275 former judges, retired officers slam US religious freedom report
USCIRF has recommended to the US Govt to impose targeted sanctions on RSS and R&AW, accusing them of involvement in violation of religious freedom
Terming it “very disturbing and completely off-the-mark”, 275 former judges, ex-civil servants and retired armed forces officers have condemned the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) report that sought to designate India as a “country of particular concern”.
The USCIRF recommended to the US Government to impose targeted sanctions on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the ruling BJP, and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, accusing them of involvement in violation of religious freedom.
The Ministry of External Affairs has already rejected the USCIRF report, calling it “motivated and biased”.
The former judges and bureaucrats, including Supreme Court ex-judges Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice Hemant Gupta, former Himachal Pradesh Governor Justice Vishnu Sadashiv Kokje, former Chief Election Commissioners OP Rawat and Sunil Arora, former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal and several former senior Army, Navy and Air Force officers, questioned the credibility of the USCIRF commissioners and the report.
They sought to highlight that the population of Muslims in India had gone up from 9.8 per cent in 1951 to 14.2 per cent in 2011, and the population of Christians and Sikhs had remained at 2.3 per cent and 1.7 per cent, respectively, while the Hindu population had gone down from 20-22 per cent in undivided Pakistan to 1.5-2 per cent in Pakistan and 7-8 per cent in Bangladesh. “Such longitudinal evidence is critical and suggests that the overall ecosystem in India has not produced the kind of sustained demographic contraction among minorities that would ordinarily indicate systemic persecution or institutionalised exclusion,” they said.
The USCIRF needed to examine the long-term demographic trends across the Indian subcontinent with an approach that provided a more objective and longitudinal measure of religious freedom than selective or episodic narratives, they said.
“The USCIRF’s recommendation to freeze assets, restrict movement of Indian citizens and placing restrictions on those associated with the RSS is highly motivated, and displays intellectual bankruptcy and deranged conclusions,” they said in a statement.
The statement said the report showed the recurring tendency of the USCIRF to portray Indian state institutions and socio-cultural organisations such as the RSS in overwhelmingly negative aspects, often without proper macro-level evidence.
“The RSS, with its extensive grassroots presence and contributions to social service and nation-building, may well be subject to critique, but such critique must be grounded in verifiable evidence and contextual understanding, not only on broad generalizations,” they said in the statement.
