US Senator introduces resolution asking India to end ‘religious persecution and violence”

Tammy Baldwin, a Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, has introduced a resolution in the US Senate urging the US government to engage with India to seek a “swift end to the persecution of and violence against” religious minorities and human rights defenders and a “reversal” of policies that “discriminate against” Muslims and Christians on the basis of their religious faith.

Baldwin, who is a two-term Senator and is up for re-election in 2024, is a progressive and came into prominence as the first openly lesbian to be elected first to the House of Representatives in 1999 and then Senate in 2013.

While any Senator has the right to introduce a resolution, the introduction of a resolution neither means that it will necessarily find other co-sponsors or be taken up by the relevant Senate committee (in this case the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) or discussed in the chamber. But a resolution is a signal of the particular individual leader’s priorities and is often driven by interest groups, including activist groups and donors.

While Delhi hasn’t officially responded to the resolution yet, India has forcefully rejected the charges laid out in the resolution about its domestic policies and record in the past. It has attributed the criticism of its democratic record to “votebank” politics within the US and to motivated groups with links with India’s adversaries.

The resolution recognises India as the world’s most populous democracy with a long history of being a strong and pluralistic democracy, and India’s relationship with the US as “long, unique and important” in “promoting common values and upholding regional stability”. It then suggests that this relationship is “fundamentally premised” on common values of “liberty, freedom, justice and equality before law” and on “opposition to every type of discrimination”.

With a nod to the Preamble of the Constitution of India and various fundamental rights embedded in the constitution, as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own statement committing to complete freedom of faith, the resolution claims that “violence” against Indian religious minorities has increased in the past decade.

It then specifies this to have taken the form of “public lynchings…vandalising and demolition of mosques and churches…demolition of homes and businesses of Muslims without due process…and arrest of Muslim men marrying Hindu women in the name of the false theory of ‘love jihad’”.

The resolution refers to State Department’s annual reports on religious freedom and human rights practices as well as the report of the US commission on international religious freedom, which have all been critical of India’s record. India has consistently rejected these reports as motivated and false.

Baldwin has also claimed that the Indian government has failed to take action against “partisan leaders of the Hindu religious community for repeatedly calling for a genocide of India’s Muslims”; referred to Karnataka’s ban on hijab in schools; mentioned the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir in 2019; portrayed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act as discriminatory; accused the Indian police of wrongfully arresting “hundreds of people…mostly Muslims” for protesting against the law; and alleged that the National Registration of Citizens process in Assam will lead to the stripping of the citizenship of 1.9 million people. The resolution, citing Christian groups, also claims that police and vigilante mobs have increasingly targeted Indian Christians and alludes to the rise in anti-conversion laws as further evidence of this discrimination.

On the basis of this background, the resolution first recognises India’s “security challenges and continued threat of state-supported cross-border terrorism”. It then asks the Indian government to amend “discriminatory laws and executive policies based on the love jihad conspiracy theory”, the CAA, and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. It calls for an end to the “discriminatory and undemocratic NRC”, the release of “unjustly detained human rights defenders, journalists and other critics”, accountability for “brutal police violence” against anti-CAA protesters, repeal of “anti-conversion and anti-blasphemy laws”, repeal of the hijab ban in Karnataka, end of the “demolition of homes, businesses and places of worship” of Muslims and Christians, unrestricted access to Jammu and Kashmir for human rights observers and the press; and the repeal of the sedition law.

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