India is a global security power, and this is in U.S. interests: Donald Lu

‘I would say the Indian government is clear that they also have human rights concerns in the United States, particularly relating to the treatment of people of South Asian descent,’ says U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia

The U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia,Donald Lu, spoke to The Hindu’s Sriram Lakshmanin a wide-ranging interview, in which he discussed his forthcoming trip to Texas (June 15-17) to engage with the South Asian diaspora and companies, India’s security role, bilateral human rights discussions, and visas.

Well, I have had the great privilege of working on South Asia generally, but specifically India, since the mid-1990s. And what has been true then, and is very much true today, is that the heart of this relationship is not governments talking to each other. It’s not even businesses talking to each other. It’s families, right? It’s the interconnectedness. We have a million people travelling back and forth between the United States and India every year. And so we want to channel that. We want to make sure that we are listening to the diaspora, that we are responsive to their interests, but that we’re also engaging them and being part of making this relationship fuller and more developed. They’ve got a lot of great ideas, particularly on the commercial side. And we want to make full use of that.

One of the things I’m most excited about is going to a company in Texas called First Solar. First Solar is the company that’s working in Chennai to produce solar modules that will support Prime Minister Modi’s goal of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel and solar energy by 2030. This is the biggest investment that the Development Finance Corporation has ever done — $500 million in a single factory and deployment of all of these solar cells. It’s going to produce an amazing amount of energy for the Indian economy. And I think it’s a model for going forward — not only from the United States, but from a whole range of countries around the world.

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So one of the wonderful things that I’m seeing is that there are South Asian Americans joining government in numbers I’ve never seen before — at levels of seniority that I’ve never seen before.

So a couple of examples that I’ll use is, in my own office, one of our new Deputy Assistant Secretaries is a person of Indian American descent. And we have as our new international religious freedom coordinator, someone of Indian descent, Rashad Hussain. And we have the Secretary of State’s new senior business development person, for the whole world, is Dilawar Syed, who is also someone of South Asian descent.

We’re seeing not only consultation with the diaspora, we’re finding that many of the people who are actually making the policy are people who themselves were born in South Asia or their parents were born in South Asia and they have this cultural, linguistic, and family context that makes us able to be better professionals.