Human Rights, Press Freedom Issues of Dialogue between ‘Friends’ India And US: Ambassador Garcetti to News18

Human rights and press freedom are issues of dialogue between two friends, India and the United States, in which they can learn lessons, said US ambassador Eric Garcetti in an exclusive interview with CNN-News18 on Tuesday.

“We have been engaged and we will continue to be engaged on the values I believe India stands for and the US stands for. We have challenges with our press, we have challenges with our religious freedom, we have challenges with hate crimes, racism. So this is really dialogue two friends are engaged on and to learn lessons about not whether bad things happen, because they do in complex societies, but how we react to them and how we prevent them from happening in the first place,” he said.

India had this month slammed the US State Department’s 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom that criticised the country for not upholding the rights of minorities, terming it ‘motivated and biased’.

In its annual report recently, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) again called on the US Department of State to designate India as a “country of particular concern”.

The body said that the Indian government “at the national, state and local levels promoted and enforced religiously discriminatory policies” in 2022. Those included “laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits and Adivasis (indigenous peoples and scheduled tribes)”.

The country’s ranking has slipped to 161 out of 180 nations on the World Press Freedom Index, according to a report released by Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this month.

Indian government representatives have on several occasions panned the “agenda-driven” ratings issued by some international agencies.