The “India exception”: An echo of the “China human rights exception” in the 1970s–1980s

On 18 September 2023, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told Parliament of a “credible allegation of a potential link” between Indian government agents and the 18 June murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh-Canadian leader. Denying the allegation, the Indian government demanded evidence. Canada and India both expelled senior diplomats, and their bilateral relationship sank to a low point. The Washington Post reported that Trudeau had asked Western allies, including the US, to publicly condemn the killing, but that was in vain. ¹ The US did not want the incident to tarnish the coming-out party for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit and, more broadly, the US and its key Western allies saw India as a counterweight to a rising China. In its response, then, the Biden administration walked a diplomatic tight rope between supporting its traditional ally and neighbour Canada and its strategic partner India. ²

However, Trudeau doubled down on 21 September, stating that there was “no question” of India's “growing importance” and its status as “a country that we need to continue to work with, not just in the region but around the world.” Yet he added: “We’re not looking to provoke or cause problems. But we are unequivocal around the importance of the rule of law and unequivocal about the importance of protecting Canadians”. ³ Trudeau also said: “We are a country of the rule of law. We are going to continue to do the work necessary to keep Canadians safe and to uphold our values and the international rules-based order.” ⁴ One can read his remarks as the beginning of “othering” India as behaving contrary to the international rules-based order, an accusation that thus far had been reserved for countries like China and Russia. In this way, a contrast was set up between pursuing strategic interests and staying true to one's values.

In response, an Indian Express editorial called Canada a “lone exception to India's growing ties with the Anglosphere—Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US.” ⁵ But the US did admit that it had shared intelligence with its “Five Eyes” partner Canada and urged India to cooperate with the Canadian investigation.

Initially, India did not receive too much negative press coverage in the West. In fact, some journalists addressed in depth the Indian perspective and context of the incident. ⁶ Could India be the exception to US and Western human rights diplomacy? Much depends on the evidence concerning the allegation that Canada still needs to share with the public. But even then, would the US and the West distance themselves from New Delhi, given their strategic goal of countering Beijing?

India's seemingly exceptional treatment is reminiscent of the China exception in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the US government chose not to highlight Beijing's human rights record despite Washington's embrace of a foreign policy of human rights. I have studied the origins, evolution, and present state of US and Western human rights policy toward China. ⁷ There are obvious differences between China and India and between different historical circumstances, some of which are recognized in this paper. History does not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain is said to have claimed, history “does often rhyme.” ⁸ Hearing an unmistakable echo of the past, I proceeded to analyze the two cases. In October 2023 I completed a draft arguing that the discourse of the “China human rights exception” and its related historical processes could help us understand the evolving “India exception.” More likely than not, the killing is the beginning of the end of the honeymoon period between India and the West, although it would take at least two decades for that process to play out. That argument, based on an analysis of the foreign policy drivers and the overall dynamic between Western democracies and a non-Western great power, has proven right so far based on developments seen in the seven months after October 2023.

The “China exception” in the 1970s and the early 1980s

The human rights movement and the US's human rights foreign policy emerged in the 1970s. ⁹ That shift did not take place in a vacuum. From its founding, democracy was important to the US. Thus, the human rights focus of the 1970s can be reframed as “reclaiming American virtue.” ¹⁰ From contemporary texts on human rights, one may well get the impression that human rights drew inspiration from around the world and are thus truly universal—an assumption that is largely true. It is hard to believe that a rational person would not want to enjoy the same rights as everybody else in the world and, indeed, the idea of human rights comes from a proud tradition that values human dignity. Moreover, human rights are enshrined in UN documents, which all UN member states have legal obligations to honour.

