With Narendra Modi and Donald Trump winning reelection last year, India-U.S. observers expect deeper alignment between the countries, despite likely friction on trade. India’s strident assertions of strategic autonomy and harsh pushback on human rights criticism will find fewer detractors in Washington.
But on the multilateral stage, the United States and India are diverging. While the U.S. is retreating from multilateral fora, India is seeking to take on additional responsibilities. As India’s global clout grows, it may align more closely with China, Russia, and other authoritarian nations in multilateral bodies to undermine international human rights standards.
While China’s efforts to erode norms in bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council have been well documented, India’s have not. Yet India has joined China and Russia in blocking NGOs from gaining U.N. accreditation. In 2023, it joined these authoritarian nations in opposing a U.N. resolution condemning human rights abuses in Iran.
It’s time we look more closely at India’s global influence on human rights.
Historically, India was a champion of human rights in multilateral fora. Under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, India expressed staunch commitment to South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and anti-colonial struggles across the Global South. When Western countries drafted U.N. resolutions that accused these movements of terrorism, India voted against them. Instead, India urged Western powers to pay attention to the root causes of violence and distinguish freedom fighters from terrorists. India continued this policy for decades after Nehru’s death in 1964. In 1988, for example, it was the first non-Arab country to formally recognize Palestinian statehood.
India’s multilateral positions on human rights shifted with the rise of militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s. India deprioritized solidarity with freedom movements and instead shifted toward becoming, as Karthika Sasikumar has put it, “a norm leader” in the “nascent regime” of counterterrorism. By 1993, India’s delegation to the World Conference on Human Rights in Geneva took credit for ensuring that, for the first time, the final declaration did not distinguish terrorism from self-determination struggles.
After 9/11, India supported U.S. efforts to build a new global counterterrorism architecture, using it to condemn its historic adversary Pakistan and justify harsh anti-terrorism policies at home. In India, as in other countries, human rights actors were arbitrarily detained under these policies and thousands of legitimate civil society organizations lost their access to foreign funding. India claimed it was only aligning its laws with international standards, including those of the Financial Action Task Force, on terrorism financing. However, in its most recent Mutual Evaluation Report, the FATF found that India’s laws create significant risk of abuse against Indian civil society.
India has stepped forward to become a leader on counterterrorism – just as the Narendra Modi government expands its use of anti-terror laws against critics. Serving as chair of the U.N. Security Council’s Counterterrorism Committee in 2022, India led the drafting of the Delhi Declaration, which urges member states to prevent terrorists from exploiting the internet and other technologies. Observers fear measures like these could be abused to restrict access to the internet and social media. After all, India leads the world in internet shutdowns on security grounds and regularly demands that social media companies block the accounts of critical voices it calls terrorists.
At the U.N., India abstained on a Security Council resolution to carve out humanitarian exemptions for sanctions, and justified this by claiming that terrorist groups in South Asia pose “as humanitarian organizations and civil society groups precisely to evade these sanctions.” While India has Pakistan in its sights with objections like these, it also sets norms for any state to follow.
India’s influence to erode human rights may run highest in the development of digital governance standards. As a technology leader, India has become a prominent voice on the global flow of digital information. It has forcefully advocated for “data sovereignty,” a term reportedly coined by a member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to justify data localization policies, e.g. private companies like Alphabet must retain data exclusively within the territory from which they are generated. In multilateral spaces, India has joined China and Russia in advocating for data localization on national security grounds. Rights groups fear that authoritarian governments push for data localization to more easily surveil their citizens and target critics. In the U.N. General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, India has refused to co-sponsor numerous resolutions, including on privacy; digital surveillance; freedom of peaceful assembly and association online; and digital human rights for journalists, human rights defenders, civil society, and women.
Human rights observers should be particularly concerned with India’s leadership on digital public infrastructure (DPI). India rapidly developed DPI, termed “the India Stack,” to cover everything from digital payments to identity verification and data governance. The India Stack has become a global model celebrated at the U.N. and during its 2023 presidency of the G-20. India is keen for nations in the Global South to adopt the India Stack; it has signed partnerships with multiple countries to develop their DPI. Yet India’s own DPI systems have faced widespread criticism over lapses in privacy and data security, as well as for creating barriers to access services. India’s role in DPI development globally should raise concerns when its own ability to protect its citizens’ data is in doubt.
India’s rising global leadership in counterterrorism and DPI coincides with a cultural shift among its foreign service in favor of Hindu nationalism. Indian embassies increasingly host or sponsor Hindu-centric events, including ones organized by Hindu supremacist organizations. For Modi himself, a muscular, aggressive foreign policy is central to the domestic image he seeks to cultivate. Amid allegations of India’s targeted killings abroad, he declared, “Even India’s enemies know: this is Modi, this is the New India… New India comes into your home to kill you.”
India’s elections last year demonstrate that despite many obstacles, it remains a vibrant democracy. Yet that should not obscure the fact that at home and around the world, India’s senior leaders remain fundamentally illiberal; their interests more closely align with authoritarian powers. The new coalition government will do little to restrain that, especially in international affairs. As India strives to be a leader of the Global South in multilateral bodies, human rights observers everywhere should be on guard.