Magnificent News: Today's WorldView: How a once-banned Modi is making history in Washington

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By Adam Taylor
with Sammy Westfall

How a once-banned Modi is making history in Washington

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the National Science Foundation in Alexandria on Wednesday. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Narendra Modi will make history on Thursday. Other Indian leaders have addressed Congress before, but none have done so twice. Not even the three Indian prime ministers who were in office longer than Modi: his immediate predecessor, Manmohan Singh; the country's sole female prime minister, Indira Gandhi; and the independence leader who inaugurated the office, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Modi's address is part of a high-profile visit to Washington that also includes his first state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening. The pomp is remarkable when you consider the lengths to which he was once kept by American leaders. Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, a state in western India, was effectively denied entry to the United States in 2005 over allegations related to religious mob violence.

Back then, the future Indian prime minister faced sanction under a law making foreign officials ineligible for visas if found responsible for "severe violations of religious freedom," after riots in Gujarat in 2002 led to the deaths of about a thousand people, mostly Muslims. In a statement at the time, Ambassador David C. Mulford said the State Department's decision was based on an Indian National Human Rights Commission report that found there was "a comprehensive failure on the part of the state government to control the persistent violation of rights of life, liberty, equality, and dignity of the people of the state."

But things changed quickly after Modi became prime minister of India in 2014. That year he delivered a speech at Madison Square Garden after receiving the visa he was once denied. He first addressed Congress in 2016 and then three years later, after a comfortable reelection win, met with President Donald Trump for a joint rally in Houston. Thursday's state dinner and the congressional address appear to confirm that Modi is not just rehabilitated but rapturously welcomed.

"There is an unprecedented trust" between the leaders of the United States and India, the prime minister told the Wall Street Journal in an article published Tuesday.

Though the Gujarat riots took place more than two decades ago, the debate about them is ongoing. Modi's supporters have argued that he was powerless over the massacres in Gujarat, and a special investigation team convened by India's Supreme Court said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the future prime minister. Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist and parliamentary leader of the ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, has said that India is a place for people of all faiths and beliefs.

Researchers said there has been a rise in the persecution of India's Muslim minority since Modi took over, along with other democratic backsliding. Early this year, Indian tax authorities raided the BBC's offices and seized its journalists' phones. That incident took place as the government took extraordinary measures to censor the British outlet's documentary, "India: The Modi Question," which contained previously unreported British diplomatic cables that said the mob violence in Gujarat was preplanned "under the protection of the state government."

Modi's rehabilitation in the United States says more about India than him personally. India overtook its neighboring giant, China, to become the world's most populous nation last year. Unlike China, many of its 1.4 billion or so population are young, so the country is expected to keep growing for decades. Trade with the United States has boomed under Modi's watch, with India now often seen in Washington as a potential bulwark for global trade as it shifts away from an inward-looking China and an isolated Russia.

The Indian leader's global presence has been boosted by the country's huge diaspora, including many in Washington. When Modi speaks to the members of Congress, he will be escorted by Indian American Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.). Vice President Harris will be one of dozens of Indian American officials present. Two Republican presidential candidates, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, are set to attend, too.

But it is not always possible to separate the leader from the country. Modi himself has frequently conflated his own story with that of India. Unlike many other Indian leaders, he has a humble background and is the first Indian prime minister to be born after the country became independent. "I present my country to the world as my country is, and myself, as I am," Modi told the Journal.

As Indian media has noted, with his visit, Modi becomes one of only a few world leaders to have addressed a joint meeting of Congress more than once. Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister, spoke three times. South Africa's Nelson Mandela spoke once before apartheid ended, as an opposition leader recently released from prison after 27 years, and once after, when he was president. Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken three times, though the Israeli prime minister's last speech was in 2015. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken twice, albeit once virtually.

In speaking about the visit, the Biden administration has focused on India's future rather than Modi's past. Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters this week that it was a "hinge moment" for the United States and India, adding that their bond "will be one of the defining relationships of the 21st century."

Modi, who will probably win reelection next year, still has a lot of ambition. He seeks a far more important role for India on the global stage, potentially including a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. But a more globally influential India may not be one that the United States welcomes.

New Delhi has refused to condemn Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine in large part because of its historical reliance on Russian military gear, which makes up about 85 percent of India's arsenal, according to research from the U.S. Institute of Peace. And while India may have its own simmering border dispute with China, few experts think it will side comfortably with Washington and its allies against Beijing, especially if it came down to war over Taiwan.

Writing in Foreign Affairs this week, USIP's Daniel Markey argues that the United States should "cooperate with India on the reality of shared interests, not on the hope of shared values." By symbolically welcoming Modi in Washington's seat of democracy, the Biden administration is making history too. It may not like the consequences.

