Delhi; 13 June 2020 (UMMN): Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that a visa request was denied to United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) teams, a non-governmental advisory body to the US Congress, after its denouncement of the state of religious freedom in India under BJP government in Delhi.
Jaishankar said this in a letter on June 1 to BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, who had raised the observations made by USCIRF, in Parliament in December 2019.
According to The Indian Express, in April, the USCIRF had recommended to the US administration that India be designated a “country of particular concern”. It was the first time since 2004 — when its recommendation came against the backdrop of the Gujarat riots in 2002. The USCIRF’s annual report had also named Home Minister Amit Shah twice, once recalling that he had referred to migrants as “termites” to be eradicated.
In its report in April, the USCIRF had said religious freedom in India had seen a “drastic turn downward”, with religious minorities under “increasing assault” in 2019, and talked of “rising Islamophobia”. It ranked India along with countries like North Korea, China and Saudi Arabia, among others, as “countries of particular concern”, for “engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act”.
It cited the CAA-NRC issue, the scrapping of special status of Jammu and Kashmir and the Delhi riots in February. The USCIRF said the CAA and NPR moves were first steps towards a national NRC.
Throughout 2019, it said, Indian government actions — whether on the CAA or the enforcement of cow slaughter and anti-conversion laws — created a “culture of impunity for nationwide campaigns of harassment and violence against religious minorities”. It also cited the Supreme Court ruling handing over the disputed Babri Masjid site to the Hindu side in November 2019.
The USCIRF recommended that the Trump administration “impose targeted sanctions on Indian government agencies and officials responsible for severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ assets and/or barring their entry into the United States… citing specific religious freedom violations”, reported The Indian Express.
