The first public comment at February’s City Council meeting wasn’t about vaccine access, or the Office of Inspector General report on the Chicago Police Department’s brutality during last summer’s protests, or even the mayor’s decision to ease business capacity and social distancing restrictions while the pandemic raged.
Over 100,000 Indian Americans live in Chicago and Hadden’s 49th Ward is one of the most diverse in the country. The ward overlaps with the Devon Avenue area, where a large proportion of the city’s South Asian Americans live and work. “What we called for is that we should not have religious oppression in democracies—it’s something here in our country that we work on and have to hold ourselves to higher standards on, and we want that accountability in other places as well,” Hadden told me.
“It is abnormal for this type of back-and-forth negotiating compromise on resolutions and it’s especially unusual for foreign governments to have such a say in a legislative process for the city of Chicago,” said Hadden. Coalition members agreed, telling the mayor’s office that while they were happy to discuss the text with other Chicago residents and City Council members, they did not want to negotiate with a foreign government or nonresidents.
He continued. “I find it surprising that an emissary or foreign government would directly lobby elected officials in a different country. It is one thing to give your stated opinion or the Indian government’s official opinion. It’s another thing to directly lobby legislators—I find that to be a troubling precedent. I would encourage them to check the city’s ethics ordinance.”
According to City Council members, even having someone at a committee hearing to speak against a resolution is extremely rare. But in the weeks prior to the meeting, retired Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th Ward, Hadden’s predecessor, had written an e-mail to the mayor’s office as a privately funded lobbyist for the US India Friendship Council objecting to the resolution. In a post on Facebook, Moore claimed that Hadden’s advocacy for the resolution was a sign that Moore was, “living rent free in [Hadden’s] head.”
In the e-mail to the mayor’s office, Moore claimed that two paragraphs of the resolution were “offensive,” specifically paragraphs eight and nine, which discuss the importance of ensuring that international human rights law is upheld, condemning religiously motivated violence, and disavowing violence against protesters and journalists.
