The USCIRF report is malicious and defamatory and is full of concoctions. The nation stood behind the Modi Government and the army during Operation Sindoor and there were no muslim protests. — Vinod Johri
Very recently, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) 2026 Annual Report was published which assessed religious freedom violations and progress in 29 countries during the year 2025 and makes recommendations for U.S. policy. Bharat figured among those countries and vicious allegations were made against Bharat which apparently spurred by the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) to grant citizenship to the migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to weed out bogus voters and illegal migrants. The plain reading of USCIRF report, makes it blatantly clear that this is direct interference in the domestic affairs of India and aims to promote the divisive forces and conspiracy in India.
It was reported in USCIRF report that in 2025, religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate as the government introduced and enforced new legislation targeting religious minority communities and their houses of worship. It targets several states which undertook efforts to introduce or strengthen anti-conversion laws. The report alleged that the Indian authorities facilitated widespread detention and illegal expulsion of citizens and religious refugees and tolerated vigilante attacks against religious minority communities.
The report charged that throughout the year, Hindu nationalist mobs across several states harassed, incited, and instigated violence against Muslims and Christians with impunity. It accused that violence erupted in Maharashtra after a hardline Hindu nationalist group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), called for the removal of the tomb of Aurangzeb and subsequent riots injured dozens of people and resulted in a curfew, fuelled by rumours from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) officials that Qur’ans were desecrated in VHP-led protests. USCIRF contended that in June 2025, a Hindu nationalist mob attacked 20 Christian families in Odisha after they refused to convert to Hinduism and the attacks did not prompt police intervention, leaving eight people injured and hospitalized.
In connection with Pak sponsored and engineered brutal terrorist attack killing 26 Hindu tourists in Pahalgam and post-Operation Sindoor, USCIRF rumoured anti-Muslim sentiment in India, including targeted attacks in which muslims were killed in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh in alleged hate crimes following the attack. The report scuttlebutted that in Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu nationalist group reportedly shot and killed a Muslim restaurant worker, vowing to avenge those killed in the Kashmir attack and the Indian government seized the aftermath of the attack to justify deportations of religious minorities it considers “illegal” migrants.
The report alleged that the Indian authorities detained 40 Rohingya refugees, including 15 Christians, all of whom were transported into international waters near the coast of Burma and forced to swim to the Burmese shore with nothing more than life vests and in July 2025, Indian authorities expelled hundreds of Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam to Bangladesh despite being Indian citizens. It retorted that the officials from the ruling BJP accused those expelled of being Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh, threatening India’s national identity. USCIRF report expressed worries over ‘crackdown’ in alleged “illegal migration,” and a new set of rules and orders for the Foreigners Act passed by the Indian Government in September. It alleged that the order expanded the authority of Foreigner Tribunals to issue arrest warrants and send those suspected of being “foreigners” to holding centres without due process.
The USCIFR report further alleged that the government continued to target houses of worship to bring them under state control. It complained that India’s Parliament passed the Waqf Bill, which provides to induct non-Muslims to the Waqf boards. USCIRF is also aggrieved with Uttarakhand’s legislative assembly having passed the ‘State Authority for Minority Education (USAME) Act’, which dissolving the Madrasa Board and bringing minority institutions under state control.
Allegations of Discriminatory Laws Restricting Religious Freedom in India
The report alleged enforcement of numerous laws targeting religious minorities, including the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the 1967 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the 2019 Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the 2025 Waqf Bill, and the 2025 Immigration and Foreigners Bill, calling them discriminatory.
USCIRF Grudge against Religious Conversion by force, fraud, allurement, or marriage
The state-level legislations prohibit religious conversion by force, fraud, allurement, or marriage but the USCIRF has alleged these laws as anti-conversion laws aimed at harsher penalties and broader definitions of “religious conversion.” Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan are alleged to push laws for the implementation of ‘anti-conversion laws’ resulting in widespread protests by hundreds of thousands of Christians.
USCIRF Report Assails Banning Cow Slaughter
It has been further alleged that throughout 2025, violent mobs attacked Muslims under the guise of protecting state-level cow slaughter laws.
Allegations of Imprisonment of Christian missionary for Conversion to Christianity
It is alleged in the USCIRF report that in 2025, authorities detained individuals accused of conducting forced conversions and in October, police arrested a U.S. citizen, James Watson, and two Indian nationals, Ganpati Sarpe and Manoj Govind Kolha, accused of converting Hindus to Christianity in Maharashtra as they were charged with “hurting religious sentiment” and for luring individuals to convert by promising “miracle cures” and prosperity.
