India’s rights record under scrutiny

Published Date: May 17, 2026

Published On: Brecorder

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF’s) renewed call for the US State Department to designate India a “country of particular concern” over “ongoing, systematic, and egregious” violations of religious freedoms based on its assessment of the conditions in the country over the last year, underscores how far the world’s largest democracy has drifted from its long-professed secular ideals. That erosion has accelerated markedly during the past decade under Narendra Modi’s BJP, which has enabled an increasingly majoritarian order through discriminatory legislation, the use of the legal system to persecute dissenting voices and fostering impunity for violent attacks on minorities.

Equally distressing is the capitulation of key institutions, including a judiciary that has failed to uphold the secular spirit of India’s Constitution and has been beholden to an executive intent on reshaping the country’s political and social fabric along ideological lines.

Moreover, a media ecosystem that downplays abuses while amplifying narratives that dehumanise minority communities has helped entrench intolerance within public discourse, resulting in countless cases of mob violence against religious minorities.

The outcome, as an expert witness for the USCIRF has noted, is a “maelstrom of religionisation” that has “polarised ‘majority’ against ‘minority’, neighbour against neighbour”. This “violent subordination of religious minority communities using state power”, as the expert witness described it, signals a dangerous unravelling of the civic compact on which modern India was founded.

Whether through the Citizenship Amendment Act, which effectively introduced a religious test for citizenship in contradiction to India’s secular constitutional principles, or the accompanying spectre of the National Register of Citizens, which critics fear could render many Muslims stateless, the legislative direction has been unmistakable.

The same pattern extends to anti-conversion laws, where alleged facilitation of conversions from Hinduism can attract Draconian punishments, including life imprisonment. Proposed amendments impacting Christian churches and philanthropic bodies, alongside changes to Waqf laws targeting Muslim institutions, have further deepened concerns over systematic state encroachment upon minority rights and religious autonomy.

Taken together, these measures point to a legal architecture increasingly shaped by the ideological drive towards establishing a far right Hindu Rashtra. This project now extends into the electoral arena as well, most recently reflected in the West Bengal state elections, where the BJP secured a decisive victory in a state that had long remained resistant to its divisive Hindutva ideology.

Amid a controversial Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls conducted by India’s Election Commission – whose autonomy has sharply eroded over the years – around 9.1 million voters were deleted, clearly undermining the integrity of the electoral process.

In the face of sustained international scrutiny and findings similar to those reached by the USCIRF, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the ideological parent of the BJP – has now launched a foreign outreach drive aimed at policymakers and academics, seeking to challenge perceptions of it as a paramilitary organisation linked to violence against minority communities.

Yet one wonders at the effectiveness of such a campaign, as even a cursory reading of its history unmasks an ideological core whose entire raison d’etre was shaped by animus and hatred towards Muslims in particular and other minorities in general, and a categorical rejection of constitutional secularism in favour of a Hindu Rashtra. This orientation has defined its identity since its inception in the pre-Independence era, well before 1947.

Against that backdrop, the USCIRF’s assessment serves as a blunt confirmation of a trajectory that has long been visible to close observers of India’s political evolution. With few remaining checks on the erosion of minority protections, the RSS vision of moulding India into a Hindu Rashtra and steering it further from its secular foundations appears closer than ever to realisation.