Why Indian P.M.’s Daughter Embarrasses President Bush?

While India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was telling his partymen and allies that he felt let down by the country’s climbdown on the nuclear deal with the US, his daughter — the New York-based Amrit Singh — was embarrassing the Bush administration about its human rights record.

The Times of India reports: “An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amrit Singh is the co-author of a just-released report Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. It is a scalding indictment of American human rights abuses based on the administration’s own records.

(Amrit, the yongest among Indian P.M.’s three daughters, was also recognised for her work in the Ali vs Rumsfeld case, which was filed against US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan detainees who were tortured in American custody….More here…)

Amrit (which in Hindi means nectar), 38, is married to an American but has kept a low profile, and hardly any Indian-American paper has written about her or her relationship to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I tease her father that he has a diversified portfolio,” Prof Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University once said. “He gets along with President Bush, while his daughter criticises him!”

“Amrit’s ACLU expose is an apt answer to those who accuse the PM of being an American stooge. Like her father, who taught for a while in the West and served as an international civil servant, Amrit is a product of liberal western academia. An alumnus of Cambridge, Oxford and Yale, from where she received her BA in economics, MPhil and her law degree respectively, Amrit was a lecturer at Oxford – her father’s alma mater – and later at Yale, where she was a visiting Fellow.

“From 1996-98, she worked at the IMF and then clerked with a Judge of the US District Court in New York. Such a resume may have earned her a damning label as a western careerist in the eyes of India’s paranoid Left and ultranationalist Right. But in 2002, Amrit joined the ACLU, scourge of American conservatives and red rag to the Bushies. In the 1988 presidential election, Dubya’s father, George H W Bush, famously pilloried his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis as a ‘card-carrying member of the ACLU,’ a ‘slur’ that ACLU has since used successfully in its recruitment drives.

“The groves of western academy can inculcate liberal values far more than the borrowed doctrinaire rubbish that Indian communists have gassed about for decades. Studying, working or living in the West does not mean condoning western excesses – or selling out India’s interests, as our Founding Fathers showed. The anti-American pathology that is starting to infect India’s political discourse – in the context of the nuclear deal – is unnecessary given the level of engagement between the two societies.

“Amrit Singh and millions of globally engaged Indians both within and outside India are testimony to a confident new people and country that is not afraid of taking on the West on their territory. So different from the neurotic, ideologically-driven, inward-looking comrades who are fearful of the future and whose young leaders sound so old and tired.

“India celebrates with gusto, and sometimes with hysteria, its diaspora in the fields of engineering, science, medicine, finance, and even the arts. But long before our first doctors, engineers, and managers winged westward, we had a disputation of western-trained black coats contesting the white man’s burden. Our founding fathers Gandhi, Patel, Nehru, Jinnah – were all legal eagles. Save for Ambedkar, who was an alumnus of New York’s Columbia University, the rest were all products of the British legal system.

“More recently, increasing numbers of Indians are making a mark in the American legal sphere. Most of them are first- and second-generation Indian-Americans. Sanjay Tailor, Anil Singh, and Jaya Madhavan serve as judges in various courts; one of the most cited constitutional experts in the US is Akhil Amar; Preeta Bansal was solicitor general for the State of New York; and Sarita Kedia was an attorney for the mobster John A Gotti.”

(Photo above: Amrit Singh courtesy Mohammed Jaffer/Snaps India/rediff.com)