US religious freedom report inflicts 'reputational damage' on India – experts

NEW DELHI: India has suffered a “huge reputational damage” with the release of a report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIFR) calling for the South Asian state to be placed on a religious freedom blacklist, political analysts told Arab News on Wednesday.
“Such reports have value, but whether this one will influence government policy, I doubt it. India has suffered a huge reputational damage on this issue,” Manoj Joshi of a New Delhi-based think-tank, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), said.
The USCIFR report, which New Delhi rejected on Tuesday as being “biased and tendentious,” says that following the massive victory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2019, “the national government used its strengthened parliamentary majority to institute national level policies violating religious freedom across India, especially for Muslims.”
“We reject the observations on India in the USCIRF Annual Report. Its biased and tendentious comments against India are not new,” India’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that New Delhi “will treat it accordingly.”
The USCIRF, a bipartisan panel on religious freedom, in its annual report on Tuesday named India “a country of particular concern.”
The report singled out the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in December last year, which aims at providing citizenship to minorities from neighboring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but excludes Muslims.
The CAA is part of the proposed plan to introduce a National Register of Citizens (NRC) that aim to identify “genuine citizens of India.”
Muslims fear that if their names do not feature in the NRC, they will be rendered stateless, though the matter does not concern the majority Hindu population of the country.
“[The CAA] potentially exposes millions of Muslims to detention, deportation, and statelessness when the government completes its planned nationwide National Register of Citizens,” Nadine Maenza, the vice chair at the US government’s religious freedom panel, tweeted on Tuesday.
The panel even recommended “targeted sanctions on Indian government agencies and officials responsible for severe violations of religious rights.”
“The US report is timely and exposes the ugly facet of modern-day India. I would have liked the USCIRF to mention the role of the Indian media in perpetuating the emotional and physical violence in India, too,” Zikra Mojibi, a Delhi-based student activist who was part of the nationwide anti-CAA protests earlier this year, told Arab News on Wednesday.
“It’s true that today Muslims in India live in fear of being declared stateless and relegated to being second-class citizens. Muslims have never lived in this kind of fear before,” Mojibi added.
She added that the report had come at a time when the government was “using the lockdown period in pursuing its divisive political agenda by detaining hundreds of young Muslim students who participated in the protest against the citizenship law.”
Zafar ul Islam Khan, chairman of the Delhi Minority Commission, argued that the US report reflected that the country was “not going in the right direction.”
“The majoritarian agenda of the Modi regime is damaging the image and reputation of the country in the world,” he continued.
“Now the whole world is commenting on India’s divisive politics. It’s high time the BJP government did some course correction,” Khan told Arab News.
Asked if the report could damage the relationship between the two countries, Pranay Kotasthane of Bengaluru-based think-tank, Takshashila Institution, said the possibility could not be ruled out.
“To the extent that the report leads to new rounds of allegations and counter allegations, it can impact the relationship. It can potentially derail a few initiatives in the short run. But the long-term relationship will be determined by a convergence of national interests of the United States and India,” he said.
For now, India’s principal challenge, Kotasthane maintained, was “to overcome the twin crises of public health and economic downturn.”
“All other issues are distractions at this point. Under these trying circumstances, India should stop all such projects such as the CAA and NRC that have the slightest potential of breaking social harmony, regardless of what the USCIRF says,” he added.