At the same time, the concept of human rights came from the concepts of natural law, social contract, and other notions developed in eighteenth-century Europe. The problem is not these values themselves, but their associated baggage of hierarchical categories of race and sex. As the historian William M. Nelson has argued, European scholars of the eighteenth century promoted both inclusive and exclusive strands of Enlightenment based on common roots in biopolitics, which informed the biological and moral qualities of citizens of sovereign states, and often advocated the ugly principles and practices of eugenics. ¹¹ In other words, although there is only one human species, we may still define civilizations as mutable or not mutually exclusive; they may share commonalities but remain distinct. This paper is not the place to engage this complex intellectual landscape. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the fact that the value-based foreign policy informed by some of these ideas may be perceived differently by those on the receiving end. ¹²

President Jimmy Carter prioritized human rights in US foreign policy. But it was the US Congress that spurred development of human rights foreign policy by highlighting issues of human rights. ¹³ However, activists and researchers in the 1970s paid little attention to human rights in China and the US government only engaged sporadically with that issue in the 1980s. Thus, Roberta Cohen called this phenomenon “the China human rights exception” and “immunity,” citing the information gap, prejudices in Beijing's favour, and the absence of a lobby. She argued that it would be a great blunder for the US to grant “the exemption of China from the international human rights standards applicable to other nations.” ¹⁴ While the US government did not proactively address human rights in China during this period, foreign journalists and human rights NGOs began to report on abuses from the past and present, gaining traction over time. For example, Fox Butterfield, the first New York Times journalist in China from mid 1979 to early 1981, won the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, which was highly critical of the Chinese political system and was based on Chinese citizens’ accounts and his personal observations. ¹⁵

There were some human rights incidents between the US and Chinese governments in the 1980s, involving a Chinese tennis player who in 1983 sought asylum in the US. In 1984, Congress wrote to the Chinese government over its human rights record, passing amendments criticizing China's forced abortion policy in 1985 and the human rights situation in Tibet in 1987. ¹⁶ Hu Na, a 19-year-old tennis player representing China in a tournament in California, sought political asylum on 25 July 1982, a high-profile defection that triggered months of intense diplomatic fights until she was granted political asylum on 5 April 1983. ¹⁷ The incident became personal when Chinese official media charged President Reagan with wanting to “snatch a Chinese girl away from the parents who nurtured her, but he is even volunteering to be her own ‘foreign daddy.’” ¹⁸ Reagan had recently remarked that he would “personally adopt her before I would send her back.” The Chinese media did note that Reagan also had said earlier that it would be “stupid” for the US not to maintain good ties with Beijing. ¹⁹ If the Hu Na incident was an accident, Congress made a conscious choice to call out the Chinese government over human rights issues that Beijing firmly believed were its own internal affairs. But such incidents were more “annoyances” and did not fundamentally alter an improving bilateral relationship between China and the US.

Realists would argue forcefully that the US needed China to counter an expanding Soviet Union, a paramount strategic rationale behind President Nixon's historical visit to China in 1972 and key to facilitating US withdrawal from Vietnam. ²⁰ Both the American and Chinese sides agreed not to interfere in each other's internal affairs during that visit. ²¹ Much of the discourse and scholarship in this period focused on a strategic triangle between the US, China, and the Soviet Union, and on how the US would gain an advantage over the Soviet Union by having better relations with each communist country directly, surpassing the relations between those countries themselves. In that sense, it was not surprising that human rights in China became a heated diplomatic issue only when the Cold War was ending. ²² At the same time, emerging human rights activists and movements in China, including the 1979 Democracy Wall movement and, more dramatically, the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, provided strong reasons for international support.

Canada was part of the human rights revolution of the 1970s. ²³ Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1968–1984) launched a domestic human rights programme and embraced various international human rights treaties, but he chose realism, pragmatism, and the primacy of Canadian sovereignty over human rights and values in Canadian foreign policy. Yet his realist foreign policy conflicted with the opinions of a growing number of Canadians concerned about human rights in foreign countries. ²⁴ Trudeau had established diplomatic relations with China in 1970, and his “leftist” attitudes toward the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba were viewed with suspicion by the US. Unlike the US, Canada had a more long-standing relationship with China during that time, with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail (G&M) assigning a correspondent to China beginning in the 1950s, a “privilege” denied to all mainstream American media. In fact, among Western newspapers, G&M had the only bureau in Beijing until 1978. ²⁵ John Burns, G&M's Beijing bureau chief from 28 June 1971 to 23 June 1975, recalls that the first lasting lesson he learned from his Chinese experience was “education by negative example.” Without any prior knowledge or interest in Mao Zedong's China—“then about as enticing to me as the far side of the moon,” Burns was reassigned by the paper to China after Prime Minister Trudeau punched him, a scandal that made his correspondence assignment in Ottawa untenable. ²⁶ G&M shared news and images with other Western media, including information about China's massive human rights violations during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was also received by the Canadian government and its Western allies.

