Modi Critics Raise Alarms Regarding India’s Persecution Of Religious Minorities
As India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares to run for a third term, the country remains on the brink. Activists, journalists and civil society groups have continued in recent months to raise alarms at the rise in religious persecution of minorities throughout the country.
While Modi has continued to deny that any religious discrimination has taken place in India, many non-profits and research organizations have continued to refute those statements.
This past October, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reiterated its concern over religious freedom in India and called for the release of the religious prisoners of conscience.
READ: Division Among India’s Political Parties Threatens To Dilute Opposition To Modi
The USCIRF's Frank. R Wolf Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List is a public database of individuals detained based on the peaceful exercise of their freedom of religion or belief, and it includes at least 37 individuals across multiple faiths imprisoned in India.
"USCIRF calls on the Indian government to evaluate these cases and to release all prisoners of conscience and those detained for peacefully expressing their religion or belief," the statement pointed out.
Religious minorities remain under threat
Since Modi first came to power in 2014, he has passed intolerant and discriminatory laws, mainly targeting minority communities. Following a resounding success of being re-elected in 2019, the Modi government revoked the special status of Kashmir — also known as “Article 370” — that allowed the region to be semi-autonomous by having its constitution, a separate flag and freedom to make their laws barring defense, foreign affairs and communications.
It also passed the discriminatory new citizenship act, known as CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), which granted Indian nationality to non-Muslim minority communities such as Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs who fled the neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2015.
In 2021, the Modi government passed yet another draconian anti-conversion law. A dozen of the 28 Indian states where the ruling party or its allies are in power passed legislation criminalizing religious conversions in various circumstances. The states will slap individuals participating in conversion with fines and imprisonment.
The laws widely seen as a crackdown on Muslims and Christians are against international human rights law that protects "the right of an individual to convert to a different religion or belief or to become non-religious. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) provides that everyone has the right to freedom of religion or belief, including "freedom to change" their religious beliefs. Article 18(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that everyone has the "freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief" of their choice,” according to a U.S. State Department report published last March regarding India’s anti-conversion laws.
"An increasingly common feature of India's state-level anti-conversion laws are provisions aimed at preventing so-called ‘Love Jihads,’ a derogatory term for conversions occurring in the context of interfaith marriages,'“ the report noted.
The USCIRF also issued a statement in mid-December, raising alarm at the transnational repression against religious minorities: “Recent efforts by the Indian government to silence activists, journalists, and lawyers abroad pose a serious threat to religious freedom.”
"The Indian government's alleged involvement in the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and the plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the United States are deeply troubling and represent a severe escalation of India's efforts to silence religious minorities and human rights defenders both within its country and abroad,” USCIRF Commissioner Stephen Schneck said.
Both the U.S. and Canada have charged India with orchestrating assassinations against the members of the Sikh diaspora. At the heart of the recent conflict is Hardeep Singh Nijjar — the Canadian Sikh leader whose killing led to a diplomatic scuffle between India and Canada. Nijjar was a proponent of the Khalistani movement which seeks to create a separate homeland for Sikhs carved out of the state of Punjab.
According to the Intercept, it gathered evidence that the Indian government sent a memo two months before Nijjar's death that said, "Concrete measures shall be adopted to hold the suspects accountable.” The memo, titled “Action Points on Khalistan Extremism,” highlighted the names of Sikh activists with several activism organizations and blames them for spreading “anti-India propaganda.”
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Wikipedia Commons photo)
Sophisticated machinery to stifle dissent
The Modi government is notorious for spreading disinformation through its social media campaigns. With over 500 million active users, Whatsapp’s most significant base is India, making it a breeding ground for mis-and disinformation.
Although very little is known about BJP's Whatsapp machinery, it is well-documented that it forms an integral part of its digital campaign, often filled with propaganda to incite hate.
