By Dr. Gyan Pathak
The Report on International Religious Freedom 2022, a Congressional-mandatory annual report by the US State Department has placed India in the group of countries where the governments have been freely targeting religious communities.
The report provides a comprehensive review of state of religious freedom in nearly 200 countries and territories of the world. It is based on the documentation and reports brought out by several other organization from within and outside the country.
Rashad Hussain, Ambassador at Large, Office of International Religious Freedom has mentioned India in the context of the key findings of the report in terms of governments continuing to freely target faith communities.
“In India, legal advocates and faith leaders from across the country’s diverse religious communities condemned a case of extreme hate speech against Muslims in the city of Haridwar, calling for the country to uphold its historical traditions of pluralism and tolerance,” he said.
In its India section of the report, it said that attacks on members of religious minority communities, including killings, assaults, and intimidation, occurred in various states throughout the year 2022. These included incidents of “cow vigilantism” against non-Hindus based on allegations of cow slaughter or trade in beef and incidents in which Muslim men were alleged to have married Hindu women to convert them. There were also attacks on pastors, disruption of Christian and Muslim worship services, and vandalism of churches.
There were numerous reports during the year of violence by law enforcement authorities against members of religious minorities in multiple states, including plainclothes police in Gujarat publicly flogging four Muslim men accused of inuring Hindu worshippers during a festival in October, and the Madhya Pradesh government bulldozing Muslim-owned homes and shops following communal violence in Khargone in April.
All these were happening despite the constitution provides for freedom of conscience and the right of all individuals to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion; mandates a secular state; requires the state to treat all religions impartially; and prohibits discrimination based on religion. It also states citizens must practice their faith in a way that does not adversely affect public order, morality, or health.
The report mentions that 13 out of 28 states have laws restricting religious conversions for all faiths. Some of these states also impose penalties specifically against force religious conversions for the purpose of marriage although historically, some state high courts have dismissed cases brought under these laws.
In June, UN special rapporteurs on adequate housing, minority issues, and freedom of religion and belief wrote the government to express their “serious concerns” about the “punitive” demolitions in Khargone, which they stated were “ordered by local governments arbitrarily to punish Muslim minorities and low-income communities.”
In October, a report drafted by a citizens committee stated there were “multiple instances of apparent police complicity” in violent actions against protestors, who were mostly Muslim, in the Delhi riots in 2020.
In multiple states, police arrested Christians accused of forcing others to convert. Christian groups said police sometimes aided crowds who disrupted worship services who said they were forcibly converting Hindus.
In its report covering events during the year, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) said Christians were “increasingly targeted using these anti-conversion laws,” as “allegations of forced conversion, no matter if false, have led many Christians to be attacked, arrested and detained by police.”
In August, there were reports that police arrested Shiite Muslims in Srinagar, Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, for marching in a procession without a permit to mark the Muslim month of Muharram. The government, citing security reasons, had not allowed such processions for the previous 25 years.
Police also arrested Muslims in Dulhepur village, Uttar Pradesh, for meeting at a house for congregational prayer.
Haryana and Karnataka passed anti-conversion laws and began enforcing them against non-Hindus. Himachal Pradesh also passed an anti-conversion law, which Christians challenged in that state’s high court.
In October, the Supreme Court failed to reach agreement in a review of a Karnataka High Court ruling that upheld a Karnataka government ban on religious garb in educational institutions, including wearing hijabs in an all-girls’ school in that state.
On April 26, 108 former senior government officials wrote Prime Minister Narendra Modi stating that government discrimination against religious minorities, “particularly Muslims, in states like Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand,” was “undermining” the country’s constitution.
In its annual report, the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the government “continued its systematic discrimination and stigmatization of religious and other minorities, particularly Muslims.”
By November 26, the NGO United Christian Forum (UCF) said there had been 511anti-Christian incidents around the country reported to its hotline, compared to505 in all of 2021, and urged the government to take action in response to these incidents. Most of the incidents were reported in four states: Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Tamil Nadu.
On April 6, the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations of North America released its 2022 annual report and documented 761 violent incidents against Christians in the country in2021, including neighbourhood skirmishes, targeted killings, and armed assaults.
In its letter, the group also said, “The violent acts against the Christian community and Muslim community or any other minority group are incomplete violation of the law of the land and the Indian Constitution.”
In August, the spokesperson of the Christian NGO Open Doors UK & Ireland said the situation facing Christians and other religious minorities in the country was “unprecedentedly grave.”
There were also cases of communal violence between religious groups. The National Crimes Record Bureau reported 378 instances of communal violence in2021 (most recent data) compared to 857 in 2020.
Religious leaders, academics, political figures, and activists made inflammatory public remarks about religious minorities. Examples included Yati Narasinghanand Saraswati, described as a Hindu religious extremist, who urged Hindus to “take up arms” against the threat of religious conversion and Muslim rule in the country; BJP state politician Haribhushan Thakur Bachaul, who said that Muslims should be “set ablaze”; P.C. George, a former legislator in Kerala State, who encouraged Hindus and Christians to not eat at restaurants run by Muslims; and former BJP Rajasthan state legislator Gyan Dev Ahuja, who encouraged Hindus to kill Muslims suspected of cow slaughter. Police charged all four for their comments, and their cases were at different levels of investigation and prosecution at year’s end.
The report also mentions RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and his engagement with Muslim communities for peace and communal harmony, but also mentioned that many described it as ‘just optics’ and preparation for the 2024 parliamentary election. (IPA Service)
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