The international norm is to cover human rights violations of all without making any assumptions, but national and international agencies involved in monitoring human rights often fail to track violations against diverse communities across Bharat, simply because they are classified as ‘Hindu’.

In fact, Western human rights reports like USCIRF have consistently covered up extreme abuse of Hindus under the rubric of “religious freedom of minorities.”

To rectify this key omission —that of discrimination against and persecution of Hindus in Bharat – and to provide a corrective to the one-sided reporting by international organizations, IndiaFacts has brought out a report on human rights violations against the majority community of Hindus in Bharat.

The IndiaFacts Hindu Human Rights report 2017 documents both systematic and episodic violations of human rights, including sanctioned discrimination against Hindus by the State. The report focuses largely on incidents from 2015 and 2016 with some other selected incidents added in certain cases for historical context.

The Report was released in a program organized by India Facts and publisher Garuda Prakashan in Delhi recently –

Here are some of the highlights of the Hindu Human Rights Report 2017 ^note  –

• Despite a so-called “Hindu-friendly” central government in Bharat after 2014, abuses against Hindus have only continued to increase. As against 231 incidents of anti-Hindu attacks in 2015, there were 244 incidents in 2016.

• There is a legalized discrimination of Hindu community and their interests by different branches of the government at the states and the centre: Confiscation of temple assets and government control over temple administration, RTE, discriminatory government schemes targeting particular religious communities are some of the examples.

• In 2015, confiscation and looting of Hindu temples was among the largest violations of religious freedom in the world, yet not a single report on religious freedom tracked this violation. Successive Karnataka have repeatedly tried to take over administration of Hindu mutts and temples like Sri Kshethra Dharmasthala temple. Similarly, Successive Rajasthan governments have tried to confiscate and auction farms owned by Hindu temples.

• There is an attempt to skew the level playing field in the private education sector against the Hindu community by the laws like Right to Education (RTE) acts. In the last three years, the government has forced closure of 7659 non-minority (aka Hindu) schools.

• In the last 3 years, budgeted percentage increase for minorities is far higher compared to other groups like Tribals, Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Caste. Benchmark comparison shows that Ministry of Minority Affairs got Rs. 524.94 crores more, Ministry of Social Justice received Rs. 465.34 crores less.

• Hindus have been consistently persecuted by various hostile ideologies like Dravidian extremism, Left-wing extremism, Islamist terrorism, and Christian extremism.

• In Tamil Nadu alone there were 30 incidents of Hindu persecution involving 80 victims during 2015 and 2016. In Kerala, 6 Hindu activists were murdered in 2016 as against 4 murdered in 2015.

• In 2015, Uttar Pradesh state government’s action forced 800 Hindu Dalits to convert to Islam. In June 2016, there was a mass exodus of Hindu families from Kairana, UP.

• In the last 24 years, about 4224 Indians have died due to Christian terrorism. In the last 35 years, about 100,053 Indians died due to terrorism. 99.87% of these terror deaths have happened due to attacks by terrorist groups with non-Hindu affiliation.

• Year 2015 witnessed many religiously motivated attack on Hindu women. About 64 women became victim of murder, rape, abduction and exploitation.

• There were a total of 231 incidents of violation of religious freedom of Hindus in 2015. In 2016, this number increased to 244 incidents. West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka are states of particular concern. In the last 2 years, these states have witnessed a high level of physical attack on Hindus.

• Our recommendations to remedy the persecution of and discrimination against Hindus include: plugging constitutional loopholes, repealing or amending draconian laws like RTEs, freeing Hindu temples, ending majority-minority discrimination in government policies, etc.

Editor’s Note

This is indeed a commendable effort by IndiaFacts to collate the various human rights abuses directed against Hindus in their civilizational homeland of Bharat itself. However, the incidents counted & listed in the report are just the tip of the iceberg – they represent a tiny fraction of the true magnitude of the problem.

As IndiaFacts has acknowledged in the report, the data collected was drawn from its own monthly persecution digest, HinduPost’s Human Rights Watch database and several bloggers & social media activists.

The sheer volume of atrocities committed against Hindus, and the politically correct coyness of mainstream/regional media in reporting such crimes, means that a lot of crimes against Hindus are missed out even by social media activists. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics do not provide data filtered by religion of victims or perpetrators – for eg. we know from NCRB data that there were 65,255 incidents of rioting in 2015, but the stats don’t tell who was involved or what triggered the rioting; even though there is evidence to suggest that most riots occur as attacks on Hindu festival processions.

So while the IndiaFacts Hindu Human Rights Report 2017 is a welcome first step, more vigilance & perseverance is required by Hindus to tell their true story. We need more community involvement to keep the HinduPost Human Rights Watch database up to date; and we also need to increase the pressure on Home Ministry to reveal granular details in annual NCRB reports rather than just high-level statistics.

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