New Delhi: Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, US president-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the justice department’s civil rights division, has publicly criticised the Modi government’s alleged role in targeting pro-Khalistan Sikhs abroad, its response to the farmers’ protests and its requests to block social media accounts.
Announcing his decision to nominate Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the justice department, Trump on Monday (December 9) said she defended Americans’ civil liberties by “taking on Big Tech for censoring” free speech, representing “Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID” and “suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers”.
Described by the New York Times as a conservative politician “so devoted to [Trump] that she was willing to attack not only Democrats but also fellow Republicans”, the Chandigarh-born and Bay Area-based Dhillon has often voiced a dim view of the Union government after Ottawa and then Washington accused it of targeting Sikh separatist citizens on their soil.
In one instance, Dhillon in March responded to a post on X by The Economist titled ‘Narendra Modi’s secret weapon: India’s diaspora’, saying “Also assassinating India’s critics in the diaspora. Full service!”
New Delhi’s sending “death squads” to the US and Canada “to target vocal Sikh diaspora critics has now been specifically confirmed by US intelligence,” Dhillon said in April in connection with a Washington Post story on the Indian government official accused by US federal prosecutors of directing a plot to kill US citizen and pro-Khalistan lawyer Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York.
That same month, she said in response to an X post that is now unavailable that “free speech in a different country is so disturbing to India that it sends death squads”. “Some democracy,” Dhillon added.
Two months before US prosecutors alleged the existence of the ‘Pannun murder plot’ in November 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared in parliament that there was credible intelligence potentially linking agents of the Indian government to the June 2023 murder of the pro-Khalistan Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Since then, Washington has named the Indian government official it accused as Vikash Yadav and charged him with murder for hire among other things. Ottawa too has upped the ante against the Indian government.
In one X post in August, Dhillon referenced a Reuters story reporting that 19 Sikh leaders in the US and Canada said they or their organisations faced targeted threats or harassment over the past year.
“Extremely disturbing,” wrote Dhillon, who on X has been vocal about her Sikh and Punjabi heritage.
Although she has spoken in favour of civil rights in some matters pertaining to India, back home in California Dhillon has generated controversy with the choice of cases she took up, including one where she reportedly represented a mother and alleged that schools were “brainwashing their kids to identify as bisexual and transgender”.
The Trump lawyer had also said in a Fox News interview that educators were “one hundred percent” ‘recruiting’ transgender students, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Also read: Could a ‘Transactional’ Trump Leverage the Pannun Case to Get Modi to Buy US Fighter Aircraft?
Three farm Bills ‘designed to marginalise farmers, destroy their culture’
During the 2020-21 farmers’ protests, she said the agitators were “protesting laws designed to marginalise them & destroy their unique culture, benefit big corporations (I was born into a Punjabi farming family). Without these farmers, India does not eat. I stand with the #FarmersProtests!”
She also reacted to news reports saying that X (then Twitter) at the Modi government’s behest withheld accounts with links to the protests as well as posts critical of its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Twitter is also censoring tweets about India’s farmer protests, the largest ongoing protests in the world right now. The farmers are protesting law changes they feel benefit large corporations over small family farmers. Rightfully so!” Dhillon had said.
Dhillon made similar criticisms earlier this year during renewed protests by farmers demanding legal guarantees for floor prices for their crops.
Reacting to Democratic US representative from California Ro Khanna’s criticism of the Pakistani general elections held early this year, Dhillon wrote: “What’s happening in India right now, @RoKhanna ? Are you concerned about turning off the internet in Punjab, shooting protesters, gov’t officials whipping up hatred against farmer protestors?”
“What about the government ordering @x not show [sic] the accounts of journalists, activists?”, she added, presumably referring to X’s withholding in India accounts belonging to farmer bodies and independent journalists.
What’s happening in India right now, @RoKhanna ? Are you concerned about turning off the internet in Punjab, shooting protesters, gov’t officials whipping up hatred against farmer protestors? What about the government ordering @x not show the accounts of journalists, activists? https://t.co/nSgg08ozBf
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) February 22, 2024
Criticism has also extended to issues of internet clampdowns, free speech
Dhillon also criticised the frequency of internet curbs in India, which are implemented in the face of protests or riots, saying that it represented “tyranny, not democracy”.
“India ranks 150th in the world in press freedom, down from a shameful 140th, and proudly sports the world’s highest number of internet shutdowns, like the one punishing Punjab right now,” she had said when the Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab imposed a clampdown on internet services when radical and pro-Khalistan Sikh preacher – and now an undertrial Lok Sabha MP – Amritpal Singh was on the run from police.
“Global censorship campaign raises alarms – India’s courts bless suppression of critical speech, western outlets fall into line like clockwork, thanks to threats from US law firms,” Dhillon said in January this year regarding an article partly about how Reuters took down a story for users around the world in response to a preliminary order from a Delhi court.
“Government attacks and raids on journalists are antithetical to democracy. This is very troubling, India!”, she had said in October 2022 when The Wire‘s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan – and others at the outlet – were raided by police after it published and then retracted stories alleging that BJP ‘IT cell’ head Amit Malviya was given special privileges by Meta to have posts removed from its platforms.
What is the department Dhillon has been selected to lead?
Upon Trump’s announcing that he would nominate Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights, she said it had been her “dream to be able to serve our great country” and that she was “so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by” Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, i.e. the topmost official in the justice department.
Dhillon will lead that division of the justice department that works to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of those in America.
“The division enforces federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, colour, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity), disability, religion, familial status, national origin and citizenship status,” its website reads.
It also enforces voting rights and probes police departments, the New York Times noted.
Having moved to the US when she was a child, Dhillon serves as national committeewoman for the California Republican National Committee and has previously served as vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party.
Some of the cases her law firm have argued have been controversial. One critic of Dhillon’s told the San Francisco Chronicle that his impression of her was that “she is very conservative and hardly a champion of civil rights as it is generally understood”.
In the case where schools were accused of brainwashing children to identify as bisexual and transgender, the mother in the case sued officials and teachers at a Bay Area school, saying they harmed her by not informing her of her child’s decision to use a different name and pronouns, as per the Chronicle.
In 2020 she co-chaired a group that challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost to outgoing President Joe Biden, the Times reported. She also suggested during the pandemic that face masks “don’t work”, or that no one could “prove they work”, reported the New York-based The Week magazine.
