India is not xenophobic, the country's foreign minister has insisted, after comments by US President Joe Biden suggesting the South Asian nation and fellow ally Japan were struggling economically because they rejected immigrants, reports BSS.
Biden, who is seeking reelection against Republican rival Donald Trump in November, made the remarks at a campaign fundraising event in Washington this week.
Indian Foreign minister S. Jaishankar told a media roundtable Friday that Biden's comments did not match India's reality.
"First of all, our economy is not faltering," he said, according to a report of the discussion published Saturday by the Economic Times newspaper.
"India has been a very unique country," he added. "I would say actually, in the history of the world, that it's been a society which has been very open... different people of different societies come to India."
India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies with annualised GDP growth of 8.4 percent in the December quarter, according to official data in February.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist government has been accused by critics of discriminating against Muslims, including through recently enacted reforms to India's citizenship law.
The amended law sparked huge protests when it was first passed by parliament in 2019 and finally enacted in March, with Amnesty International warning that it still risked being used as a tool, alongside a mooted National Register of Citizens, to deprive some Muslims of citizenship.
"There are people who publicly said on record that... a million Muslims will lose their citizenship in this country," Jaishankar said.
"Why are they not being held to account? Because nobody has lost citizenship."
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
