Washington : Describing Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi as the "poster child for India's failure to punish the violent", two US officials have wondered which India would prevail in 2014 elections.
There are "two faces of India" suggested Katrina Lantos Swett, Vice Chairwoman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent commission created by an act of US Congress, and Mary Ann Glendon a USCIRF Commissioner in an OpEd published in the CNN website.
The annual commemoration of end-of-year holy days from Diwali to the Islamic New Year to Christians "are a testament to India's remarkable religious diversity, they wrote. "Yet on the ground, in a number of key areas across the country, there exists a second, markedly less benign India."
"Indeed, the governments and societies of several Indian states display unmistakable hostility to freedom of conscience and religion, especially for religious minorities," Swett and Glendon wrote noting "Over the past decade, hostility has often devolved into violence."
"At least two factors have fuelled the bloodshed - anti-conversion laws and a failure to bring perpetrators to justice," the officials wrote.