Looking back, even though human rights activists and organizations felt frustrated that their early warnings about human rights abuses did not receive sufficient attention, let alone result in official actions against Beijing, pressure kept building until human rights came to dominate US policy toward China in the early 1990s and now underlies the US's strategic rivalry with China. Following its neighbour's lead, around 2018 Canada embraced the Indo-Pacific strategy, shifting away from the non-confrontational approach of its “Asia-Pacific” era. ²⁷ Despite some debates over Canada's difficult choices, ²⁸ Canada has sided with the US and imposed sanctions on China over human rights violations.

The lesson from the “China exception” discourse is that was the beginning of the end of a cooperative bilateral relationship. The very fact that the expression “exception” was used indicated criticism and the creation of controversies over violating one's principles. It was difficult to debate publicly in defence of material interests over morality in a democracy. Does that dynamic apply to the “India exception” situation, if there is indeed such a case?

The “India exception”

We can compare the China and India exceptions based on similar discourses in play such as exceptions, exemptions, or immunity from accountability. Indeed, soon after Justin Trudeau's allegation, speaking to White House reporters, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan rejected the criticism of giving India a “special exemption.”

There's not some special exemption you get for actions like this. Regardless of the country, we will stand up and defend our basic principles and we will also consult closely with allies like Canada as they pursue their law enforcement and diplomatic process. ²⁹

Officials, of course, do not deny anything unless they have realized the power of a particular narrative.

Commentators recognize a “lighter touch” when it comes to the Indian government. As Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior fellow at Chatham House, observed, “the US has been downplaying concerns about India's human-rights record and allegations of democratic backsliding” because “India is a long-term strategic partner and is seen as a bulwark against the rise of China.” ³⁰ President Biden gave Indian prime minister Modi a state dinner, though in earlier years Modi had been banned from the US for his alleged silence against the mass killing of Muslims. Strategic calculations prevailed, reminiscent of President Nixon's visit to China during the Cultural Revolution, when massive human rights violations were taking place.

The India exception does exist, however one considers it. It contrasts with, for example, the US's initial hostility toward Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist, by the agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018. Yet the US messaging over the killing of Nijjar was calm and collected.

Since October 2023, the India exception has become more prominent, especially as additional revelations came out about the Indian plot against Sikh activists in North America. In November 2023, the US Justice Department announced an indictment of an Indian intelligence agency official who organized a plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US citizen and Sikh political activist, on US soil. The Indian government blamed rogue officials, not the government, for the conspiracy. In early May of 2024 the Canadian police arrested four Indian suspects in the killing of Nijjar. On the other hand, strategic cooperation between the US, the West, and India continues.

To say that the India exception exists does not mean that it is exactly like the China exception or forecasts how the India exception will play out.

The India exception versus the China exception

Obvious differences exist between China then and India now. Bajpaee, for example, has specifically differentiated India from China and Russia. India is a partner with the US for the rules-based international order—and a democracy, if a flawed one. However, China did not challenge US leadership in the 1980s. And the current gap between China and India is not as big as one might think. The People's Republic of China has not been a democracy, but Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform and facilitated the country's opening in 1978. The 1980s was a reform decade for the country as it sought to establish links with the capitalist global market. ³¹ Time Magazine even picked Deng as their 1985 “Man of the Year,” citing his “sweeping reforms that have challenged Marxist orthodoxies.” ³² Thus, from the US perspective, China was “improving” then while Indian democracy is viewed as having worsened in recent years. ³³ Freedom House, for example, now rates India as “partly free,” with a 2024 global freedom score of 66/100. Yet India was viewed as “free” as recently as 2020. By contrast, in 2024 Canada had a 97/100 score, the US 83/100, and China 9/100.

