essay on religious intolerance in india

India: Growing Intolerance and Hate Toward Religious Minorities

Recently, 40 Christians in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest province, met in the home of a church leader to pray. Two-dozen Hindu militants stormed in and verbally and physically abused those gathered. Six of the worshipers needed urgent medical attention, and it is reported that the militants threatened to return and kill the Christians if they continued to gather for prayer. Christian Solidarity Worldwide Chief Executive, Mervyn Thomas said, “We are increasingly concerned about the atmosphere of intolerance and hate toward religious minorities, which is unfolding in Uttar Pradesh and across India.”

One in six people on the planet today live in India. The world’s second-most populist country, with more than 1.3 billion people, is a religiously pluralistic and multi-ethnic democracy — the largest in the world. Its constitution provides for freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practice, and propagate religion. India is the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. The latest census conducted in 2011 reported that approximately 80% of the population is Hindu, 14.2% are Muslim, 2% are Christian, and another 2% are Sikh. Buddhists, Jains, Bahá’ís, Jews, and observers of other small tribal religions collectively comprise less than 2% of India’s religious communities.

Yet despite the diversity of religions represented, religious freedom in India has deteriorated swiftly in recent years. Some observers point to the rise of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 as a cause for compromised religious freedom because many Hindus interpret the political shift as a mandate to advance movement toward a Hindu-only nation. Although much of the religious discrimination is against Muslims, violence against Christians has greatly increased. When Narendra Modi and BJP came to power in 2014, Open Doors USA ranked India #28 on their World Watch List for violence against Christians. Today, India is ranked #10.

A recent report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service describes serious ongoing concerns about religious freedom in India. The report cites a dramatic increase in attacks on religious minorities, with anti-conversion laws predominately used to discriminate against Christians. Hindus hold cows to be sacred, and the anti-cow slaughter laws are often used to discriminate against Muslims and Dalits, many of whom make their livelihood in the country’s beef and leather industries.

The latest report issued by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) classifies India as a Tier 2 country because of persistent conditions unfriendly to religious freedom. USCIRF has recommended the U.S. government press India to repeal or amend anti-conversion and anti-cow slaughter laws to conform to international human rights standards. At a recent hearing, USCIRF Chair Tenzin Dorjee noted, “In recent years, religious extremists in India have intimidated, harassed, and sometimes murdered members of religious minorities or those who either abandon or change faiths. These actions represent a direct threat to the secular claims of the Indian constitution and the fundamental rights of millions of Indians to practice their religion freely or live according to their beliefs without fearing violence.”

Religious freedom has been deteriorating in India for several years

Amidst the threats to this basic human right, India’s citizens are speaking out. In recent years, thousands of people, including church groups, have gathered across India to protest mounting religious intolerance and express solidarity with the victims of religious persecution.

Laws are being challenged. Lawyer groups in India are working to eliminate the country’s Freedom of Religion Acts or “anti-conversion” laws. State-level statutes have been enacted to regulate religious conversions in eight out of 29 states. In Himachai Pradesh, for example, lawyers challenged the anti-conversion law and won the case; the Himachai high court held that religious conversion is a matter of faith and personal thought of an individual and state government cannot encroach upon the privacy of any citizen. Lawyers are presently challenging the state laws in Uttarakhand and Jharkhand.

The Parliamentary election in India is less than one month away in what some are calling India’s most important election in decades.

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• Pray for upcoming elections in India and for elected leaders to publicly condemn intolerance and hold to account those involved in perpetrating or inciting religious violence
• Learn more about the work of Alliance Defending Freedom in India
• Read the We’re Indians Too report published by Open Doors

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The many shades of intolerance

Intolerance in india is discussed mostly within the framework of religion and not caste.

Updated - December 04, 2021 10:29 pm IST

Published - August 13, 2021 12:15 am IST

Mohammad Akhlaq’s mother shows his blood-stained clothes at Bishara village in Dadri. File

The Pew Research Center report, ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’ (June 2021), has provoked several critical articles, which mostly present its findings as being about Hindu-Muslim relations. The survey, however, presents comparative data pertaining to four other major religions: Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism. Its conclusion, according to these articles, broadly confirms the growing influence of Hindutva politics on India’s social fabric. According to the report, “India’s concept of religious tolerance does not necessarily involve the mixing of religious communities. While people in some countries may aspire to create a ‘melting pot’ of different religious identities, many Indians seem to prefer a country more like a patchwork of a fabric with clear lines between groups.” However, interrogation of the conceptual foundations on which the report is premised could lead to a vastly different understanding of tolerance in India.

Falling into a trap

For instance, the notion of tolerance employed primarily relates to inter-religious issues. In Indian debate, the concept of tolerance has earned great presence ever since the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015. In recent years, in discussions on prejudices or violence between Hindus and Muslims, the word ‘tolerance’ seems to have increasingly replaced the word ‘communal’, which dominated public discussions since the early part of the 20th Century, particularly since the Bengal Partition. Despite a considerable overlap in the connotations of these two terminologies, they are not the same. In the noisy political discourse around the Hindu Right, the erstwhile communalists have become the new nationalists — specifically, Hindu nationalists. An old communalist now calls himself a nationalist without shedding the skin of prejudices that he has been wearing all along. This has been possible owing to the well-oiled propaganda machine that the Hindu Right has been able to operate since the 1920s. Surprisingly, secularists of various shades have fallen into this trap. They have also accepted the deployment of the word ‘tolerance’ as completely normal.

India has historically been a tolerant country, it is further argued, and is now increasingly turning into an intolerant one, particularly after 2014. Since Indians were tolerant in the past, they must remain so now and in future. According to liberals, this is the most persuasive way to convince Indians about the virtue of tolerance. The Pew Survey endorses this line of reasoning.

