Western duplicity on human rights is evident – but is India following the same path?

The spectacle of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the joint session of the United States Congress on July 25 and the repeated standing ovations he received from lawmakers is among the most disquieting moments in modern politics.

Israel has in its 10-month war on Gaza killed over 39,000 people, 11,000 of them children, according to Palestinian Authority sources confirmed by experts. Tel Aviv says that these deaths occurred in its pursuit to eliminate Hamas, after the group’s attack on Israel on October 7.

Gaza’s entire physical infrastructure, including hospitals and water supply, stands destroyed. Everyone in Gaza is “injured, sick or both”, and famine is a reality for all of its inhabitants. This is due to “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people”, United Nations experts say. This is a genocide in full public view.

Efforts by the international community to halt the violence, including several by the United Nations General Assembly calling for a ceasefire, have failed to move Israel. Israel has also been impervious to public protests and campus encampments throughout much of the world.

All along, Israel has continued its wholesale targeting of civilians in Gaza, while Netanyahu and his cabinet have scuppered several attempts at reaching a ceasefire deal. Jewish settlers, working with the Israeli military, continue to wreak havoc against Palestinians in the West Bank, with extrajudicial killings, detentions and reprisal attacks escalating.

The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest court, has ruled that Israel’s military operations in Gaza amounted to “plausible genocide”. Separately, the Court has ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and that its discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinians violate the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.

In May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – the world’s top court to try the most serious crimes – accused Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant of criminal responsibility for acts committed in Gaza amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court announced that it was seeking arrest warrants against them, along with those against Hamas top brass.

Against this backdrop, US lawmakers cheering Netanyahu, a deemed war criminal, is shocking and revolting. In his address, Netanyahu denounced those protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza as well as the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu urged the US to stand together with Israel because his country was fighting the West’s war between “civilisation and barbarism”. To rapturous applause, he demanded that America fastrack more arms shipments to Israel to “finish the job”.

Western duplicity

President Joe Biden has continued to provide American military aid and diplomatic cover to Israel, most notably at the United Nations’ Security Council, by using the United States’s veto powers to prevent any binding resolutions for a ceasefire.

This is double standards at its worst, especially given the US’s position in the Ukraine conflict, purportedly in support of victims, and against the aggressor power. The US is also the leader, among Western nations, of deploying a range of legal instruments avowedly to combat grave human rights abuses globally, through a raft of general and targeted sanctions that it uses liberally against international perpetrators.

All this is in context of the US and western world’s claims to defend democracy and rule of law at home and globally. Yet, none of these claims seem to matter when it concerns abuses by Israel against the occupied Palestinians. Indeed, recent actions to sanction the International Criminal Court for its seeking the arrest of Israeli leaders demonstrates the will of the American political elite to undermine international law.

The Western embrace of Israel, despite Tel Aviv’s long history of disregarding international law, is rooted in the history of the West itself, specifically the legacy of European anti-semitism. It is explained as an attempt to insulate itself from the shame and guilt of the Jewish Holocaust.

There is also the claim that Israel is the West’s forward base in West Asia. This is most revealingly captured in Zioinist founding leader Theodore Herzel’s claim that Israel “serv(es) as the outpost of civilisation against barbarism”, evident today in Israel claims to be fighting the West’s “war on terror”.

The American “war on terror” and the crimes committed as a result of US interventions in West Asia and the broader Muslim world are among the most clear manifestations of the selective use of international law. But there are numerous other examples too, including the West’s positions on colonial crimes, as well as its crimes in Latin America and South East Asia.

The cost of double standards

What are the wider implications of this selective use of international law by Western powers, which at the same time seek to claim the high moral ground as defenders of human rights, democracy and a rules-based order?

For one, it undermines the struggles of victims for justice and accountability. As the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories remarked after the US Congress’s celebration of Netanyahu, “That’s what letting heinous crimes go unacknowledged and unpunished ultimately leads to…protracted impunity leads to unlawfulness.”

It also undermines the legitimacy of international law in the eyes of the world, given how so much of the discourse on international human rights and democracy is a Western one, claimed by its votaries as its unique gift to the world.

Western double standards encourage human rights violators elsewhere to follow suit. In their own cynical pushback against local struggles for justice and accountability, countries such as China, Iran and Russia question the point of international human rights in the first place.

