Dr Bilawal Kamran
The latest annual report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom marks a significant and qualitative shift in how international bodies are beginning to assess the condition of religious minorities in India. Previous reports had registered concern. This one demands consequences. The distinction is not merely procedural. It signals a growing recognition that expressions of worry, unaccompanied by any mechanism of accountability, have done nothing to arrest the deterioration of conditions on the ground. The Commission has now called for India to be formally designated a country of particular concern, and has gone further by recommending targeted sanctions against specific actors, including the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent organisation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The proposed measures include asset freezes, travel bans, and a direct linkage between trade policy and demonstrable improvements in religious freedom.
That last recommendation is particularly significant. It transforms religious freedom from a diplomatic talking point into a concrete variable in economic relations. Whether Washington acts on it is another matter entirely. But the recommendation itself establishes a standard that India’s government can no longer deflect through the language of sovereignty alone.
At the heart of the report lies a systematic indictment of Indian state policy. The Commission identifies several legal instruments as tools of deliberate exclusion rather than legitimate governance. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act has been applied repeatedly to silence critics, journalists, and activists who have raised their voice against the ruling dispensation. The Citizenship Amendment Act introduced religion as an explicit criterion for citizenship, a departure from the secular premise that defined India’s constitutional identity at its founding. The National Register of Citizens, implemented in Assam and proposed nationally, threatens to render millions stateless, with Muslim communities bearing a disproportionate burden of its consequences. Together, these laws do not operate in isolation. They form a coherent architecture of exclusion, one that embeds religious identity into the logic of state power.
Legal scholars and constitutional experts within India itself have made this argument repeatedly. Retired judges, former civil servants, and senior lawyers have documented the erosion of the secular compact with considerable precision and considerable courage. Their arguments have not lacked merit. They have lacked political weight, overwhelmed by the electoral dominance of Hindutva ideology and a media landscape increasingly aligned with the governing narrative.
The report also examines the social infrastructure sustaining religious polarisation. Organisations operating within the broader Sangh Parivar ecosystem, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, are identified as active propagators of an exclusionary vision of national identity. Campaigns such as Ghar Waapsi, which promote the conversion of religious minorities to Hinduism, and episodes of vigilante violence conducted under the pretext of cow protection, are not treated as isolated incidents of social disorder. They are understood as expressions of a deliberate ideological project, one made possible not merely by the enthusiasm of its practitioners but by the institutional tolerance of the state. Selective enforcement of law, deliberate inaction in the face of communal violence, and in some documented instances open complicity by local authorities, have created an environment in which such violence carries little cost and considerable social endorsement.
The reference to RAW introduces the most grave dimension of the report. The Commission’s connection of India’s external intelligence apparatus to extraterritorial operations targeting dissidents and critics abroad elevates the critique from domestic repression to international conduct. A state that deploys its intelligence resources to pursue individuals on foreign soil is not merely failing its minorities at home. It is extending the architecture of repression across borders. By recommending sanctions against both an ideological organisation and a state institution, the Commission places a clear marker on where it believes accountability must begin.
New Delhi’s response followed a predictable script. Government spokespersons dismissed the findings as motivated and biased, the standard deflection employed whenever international scrutiny becomes inconvenient. What is notable about this rebuttal is what it does not say. It does not contest the existence of the Citizenship Amendment Act or the discriminatory logic embedded in its framework. It does not dispute that anti-terror legislation has been applied to citizens who peacefully protested that law. It does not address the documented pattern of vigilante violence or the conditions that allow it to persist. It simply asserts that the report is without merit, a claim that substitutes assertion for argument and emotion for evidence.
The implications of this report travel beyond its immediate recommendations. It signals that the patience of international human rights bodies with purely rhetorical commitments to pluralism is diminishing. India’s government has long relied on the appeal to democratic credentials, positioning itself as the world’s largest democracy and therefore immune to certain categories of criticism. The Commission’s report implicitly challenges this framing. Democratic procedures, it suggests, are not sufficient to guarantee democratic values. A government can win elections by large margins and still preside over the systematic degradation of minority rights. The ballot box does not automatically produce justice.
Yet the honest assessment must acknowledge what the report itself cannot quite say. The probability of the United States formally designating India as a country of particular concern remains low to the point of being negligible. The strategic and economic relationship between Washington and New Delhi has deepened considerably over the past decade, driven by shared concerns about China’s regional ambitions and India’s value as a counterweight in the Indo-Pacific calculus. Religious freedom, however sincerely prioritised within the Commission’s mandate, sits well below these considerations in the hierarchy of American foreign policy. Geopolitics, trade volumes, and defence partnerships will continue to insulate India from the formal consequences that the report recommends.
That gap between documentation and action is itself a form of indictment, not of India alone, but of a global order that routinely measures human rights by the strategic usefulness of its violators. The USCIRF report is a serious document. What happens next will reveal whether seriousness is enough.
