Clarion India
NEW DELHI – The United States has been discussing communal rhetoric with India for a long time and will continue to do so, the country’s top diplomat in India said on Friday.
According to NDVTV, Elizabeth Jones, the United States’ Chargé d’Affaires for India, made the statement while speaking to journalists on Friday.
“We have been discussing this for a long time and will continue to do so,” she said in response to a question about communal statements during elections. “…That’s one of the benefits of this consequential relationship, that we can discuss a great variety of issues – easy issues, difficult issues, issues on which we agree, issues on which we don’t.”
Earliwe, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent American government agency that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion and makes policy suggestions to the White House, said that religious freedom and the human rights related to it are under threaten in India for several reasons, including the government policies failure to protect minorities.
The panel reiterated its recommendation from April that the United States government should designate India as a “country of particular concern” for engaging in or tolerating systematic violations of religious freedom.
Meanwhile, Jones on Friday supported India’s stand on China’s objections to an ongoing Indo-United States military exercise being held in Uttarakhand, PTI reported. To a question on China’s concerns about the exercise, she said: “I think I would point it to the kind of statement that we heard from our Indian colleagues to the effect that it is none of their business.”
On Thursday, the spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs Arindam Bagchi said that the exercise “has got nothing to do with the 1993 and 1996 agreements”.
The agreement from 1993 is to do with maintaining peace along the Line of Actual Control with China, while the one from 1996 pertains to confidence-building measures in the military field.