Untouchability in India

But has India been a historically tolerant country? Untouchability has been practised for ages in India and it remains widespread in both urban and rural areas. We may ask: what is the relationship between untouchability and tolerance? By all accounts, untouchability is an act of extreme intolerance. That being the case, how can it then be argued that India has been historically tolerant? Strangely, the issue of tolerance is not seen in connection with caste and is argued exclusively in the context of inter-religious communities. But the ideas of caste and intolerance are deeply entertwined — empirically, conceptually and historically. The socially dominant group in Hindu society that practises intolerance towards Muslims or Christians has been practising the same against Dalits in an organised way as a custom. The latter is justified on the ground that Dalits are historically inferior, whereas Muslims are historically oppressive, violent and disloyal. The truth is that caste is the enduring source of intolerance and segregation, and the rest emanates from it. So long as this connection is not recognised, any effort to make sense of India’s growing intolerance would be shallow and misleading. The Pew Survey seems to make this fatal mistake. In the limited space it offers to caste, it neither recognises this connection nor introduces it to its theoretical framework that helps formulate its profound findings. And, strangely, it finds that a majority Indians do not experience widespread caste discrimination.

Shaikh Mujibur Rehman teaches at Jamia Central University and is the author of the forthcoming book, Shikwa-e-Hind: The Political Future of Indian Muslims

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Religious Intolerance in India

By The Editorial Board

• Dec. 25, 2014

Hope is in danger of crumbling that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would rein in the divisive agenda of his militant Hindu-nationalist supporters and allow India to concentrate on the important work of economic reform, and the blame lies squarely with Mr. Modi.

During the last days of its winter session ending on Tuesday, Parliament was unable to deal with important legislative business because of repeated adjournments and an uproar over attempts by Hindu groups to convert Christians and Muslims. The issue has come to a head following a “homecoming” campaign by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad — groups dedicated to transforming India’s secular democracy into a Hindu state — to “reconvert” Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.

In recent weeks, Hindu militants have engineered conversions of Muslims and Christians in Agra and in the states of Gujarat and Kerala. Police are investigating accusations that people have been induced to participate in mass conversion meetings by a combination of intimidation and bribery, including the promise of food ration cards. Attacks on Christians and their places of worship have intensified in recent weeks. One of New Delhi’s biggest churches burned down on Dec. 1 — arson is being blamed — and Christmas carolers were attacked on their way home in the city of Hyderabad on Dec. 12.

More than 80 percent of Indians are Hindus, but Muslims, Christians and Sikhs form important religious minorities with centuries of history in India. Religious pluralism and freedom are protected by India’s Constitution. The issue of religious conversion is contentious in India. Many Dalits, known formerly as untouchables, and other low-caste Hindus and Tribals admit they convert to Islam or Christianity primarily to escape crushing caste prejudice and oppression. The main architect of the Constitution, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born a Dalit, famously converted to Buddhism to escape caste-oppression under Hinduism.

As opposition political leaders are demanding, Mr. Modi must break his silence and issue a stern warning to emboldened Hindu militants before their actions turn further progress on economic reform into a sideshow, with the politics and divisiveness occupying center stage.

Philanthropy in India

This resource is brought to you by IssueLab

Published June 29, 2021

Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation

Publisher(s): Pew Research Center

Funder(s): John Templeton Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts

Author(s): Ariana Monique Salazar, Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi, Neha Sahgal

More than 70 years after India became free from colonial rule, Indians generally feel their country has lived up to one of its post-independence ideals: a society where followers of many religions can live and practice freely.

India's massive population is diverse as well as devout. Not only do most of the world's Hindus, Jains and Sikhs live in India, but it also is home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations and to millions of Christians and Buddhists.

A major new Pew Research Center survey of religion across India, based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020 (before the COVID-19 pandemic), finds that Indians of all these religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths.

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2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: India

• Executive Summary

The constitution provides for freedom of conscience and the right of all individuals to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion; mandates a secular state; requires the state to treat all religions impartially; and prohibits discrimination based on religion.  It also states that citizens must practice their faith in a way that does not adversely affect public order, morality, or health.  Ten of 28 states have laws restricting religious conversions.  Four state governments have laws imposing penalties against so-called forced religious conversions for the purpose of marriage although some state high courts have dismissed cases charged under this law.  In August, two Muslim men from Jamshedpur in Jharkhand State filed a complaint against local police alleging that seven police officers sexually abused them during interrogation and used anti-Islamic slurs.  According to media, police took no action on the complaint by year’s end.  Police made several arrests during the year under laws that restrict religious conversion, and several state governments announced plans to strengthen existing legislation or develop new legislation restricting religious conversion.  According to the United Christian Forum (UCF), a Christian rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), in the period between January and June, 29 Christians were arrested in three states on suspicion of forceful or fraudulent religious conversions under the laws restricting religious conversions in those states.  Some NGOs reported that the government failed to prevent or stop attacks on religious minorities.  A faith-based NGO stated in its annual report that out of 112 complaints of violence filed by Christian victims from January to August, police filed official reports (First Information Report or FIR) in 25 cases.  There were no updates on these cases by the end of the year.  Police arrested non-Hindus for making comments in the media or on social media that were considered offensive to Hindus or Hinduism.  NGOs, including faith-based organizations, continued to criticize 2020 amendments passed to the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) as constraining civil society by reducing the amount of foreign funding that NGOs, including religious organizations, could use for administrative purposes and adding onerous oversight and certification requirements.  The government continued to say the law strengthened oversight and accountability of foreign NGO funding in the country.  According to media reports, FCRA licenses of 5,789 NGOs, including hundreds of faith-based organizations, lapsed after the government said the organizations did not apply for renewal in time.  In addition, during the year the government suspended FCRA licenses of 179 NGOs, including some that were faith-based.  The states of Assam and Karnataka enacted legislation imposing strict penalties for killing cattle; 25 of 28 states now have similar restrictions.  The most recent National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report, Crime in India for 2020 , released in September, said that the violence in New Delhi in February 2020 following passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) resulted from a “feeling of discrimination” among the Muslim community.  During the year, Delhi courts acquitted some of those arrested on charges related to the protests and convicted one Hindu participant.  Various courts criticized the Delhi police for inadequate investigation of the protests.  Politicians made inflammatory public remarks or social media posts about religious minorities.  For example, Madan Kaushik , president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttarakhand State, told the media in October that “Our party line is clear that no [religious] conversion [from Hinduism] will be tolerated.”  In May, the Assam government removed theological content from the curriculum of more than 700 state-run madrassahs and state-run Sanskrit schools, which converted them into regular public schools.  Analysts indicated that madrassahs were impacted in greater numbers.