Unlike in the China case, the would-be reckoning for India has begun with Canada rather than the US. However, if we see Canada and the US as belonging broadly to the West and sharing common values, the two cases are more similar than different. Like the US, Canada has pursued a human rights foreign policy and engaged in human rights disputes with Saudi Arabia and China, even if their consistency has been debatable. ³⁴

Nijjar was a Canadian citizen murdered on Canadian soil. One does not have to be a human rights champion to protest foreign killings in their country. After all, the Turkish government condemned Saudi Arabia over the killing of Khashoggi in Istanbul. Thus, the Hu Na asylum and the killing of Nijjar both relate to sovereignty. Canada and the US guard their sovereignty over their territories and protect the rights of foreign nationals in their countries. At the same time, both the Chinese and Indian governments have long complained that the West does not respect the sovereign rights of non-Western nations. The Chinese government has charged the US with supporting “Tibetan separatists” to split the Chinese motherland. The Modi government has criticized the Canadian government for allowing what it views as “Sikh fundamentalists” to use Canada as a base against Indian security and threaten its territorial integrity.

Diaspora politics is part of the reason that the Hu Na case and the killing of Nijjar can be framed as human rights issues. Hu Na later became a citizen of the Republic of China in Taiwan. There was a perceived divide between pro-Beijing and pro-Taiwan segments in the Chinese-American community. Canada hosts the largest Sikh diaspora, totaling 771,790 as of 26 October 2022, comparable with its Hindu population (828,195), ³⁵ and surpassing the number of Sikhs in the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, and the US. The Sikh-Canadian community is an important voting bloc and political force in Canada. The Indian government has long accused Canada of sheltering “Khalistani separatists and terrorists,” referring to those Sikhs seeking an independent homeland in northern India. Thus, the Indian elites and public have a largely shared negative reaction to the Canadian allegation ³⁶ as Sikh separatism in their country was violent in the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Moreover, the China exception took place during the Cold War and the India exception is occurring during what is arguably a second Cold War. India is increasingly cooperating with the US due to its threat perception of Chinese aggressiveness in its northern border and strategic encirclement in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, which facilitated a cost-benefit analysis of participating in the Quad and positive assessment of anti-China coalitions such as the AUKUS. ³⁷ This is almost identical to China's fear of Soviet attack from the north and strategic encirclement, which pushed Beijing to join forces with the US. China and the US were as like-minded in the 1970s as India and the US are at present.

Fundamentally, the two cases are related because their political processes and drivers are similar, as illustrated in part above. Canada and the US are Western democracies shaped largely by Western values of human rights, democracy, and sovereignty as well as persistent hierarchical categories of race and sex, even though citizenship has become more inclusive and rights more widespread. The Western media enjoys a high degree of autonomy and seeks news stories that often take on a life of their own, which can in turn pressure elected officials to adopt policies accordingly. The US and Canadian governments need to navigate between domestic and international politics, sometimes leading and sometimes trailing. As the largest non-Western rising powers with real human rights problems, China and India see themselves as defending their interests and values, and criticism or punitive measures from the West are merely “hypocritical.” Both great powers also try to “divide and conquer” their critics, sometimes to great effect.

The Hu Na and the Nijjar incidents also could be viewed simply as accidents. Historical incidents that would later prove consequential, such as the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife which triggered the First World War, often are unpredictable accidents. However, once such historical events have taken place, one can find logical reasons why such events happened. The Nijjar assassination, for example, could have happened given the long history of Sikh separatism and diaspora politics in the West.

Looking to the future

What will happen to India's relationship with Canada and the US? This paper forecasts that the relationship will stay steady for now but deteriorate at some point. Of course, to say that a bilateral relationship will deteriorate is not a revelation because all relationships deteriorate at some point, if we see them as going through a pattern of ups and downs. India's relationships with the US and Canada have been rocky at times in the past, particularly over India's close relations with the Soviet Union, the 1974 nuclear test, and the 1998 tests, ³⁸ and they may become problematic yet again. Consider that the US once invaded Canada in the past as well. There are therefore different ways to forecast the future, but this paper offers a scenario analysis based on the China analogy. ³⁹

Viewed from hindsight, in the China case we can see a pattern of a slowly but surely deteriorating relationship with the US. One can write off the 1970s because the US and China were trying to establish diplomatic relations, which they achieved only in 1979. It did not take long for “isolated” human rights incidents to take place in the 1980s, but the two countries were focused on their common strategic concerns regarding the Soviet threat, a rationale reinforced by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening policy. The 1989 Tiananmen Incident sank China's relations with the US and the West to a low point. But the US and China managed the relationship in the 1980s and 1990s based on material interests in a globalizing world economy. The growing backlash against a rising China came from both the working class in the US worried about their employment and defence hawks who see rapid advances in Chinese technology as a threat to the US's dominance in global security. A more assertive Chinese foreign policy under Chinese President Xi Jinping was the final straw for those critics of Chinese policy and China.

