LegiStorm

Summary:

India is the world’s most populous country, with more than 1.4 billion people, and the world’s fifth-largest economy. In recognition of India’s global importance and growing ability to influence world affairs—and with a widely held assessment that a stronger and more prosperous and democratic India is good for the United States—the U.S. Congress and four successive U.S. presidential administrations have acted to both broaden and deepen U.S. engagement with India. Washington and New Delhi launched a “strategic partnership” in 2004, along with a framework for long-term defense cooperation that now includes large-scale joint military exercises and multi-billion-dollar defense trade. In concert with Japan and Australia, the United States and India in 2020 reinvigorated a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“Quad”) as a flagship initiative of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy. The mechanism is widely viewed as a counter to China’s growing influence. U.S-India trade and investment have increased, while a relatively wealthy and well-educated Indian-American community is exercising newfound domestic political influence. An officially secular democracy—its 1950 constitution establishes a “sovereign, socialist, secular democratic state”—India has thousands of ethnic groups, 22 official languages, and a long tradition of religious tolerance, although with periodic and sometimes serious lapses. Religious freedom is explicitly protected under its constitution. India is the birthplace of four major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. It is also home to roughly 200 million Muslims—only Indonesia and Pakistan have more. A Christian minority includes about 30 million people. Hindus account for a vast majority (nearly four-fifths) of the country’s populace, and Hindu nationalism has become a rising political force, which is viewed by some analysts as eroding India’s secular nature and leading to new assaults on the country’s religious freedoms and minorities’ civil rights. The 2014 national election victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP or Indian Peoples’ Party) brought acute attention to the issue of religious freedom in India. Tracing its origins to a political party created in 1951 in collaboration with the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteer Organization), the BJP has gone on to win control of 13 of India’s 28 state governments (up from 5 in 2014), including in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state. The BJP’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is a self-avowed Hindu nationalist and lifelong RSS member with a controversial past: In 2002, during his 13-year tenure as chief minister of India’s Gujarat state, mass-scale anti-Muslim rioting there reportedly left more than 1,000 people dead, and Modi faced accusations of complicity and/or inaction (he was later formally exculpated). In 2005, Modi was denied a U.S. visa under a rarely-used law barring entry for foreign officials found to be complicit in severe violations of religious freedom, and he had no official contacts with the U.S. government until 2014. Some Members of the 113th Congress were critical of Modi’s role in the 2002 violence. Some Members of Congress continue to call attention to signs that human rights and religious freedom violations are increasing in India, as documented by the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and independent human rights groups. With a U.S.-India strategic partnership ostensibly based on shared values, the apparent deterioration of India’s human rights conditions has led some observers to urge instead an emphasis on shared national interests, not least with regard to balancing against China. Others counter that maintaining attention to democracy and human rights protections in India is, in fact, in the U.S. national interest, and that human rights protections and national security are not mutually exclusive goals. This report provides an overview of religious freedom issues in India, beginning with a brief review of U.S.-India relations and India’s human rights setting broadly, then discussing the country’s religious demographics, religious freedom protections, and conceptions of Hindu nationalism and its key institutional proponents in Indian society. It then moves to specific areas of religiously motivated repression and violence, including state-level anti-conversion laws, cow protection vigilantism, regional communal violence, and reported assaults on freedoms of expression and operations by nongovernmental organizations that are seen as harmful to India’s secular traditions and the U.S-promoted goal of interfaith tolerance. The report concludes with considerations and possible questions for Congress.