Attacks on members of religious minority communities, including killings, assaults, and intimidation, occurred throughout the year.  These included incidents of “cow vigilantism” against non-Hindus based on allegations of cow slaughter or trade in beef.  According to the UCF, the number of violent attacks against Christians in the country rose to 486 during the year from 279 in 2020.  According to Catholic news agency Agenzia Fides , Hindus committed 13 instances of violence and threats against Christian communities in Uttarakhand, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi.  According to UCF, most of the incidents were reported in states ruled by the BJP and included attacks on pastors, disruption of worship services, and vandalism.  The NGOs United Against Hate, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, and UCF released a joint report that noted more than 500 incidents of violence against Christians reported to UCF’s hotline during the year.  Suspected terrorists targeted and killed civilians and migrants from the Hindu and Sikh minorities, including Hindu migrant laborers from Bihar, in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.  As of December, alleged terrorists had killed 39 civilians including two schoolteachers from the Hindu and Sikh communities.  According to media reports, the killings caused widespread fear among Hindus and Sikhs in the Kashmir valley, leading hundreds of migrants to depart Jammu and Kashmir.  There were reports of vandalism against Muslim facilities during the year, including by Hindu nationalist groups damaging mosques, shops, and houses belonging to the Muslim community across Tripura State in October.  Media reports said these attacks occurred in retaliation for attacks on minority Hindus in Bangladesh during the Durga Puja festival in that country.  A mob killed four Muslim men on June 20 in Tripura on suspicion of cattle smuggling.  On June 21, suspected cow vigilantes killed Muslim Aijaz Dar in Rajouri District of Jammu and Kashmir.  Cow vigilantes allegedly killed Babu Bheel, a member of a Rajasthan tribal community, on June 14.  Religious leaders, academics, and activists made inflammatory remarks about religious minorities.  During a Hindu religious gathering in Hardiwar, Uttarakhand State, December 17-19, Yati Narasinghanand Saraswati, described as a Hindu religious extremist, called upon Hindus to “take up weapons against Muslims” and “wage a war against Muslims.”  On December 21, police named Narasinghanand and seven others for “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings” in multiple FIRs; police arrested Narasinghanand a few weeks later, although he was subsequently released on bail.  The others had not been arrested by year’s end.  The Pew Research study on “Religion in India” released in July noted that most Indians valued religious tolerance but preferred living religiously segregated lives.  Eighty-nine percent of Muslims and Christians surveyed said they were “very free to practice their own religion” but 65 percent of Hindus and Muslims said they believed communal violence between religious groups was “a problem” for the country.  Freedom House downgraded the country’s ranking from “free” to “partly free” during the year in part due to policies described as advancing Hindu nationalist objectives.

During the year, U.S. embassy officials, including the Chargés d’Affaires, engaged with members of parliament, politicians from multiple political parties, religious leaders, representatives of faith-based organizations, and civil society members to discuss the importance of religious freedom and the responsibility of democracies to ensure the rights of religious minorities.  During engagements with political parties, civil society representatives, religious freedom activists, and leaders of various faith communities, U.S. government officials discussed the importance of religious freedom and pluralism; the value of interfaith dialogue, and the operating environment for faith-based NGOs.  Throughout the year, the Chargés d’Affaires met with religious communities, including representatives of the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh faiths to discuss their perspectives and views on religious freedom issues.  In May, the embassy organized a virtual interfaith dialogue during Ramadan to emphasize the U.S. government’s commitment to religious freedom and interfaith harmony.  In July, the Secretary of State, during his visit to the country, addressed the importance of freedom of religion and belief in his opening remarks and held a roundtable with diverse faith leaders to discuss inclusive development.

Religious Demography

The U.S. government estimates the total population at 1.3 billion (midyear 2021).  According to the 2011 national census, the most recent year for which disaggregated figures are available, Hindus constitute 79.8 percent of the population, Muslims 14.2 percent, Christians 2.3 percent, and Sikhs 1.7 percent.  Groups that together constitute fewer than 2 percent of the population include Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians (Parsis), Jews, and Baha’is.  In government statistics, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs officially identifies as Hindus more than 104 million members of Scheduled Tribes – indigenous groups historically outside the caste system who often practice indigenous religious beliefs – although an estimated 10 million of those listed as Scheduled Tribe members are Christians according to the 2011 census.

According to government estimates, there are large Muslim populations in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, and the Union Territories of Lakshadweep and Jammu and Kashmir.  In Lakshadweep and Jammu and Kashmir, Muslims account for 95 percent and 68.3 percent of the population, respectively.  Slightly more than 85 percent of Muslims are Sunni, with the remainder mostly Shia.  According to media reports during the year, there are an estimated 150,000 Ahmadi Muslims in the country.  According to government estimates, Christian populations are distributed throughout the country but in greater concentrations in the northeast as well as in the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Goa.  Three northeastern states have majority Christian populations:  Nagaland (90 percent), Mizoram (87 percent), and Meghalaya (70 percent).  Sikhs constitute 54 percent of the population of Punjab.  The Dalai Lama’s office states there are significant resettled Tibetan Buddhist communities in Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Uttarakhand States, and Delhi.  According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and media reports, there are approximately 100,000 Tibetan Buddhists in the country.  According to media reports, approximately 40,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees from Burma live in the country.  UNHCR estimated it received 1,800 requests for refugee registration since August 2021 and projects it will receive 3,500-5,000 refugee registration requests by the end of 2022.

Section II.

Status of government respect for religious freedom.

