US expresses concern about violence and discrimination against religious minorities in India

The United States is “very concerned” over violence and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities in India, a senior official of the President Donald Trump’s administration in Washington D.C. said.

“We do remain very concerned about what is taking place in India. It has historically just been a very tolerant, respectful country of religions, of all religions,” Samuel Brownback, US Ambassador-At-Large for International Religious Freedom, said. His comment came after the US State Department published a report, which took note of the moves by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in New Delhi to strip Jammu and Kashmir off its special status and reorganize the state into two Union Territories, as well as enforcement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act last year.

New Delhi, however, has dismissed the report by the US State Department as an “internal document”, saying no foreign entity has any locus standi to pronounce on the state of the constitutionally protected rights of the citizens of India.

Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, published the annual report on international religious freedom in Washington D.C. late Wednesday. The report noted that the Government of India sometimes had sometimes failed to act to prevent or stop mob attacks on religious minorities, marginalized communities. It also took note of the attacks on the critics of the Government.

“Some officials of Hindu-majority parties, including from the Bharatiya Janata Party, made inflammatory public remarks or social media posts against minority communities,” the report compiled by the US State Department noted, adding: “Mob attacks by violent Hindu groups against minority communities, including Muslims, continued throughout the year (2019) amid rumors that victims had traded or killed cows for beef. Authorities often failed to prosecute perpetrators of such ‘cow vigilantism’, which included killings, mob violence, and intimidation.”

It noted that the Modi Government had sent thousands of additional security forces to Jammu and Kashmir after its August 5, 2019 move, shut down many internet and phone lines and had not restored full service by the end of the year. The government also closed most mosques in the area until the middle of December 2019, it added.

The report noted that the CAA accelerated “citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who entered the country on or before December 31, 2014, but not for similarly-situated migrants who are Muslims, Jews, atheists, or members of other faiths.” It also noted incidents cow-vigilante

“We’re seeing a lot more difficulty. I think really they need to have a - I would hope they would have an - interfaith dialogue starting to get developed at a very high level in India, and then also deal with the specific issues that we identified as well,” said Brownback, expressing concern over growing communal violence in India.

New Delhi rejected the US State Department’s report, stating that its vibrant democratic traditions and practices were evident to the world. “The people and Government of India are proud of our country’s democratic traditions. We have a robust public discourse in India and constitutionally mandated institutions that guarantee protection of religious freedom and rule of law,” Anurag Srivastava, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, said.

The report came a few weeks after a US federal commission had recommended the Trump Administration to designate India as a “Country of Particular Concern” in view of its “sharp downward turn” in religious freedom. The US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) had also recommended “targeted sanctions” on “agencies and officials” of the Government of India responsible for severe violations of religious freedom, by freezing their assets and barring their entry into America.

New Delhi had dismissed the USCIRF’s report calling it biased and prejudiced. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recently wrote in a letter to BJP MP Nishikant Dubey that the government had denied visas to a USCIRF team, which had expressed desire to visit India.