{"id":266,"date":"2005-03-19T13:16:18","date_gmt":"2005-03-19T07:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/03\/19\/denying-the-visa-was-the-right-thing-to-do\/"},"modified":"2005-03-19T13:16:18","modified_gmt":"2005-03-19T07:46:18","slug":"denying-the-visa-was-the-right-thing-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200503\/denying-the-visa-was-the-right-thing-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Denying the visa was the right thing to do."},"content":{"rendered":"

I am talking of Narendra Modi, of course. I don’t understand the argument that the Americans are “interfering” in our Internal Affairs. Yes, the fact that he is still the chief minister even after he explicitly gave instructions to his policemen not to protect the muslims who were being killed and raped by his partymen is our “internal affair”, to our eternal shame. But if the Americans won’t let such a man into their country, it is their internal affair too. Yes, he is the democratically elected chief minister of an Indian state, but that is not the Americans’ fault, it is ours.
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\nThe other arguments being offered by my countrymen are equally specious. Yes, the Americans are hypocrites, but that doesn’t make this decision wrong. The principle that you shouldn’t do the right thing once unless you do the right thing everytime is one impossible to uphold. Nitin Pai<\/a> is arguing that this is wrong because they were motivated by politics rather than principle. Yes, of course, all government decisions are political decsions. This doesn’t make them wrong. Yes, probably Christian conservatives were behind this decision. It still does not make it wrong. There is nothing wrong in being concerned for your co-religionists in some other country. <\/p>\n

Modi is asking why we shouldn’t deny President Bush a visa because of what he did in Iraq. Why, if we take the view that invading Iraq and installing a democratic government there is equivalent to killing 2000 muslims, then yes, we are at liberty to deny him entry into India. Do we want to get into that kind of a fight? Being ethically right is different from being physically stronger. In this case, we are weaker on both counts. I don’t see the sense of getting into a fight on this issue.<\/p>\n

There are some cases where I’ll support my country even when I think that its decisions were unwise. For example, I am still seething about India backing off from the pipeline deal under Rice’s pressure, even though I thought that the pipeline deal was a stupid idea in the first place. This is not one of those cases. <\/p>\n

Incidentally, I don’t think that the BJP can make much political capital out of this – though I may be mistaken in this. From what I know of the middle-class, they will be up in arms against this decision, but then the US government isn’t standing for elections in India. If anything, the Congress and the communists are even more anti-American than the BJP, so I am hard put to think what slogans the BJP can come up with on this issue. Burning American flags isn’t really a vote winner outside of West Bengal and Kerala. (Not because most Indians love the US or anything. It just isn’t enough of an emotional issue) The only way the BJP can make capital out of this is if they succeed in turning this into an Anti-Christian issue, but then, that is not much of an issue with the middle-class; only with the tribal belt where it is toughest to make this association.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am talking of Narendra Modi, of course. I don’t understand the argument that the Americans are “interfering” in our Internal Affairs. Yes, the fact that he is still the chief minister even after he explicitly gave instructions to his policemen not to protect the muslims who were being killed and raped by his partymen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}