• Legal Framework

The constitution mandates a secular state and provides for freedom of conscience and the right of all individuals to profess, practice, and propagate religion freely, subject to considerations of public order, morality, and health.  It prohibits government discrimination based on religion, including for employment, as well as religiously based restrictions on access to public or private establishments.  The constitution states that religious groups have the right to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes, manage their own affairs in religious matters, and own, acquire, and administer property.  It prohibits the use of public funds to support any religion.  National and state laws make freedom of religion “subject to public order, morality, and health.”  The constitution stipulates that the state shall endeavor to create a uniform civil code applicable to members of all religions across the country.

Federal law empowers the government to ban religious organizations that provoke intercommunal tensions, are involved in terrorism or sedition, or violate laws governing foreign contributions.

Ten of the 28 states have laws restricting religious conversion:  Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand.  Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh States prohibit religious conversion by “force,” “allurement,” or “fraudulent means” including marriage “with the intention of conversion” and require district authorities to be informed of any intended conversions one month in advance.  Himachal Pradesh and Odisha States maintain similar prohibitions against conversion through “force,” “inducement,” or “fraud,” which would include the provision of any gifts, promises of a better life, free education, and other standard charitable activities, and bar individuals from abetting such conversions.  Odisha State requires individuals wishing to convert to another religion and clergy intending to officiate at a conversion ceremony to submit formal notification to the government.  The notification procedures state that police must ascertain if there are objections to the conversion.  Any person may object.  Four state governments have laws imposing penalties against “forced” religious conversions for the purpose of marriage (Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Madhya Pradesh), although some state high courts have dismissed cases charged under this law.  By year’s end, four other state governments announced plans to enact similar legislative measures:  Haryana, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Assam.  Since March, Madhya Pradesh has required prior permission from a district official to convert to a spouse’s faith in case of interfaith marriage, has permitted the annulment of a fraudulent marriage, and set the penalties for violators at a prison term of up to 10 years without bail and fines up to 100,000 rupees ($1,300).

Violators, including missionaries, are subject to fines and other penalties, such as prison sentences of up to three years in Chhattisgarh and up to four years in Madhya Pradesh if converts are minors, women, or members of Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes.  on freedom of religion in April, Gujarat also imposes sentences of between three and 10 years in prison and fines of up to 50,000 rupees ($670) for forcible or fraudulent religious conversions through marriage.  In Himachal Pradesh, penalties include up to two years’ imprisonment, fines of 25,000 rupees ($340), or both.

The federal penal code criminalizes “promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion” and “acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony,” including acts causing injury or harm to religious groups and their members.  The penal code also prohibits “deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.”  Violations of any of these provisions are punishable by imprisonment for up to three years, a fine, or both.  If the offense is committed at a place of worship, imprisonment may be for up to five years.

There are no requirements for registration of religious groups unless they receive foreign funding, in which case they must register under the FCRA.  Federal law requires NGOs, including religious organizations, registered under the FCRA to maintain audit reports on their accounts and a schedule of their activities and to provide these to state government officials upon request.

Organizations conducting “cultural, economic, educational, religious, or social programs” that receive foreign funding are required to obtain a license under the FCRA.  The central government may also require that licensed organizations obtain prior permission before accepting or transferring foreign funds.  The central government may reject a license application or a request to transfer funds if it judges the recipient to be acting against “harmony between religious, racial, social, linguistic, regional groups, castes, or communities.”

NGOs, including religious organizations, may use 20 percent of their funding for administrative purposes and are prohibited from transferring foreign funds to any other organization or individual.

The constitution states that any legal reference to Hindus is to be construed to include followers of Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism, meaning they are subject to laws regarding Hindus, such as the Hindu Marriage Act.  Subsequent legislation continues to use the word Hindu as a category that includes Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’is, and Jains, but it identifies the groups as separate religions whose followers are included under the legislation.

Federal law provides official minority status to six religious groups:  Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, and Buddhists.  State governments may grant minority status under state law to religious groups that are minorities in a particular region.  Members of recognized minority groups are eligible for government assistance programs.  The constitution states that the government is responsible for protecting religious minorities and enabling them to preserve their culture and religious interests.

Personal status laws establish civil codes for members of certain religious communities in matters of marriage, divorce, adoption, and inheritance based on religion, faith, and culture.  Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Jewish, and Islamic personal status laws are legally recognized and judicially enforceable.  Personal status issues that are not defined for a community in a separate law are covered under Hindu personal status laws.  These laws, however, do not supersede national and state legislation or constitutional provisions.  The government grants autonomy to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Parsi community to define their customary practices.  If law boards or community leaders are not able to resolve disputes, cases are referred to the civil courts.

Interfaith couples and all couples marrying in a civil ceremony are generally required to provide public notice 30 days in advance – including addresses, photographs, and religious affiliation – for public comment, although this requirement varies across states.  Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, or Jains who marry outside their religions face the possibility of losing their property inheritance rights under those communities’ personal status laws.

The law recognizes the registration of Sikh marriages but does not include divorce provisions for Sikhs.  Other Sikh personal status matters fall under Hindu codes.  Under the law, any person, irrespective of religion, may seek a divorce in civil court.

The constitution prohibits religious instruction in government schools; the law permits private religious schools.  The law permits some Muslim, Christian, Sindhi (Hindu refugees), Parsi, and Sikh educational institutions that receive government support to set quotas for students belonging to the religious minority in question.  For example, Aligarh Muslim University must admit at least 50 percent Muslims.  St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and St. Xavier’s in Mumbai must admit at least 50 percent Christians.