Finally this unquestioned embrace of Israel’s genocide ultimately undermines the West’s own strategic resources in a changing world, where the balance of power is in greater flux today than ever before. In the process, Western legitimacy in much of the global south and beyond has taken a definite hit.

Human rights in India

The alarming human rights situation in India in recent years is in a different category than that of Israel-Palestine. India’s parallels with Israel’s in engaging with allegations against its own abuses are telling.

Ahead of the general elections in April-May, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in March expressed concerns about “increasing restrictions on the civic space, as well as by hate speech and discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims”.

A group of 25 United Nations mandate holders called on India to “implement its human rights obligations fully, set a positive example by reversing the erosion of human rights, and address recurring concerns raised by UN mechanisms”.

These early warnings had little effect with the elections seeing a dramatic rise in anti-minority rhetoric and dehumanisation, especially of Muslims. That much of this was led by senior politicians, including but not limited to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was remarkable.

According to one study, the campaign period saw 72 instances of anti-minority hate speech that appeared to meet the United Nations’ threshold for top-level hate speech. This kind of speech, prohibited by international law, is characterised by its direct incitement to hostility, discrimination or violence.

After the elections, the real-life consequences of the months-long vitriolic anti-minority campaign became clear. There was an increase in public lynchings and mass violence, as well as extra-judicial killings and punitive demolitions of properties of Muslims, especially in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The trend has been sustained. Alongside this, dissenters continue to be targeted. Clearly, a reduced mandate for the BJP and a coalition government in power at the Centre have not put the brakes on human rights violations as was expected.

Denial and deflection

On July 15 and 16, India was reviewed by the Human Rights Committee on its performance under International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a preeminent United Nations treaty. The fact that the review was held after 27 years is itself notable, a sign of India’s reluctance to engage with international human rights.

At the dialogue, committee members called out India, especially for anti-minority abuses, violence against women, violating basic freedoms and the targeting of dissenters, among other violations. But the Indian delegation made an indifferent effort to provide specific responses or acknowledge the seriousness of the human rights situation in the country.

On show were generalities and distractions. When asked about India’s refusal to ratify the Torture Convention, the delegation claimed that India was long a contributor to United Nations Torture Fund. The delegation also tried to deflect criticism, such as by claiming that the prolonged violence in Manipur was rooted in its history rather than in the state authorities’ commissions and omissions.

There was also pushback against the UN committee, such as characterising its concerns about the pattern of anti-minority lynchings and demolitions as “false narratives”.

Throughout, the Indian delegation attempted to explain away the existence of counter-terrorism and national security laws and measures, as necessary and justified. The committee said that many of these measures had in fact resulted in “widespread and grave human rights violations, including excessive use of force leading to unlawful killings, prolonged arbitrary detention, sexual violence, forced displacement and torture”. When pushed, the delegation sought to blame the victims of the violations.

This is par for the course, demonstrating India’s stock response to international criticism of its human rights record. Rather than engaging constructively, the Indian government mostly responds with proforma responses boasting about its democratic and “civilisational” ethos.

Despite claiming to champion international human rights, India’s cooperation with the United Nations human rights mechanism, historically weak, has worsened in recent years. India has not accepted the competence of any United Nations treaty body to receive communications or individual complaints.

When United Nations mandate holders spoke out in March, they were deploring the low level of response from India to their communications and of allegations of human rights violations. India has also denied United Nations mandate holders permission to visit India, since at least 2017, despite ostensibly offering a “standing invitation”.

There is increasing acknowledgment now of the growing gap between India’s claims of being “the world’s largest democracy” and its weak practices on human rights and fundamental freedoms. Several global indices attest to that reality. There is also growing international concern about how the world’s largest democracy could turn into a significant source of violence and instability, and what that would mean for regional stability and the international order.

An alternative to the lose-lose proposition

This is a significant loss from a position where India, especially in the early years of Independence, was recognised the world over as a beacon of democracy and international human rights and among the champions of the postcolonial world order.

Like the West’s loss of legitimacy on account of its selective use of human rights, India’s widening gap between democratic claim and practice risks losing it much of its democratic legitimacy – in the process also frittering away the goodwill it has, especially in the Global South.

This cannot be a sustainable proposition for India: condemning its many minorities and dissenters further to the margins, whilst it undermines its own claim as a global power. There has to be another way – one that is worthy of India’s rightful place in the new world order and of the genius of its citizens, all of them, regardless of their differences.

Sajjad Hassan is a researcher of conflicts and peace-building in an uncertain world.