Dear Prime Minister,

I believe you are deeply saddened by the death of a critic of the Russian President while being incarcerated. Please accept my condolences and stay strong. 

While I do understand that you carry the burden of being a self-styled leader of human rights in the world, and have an obligation to stand up for alleged repression of political dissidents in Russia, I fail to fathom why you never display such passion when it comes to state violence in other parts of the globe.

I don’t think I need to remind you that India is a neighbour to Russia, and that the country you aren’t unfamiliar with has a poor record on civil rights. After all, you recently acknowledged that they could be behind the murder of a Canadian Sikh activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and yet you have a tendency to forget.

Following the recent death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian jail, your government not only announced more sanctions against Russia, but you called the country’s president Vladimir Putin, a monster. Wow . How brave. Applause. 

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that you never dared to call Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi just that, despite the fact that he has Muslim blood on his hands. He was instrumental behind the 2002 massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat province of India. Before being elected as Prime Minister in 2014, he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, and was denied visa by several countries for that reason. How can you overlook such an important historical fact? Not very long ago, in 2021, political prisoner Stan Swamy died in custody of the brutal Indian state. You never uttered a word. Swamy was a Christian preacher who worked among the indigenous communities of India and was locked up under trumped up charges for merely defending their right to the lands being appropriated by the extraction industry. Well, what can be expected from the Prime Minister of a country built on stolen lands of the First Nations? If Putin is a monster, then Modi is a devil who deserves to be punished for his crimes against humanity. The story does not end there. Sikh groups started a petition asking for sanctions against India in the light of Nijjar’s murder. But nothing came out of that. You need to come clean on this. Either act against India with a similar zeal, or stop pretending. Unfortunately, that’s what you have been doing in the garb of human rights advocacy. You don’t see the sufferings of the Palestinians under the repressive Israeli government, but you are obsessed with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You even failed to make the Israeli state accountable for the genocide of people of Gaza, but chose to call pro-Palestine activists "anti-semitic", whereas Modi is the real anti-semite whose Hindu supremacist organization RSS glorified Hitler and justified the Jewish holocaust. Kindly learn something from South Africa, which has taken the lead on social justice, and stop fooling yourself. 

Gurpreet Singh

Independent journalist and broadcaster.