“Other parties in India have tried this. We've seen it in other countries like Brazil. But WhatsApp was really mastered first, and at scale, by the BJP,” Kiran Garimella, a Rutgers University professor who researched WhatsApp's role in Indian politics, told The Washington Post. “It requires resources, planning, investment, and a top-down belief in building this infrastructure. But 99 percent of what's happening in these groups is off-limits. We have no visibility at all.”
Modi government officials, experts said, act like “social media warriors.”
"Each and every BJP volunteer who has a mobile is a social media warrior," Ajith Kumar Ullal, 59, the BJP's social media head in the port city of Mangaluru, told The Washington Post.
Mangaluru, situated in the southern state of Karnataka, falls under what is often called the “Hindutva lab.”
Ullal, who is also a member of some 200 Whatsapp groups, “operates out of a ‘war room’ in the BJP's gleaming downtown office, commanding a social media ‘cell’ of nine volunteers responsible for an area in coastal Karnataka inhabited by 1.5 million people,” The Washington Post reported.
Several BJP groups held their national social media workshops in recent months as the Hindu Party streamlines its social media strategy ahead of the general elections in 2024.
“An important source of BJP said that work of the Narendra Modi-led government of 9 years have to reach the public...through social media and conveying the message to the public through digital means," Asian News International reported. “Social media teams will be made at various levels including district, state and divisional. A team of five to six people will be formed at all fronts with one social media coordinator and two co-coordinators.”
Many campaigns are geared toward improving BJP's image at home and abroad. One such campaign is the “Disinfo Lab,” which claims to be "investigating Info-warfare & Psy-war" and has systematically been targeting the Modi government's critics in the U.S.
In April, the Disinfo Lab published a report criticizing the New York-based Hindus for Human Rights Founder, Sunita Viswanath, a human rights group critical of Modi's Hindutva policies.
The report linked Viswanath to Soros's Open Society Foundations for receiving funding for a nonprofit she launched to help female Afghan refugees.
Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP's social media team, posted on X: “Who is she exactly? She is nothing but a proxy of George Soros, who has committed $1 billion to meddle in India's internal affairs, through a network of opposition leaders, think tanks, journalists, lawyers and activists.”
“In 28 reports it has published so far, the organization has often painted a picture of an India under attack by a sprawling "nexus" of conspirators funded by Pakistani intelligence, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Soros," The Washington Post reported in its recent investigation on lab.
The Disinfo Lab also insinuated that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-American Democrat from Washington State who is critical of Modi, received funds via this “nexus.”
The Disinfo Lab has gone after the Indian-American activists who criticized the Modi government for discrimination against Muslims and Dalits, members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF), a bipartisan organization that recommended the state department assign India a “country of particular concern” on account of how the religious minorities are being treated in the country under Modi.
In a related investigation by The Washington Post, Facebook India was found scrambling when it discovered that the Indian army was running a secret operation using fake accounts in Kashmir. Some employees pushed to shut down the operations, but some executives stalled the process. It later scrubbed the operation without making it public.
A Kashmiri journalist, Jibran Nazir, discovered an account that was using her image and tweeting under the hashtag #NayaKashmir (New Kashmir), praising the dilution of Article 370 and the region's prosperity after the dilution.
Based on Stanford University's Internet observatory that studies the abuse of internet technologies around the world, the Wire, a nonprofit Indian news outlet, reported on this issue in September last year, where hundreds of thousands of bot accounts were discovered speaking on behalf of Kashmiris, spreading pro-Indian army propaganda.
In recent years, several nonprofits and think tanks critical of the Modi government and its policies have shuttered their offices following government raids.
The political parties have become information war machinery, spreading divisive and polarizing idealogy to garner votes. The scale at which fake news is being churned to mold people's opinions, which informs their political will, is unprecedented.
Manmeet Sahni is an independent journalist from New Delhi based in New York. She writes about politics, human rights, inequality and social movements. Her bylines have appeared in Documented, The Article and others, and she is an alumna of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.