Govt of India shouldn't use FCRA to target missionaries, human rights groups: USCIRF

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Counterview Desk
The just-released United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF’s) “2019 Annual Report” has said that India is one of the dozen-odd countries where USCIRF has found “deteriorating religious freedom conditions” as also “increased securitization and politicization of religion.” In India, it adds, “It is increasingly difficult to separate religion and politics, a tactic that is sometimes intentional by those who seek to discriminate against and restrict the rights of certain religious communities.”
Pushed into Tier 2 as a result of this "deterioration", India is now in the company of Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, and Turkey”, the report says.
The report, significantly, recalls that the Individual Violators Section 212(a)(2)(G) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which “makes inadmissible to the United States foreign officials who are responsible for or directly carried out particularly severe religious freedom violations”, was applied on Narendra Modi before he became Prime Minister.
It says, “To date, the provision’s only publicly known use was in 2005, when then Chief Minister Narendra Modi of Gujarat State in India was excluded due to his complicity in 2002 riots in his state that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,100 to 2,000 Muslims.”

Key findings

In 2018, religious freedom conditions in India continued a downward trend. India has a long history as a secular democracy where religious communities of every faith have thrived. The constitution guarantees the right to religious freedom, and the nation’s independent judiciary has often provided essential protections to religious minority communities through its jurisprudence.
Yet, this history of religious freedom has come under attack in recent years with the growth of exclusionary extremist narratives—including, at times, the government’s allowance and encouragement of mob violence against religious minorities—that have facilitated an egregious and ongoing campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities. Both public and private actors have engaged in this campaign.
In 2018, approximately one-third of state governments increasingly enforced anti-conversion and/or anti-cow slaughter laws discriminatorily against non-Hindus and Dalits alike. Further, cow protection mobs engaged in violence predominantly targeting Muslims and Dalits, some of whom have been legally involved in the dairy, leather, or beef trades for generations.
Mob violence was also carried out against Christians under accusations of forced or induced religious conversion. In cases involving mobs killing an individual based on false accusations of cow slaughter or forced conversion, police investigations and prosecutions often were not adequately pursued. Rules on the registration of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were discriminatorily implemented against religious minority groups.
Religious freedom conditions varied dramatically from state to state, with some states continuing to be relatively open and free for religious minorities, while others—if taken on their own—had “systematic, ongoing, egregious” violations of religious freedom. In 2018, the Supreme Court of India highlighted the deteriorating conditions for religious freedom in some states, concluding that certain state governments were not doing enough to stop violence against religious minorities and, in some extreme instances, impunity was being granted to criminals engaged in communal violence.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi seldom made statements decrying mob violence, and certain members of his political party have affiliations with Hindu extremist groups and used inflammatory language about religious minorities publicly. Victims of largescale attacks in recent years have not been granted justice, and reports of new crimes committed against religious minorities were not adequately accounted for or prosecuted.
India’s substantial population both complicates and limits the ability of national and state institutions to address these issues. Based on these concerns, in 2019 USCIRF again places India on its Tier 2 for engaging in or tolerating religious freedom violations that meet at least one of the elements of the “systematic, ongoing, egregious” standard for designation as a “country of particular concern,” or CPC, under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).
While the Indian government repeatedly has denied USCIRF access to India, the Commission welcomes the opportunity to openly and candidly engage with the government—including the chance for a USCIRF delegation to visit India—to discuss shared values and interests, including international standards of freedom of religion or belief and related human rights.

Recommendations to the U.S. government

>> Press the Indian government to allow a USCIRF delegation to visit the country and meet with stakeholders to evaluate conditions for freedom of religion or belief in India;

>> Work with the Indian government to create a multiyear strategy to ebb the flow of hate crimes targeting religious minorities, including by:

• Pressing state governments to prosecute religious leaders, government officials, and media personalities who incite violence against religious minority groups through public speeches or articles, as was recommended by the National Minorities Ministry in July 2014;
• Strengthening the training and capacity of state and central police to prevent and punish cases of religious violence, while also protecting victims, witnesses, and houses of worship and other holy sites; 
• Encouraging passage of the Protection of Human Rights (Amendment) Bill, 2018 to establish national and state human rights commissions and human rights courts; and 
• Assisting the Ministry of Law and Justice to work with state prosecutors to increase the rate of prosecutions for hate crimes and online hate speech targeting religious minorities; 

>> Increase the U.S. Embassy’s focus on religious freedom and related human rights through continued visits to regions impacted by religiously motivated violence and dialogue with religious communities, local governmental leaders, and police; and
>> Advocate for the Indian central government to ensure that the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act is not used discriminatorily to target international missionary and human rights groups, and to press states with anti-conversion and anti-cow slaughter laws to do the same.
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Click HERE India section of the report, and HERE for the full report