As Rubio heads to India, US Progressives sound alarm about repression and surveillance of Protests
The part that gets me is the alleged spying on American soil. There's something almost surreal about a friendly government running surveillance operations inside its ally's borders, and then that ally's diplomats having to gently raise it in a letter while preparing a red-carpet visit. It's the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes international relations feel less like statecraft and more like a family dinner where nobody mentions the elephant in the room.
I keep circling back to what this letter actually reveals: that the language of rights is still the only shared vocabulary these two governments have, even when the practice falls short. Rubio will likely smile, shake hands, and talk about trade and security, while six members of Congress try to hold the moral line from thousands of miles away. Whether that pressure changes anything in New Delhi is another question entirely. But I'd want to know how much of this surveillance is standard intelligence gathering dressed up as something more sinister, and how much is genuinely new. The letter's authors seem convinced it crosses a line, and that alone is worth paying attention to.