Lloyd Austin is on a three-day visit to India. Austin is the first-ever US defense secretary to include India on his maiden foreign trip.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is on a three-day visit to India. Austin is the first-ever US defense secretary to include India on his maiden foreign trip. However, what has caught our attention is that US Senator Robert Menendez on Wednesday urged Austin to talk about the ongoing farmers protest in India during his official visit to the country.
''Getting the US-India partnership right is critical to addressing 21st-century challenges, and that includes urging the Indian government to uphold democratic values and human rights,'' Senator Robert Menendez, Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter to Austin.
''In meetings with Indian counterparts during your upcoming visit, I strongly encourage you to make clear that in all areas, including security cooperation, the US-India partnership must rest on adherence to democratic values,'' Menendez said in his letter, a copy of which was released to the press on Wednesday.
Now, some Opposition leaders of our country will take advantage of this letter and make a huge issue out of it to prove that democracy in India is over and the fundamental rights of the citizens have also been taken away from them.
The important thing here is that the allegations made on India in this letter are based on a recent report by the Freedom House, which said that freedom in India is extremely limited. However, you may remember that in the last days we had told you the whole truth of this NGO in America. The NGO receives 80 per cent of the funding from the US government and the NGOs are fully influenced by the US foreign policy.
That is, the only purpose of writing such a letter and raising the issue of democracy and human rights is to weaken India's position before the United States on the negotiating table and this has been done earlier also. You may recall that in the month of February 2020, former US President Donald Trump visited India and then a similar letter was written about a month before the visit. And the point to note here is that the letter was written not by anyone else, but by the same American parliamentarian named Robert Menendez.
Just two days before the visit of the US defense secretary, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee writes a letter that seeks to defame India's democracy.
In fact, Robert Menendez is a senator from New Jersey, USA since 2006. It is alleged that he took expensive gifts from a person to get him big contract and sometimes also used his private jets.
In 2015, when Barack Obama was president of the United States and there was a peaceful agreement with Iran on the use of nuclear weapons, Robert Menendez then had said that doing so would make it easier for Iran to build nuclear weapons. But former President Donald Trump took a tough stand on the same agreement and it was changed.
You can understand this double standard from another example. On the one hand, the issue of farmers ' agitation in India was raised in this letter and it has been said that the government's policy on this movement in India is not correct. On February 4, about a month ago, the Biden administration endorsed India's new agricultural laws and described it as very beneficial for the market. With these double standards, you can understand that this letter has no seriousness and no significance.
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