WASHINGTON: Minorities in India face deteriorating treatment, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said, and it recommended targeted sanctions against India’s external spy agency, RAW, over alleged involvement in assassination plots against Sikh activists.
Analysts say Washington has long seen New Delhi as a counter to China’s rising influence in Asia and elsewhere, and, hence, overlooked human rights issues in India.
Since 2023, India’s alleged targeting of Sikh leaders and activists in the U.S. and Canada has emerged as a wrinkle in U.S.-India ties, with Washington charging an ex-Indian intelligence officer, Vikash Yadav, in a foiled U.S. plot. “In 2024, religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate as attacks and discrimination against religious minorities continued to rise,” the U.S. commission said in its recent report.
It said Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “propagated hateful rhetoric and disinformation against Muslims and other religious minorities” during last year’s election campaign.
Modi in April last year referred to Muslims as “infiltrators” who have “more children.” U.S. State Department reports on human rights and religious freedom have noted minority abuses in recent years. The panel recommended the U.S. government “designate India as a ‘country of particular concern'” for religious freedom violations and “impose targeted sanctions” against Yadav and RAW.
Rights advocates, in noting the plight of Indian minorities, point to rising hate speech, a citizenship law the U.N. called “fundamentally discriminatory,” anti-conversion legislation, that critics say challenges freedom of belief, the revoking of Muslim majority Kashmir’s special status and the demolition of properties owned by Muslims.
The commission is a bipartisan U.S. government advisory body that monitors religious freedom abroad and makes policy recommendations.
