Hypocrisy is not a new terrain for the US. It routinely plays self-anointed “democracy police”, lecturing other countries on democracy and freedom of expression, while overlooking issues in its own backyard. In the case of Bharat, the lecturing inevitably involves the issue of religious freedom, something that the US has repeatedly used as a geopolitical whip to “keep India in its rightful place”, as it were.
Thus, the US State Department’s latest Report on International Religious Freedom accused Bharat of targeting religious minorities through the anti-conversion laws passed by Bharatiya states and covertly facilitating attacks against minorities like Christians and Muslims by supposedly not acting promptly enough on their complaints in case of communal violence. The report thus blatantly accused the Bharatiya state of influencing the investigation of communal crimes in a direction that favored the majority Hindu population and discriminated against the “minorities”.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while unveiling the annual report, said that in Bharat, “Christian communities reported that local police aided mobs that disrupted worship services over accusations of conversion activities, or stood by while mobs attacked them and then arrested the victims on conversion charges”.
“In India, we see a concerning increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, demolition of homes and places of worship for members of minority faith communities”, Blinken said further.
The contents of the 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: India recently released by the US State Department gravely undermine Bharat’s democracy and sovereignty. Not just that, the report passes wild judgments on laws passed by the democratically elected Bharatiya Parliament and state legislatures through standards protocol and mechanisms.
Firstly, the report focuses solely on Muslim and Christian minorities in Bharat while it stays silent on incidents involving anti-Hindu hate and violence in Bharat. In communal incidents where both Hindus and Muslims or Hindus and Christians suffered violence, the report blatantly sides with the “minorities”, selectively quoting from biased media sources, and thus conclusively, holding Hindus responsible for the violence, without any evidence whatsoever.
Moreover, its abject silence on incidents where Hindus have been the sole victims of communal violence is shocking. It glosses over incidents like the horrific Sandeshkhali violence, numerous incidents of Hindus in West Bengal being brutally attacked by TMC goons, the brutal murder of tailor Kanhaiya Lal in Rajasthan for putting out a social media post in support of BJP leader Nupur Sharma who received multiple death threats after making a statement on Prophet Muhammad during a TV debate, multiple incidents of vandalism of Hindu temples in West Bengal, and multiple incidents of identity fraud where Hindu girls were lured into marriage for Muslim men posing as Hindus and later being forced to convert to Islam, and numerous incidents of fraudulent Christian conversions in India, etc.
Also, in the context of Manipur violence, the report is full of inflammatory material that has the potential to stoke further conflict in the state. It force-fits the Meitei-Kuki issue in Manipur into the minority-Hindu and minority-Christian paradigm.
It quotes selectively from biased left-liberal media sources to sensationalize the issue and perpetuate the narrative that the Meitei Hindu community is inflicting violence on the minority Kuki Christians and that the Bharatiya state is siding with the Meitei Hindus, and not doing enough to protect the Kuki Christians. Nothing, of course, can be farther from the truth.
Most importantly, the report targets a broad spectrum of Bharatiya legislations – the anti-conversion laws passed in various Indian states, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) which has been implemented by the Uttarakhand government, and certain provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replacing the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that came into force July 1, 2024.
The International Religious Freedom Report majorly targets the anti-conversion laws passed by various Bharatiya states, arguing that the government doesn’t have a right to put restrictions on one’s right to proselytize. But the Bharatiya Constitution guarantees one the freedom to practice one’s own religion, taking it as a right to aggressively proselytize and convert would be taking it too far. The Allahabad High Court, while hearing a case of unlawful religious conversion, also observed recently that Article 25 of the Constitution provides Individuals the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate their religion, but it doesn’t give them the freedom to convert people from one religion to the other. That would, on the contrary, infringe on the right of those converted to practice their own religion without force or coercion.
The report also attacked the provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita involving
individuals who engage in sexual relations through deceitful means such as misrepresentation of their identity, or false promises of employment or marriage, with no intention to fulfill them. According to the new provisions, such misrepresentation could lead to imprisonment of up to 10 years, accompanied by fines.