Twenty-five of the 28 states apply partial to full restrictions on bovine slaughter.  Penalties vary among states and may vary based on whether the animal is a cow, calf, bull, or ox.  The ban mostly affects Muslims and members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes that traditionally consume beef.  In most of the states where bovine slaughter is banned, penalties include imprisonment for six months to two years and a fine of 1,000 to 10,000 rupees ($13-$130).  Since August, when the Assam state government enacted new legislation, penalties have included minimum imprisonment of three years or a fine between 300,000 and 500,000 rupees ($4,000-$6,700) or both, without being eligible for bail prior to trial, for slaughtering, consuming, or transporting cattle.  Since February, the slaughter of all cattle, except for buffalo older than age 13, has been illegal in Karnataka, with violators subject to imprisonment of between three and seven years and penalties between 500,000 and 1,000,000 rupees ($6,700-$13,500).  Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir penalize cow slaughter with imprisonment of two to 10 years.  Gujarat state law mandates a minimum 10-year sentence and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for killing cows, selling beef, and illegally transporting cows or beef.

One state, Madhya Pradesh, imposes fines of 25,000 to 50,000 rupees ($340-$670) and prison sentences of six months to three years for “cow vigilantism,” i.e., committing violence in the name of protecting cows.  This is the only law of its kind in the country.

The National Commission for Minorities, which includes representatives from the six designated religious minorities and the National Human Rights Commission, investigates allegations of religious discrimination.  The Ministry of Minority Affairs may also conduct investigations.  These agencies have no enforcement powers but conduct investigations based on written complaints of criminal or civil violations and submit findings to law enforcement agencies.  Eighteen of the country’s 28 states and the National Capital Territory of Delhi have state minorities commissions, which also investigate allegations of religious discrimination.

The constitution establishes the legal basis for preferential public benefit programs for Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe communities and members of the “Other Backward Classes,” a category for groups deemed to be socially and educationally disadvantaged.  The constitution specifies only Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists are eligible to be deemed members of a Scheduled Caste.  As a result, Christians and Muslims qualify for benefits if deemed to be members of “backward” classes due to their social and economic status.

The government requires foreign missionaries to obtain a missionary visa.

The country is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

• Government Practices

On September 26, a 14-year-old Christian boy in the Gaya District of Bihar died at a hospital in Patna after perpetrators threw acid on him, according to media reports.  The family members said police did not register a complaint despite threats to the family by Hindu groups and local individuals.  The boy’s father, Vakil Ravidas, had adopted Christianity with his family five years earlier and, according to family members, local community members threatened and warned them against attending church.  Police told media the boy died by self-immolation due to a familial dispute, a claim the victim’s family denied.  Media reported the family signed a consent letter declaring they did not want to pursue the matter with police or the courts.

According to media reports, two Muslim men from Jamshedpur in Jharkhand stated that during an interrogation on August 26 police used anti-Muslim slurs, forced them to strip naked at a city police station, and pressured them to have sexual intercourse with each other.  When they refused, they said they were “beaten and threatened to be sent to Afghanistan.”  Police released them the same day.  The men said they were called to the police station for questioning in connection with an alleged kidnapping case involving a Muslim man and a Hindu woman who had eloped.  They said seven police personnel, including the station officer in charge, sexually abused them.  The officer in charge denied the allegation.  On August 27, the two men — Mohammad Arzoo and Mohammad Aurangzeb — filed a complaint with Jamshedpur police that they were tortured by seven police personnel.  According to a media report, no action was taken against the accused police officers by year’s end.

The government did not release data on communal violence during the year.  Government data from 2020 reported a large increase in communal violence compared to 2019, largely due to the February 2020 violence and protests following passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).  The CAA provides an expedited path to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who had entered the country on or before December 31, 2014.  Similarly situated Muslims, Jews, members of other faiths, and atheists from these three countries were not included.  The government argued the law was necessary to provide protections for religious minorities from those countries.

The National Crimes Record Bureau reported 857 instances of communal violence in 2020 compared to 438 in 2019.  According to both media and the Crime in India for 2020 report, released in September, police arrested 1818 individuals throughout 2020 for the protests in Northeast Delhi.  The report said that 53 persons including two security personnel were killed in the protests, and 581 individuals, including 108 police personnel, were injured.  Of those killed, 35 were Muslim and 18 Hindu.  Of those arrested, 956 were Muslim and 868 Hindu.  By the end of the year, 1204 individuals remained in jail, 544 individuals had been released on bail, various courts in Delhi were processing 250 outstanding criminal complaints, and Delhi police were investigating an additional 350 criminal complaints related to the riots.  Those numbers continued to fluctuate due to the ongoing hearings.  The first conviction was a Hindu male in December for setting a Muslim resident’s house on fire as part of a mob.

The Crime in India for 2020 report said the riots resulted from the Muslim community’s “feeling of discrimination” due to the NRC and the CAA, and certain groups with “vested interests capitalized on this feeling and further aroused the sentiments of this community against the central government.”  The Assam State government published its NRC in 2018 to define citizenship, and any Assamese resident who did not appear on the list would need to go before the Foreigners’ Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body, which would declare them a foreigner or citizen.  An estimated one-third of Assam’s 33 million residents are Muslim.  The Muslim community and media expressed concern that the NRC, a proposed list of all citizens being implemented only in the state of Assam, coupled with the national CAA, could result in Muslims being determined to be “illegal immigrants” and detained or deported.  None had been deported by the end of the year.

Opposition parties and civil society members continued to criticize the probe into the riot cases and accused Delhi police of targeting minorities, a charge Delhi police and the national Home Ministry (responsible for police oversight) denied.  In a press conference on September 13, several prominent civil society members and activists said Delhi police were responsible for “derailing” the probe and demanded release of individuals arrested for the rioting or protesting against the CAA.  Various courts also criticized the Delhi police for inadequate investigation of the riots, which Muslim academics, human rights activists, former police officers, and journalists said reflected police anti-Muslim bias, while deflecting the investigation away from those responsible.  A lower court in Delhi imposed a fine of 25,000 rupees ($340) on the Delhi police for “callous” investigation into the case of one man who said police shot him in the eye during the riots.  The judge said the police had “miserably failed” their duty in that case.  The Delhi High Court stayed the fine but upheld the lower court judge’s criticism of the riot investigation.  Critical court rulings led to the Delhi police setting up a Special Investigation Cell to monitor progress of the Delhi riots investigation.

