 "Exposing American hypocrisy: Time for India to rank the West on religious freedom and minority rights")
The West uses global indices as a geopolitical tool to coerce “difficult” countries into succumbing to its worldview and position on pressing global issues. Often, countries of the Global South are expected to succumb to the Western whip (pun intended) and submissively adhere to the rulebook of the global hegemonic powers, even if that comes at the cost of their national interest.
The West routinely uses research as a tool to control and intimidate countries like India. That its tactics don’t seem as effective any longer, at least when it comes to India, is another matter altogether. India ranked 104th in the recent V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index, released in the earlier part of 2024. The index, which reviewed 179 countries, called India an autocracy claiming that the country’s democracy has been fast deteriorating since 2014, when the Modi government first came to power.
In the V-Dem report, India has been classified as an electoral autocracy along with countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Russia, and Turkiye. It’s incredible that the so-called index talks in the same breadth about the world’s largest democracy and countries that don’t have any democratic system whatsoever. In the World Press Freedom Index 2023, India was ranked 161 out of 180 countries. Interestingly, Pakistan at 150 ranked more than 10 places above India in the index. Sri Lanka at the 135th spot also ranked way above India.
In the Global Hunger Index 2023, India ranked 111 out of 125 countries, lower than neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. There is a slew of such motivated indexes — the World Happiness Index, the Global Poverty Index, the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, etc. What has changed though is the Indian government’s attitude towards these indices. India has started categorically rejecting these indices and calling them biased. That is indeed a welcome change.
In its latest anti-India offensive, the US State Department has accused India of covertly facilitating violent attacks against minorities and their targeting through “draconian” measures like anti-conversion laws. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, while unveiling the annual report, said that in India, “Christian communities reported that local police aided mobs that disrupted worship services over accusations of conversion activities, or stood by while mobs attacked them and then arrested the victims on conversion charges.”
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More Shorts“In India, we see a concerning increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, demolition of homes and places of worship for members of minority faith communities,” Blinken further said.
The contents of the 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: India recently released by the US State Department constitute a blatant violation of India’s sovereignty, democracy, and laws passed by the democratically elected Indian Parliament and state legislatures through standards protocol and mechanisms. A cursory read of the report is enough to ascertain that it’s no less than a rather grave manoeuvre to undermine the credibility of Indian democracy and India’s ability to enact laws governing its own citizens.
The ridiculously biased report solely focuses on Christian and Muslim minorities in India and conveniently overlooks the incidents of atrocities committed against the country’s Hindu population. It conveniently overlooks events like Sandeshkhali violence, numerous incidents of Hindus in West Bengal being brutally attacked by the TMC goons, the brutal murder of tailor Kanhaiya Lal in Rajasthan for putting out a social media post in support of BJP leader Nupur Sharma, who received multiple death threats after making a statement on Prophet Muhammad during a TV debate, numerous incidents of vandalism of Hindu temples in West Bengal, multiple incidents of identity fraud where Hindu girls were lured into marriage with Muslim men posing as Hindus and later being forced to convert to Islam, and numerous incidents of fraudulent Christian conversions in India, etc.
The report falsely paints the situation in Manipur as a Kuki Christian and Meitei Hindu binary. It forcefully tries to fit the Kuki-Meitei issue in Manipur into the minority-Christian and majority-Hindu paradigm. Lacking any sort of nuanced and informed understanding of the complex situation in Manipur, the report rather sensationalises the whole issue, insinuating that the Meitei majority Hindus are inflicting violence on Kuki Christians, and the Indian state is not doing enough to protect the Christians of Manipur.
“In June, the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum said that at least 253 churches were burned down during the violence in Manipur. According to international and domestic media reports, the violence resulted in the killing of more than 200 persons and the displacement of over 60,000. Although the violence resulted in the destruction of religious places belonging to both communities, media reports stated that more churches than Hindu temples were destroyed,” said the report. It further continued to peddle the ‘majority Hindus harassing minority Christians narrative’. “Some members of the Kuki community reported that police abetted the Meitei groups who engaged in violence. There were also reports of Meitei Hindus pressuring Meitei Christians to convert and attacking churches belonging to Meitei Christians,” it said.
The International Religious Freedom report specifically targets a wide array of Indian legislations – the anti-conversion laws passed in various Indian states, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) which has been implemented by the Uttarakhand government, and certain provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replacing the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that came into force July 1, 2024. According to the provisions of the new law, individuals who engage in sexual relations through deceitful means such as misrepresentation of their identity, or false promises of employment or marriage, with no intention to fulfil them, could face imprisonment of up to 10 years, accompanied by fines.
This new provision is expected to tackle widespread instances of young Indian women being fraudulently duped into marriage and thus preventing any crimes that may result thereafter. There have been numerous Indian media reports of “love jihad”, the fraudulent practice of Muslim men targeting Hindu women for conversion. The usual modus operandi involves these men enacting a false identity, often misrepresenting themselves as Hindu, and eventually forcing the woman to change her religion once they get married.
Despite the widespread prevalence of love jihad in India as widely reported by Indian media, the Western media dismisses it as a “conspiracy against minorities”. If it’s indeed a conspiracy, then why is the US State Department’s report on Religious Freedom in India so worked up about the country’s new set of criminal laws? “Although the new penal code did not mention religion, some critics and proponents of the law said provisions on deceit by ‘suppressing identity’ aimed to criminalise ‘love jihad’, a derogatory term referring Muslim men seeking to marry women from other faiths to convert them to Islam,” said the report.
