Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is best known here for being the prime sponsor of the House Medicare For All bill, one that differs in some important ways (which I think are improvements) from the Senate bill sponsored by Bernie Sanders. But she is also a strong advocate for human rights, especially for her country of birth, India.
Recently she has been highly critical of the Modi government in India for its ending of local government and civil rights in Jammu and Kashmir, and its horrible new citizenship law that blatantly discriminates against Muslims and has generated mass protests. (The new citizenship law also discriminates against Jews, something no Indian government has ever done before going back thousands of years, but there are so few Jews in the countries the law addresses — zero in Bangladesh, one in Afghanistan, and fewer than a thousand in Pakistan, a country that no longer has a synagogue — that this may be unintentional. Jews are often collateral damage in anti-Muslim campaigns.) The Trump Administration is of course quiet on all this and Mike Pompeo recently welcomed India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh for an official visit. Pompeo has supposedly made international religious persecution a focus of his tenure as Secretary of State but this silence shows that this is all hype and no substance.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee was interested in talking to Jaishankar but the Indian government let it be known that the necessary condition was that Jayapal, who is not a member of the Committee, could not attend. Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY), my congressman, did not blink. Jayapal describes what happened in a Seattle Times essay. Jayapal deserves praise for her commitment to human rights and so does Engel, and Engel deserves praise for not caving. Only crickets of course from the Trump Administration for this outrage. Send Pramila Jayapal a campaign contribution, and send Eliot Engel a campaign contribution. We need people like them to stay in Congress.
