been subjected to a lot of nasty trolling by the BJP’s supporters. The American president’s office has expressed its strong displeasure over this even though trolling of journalists or anyone else shouldn’t ordinarily be any of its concern.
Earlier, before the prime minister’s arrival in the US, a former American president, Barack Obama, also expressed some doubts on India’s treatment of minorities. He had done it in 2015 also when he was still president. India’s finance minister — and strangely not its foreign minister — has reminded him that his government had bombed six Muslim countries. The chief minister of Assam — why him? — said something nasty about “Hussein” Obama. Hussein is Barack Obama’s middle name.
Clearly, the whole affair has taken a nasty personal turn which could have been avoided if the former president had minded his own business and if the WSJ journalist had stuck to her newspaper’s USP, which is business and economics.
Likewise, Indian sensitivities and sensibilities, even if offended, could have avoided what China calls “wolf diplomacy”. This consists of super-aggressive retaliation to what China regards as insulting. It brings no credit to its practitioners. That said, while there’s a lot of evidence that Indian groups that support the BJP are indeed treating India’s Muslims badly, especially in UP, there is no evidence at all that the government is doing so, too. And therein lies the problem.
It’s necessary and desirable and possible for the state to be impartial between religious groups. But it’s impossible for individuals to be impartial. Even in Obama’s own country there are millions who don’t like Muslims and other religious groups. So as long as a government is not passing discriminatory laws, it’s really not any foreigner’s business to raise such issues with the head of a government.
Ideally such concerns should be raised with the party in power. A letter from Obama to the BJP’s president would have had the same effect. As for the journalist, was not her intention to troll the prime minister?