WASHINGTON: The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has once again urged the State Department to declare India a “Country of Particular Concern”, citing in its assessment and hearing testimony as “ongoing, systematic, and egregious religious freedom conditions” in the country.

The issue was examined during an in-person hearing in Washington on Thursday, where commissioners, lawmakers, scholars, and legal experts expressed their views on conditions facing Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits, as well as allegations of growing transnational repression targeting critics abroad.

Vicky Hartzler, the USCIRF chief, said India’s trajectory on religious freedom had continued to decline. She stated: “Our 2026 Annual Report, USCIRF once again recommended that the State Department designate India as a Country of Particular Concern for its ongoing, systematic, and egregious religious freedom conditions.”

She added that under the current political environment, “the Indian government, at both the national, state and local levels, continues to facilitate and tolerate religious freedom violations through the use of discriminatory legislation, arbitrary detention of religious leaders, and failure to intervene in attacks against religious minority communities.

Hartzler also highlighted the legal framework affecting conversions and security laws, saying: “As of 2026, 13 out of 28 Indian states now have and enforce strict anti-conversion laws.”

She further noted: “These laws also include harsh punishments — in some cases, life imprisonment — for those deemed to have facilitated or conducted religious conversions from Hinduism to another religion”.

USCIRF Vice Chair Asif Mahmood, in his written observation, focused on what he described as growing transnational repression and pressure on religious communities and their institutions beyond India’s borders.

He stated that “the Indian government has also targeted religious minorities and advocates beyond its borders, through acts of transnational repression,” adding that this included “surveillance and monitoring of advocates, and at the most extreme end, assassination attempts predominantly of Sikhs in North America”.

US Representative Chris Smith focused his intervention on India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) and its implications for civil society. He said: “The government of India has long tolerated and, at times, facilitated serious rights violations against religious minorities, especially Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs.”

He warned of proposed legal amendments, stating: “The vast majority of these are Christian churches and charitable institutions, such as hospitals and schools. In effect, if the amendments to the FCRA are enacted, the total property of entire Christian organisations and dioceses, as well as health-care systems and schools could soon be vulnerable to expropriation by the government of India.”

Smith added that the proposed changes would significantly expand state powers: “The FCRA amendments would permit state takeover of assets of NGOs whose licenses to receive foreign funds lapse, are denied, or are not renewed.”

Patterns of violence

Ambassador Stephen Rapp, former Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, described a “deterioration in patterns of violence” and accountability. He stated: “For the past decade, atrocities against minorities are showing signs of becoming less episodic, more normalized, where everyday violence and open calls to violence have become routine.”

He noted that “throughout this grim history, it is seldom that perpetrators have been held to account, and justice done – deeply entrenching impunity.” Rapp also noted India’s ranking in global risk assessments: “India consistently ranks among high-risk countries for mass killings and atrocities in the Early Warning Project’s Statistical Risk Assessment.”

Scholar Angana Chatterji of the University of California, Berkeley, described what she termed a structural transformation of religious and political life. She stated: “Under an authoritarian regime, freedom of religion is imperiled for minoritised communities”.

She further wrote: “This maelstrom of religionisation has progressively polarised ‘majority’ against ‘minority,’ neighbour against neighbor, endangering religious pluralism.” She also described “the racialized and violent subordination of religious minority communities using state power.”

Raqib Naik, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, alleged large-scale abuses against Muslims and refugees.

He said: “State-led violence and dispossession against Muslims have reached an unprecedented scale.”

He referred to “documented cases of Bengali Muslims, in Assam and other states, being forcibly taken to the border with Bangladesh and thrown across, sometimes gagged and at gunpoint, into a country they have never lived in”.

On Rohingya refugees, Naik added: “Members of the Rohingya refugee community in India have been subjected to similar treatment.”

He also alleged that in 2025, “the Indian Navy forcibly expelled around 40 Rohingya refugees by ferrying them out into the Andaman Sea.

Professor Arjun Sethi of Georgetown University Law Center focused on alleged transnational repression targeting diaspora activists. He stated: “Indian authorities are assassinating activists in North America.”

He referred to the 2023 killing of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, saying: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later informed the world that the Indian government authorized the assassination and was engaged in ‘clandestine information gathering techniques, coercive behaviour targeting South Asian Canadians, and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder.’”

He also cited an alleged plot against Sikh American activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, stating: “Simultaneously, the Indian government was plotting to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh American citizen, in Brooklyn, New York.”

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2026