During the year, Delhi courts released some of those arrested during the 2020 riots.  In July, for example, a court dropped charges against a Hindu man who was held for over a year in pretrial custody after being accused of joining a mob that burned and looted a shop the mob thought was Muslim-owned, according to media reports.

The case against activist and former Jawaharlal Nehru University student Umar Khalid, a Muslim, who told a court in 2020 he had spent time in solitary confinement after being arrested during the riots, remained ongoing at year’s end and he remained in custody.  Media reported that during a bail hearing, Khalid’s lawyer argued the police officer who originally filed charges against his client had been influenced by the communal tension during the riots and the charges were fabricated.  In September, prominent civil society groups demanded Khalid’s release, describing him a “defender of human rights” and a “peace activist.”

By year’s end, the government had not enacted rules to implement the CAA, and the Supreme Court had not heard any of the more than 100 legal challenges to the act.

Christians and Muslims were charged during the year under laws restricting conversions, and some state governments announced plans to strengthen existing legislation or develop new legislation.

Media reported Madhya Pradesh police filed 21 cases against 47 individuals and arrested 15 Muslims and six Christians between March and June for violations of the state’s law restricting conversions.  In 15 of the 21 cases, rape and molestation charges were added.

On March 8, a law went into effect in Madhya Pradesh that increased the penalties for forced religious conversion through marriage or any other fraudulent means.  The law requires prior notice to a district official, to which any person may object, to convert to the spouse’s faith.  The law also permits the annulment of a fraudulent marriage and increases the penalty for violators from a two-year prison term with bail possible to a term of up to 10 years without bail and fines that can exceed 100,000 rupees ($1,300).  Legal expert Sanjay Hegde said the state laws against conversion let the mobs have the final say.  “If you are born in a religion, you can’t change your religion, without the State’s consent,” said Hegde.  “These laws try to control women, rather than marriage, and assume that the women don’t have any agency of their own,” Hegde added.

According to the Christian NGO International Christian Concern (ICC), on January 11, Azad Prem Singh, a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad Hindu nationalist group, sent a memorandum to the Jhabua District administrative head in Madhya Pradesh demanding a ban of all churches in tribal areas.  Singh said Christians were fraudulently mass converting individuals to Christianity.  “In the past 70 years, Christian missionaries have converted gullible indigenous people to Christianity and built churches specifically on protected tribal land,” Singh said.  “All the illegally built churches should be shut down immediately and action should be taken against all priests and pastors involved in the process.”  In the memorandum, Singh gave the local government 30 days to meet his demands and threatened to use violence if they were not met.  The state government did not agree to Singh’s demand to ban all churches in tribal areas.  The police continued to arrest Christians on charges of forced or induced conversion in the region, according to Christian community members.  On December 25, police arrested three persons, including a Catholic priest and a Protestant pastor, at Bicholi village in Jhabua District for allegedly luring tribal villagers into Christianity by offering free education and treatment in missionary-run schools and the hospital, media reported.  In September, the Christian community in Jhabua wrote to the district authorities and President Ram Nath Kovind complaining of attacks and false accusations by the various Hindu nationalist affiliates of the BJP and the Hindu nationalist organization RSS.

In Uttar Pradesh, between November 2020 and November 2021, police filed 148 cases against 359 persons for violating laws restricting conversion.  According to state police records, the police completed investigations in 113 cases and filed charges in 90, but media reported that no case had been decided by the courts in Uttar Pradesh by year’s end.  Media reported that 72 of the 359 had charges dropped against them for lack of evidence.  According to a faith-based NGO, between June and September, at least 71 Christian leaders were arrested in Uttar Pradesh after Hindu nationalists accused them of carrying out illegal conversions.

In June, the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested Muslim clerics Mohammad Umar Gautam and Mufti Qazi Jahagir Alam Qasmi for performing illegal conversions.  Police told media the two had been running a “huge conversion racket.”  The ATS later arrested eight more individuals whom police said were performing conversions at the Islamic Dawah Centre by offering “education, marriage, and jobs” to poor people.  According to media reports, eight of those arrested, including the two clerics, were charged in September with “illegal conversions” and “waging war against India.”

On October 7, the Uttar Pradesh ATS arrested a Muslim man in connection with his activities as a member of a WhatsApp group that encouraged individuals to convert to Islam.  ATS told media that the man had been involved in illegal conversion activities since 2016 and that he and others “spread religious hatred” by inducing people to convert to Islam.

On October 10, seven Protestant pastors in Mau District in Uttar Pradesh were taken into judicial custody pending a police investigation after being arrested on charges of unlawful religious conversions.

In March, Uttar Pradesh police detained two nuns and two postulants from the Sacred Heart convent of the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala after Hindu activists riding with them on a passenger train said the nuns were forcibly converting the postulants to Christianity, according to media reports.  According to the Evangelical Fellowship of India’s (EFI) report covering January-June, police immediately arrested the four and took them to the local police station followed by a crowd of 150 “religious radicals.”  The police released the four after five hours of questioning and did not press charges.  In a statement, the Church said the four continued their journey with police protection.

In January, according to the EFI report, police in Malkangiri District of Odisha arrested Raja Kartami for violating the state’s conversion restriction laws following a complaint from his Hindu in-laws that he was forcing his wife to become a Christian.  As of year’s end, Kartami was in jail awaiting trial.

In August, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Khattar announced that the state would consider drafting legislation to stop forced religious conversions in response to incidents of “love jihad” (a derogatory term referring to Muslim men seeking to marry women from other faiths to convert them to Islam).  Such legislation had not been introduced by year’s end.

On September 21, Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanendra announced that his government would propose legislation to prevent forced religious conversions in the state.  Following this announcement, a delegation of Karnataka-based Catholic bishops, led by Archbishop of Bengaluru Peter Machado, met with state Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai to discuss the proposed legislation.  The delegation expressed concern, should the legislation become law, about the potential misuse of the law to falsely accuse the Christian community of engaging in forced conversions.  On December 23, the Karnataka State Legislative Assembly passed the “anti-unlawful conversion bill,” which would prohibit forced religious conversion in the state.  At year’s end, the bill was pending approval by the State Legislative Council.