1,000 Words

(OceanGate Expeditions/Reuters)

The tyranny of time, physics and distance now defines the fast-closing window of opportunity to rescue five people in a submersible lost in the Atlantic, and experts foresee that a tough choice is near. They have enough oxygen to last until Thursday morning.

The search-and-rescue task was huge: Finding a craft the size of a minivan in an area twice the size of the state of Connecticut and up to 2½ miles deep.

Talking Points

• Armed Israeli settlers rampaged through a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, leaving at least one Palestinian dead and 12 injured a day after four Israelis were killed by Hamas gunmen. Earlier Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that 1,000 new housing units would be built in Eli, the Israeli settlement where Palestinian militants opened fire Tuesday. "Our answer to terrorism is to strike at it forcefully and build up our country," read a joint statement from Netanyahu and other ministers. The IDF also said it had killed three people in a rare drone attack on a "suspicious vehicle" near Jenin, targeting a "terrorist cell."

• National security reporter Ellen Nakashima writes how Modi's trip to Washington is sending a big, if quiet, signal to China: In the many joint statements issued by the U.S. and India over the last years, there never has been an outright mention of China. Yet it is China that has supplanted Pakistan as India's main security threat. While Delhi may wish to minimize accusations that can heighten tensions with leadership in Beijing, China's clashes with India along its border have turned the world's two most populous countries into rivals again in the Indo-Pacific. It is the resurgence of that rivalry — after decades of détente — that has made for a convergence of strategic interests between the United States and India, Nakashima writes.

• Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine, Anastacia Galouchka, Kostiantyn Khudov and Today's WorldView's Adam Taylor describe the uphill battle the nation faces to start reconstruction. The war could drag on. And even if Ukraine survives militarily, some officials fear that it could end up starved economically. The World Bank estimated in March that Ukraine needs $411 billion to recover from the war. At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London this week, huge Western pledges made up only a fraction of the estimated need.

And, the Pentagon has uncovered a significant accounting error that led it to overvalue the amount of equipment it has sent to Ukraine since the war began — by $6.2 billion. That means it can send more weapons to Ukraine before going to Congress to request more money.

Viewpoints

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Hidden beneath the surface

Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Locals used to say that Crawford Lake was bottomless. Its waters ran deeper than people could reach. Anything that dropped into the basin, it seemed, would fall till the end of time.

Yet when scientists finally looked into the lake's murky depths, they found not a void, but a mirror.

For centuries beyond memory, Crawford Lake has quietly absorbed signs of change from the surface world. Whatever fell into the water would drift down to the lake floor. There, it was permanently preserved in layers of mud.

Digging into these sediments, scientists have uncovered a record of more than a thousand years of history. It shows — perhaps more than any other place on Earth — that humans have transformed the planet's chemistry and climate at a pace never seen before.

These changes are so fundamental, many scientists believe they mark a new chapter in geologic time: The Anthropocene.

This summer, researchers will determine whether Crawford Lake should be named the official starting point for this geologic chapter, with pollution-laden sediments from the 1950s marking the transition from the dependable environment of the past to the uncertain new reality humans have created.

In just seven decades, the scientists say, humans have brought about greater changes than they did in more than seven millennia. Never in Earth's history has the world changed this much, this fast. Never has a single species had the capacity to wreak so much damage — or the chance to prevent so much harm.

"It's a line in the sand," said Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario, who has led research on Crawford Lake. "The Earth itself is playing by a different rule book. And it's because of us."

Tim Patterson, an environmental geologist at Carleton University, transports a frozen core sample. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Every new phase of Earth's history begins with a "golden spike" — a spot in the geologic record where proof of a global transformation is perfectly preserved.

An exposed Tunisian cliff face bearing traces of an ancient asteroid impact marks the transition from the age of the dinosaurs to the Cenozoic era. Hydrogen molecules uncovered in Greenland's ice denote the start of the Holocene — the 11,700-year stretch of stable temperatures that encompasses all of human civilization, up to and including the present day.

These spikes are like exclamation points in the story of the planet, punctuating a tale of shifting continents, evolving species and temperatures that rose and fell as carbon levels fluctuated in the atmosphere. They mark the starts of epochs — small segments of geologic time. And they have helped scientists interpret the forces that shaped Earth's past climates, which in turn allows them to forecast the effects of modern warming.

In 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy — an obscure scientific body responsible for defining the phases of Earth's past — created a new working group to investigate the evidence for the Anthropocene. The group's mission: to identify a potential "golden spike" site that might convince fellow scientists of the new epoch's validity.

Their search spanned from mountain summits to the depths of the ocean, from the Antarctic ice sheet to tropical coral reefs. And, in 2018, it led them to McCarthy's office door. — Sarah Kaplan, Simon Ducroquet, Bonnie Jo Mount, Frank Hulley-Jones and Emily Wright