The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has done it again—put India, the world’s largest democracy, on the list of countries that are actually committing genocide of their minority population. USCIRF’s annual report on religious freedom around the world, recommends to the US government designating India as a country of particular concern “for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom”. It also recommends that the US should “impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ or entities’ assets and/or barring their entry into the United States”; and raise the subject of “human rights of all religious communities” in India through forums such as the Quad. The report also advises the US Congress to “raise religious freedom issues in the U.S.-India bilateral relationship and highlight concerns through hearings, briefings, letters, and congressional delegations”. The commission recommends that countries such as Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, Syria and Vietnam should be designated as “Country of Particular Concern” and be in the company of other CPCs such as Pakistan, Burma, China and North Korea, among others—Pakistan, the disappearance of whose minority population has acquired genocidal proportions; China, which runs Nazi-like concentration camps for its minority Uyghur Muslims; Burma, which has been in the news for its military coup and for massacring its civilians for daring to demand the restoration of democracy; and of course the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, which would be the world’s worst place to live in currently, even for the majority Pashtuns.
Interestingly, without a hint of irony, the report also refers to certain minority groups fleeing nations such as Afghanistan and Burma—Sikh and Chin—and seeking refuge in…you guessed it right…India. “An estimated 30,000 predominantly Christian Chin fled into neighboring India in December 2021” says the USCIRF report on page 15. And almost in the same breath it flags almost everything that India does, as a problem, including its anti-conversion laws and its Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, most of which predate the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party government and therefore cannot be laid as a “crime” at the door of the “Hindu nationalists” who are “oppressing the minorities”.
The report indulges in deliberate obfuscation by not disclosing that anti-conversion laws are rarely used to prosecute or convict anyone; or that if “at the close of 2021, the licenses of nearly 6,000 organizations, including religious and humanitarian organizations such as Missionaries of Charity and Oxfam India, were not renewed under the FCRA”, several Hindu organisations too lost their licences, plus institutes and organisations of various hues, a majority of them non-religious. To haul up India—nay, threaten to get it listed as a CPC like Afghanistan, Pakistan and China—for seeking accountability from organisations receiving money from abroad, amounts to raising a bogey of oppression where none exists. Stray incidents of violence in a country of 1.4 billion people have been picked up to be highlighted as the “norm” to paint a rather gloomy picture of the situation in India. If any such report on India does not take into account this country’s rather complex social or inter-community history or the fact that in a neighbourhood dominated by majoritarianism, India is the only beacon of sanity, then such a report reeks of bias. If India was such a horrible place for minorities, how is it that their numbers are burgeoning in this country, with the largest minority group, the Muslims numbering over 200 million?
But then why care for facts when the purpose is to spin a fiction to bring pressure on India? The intention is also to get India “blacklisted” so that its ratings are hurt, with international agencies designating India as “unstable” and thus making investors wary of this country as an investment destination.
Someone somewhere seems definitely worried about India’s rise on the global stage.
Several reports in recent days have shown how USCIRF has been influenced by Pakistani lobbying, and also probably Chinese, and how some of their office bearers have connections with dubious anti-India elements and groups that do not want India-US relations to thrive. No wonder, USCIRF’s reports on India have started reading like handouts given by Pakistani ISI’s publicity division. However, by allowing its agenda to be dictated by such influence groups, the USCIRF is proving itself to be a non-serious observer of religious rights in the world, which is a shame.
Given that the USCIRF is a US federal government commission, it is hoped that the Joe Biden administration will rein it in. As else, the USCIRF, by weaponizing “religious rights”, may end up affecting India-US relations adversely.