In October, the Uttarakhand government stated it intended to amend existing law and empower police to register cases based on allegations of forced religious conversion.  The existing state law requires such allegations to be handled directly by the courts.  Madan Kaushik, the BJP’s president in Uttarakhand, told media in October that “Our party’s line is clear that no conversion will be tolerated.”  A civil rights attorney in the state expressed concern that such a change in the law could lead to abuse.  She said, “A citizen is somewhat protected if the court hears the complaint and proceeds with the matter.  However, if the state police are given the power to register FIRs [in forced conversion cases], there is no protection from misuse.”

In February, the Supreme Court declined to hear petitions from NGOs and activists challenging the constitutionality of the conversion restriction laws in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, deferring the challenges first to the respective state high courts.

On June 21, Gujarat police arrested a Muslim man for forcibly marrying a Hindu woman.  Police said the man was in violation of the state’s freedom of religion law, which had been amended in April to increase penalties for forced marriages.  According to media reports, after the victim’s mother filed a missing person complaint, Gujarat police opened an investigation and determined that the man, who was already married, kidnapped the woman and forced her to marry him.  Media also reported that the woman said the man raped her and threatened to harm her family if she did not marry.  The Muslim man was charged with kidnapping, rape, and criminal intimidation.  Investigation on the case continued at the end of the year.

On April 1, Gujarat government amended legislation enacted in 2003 on freedom of religion to explicitly prohibit the use of fraudulent marriage to convert partners of different religions.  The law’s preamble stated the amendment aimed to reduce the “emerging trend” of coerced religious conversion of women.  On August 19, the Gujarat High Court suspended seven provisions of the state’s amended freedom of religion law, stating an interfaith marriage by itself cannot be treated as a forceful or “unlawful conversion by deceit or allurement.”  On August 26, the state government asked that the suspension of those provisions be annulled; the High Court rejected the request.  On December 14, the Gujarat government challenged the stay in the Supreme Court; there was no ruling by the end of the year.

On October 13, the Gujarat High Court granted bail to all seven individuals arrested in the state’s first case under the amended freedom of religion law.  The case involved a Hindu woman who filed forced conversion charges against her Muslim husband, five of his Muslim family members, and the officiant at their wedding; all of whom were arrested on June 18.  On August 5, the woman filed a petition in the Gujarat High Court to retract her complaint, stating the police had “twisted” her complaint into a case of forced religious conversion, rape, and other charges.  According to the police report, her Muslim husband had claimed to be Christian before their wedding and, once they were married, the family pressured the wife to convert to Islam.  Police dropped the case after the woman retracted her complaint.

In September, media reported the MHA had suspended the FCRA licenses of six NGOs, including two Christian evangelical groups and one Islamic charity in Kerala, citing FCRA violations.  In December, the MHA stated that FCRA licenses of 5,789 NGOs had lapsed because they did not apply for renewal in time.  Media reported that hundreds of these NGOs were faith-based.  The MHA also stated that it had denied FCRA renewal to 179 NGOs during the year, including Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.  The MHA reversed the denial several weeks later.  The original MHA announcement of the action cited unnamed “adverse inputs” against the NGO.  Some media reports noted that the government decision came days after police filed a complaint against the director of a children’s home run by the Missionaries of Charity in Gujarat state for attempting to convert young girls to Christianity although the Ministry of Home Affairs did not attribute a linkage between the two events.

NGOs, including faith-based organizations, continued to criticize the requirements of the FCRA as constraining civil society and religious organizations.  Opponents of the FCRA amendments called the requirements onerous and a barrier to organizations continuing to work in the country.  The government continued to say the FCRA law strengthened oversight and accountability of foreign NGO funding in the country.

In a July virtual session hosted by the U.S.-based nonprofit Indian American Muslim Council on Religious Freedom in India, Amnesty International USA said the organization was forced to halt all operations in the country in 2020 because of the FCRA requirements.  The Amnesty representative said the FCRA requirements were one example of “the Indian government activating their overall governmental framework” to crush opportunities for upholding religious freedom.

In March, the MHA stated 22,678 NGOs had been granted registration under the FCRA during the last five years.  The government also reported the registrations of 2,742 NGOs had been revoked from 2018 to 2020 for noncompliance, the most recent data available.

In its annual report, international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the government adopted laws and policies that discriminated against religious minorities, especially Muslims.  HRW also said some BJP leaders vilified Muslims and police failed to act against some BJP supporters who committed violence, a combination that emboldened some Hindu nationalist groups to attack Muslims and government critics with impunity.

On January 4, police officials in Karnataka’s Hassan District banned a Christian prayer service, according to media reports.  A senior police officer asked the worshippers, who included 50 individuals from 15 families, to show proof they were Christians; he later accused them of having been converted to Christianity and misrepresenting their religion by claiming they had been Christian from birth.  Police did not charge the families and warned the worshippers against conducting prayer gatherings without permission.

According to ICC, police shut down a house church in Dharmapuri, Telangana on February 28 following a complaint from a local Hindu group, which had also disrupted the church service there.  The NGO stated that the police invoked a 2007 Andhra Pradesh state law, later adopted by the state of Telangana, to close down the church because Dharmapuri is designated by the law as a “temple town.”  The pastor told ICC he had been leading worship in his home for five years without problems.  While the town of approximately 78,000 persons is overwhelmingly Hindu, there are more than 300 Christians and more than 2,000 Muslims living there.

On July 24, Tamil Nadu police arrested Father George Ponnaiah, a Catholic priest based in Nagercoil, south Tamil Nadu, for alleged hate speech against Hindu gods, the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, and the state government in Tamil Nadu.  Ponnaiah was in custody for 16 days.  At year’s end, Ponnaiah was released on bail, awaiting trial.  If convicted, he could face a prison term up to five years.  Archbishop of Madurai Antony Pappusamy publicly criticized Ponnaiah for his statements.