If we follow the precedent of the China exception, negative narratives would emerge sporadically before gathering enough steam to put pressure on the governments, which in turn will change course if they begin to see India as a challenger rather than a willing partner. The Washington Post did carry a three-piece series of headlined, multiple-page exposés on India in early October 2023, ⁴⁰ which were followed with an editorial entitled “A toxic mix of tech and hate threatens India.”[cite] It started out with damning commentary: “In India, social media platforms have become conveyor belts for hate under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliate groups.” But how may that be addressed? The editorial opined pessimistically that the situation “would require a major change by the BJP, which is not likely, or far more aggressive policing by the platforms, which is hardly assured.” ⁴¹ The editorial did not say what the US-led West should do, but one may conclude that the West may become more wary of New Delhi and will be more likely to anticipate trouble down the line.

Around the same time, The Economist suggested that the killing of Nijjar reveals the limit of US-Indian relations and stands as a warning against “Indian overreach.” To be specific, “if India started throwing its weight about in ways reminiscent of China itself, it would quickly lose some of the bipartisan support that it currently enjoys in Washington” and “Mr. Modi should temper his defiance.” ⁴² Another Economist article finds India's bullying behaviour in cricket to be “a troubling augury of its global rise.” ⁴³ Moreover, it is now reported by mainstream Western media that Indian spies have long operated in the West. ⁴⁴ India's neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war is unpleasant for the West, ⁴⁵ but Washington still accommodates India in order to shore up its coalition of allies with concerns over China.

In the US, more high-profile news stories and editorials have criticized Indian politics and the murder plots. ⁴⁶ As discussed, human rights groups have also downgraded India's rating, and the subsequent arrests of Indian suspects will keep the issue alive.

Will Prime Minister Modi temper his defiance? Unlikely, since his defiance has served him well in domestic politics. ⁴⁷ Defiance against the West serves an Indian politician's interests because of their country's colonized past. As Bajpaee has noted, India and China share much in common: both are civilizational states that feel wronged by the West. In fact, “the Chinese have their 100 years of humiliation, and the Indians have their 200 years of humiliation under British colonial rule,” similarities that “create the ingredients for potentially more assertive foreign policy.” ⁴⁸ Moreover, as mentioned earlier, India can exploit the differences between other countries to advance its interests, a strategy that has been quite successful so far. ⁴⁹ However, a gap in fundamental values will keep a lid on how far a relationship can go. Moreover, China was also successful in fending off Western human rights pressure for a lengthy period, until it was not. ⁵⁰

Is China's present India's future? Arguably, many would want to have China's level of present power, if not to be exactly like China, but few have the size to dream a dream like China's. Now the most populous country in the world, India is one of a few that may emulate China's rise, which is also the reason for the US and the West to befriend New Delhi in the first place, similar to their wooing of China as a tactic against the Soviet Union. While still a democracy, India is backsliding and, like China, is an ancient civilization seeking to restore its past glory. Since its founding India has pursued an independent foreign policy, whether labeled nonalignment or strategic autonomy. ⁵¹ If India has not bent to the US and the West over its repeated nuclear tests, why would it do so now, with a greater power basis? China as a systemic rival for the US will not go away anytime soon. Thus, the strategic necessity to solicit Indian assistance will also not go away anytime soon. We are entering a period of “same bed, different dreams” in India-West relations, similar to US-China relations in the 1990s. ⁵² If the China analogy holds, assuming that India continues to grow and further throw its weight around, that China relatively declines, and that the US maintains its power position and continues to seek global primacy, then India will become a primary rival for the US in about two decades.