In its quest to perpetuate an anti-India narrative, the authors of the US State Department report stooped down to the level of glorifying practices like polygamy, insinuating that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s decision to introduce a bill to ban polygamy is an attack on the rights of Muslim minorities in India since the “1937 Muslim Personal Laws (Shariat) Act permits polygamy”.
The Report also puts to scrutiny judgements delivered by Indian courts including the Allahabad High Court ruling to conduct a survey of the 17th-century Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi and its ruling to permit the examination of the 17th-century Shahi Eidgah Mosque in Mathura. Taking forward the vicious narrative that such decisions amount to an infringement on the religious identity of minorities, the report has stayed silent on the other side of the issue — the presence of incriminating evidence on these sites that makes archaeological surveys to determine if these mosques were built on the remains of Hindu temples destroyed by Islamic invaders.
But such nuances don’t fit into the anti-India agenda of the US State Department; thus, they deliberately take a simplistic and one-sided view of these issues. What they also fail to recognise or perhaps conveniently overlook is that nationwide efforts to reclaim India’s civilisational heritage, destroyed by Islamic invaders and European colonisers, is a matter of cultural solidarity and pan-India national identity, it doesn’t in any way infringe on the rights of Indian citizens practicing Christianity or Islam.
To conflate the identity of present-day Muslims and Christians with the oppressive legacy of Islamic invaders or British colonisers is akin to all white people viewing colonialism as an “empowering legacy”. The very idea sounds laughable, but this is exactly what’s happening in the context of India. Western media and the think tank ecosystem perpetuate the narrative of “minorities being in danger” by portraying Bharat’s resistance to the ecosystem of fundamentalist Islam or the aggressive missionary ecosystem of Christianity as an “infringement on the rights of minorities”.
Thus, attempts by local Hindu groups and organisations to resist and challenge the large-scale proselytisation and the conversion of local Hindu population are portrayed by the Western media as an “attack on minorities”. Reports like the one released by the US State Department quote from such biased and one-sided reports, creating the impression that Hindus in Bharat are attacking minorities like Christians and Muslims. By cleverly omitting the background and the context, such reports create a false perpetrator-victim narrative in the context of Hindus and minorities of Bharat.
The Report on religious freedom continuously attacks anti-conversion laws passed in various Bharatiya states, arguing that the government doesn’t have a right to put restrictions on one’s right to proselytise. But the Indian Constitution guarantees one the freedom to practice one’s own religion. Taking it as a right to aggressively proselytise and convert would be taking it too far. The Constitution doesn’t give the right to endlessly proselytise and convert. That would amount to an infringement of the rights of those being sought for conversion; it would be a violation of their right to practice their own religion in peace.
Most importantly, the Report accuses the Indian government of deliberate “inaction in investigating and prosecuting crimes against members of religious minority groups”. That’s quite a serious charge and the report levies these charges casually, without concrete evidence whatsoever. It selectively cites certain incidents, Indian court judgements, media reports, and opinions of mostly unnamed sources to somehow construct a trail, arguing that the Indian state has a deliberate bias when it comes to the investigation of crimes against members of religious minority groups.
The report conveniently omits the background and the context of incidents quoted; it doesn’t seem like a research paper compiled under the aegis of the US State Department but rather a college essay or dissertation where the writer, in their over-enthusiasm to prove a set of points, no matter what, conveniently distort facts and sensationalise incidents and perspectives.
The Indian government has categorically rejected the US State Department’s annual Report on International Religious Freedom. The Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, called the report deeply biased that lacked an understanding of India’s social fabric and driven by vote bank considerations. Perhaps it’s high time the Indian government should consider commissioning its own indigenous “Religious Freedom Report” in collaboration with Indian think tanks. With India’s increasing geopolitical clout, the next step should be to set our own global standards and benchmarks in evaluating phenomena like religious freedom, terrorism, social justice, etc.
The US report “tracks” religious freedom in almost 200 countries. All country-wise reports can be accessed through their page. Yet, the report conveniently omits the issue of Hinduphobia in Western countries. The International Religious Freedom Report: UK, for example, condemns Islamophobia and antisemitism but it doesn’t mention a word on Hinduphobia or anti-Hindu hate crimes. Rising temple attacks in the West, the series of incidents in Leicester violence targeting Hindus, rise in anti-Hindu hate crimes in the West - the report dodges all these issues.
Perhaps, an independent report commissioned by the Indian government should take up these issues. In the US, caste is increasingly being used as a ploy to soft-sell Hinduphobia. While there are no new laws in place to prohibit vandalism of Hindu places of worship, to keep a check on rising anti-Hindu hate crimes in the US, bills are being introduced in the US and Canada to ostensibly prevent caste discrimination. Hindu advocacy groups in the West are putting up a united front against such bills, saying such measures would amount to the increased caste profiling and demonisation of Hindus.
With the US lecturing the whole world on religious freedom, perhaps it’s the right time the country looks in its own backyard and evaluates its “not so generous” treatment of minorities, including Hindus.
Rati Agnihotri is an independent journalist and writer currently based in Dehradun (Uttarakhand). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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