Supporting Secessionists
The report accused that the government continued to wield anti-terrorism laws to imprison religious minorities and those advocating on their behalf. It quoted Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and several others involved in the 2020 CAA protests remained in prison for the fifth year without trials. Similar few cases were also cited in the report.
USCIRF Recommendations to the US Government
- Designate India as a “country of particular concern,” or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA);
- Press India to allow US government entities such as USCIRF and the U.S. Department of State to conduct in-country assessments of religious freedom conditions;
- Impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities, such as India’s Research and Analysis Wing and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for their responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ or entities’ assets and/or barring their entry into the United States;
- Link future U.S. security assistance and bilateral trade policies with India to improvements in religious freedom; and
- Enforce Section 6 of the Arms Export Control Act to halt arms sales to India based on continued acts of intimidation and harassment against U.S. citizens and religious minorities.
- Reintroduce and pass the Transnational Repression Reporting Act of 2024 to require the annual reporting of acts of transnational repression by the Indian government targeting religious minorities in the United States. It focuses on documenting cases, law enforcement responses, and actions against perpetrators from countries like China, Iran, and India.
Indian Reaction
India slammed ‘selective targeting’ as US body seeking sanctions on RAW and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The Centre responded strongly after a United States federal government commission recommended that India be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious freedom violations and called for targeted sanctions on the external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In response to the report, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, “We have taken note of the latest report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). We categorically reject its motivated and biased characterisation of India. For several years now, USCIRF has persisted in presenting a distorted and selective picture of India, relying on questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts.”
Randhir Jaiswal further added, “Such repeated misrepresentations only undermine the credibility of the Commission itself. Instead of persisting with selective criticism of India, USCIRF would do well to reflect on the disturbing incidents of vandalism and attacks on Hindu temples in the United States, selective targeting of India, and growing intolerance and intimidation of members of the Indian diaspora in the United States, which merit serious attention”.
The external affairs ministry said USCIRF issued biased and politically motivated assessments. It said the USCIRF cast aspersions on India’s vibrant multicultural society as it was a deliberate agenda rather than a genuine concern for religious freedom.
The ministry underlined that India is home to 1.4 billion people who are adherents to all religions. It said it does not expect the USCIRF to engage with the reality of India’s pluralistic framework or acknowledge the harmonious coexistence of its diverse communities. “Such efforts to undermine India’s standing as a beacon of democracy and tolerance will not succeed. In fact, it is the USCIRF that should be designated as an entity of concern,” the ministry said last year. India has also denied visas to the USCIRF team and pushed back against the commission’s comments on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2019.
In a move that sends a lightning bolt through Washington-Delhi relations, the USCIRF is now officially calling for a ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and they didn’t stop at the political grassroots. The commission wants the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)—India’s elite foreign intelligence agency—blacklisted right alongside them. This isn’t just another dry human rights report. It’s a direct hit on the bedrock of India’s current power structure.
The USCIRF report is malicious and defamatory and is full of concoctions. The nation stood behind the Modi Government and the army during Operation Sindoor and there were no muslim protests. The Waqf Amendment Act aimed to manage the waqf properties transparently and stop misuse of properties by the Waqf trusties. The initial protests were incited by the vested interests whose monopoly on the waqf properties was at stake. The Citizenship Amendment Act grants citizenship to the persecuted Hindus and other minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and was not aimed at cancelling citizenships. The illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh and Pakistan have entered the country over several decades and their population is in crores. They have changed the demography of the border areas and have set up network of contraband and crimes and are largely engaged in secessionist activities in the border areas. SIR aims at disfranchising the illegal immigrants. The muslim population have increased phenomenally in the county which is enough to prove that the muslims are living in the country with more security, equality and comfort than in the Islamis countries. There is a strong sentiment in the country on the forced religious conversions by the Church missionaries and Islamic extremists by way of violence, love jehad, land jehad, killings and allurement. Such elements have distorted social harmony and equilibrium. There is a strong network of anti-national activities outside India, which must be dismantled. On the contrary, USCIRF must examine the violations of human rights in US itself and the US support to the terrorist countries like Pakistan in our neighbourhood resulting in mass killings by the Pakistani terrorists and its local network in India. Such reports of USCIRF have only eroded the credibility of the US itself.
(Source - U.S. COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, 732 North Capitol Street, NW, Suite A714, Washington, DC 20401, 202–523–3240, www.uscirf.gov)
