‘Driven by vote bank’: India stings US over its new religious freedom report

India on Friday rejected a US government report criticising the state of religious freedom in the country, saying in a strongly worded riposte that the findings were “deeply biased” and “driven by vote bank considerations”.

The external affairs ministry responded two days after the US state department criticised India’s record in its annual international religious freedom report for 2023 and alleged the government had failed to protect members of religious minorities from violence or investigate hate crimes.

“As in the past, the report is deeply biased, lacks an understanding of India’s social fabric, and is visibly driven by vote bank considerations and a prescriptive outlook,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told a regular media briefing.

“We therefore reject it. The exercise itself is a mix of imputations, misrepresentations, selective usage of facts, reliance on biased sources, and a one-sided projection of issues,” he said.

This, Jaiswal said, includes the depiction of India’s constitutional provisions and laws, and “selectively picked incidents to advance a preconceived narrative”. He added, “In some cases, the very validity of laws and regulations are questioned by the report, as are the right of legislatures to enact them. The report also appears to challenge the integrity of certain legal judgments given by Indian courts.”

The exercise itself is a mix of imputations, misrepresentations, selective usage of facts, reliance on biased sources, and a one-sided projection of issues

The report also targeted regulations that monitor the misuse of financial flows into India and suggested the burden of compliance is unreasonable, Jaiswal pointed out. “It seeks to question the need for such measures. On its own part, the US has even more stringent laws and regulations and would surely not prescribe such solutions for itself,” he said.

Human rights and respect for diversity “have been and remain a legitimate subject of discussion” between India and the US, Jaiswal said while pointing to India raising hate crimes committed in the US that targeted people of Indian origin or places of worship.

“In 2023, India has officially taken up numerous cases in the US of hate crimes, racial attacks on Indian nationals and other minorities, vandalisation and targeting of places of worship, violence and mistreatment by law enforcement authorities, as well as the according of political space to advocates of extremism and terrorism abroad,” he said, in an apparent reference to the activities of pro-Khalistan activists in some American cities.

“However, such dialogue should not become a licence for foreign interference in other polities,” Jaiswal said.

Speaking at the release of the report on Wednesday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken offered rare public criticism of India, which is usually described by the Biden administration as a preeminent partner on the global stage. Blinken said: “In India, we see a concerning increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, demolitions of homes and places of worship for members of minority faith communities.”

At the same event, the US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, Rashad Hussain, was critical of Indian police. He said Christian communities in India reported that local police aided mobs that disrupted worship services over accusations of conversion, or “stood by while mobs attacked them and then arrested the victims on conversion charges”.

The report also referred to violent attacks on religious minorities in India, including killings and assaults, and cited the violence in the northeastern state of Manipur.

Despite public criticism in annual report, the US state department is not expected to take action against India when it drafts its annual blacklist of countries over religious freedoms later this year.