A Congressman standing on the floor of a congressional briefing room on Capitol Hill is not the typical venue for testing India's ties with Washington on defence, but on July 14, Congressman Jim McGovern, the co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, rose to his feet and requested that the State Department revisit its decision to renew its order for American arms to India. It was a joint session by Equitas Forum USA, Hindus for Human Rights, the Sikh Coalition, the Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund, the New York State Council of Churches, and the Dalit Solidarity Forum with support from Congresswoman Summer Lee's office titled "India's Transnational Repression: Implications for US National Security. McGovern made two requests passage of the Transnational Repression Policy Act, which has languished in Congress for more than three years and is largely bipartisan, and for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to look at New Delhi's continued eligibility to buy U.S. arms under the Arms Export Control Act.

All this is not new. This idea has been floated around in Congress for at least two years now, since at least 2020, when Rep. Ilhan Omar led a letter calling for a delay of a group of arms sales to India, Egypt, the Philippines, Hungary and the UAE until human rights issues are reviewed. It had come to the fore again in 2024 when it came to the sale of MQ-9B armed drones and this year, through the annual report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, recommending that India be classified as a Country of Particular Concern and consideration be given to targeted sanctions against the Research and Analysis Wing and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The difference this time is the specificity of the legislative request: that eligibility to arms sales be linked to the Section 6 enforcement of export control law, and the timing, which comes just months after the 10-year Defence Cooperation Agreement was renewed between Washington and New Delhi.

It did not take long for the Indian government to react. The Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Randhir Jaiswal rebutted the USCIRF report saying it had been "motivated and biased characterisation" based on "questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts" a verbatim quote from New Delhi's response to all USCIRF reports dating back years. The ministry has also returned the tirades it launched against Hindu temples and the Indian community in the United States, suggesting that the criticism of such acts is as much warranted as that of acts committed in India. It's a ritualistic tit-for-tat that has been playing out now: an American panel or lawmaker brings out a concern, India strikes back as it's "distorted and selective," and the basis of the defence relationship continues much the same.

It's the magnitude of the relationship that makes McGovern's proposal so big a lift in practice. India has purchased billions of dollars of American military equipment since 2008, and from C-17 and C-130J transport aircraft to P-8I maritime patrol planes, Apache and Chinook helicopters, M777 howitzers, and most recently the MQ-9B fleet. The drone deal was worth almost four billion dollars and would be delivered by 2029, thirty-one drones were approved in 2024. Add to these a nearly billion dollar sustainment package for Seahawks signed this year, a nearly one billion dollar commitment for new sets of F404 jet engines to fuel India's home-grown fighter programme and the fact that they are planning to buy further P-8I aircraft valued at close to three billion dollars, and it becomes clear that there is more to it than a one-off contract. Late last year smaller packages cleared, such as Excalibur artillery rounds and Javelin anti-tank systems that cost about ninety million dollars, and they continue to arrive on schedule despite the political bickering in Washington.

It's been a pretty tough time in the wider relationship, and that resilience has stood the test of time. This February, Washington has lowered those tariffs, and at the time, they stood at fifty percent, the highest the U.S. had imposed on any trading partner, but Washington spent much of the past year leaning on India with them. As others parts of the relationship have shifted, one thing has remained constant since Trump took office for a second term: defence cooperation has not slowed down, with arms approvals and joint exercises proceeding on an independent track while the other negotiators continued to haggle over tariff schedules. There's even real dollars to be won on the macro-economic side of the tracks: The report was that India would agree to buying as much as five hundred billion dollars of American aircraft and aircraft-related gear over time, which is quite a bit more than what's on the table in the arms-sale debate McGovern is seeking to revive.

None of all of this is to say that the advocacy effort is empty or to dismiss it as a sound bite. The issues themselves of complaints and harassment of diaspora activists, surveillance concerns, unresolved fallout from the Pannun case that first raised these issues in 2023, are genuine concerns that should be addressed in their own right, irrespective of any leverage that may be sought from a drone contract. For that to actually take place, however, the executive branch needs to step in, and neither the State Department under this administration nor the Pentagon has shown much interest in tying arms sales to human rights conditionality in the case of a partner Washington continues to rely on to balance China across the Indo-Pacific. Often, law that would actually hold up arms sales, like Congress did when it was considering fast-track treaties for Indian arms in 2023, has been slower to move than the deal itself. Right now, McGovern has a room filled with advocacy buddies and a familiar bill that he can reintroduce. New Delhi has a trite rejection lined up. And ten-billion-dollar defence contracts, years of delivery plans keep rolling on.