Trump’s Dictator Buddies Across the World Are Not Friends of Women

Article originally published by PassBlue

In the gallery of authoritarian governments undercutting the rights of women and threatening democracy around the world, five nations stand out for a special reason. Donald Trump has made the leaders of Brazil, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey his friends and accomplices.

In all of these countries, according to mounting evidence in numerous studies, women’s reproductive rights in particular have become targets of repressive policies. Women are also often victims of state violence.

India, a startling example for a democratic nation, is especially newsworthy.

With all the baggage of his antiwomen policies and actions in the United States, Trump is scheduled to travel to India in late February to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This trip comes against the backdrop of women side-by-side with men being beaten by police on the streets and university campuses of Indian cities as they protest new anti-Muslim citizenship laws.

No quarrel with Modi on that count. Trump has just proposed an extended ban (or limitations) on travel to the US to six more nations with large Muslim populations, four of them in Africa: Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania. Kyrgyzstan has also been added to the ban, as well as Myanmar, where the Muslim Rohingya have been the victims of prolonged lethal assault by the largely Burmese Buddhist military.

In the Muslim majority territory of Kashmir, nearly six months after a heavy Indian Army occupation was imposed, thousands of women and their families are still without male breadwinners who were taken into Indian detention without explanation. A loose coalition in the US Congress is forming to oppose Modi’s Kashmir policies, backed by a Congressional Research Service report warning that the Hindu nationalist government’s actions could taint India’s democratic credentials . . .