This new provision is expected to tackle the widespread instances of love jihad, the phenomenon of Hindu women being targeted for conversion by Muslim men who hide their identity while “befriending” them, often posing as Hindu men, and forcing them to convert them once the couple gets married.
Despite the widespread prevalence of love jihad in Bharat as widely reported by Indian media, the Western media dismisses love jihad as a “conspiracy against minorities”. If it’s indeed a conspiracy, then why is the US State Department’s report on Religious Freedom in India so worked up about the country’s new set of criminal laws? “Although the new penal code did not mention religion, some critics and proponents of the law said provisions on deceit by “suppressing identity” aimed to criminalize “love jihad”, a derogatory term referring Muslim men seeking to marry women from other faiths to convert them to Islam”, says the report.
The US State Department International Religious Freedom Report also questions numerous judgments delivered by Bharatiya courts including the Allahabad High Court ruling to conduct a survey of the 17th-century Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi and its ruling to permit the examination of the 17th-century Shahi Eidgah Mosque in Mathura. While analyzing these judgments, the authors of the report offer a highly biased and one-sided perspective, ignoring the presence of a plethora of scientific evidence of these sites regarding the pre-Islamic religious character of these places, which makes it necessary to undertake further archaeological surveys.
This is perhaps one of the most important visionary pitfalls of those who simplistically criticize Bharat’s quest to reclaim its civilizational heritage. The identity of present-day Christians and Muslims in Bharat should be a part of a pan-Bharatiya cultural identity, and not an extension of European colonizers or Islamic invaders. The Western ecosystem either fails to understand this nuance or perhaps they deliberately pretend to not understand.
The Bharatiya government has rejected the US State Department’s annual Report on International Religious Freedom. The Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal called the report deeply biased which lacked an understanding of India’s social fabric and was driven by vote bank considerations.
One of the most shocking emissions of the US State Department International Religious Freedom Report is the issue of Hinduphobia in Western countries. The report not only conveniently omits incidents of violence and hatred against Hindus in Bharat where they are a majority, but also skips even a cursory mention of Hinduphobia in Western countries where Hindus constitute a minuscule minority.
Unless one has been living under a rock, the alarming rise in incidents of vandalism of Hindu places of worship and the rise in anti-Hindu hate crimes in the West cannot go unnoticed. In Canada, Khalistani extremists routinely post videos on X, threatening Hindus to leave Canada, otherwise suffer the “consequences”. In the UK, incidents such as the Leicester violence have come to the fore where Hindus have become victims of mob violence inflicted by local Islamists; regarding which there has been numerous evidence that has been conveniently ignored by mainstream Western media. Despite all this, it’s shocking that the US International Religious Freedom Report that tracks religious freedom in almost 200 countries, doesn’t even mention the word “Hinduphobia” in its reports evaluating religious freedom in Canada and UK.
In the International Religious Freedom Report UK, incidents of Islamophobia and antisemitism have been discussed in detail but not a single incident of anti-Hindu hatred and violence has been mentioned. When so many Hindu advocacy groups exist in the UK highlighting these incidents and numerous temple attacks have taken place in the country that have even been highlighted by the mainstream media, how is it even possible that the US State Department doesn’t find it worthwhile to mention even a couple of sentences on Hinduphobia in the UK?
The omission gets even more shocking in the case of Canada where Hindus are routinely subjected to racial slurs and hate speech by Khalistani extremists. Khalistani extremists in Canada have concocted a vicious cocktail of anti-Bharat and anti-Hindu hatred and are vehemently targeting Hindus in Canada. Yet, while the US International Religious Freedom Report again discusses numerous incidents of Islamophobia and antisemitism in Canada, it doesn’t even mention the word “Hinduphobia”.
Also, Hindus in the West are increasingly being harassed and targeted in the name of “caste”. Laws exclusively banning caste discrimination are being passed in their countries, and such motions and Bills are being introduced when they already have ample constitutional provisions banning all sorts of discrimination including that based on ancestry. Why this singling out of Hindus who are a minority in the West and why does the US State Department Report fail to mention all of this?
Perhaps, it’s high time that Hindu organizations worldwide get together to commission their own research on the religious freedom of Hindus across the world.
