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U.S. President Joe Biden claims that he warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Geneva last week that human rights is always going to be on the table when dealing with his administration. He also threatened Russia with devastating consequences if opposition activist Alexey Navalny were to die in a Russian prison.

Criticizing the assault on media freedoms and human rights in Russia and China has long been an American political reflex. Indeed, Bidens insistent rhetoric that democracy is in a global contest with autocracy marks him as one of the U.S. leaders intellectually conditioned by the Cold Wars simple oppositions.

However, a more severe and unfamiliar test for Bidens foreign policy looms: whether he will be equally keen to put human rights on the table with India, a key member of the democratic coalition he wants to rally.

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Critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised this thorny question even before Biden was inaugurated. They say that Indias slide into illiberalism should be called out no less than Turkeys or Hungarys.

Modis government and its supporters havent made things any easier for Biden with their continued campaign unprecedented in India against writers, journalists and intellectuals. Just last week, the government threatened to withdraw Twitter Inc.s liability protections for failing to comply with new social media guidelines.

Soon thereafter, police in the state of Uttar Pradesh, run by Modis Bharatiya Janata Party, registered a criminal complaint against Twitter and several journalists including a Washington Post columnist for reporting the claims made by a Muslim victim of mob violence.

Of course, there has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that India is a critical ally in its attempt to check Chinese influence in Asia. In overlooking the Modi governments excesses, Biden probably counts on support from a U.S. foreign policy establishment invested more in realpolitik than human rights.

Double standards similarly shadowed proclamations of human rights and democracy during the Cold War. Successive administrations from Eisenhower onwards collaborated with some atrocious regimes while claiming to defend the democratic free world against communist autocracy.

But the world was, and felt like, a very different place then, before the communications revolution that transformed how billions of people see themselves and their place in the world.

The U.S. enjoyed global hegemony for decades, cultural as well as geopolitical and military, and was usually able to impose its own interpretations of the events it shaped diplomatically and militarily.

The then-alternative global sources of information and analysis such as Pravda, Tass and Peoples Daily had none of the propagandistic elan and vigor of Russias RT and Chinas Global Times today, let alone Twitter and Facebook bubbles and WhatsApp groups. The U.S. political and economic system seemed superior even to many of its distant victims.

Post-Donald Trump, the U.S. now faces close and hostile examination of its domestic and foreign policies. It is struggling to renovate its tarnished image abroad, rebuilding in the ruins of broken treaties and commitments. It is also engaged, more crucially, in a battle for democracy at home, as one of its two major political parties seems intent on undermining voting rights and other democratic institutions.

Biden must also contend with a rising number of critics in his own party. Legislators on the left of the Democratic Party such as Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna have been vocal critics of Modi. Vice President Kamala Harris as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke out against Modis crackdown on the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir; they will find it difficult to remain silent if democratic norms are further eroded in India.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment would also find it hard to keep counterposing Indian democracy to Chinese authoritarianism if the state continues to go after writers and journalists especially those affiliated to American periodicals, universities and think tanks.

Biden seems weirdly oblivious to these fresh complexities as he echoes a Cold War rhetoric from the 1970s and 80s. The White House correspondent of the New York Times notedin him a stubborn optimism that critics say borders on worrisome naivete.

Such optimism is surely laudable, as is Bidens determination to keep human rights on the table. But he needs to combine it with principled realism, breaking free of obsolete geopolitical certainties just as boldly as he has overturned decades of economic dogma.

This means putting fundamental rights on the table everywhere, at home as well as abroad, with new friends such as India no less than old adversaries such as Russia and China.

Certainly, an old posture of American moral superiority will convince very few people. To some, it will indeed make the new administration seem worryingly naive to others, depressingly cynical.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net

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