Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday lashed out at former U.S. President Barack Obama for saying India’s government should do more to protect Muslim citizens.
Sitharaman fired back that Obama dropped bombs on a large number of Muslims during his presidency.
Obama said on Thursday that “the protection of the Muslim minority in a Hindu-majority India is worth mentioning” during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States, which concluded the following day.
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“If I had a conversation with PM Modi, who I know well, part of my argument would be that if you don’t protect the rights of ethnic minorities in India, there is a strong possibility that India at some point starts pulling apart. That would be contrary to the interests of India,” Obama told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Obama’s remarks were doubtless even more irritating to members of the Modi administration because he was answering a question about how U.S. presidents should deal with “autocratic” leaders and “illiberal democrats,” a group he implicitly lumped Modi into despite claiming to know him well and regarding him as a friend.
“We want friendship with the U.S., but we get remarks about religious freedom in India. It is during his tenure as President that the U.S. bombed six Muslim countries and dropped more than 26,000 bombs in these countries. How will people trust these allegations?” Finance Minister Sitharaman fired back at Obama on Sunday.
India Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (U.S. Secretary of Defense/Flickr)
Sitharaman said she was “shocked” that “a former president of the U.S. was speaking about Indian Muslims.” She accused Obama of undermining Modi by feeding red meat to his political opponents, and countered his criticism by noting Modi has been granted six major honors by “countries where Muslims are in the majority,” most recently including Egypt.
Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh responded to Obama’s remarks on Monday, repeating Sitharaman’s point that Obama should “think about himself as to how many Muslim countries he has attacked” before hypocritically criticizing Modi.
“Obama should not forget that India is the only country which considers all the people living in the world as family members,” he said.
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