After US Representative Ilhan Omar questioned the alleged reluctance of the US government to criticise Narendra Modi’s government on human rights, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States was monitoring a rise in “human rights abuses” by some officials in India.

“We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials,” Mr Blinken said on Monday in a joint press briefing with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.

Ilhan Omar, who belongs to President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party had said last week, “What does Modi need to do to India’s Muslim population before we will stop considering them a partner in peace?”

Several Indian states have passed and some are considering anti-conversion laws that challenge the constitutionally protected right to freedom of faith and religion.

In 2019 when Modi led government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir in an attempt to fully integrate the Muslim-majority region with rest of the country,  in the same year it passed a citizenship law.

The law was passed to grant citizenship to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs who fled Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before 2015. The law  excluded Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries

The Karnataka administration recently banned wearing hijabs in Educational Institutions in the state.