On January 1, police in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, arrested stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqi and five associates after Eklavya Gaur, the son of state Member of Legislative Assembly Malini Gaur and the head of a local Hindu nationalist group, filed a police complaint stating he overheard the comedian and his associates using religiously offensive language during rehearsal.  On February 6, Indore prison authorities released Faruqi after the Supreme Court granted him bail.  The Madhya Pradesh High Court later granted bail to Faruqui’s five associates.

On January 14, Andhra Pradesh police arrested nondenominational Christian pastor Praveen Chakravarthi for “disturbing communal harmony” after one of his videos from 2013 circulated on social media.  In the video, in a conversation with the head of a U.S.-based NGO, Chakravarthi discussed his evangelism in the country.  After his arrest, Chakravarthi’s bank accounts were frozen.  He was later released on bail, and no further action was reported by the end of the year.

On August 19, Hyderabad police arrested Pastor Honey Johnson from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh on the charge of making derogatory remarks against Hinduism and Hindu deities on his YouTube channel.  Members of his church held protests in Visakhapatnam demanding his release, and he was subsequently released on bail.

On July 20, the Supreme Court expressed concern about the Kerala government’s relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions during Eid al-Adha celebrations July 18-20.  In a ruling, the court said it could not block the state government’s actions after the fact, but it said, “The Kerala government failed to protect the fundamental rights of life and health of the people.”  The court said it would take action against the Kerala government if the loosened restrictions led to additional spread of COVID-19, but it took no further action on this issue by year’s end.  Earlier in July, the Supreme Court had cancelled the annual Hindu Kanwar Yatra festival in Uttar Pradesh due to a surge in COVID-19 cases there.  In April, activists had asked the government to cancel the Hindu Kumbh Mela festival for COVID-19 reasons, but the government declined to do so.  Also in April, the Supreme Court approved the petition of Muslim leaders to open the Nizzamuddin Mosque in New Delhi for Ramadan services.  Advocates for the mosque cited the Kumbh Mela celebrations in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, which were permitted, as well as at the Hindu temple dedicated to Hanuman in Karol Bagh, Delhi, which remained open despite COVID-19 restrictions, to support their request to reopen.

In June and July, residents of the predominantly Muslim Union Territory of Lakshadweep protested reforms proposed by Administrator Praful Khoda Patel in December 2020.  The reforms included banning cow slaughter and beef sales on the islands, removing beef and meat (except fish and eggs) from meals in schools, closing government-run dairy farms, permitting liquor sales, imposing a law allowing preventive detention, and disqualifying residents with more than two children from running in local elections.  Media reported the local residents considered the proposed reforms as anti-Muslim, and primarily affected Muslim families.  Protesters said Patel had been trying to transform the island culturally and demographically.  The Lakshadweep administration said the reforms were necessary to develop Lakshadweep as a global tourist destination like the Maldives.

NGOs, including faith-based organizations, continued to criticize the requirements of the FCRA as constraining civil society and religious organizations.  According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, 5,789 NGOs lost their FCRA licenses because they did not file for their renewal.  Some opposition political parties and faith-based NGOs described the regulations as “onerous” and difficult to comply with, making registration and renewal difficult.  The government continued to say the FCRA law strengthened oversight and accountability of foreign NGO funding in the country.

In October, media reported Hindu protesters in Haryana said Muslims had been using public property to conduct daily prayers for four weeks without authorization from local authorities.  The Muslim worshippers, who numbered 200 according to the media, had been praying outside in an area not designated for prayer.  The protestors said they would continue to “protest peacefully” until the police took action.  Haryana Chief Minister Khattar stated prayer in public spaces would be prohibited.  Muslim groups representing the worshippers stated they were offering prayers at places designated by Haryana government officials.  On December 16, Muslim former MP Mohammed Adeeb filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking action against Haryana government officials for not following directions to allow Muslims to offer prayers at designated public spaces.  The Supreme Court had not ruled on the matter at year’s end.

The government closed the 600-year-old Jamia Mosque, which serves the largest Muslim congregation in Jammu and Kashmir, for 45 of the 52 Fridays during the year.  According to media reports, the chief imam of Jamia Mosque remained in home detention during closure of the mosque.  Some other mosques in the region closed by the government in August 2019 when it abrogated Article 370 (state status) in Jammu and Kashmir were allowed to reopen during the year.  Since 2019, the government has continued to close mosques in the area periodically, sometimes for long intervals.

In May, authorities in Uttar Pradesh bulldozed a 100-year-old mosque in Barabanki on the grounds that it was an illegal structure.  The destruction followed a March 15 order from the state government to cease worship in the mosque so it could be demolished.  The government also said it blocked traffic.  Muslim leaders said the destruction violated a court order suspending destruction of all “illegal” structures until the end of May and said they would take the case to the Supreme Court.  The government then tried to block access to the mosque by building a wall, which according to media led to public protests in which activist Syed Farooq Ahmad stated at least 30 persons were arrested and others were beaten.  Two days after authorities demolished the mosque, the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh filed a petition in the Allahabad High Court demanding the government reconstruct the mosque.  The court had not ruled on the matter at the end of the year.

On September 6, opposition legislative assembly members from the BJP in Jharkhand protested the state government decision to offer a room in the state assembly building for Muslims to pray.  Media reported that BJP legislators loudly disrupted the assembly session that day with Hindu chants and instruments, calling for the prayer room decision to be rescinded or a separate Hindu prayer room also be designated in the building.  In a media interview, BJP national vice-president Raghubar Das said that the [Muslim] members of the state assembly from the Jharkhand government “openly support the Taliban.  A separate Namaz Hallim [Muslim prayer room] in the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly is a result of this ideology.  Otherwise, any person who believes in Indian democracy would not do such an act.”

In January, two residents of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, filed a petition in the Allahabad High Court challenging the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court’s September 2020 acquittal of all 32 persons, including BJP politicians, charged in the 1992 demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya.

In May, the Assam government implemented the 2020 Assam Repealing Bill, which abolished the 1995 Assam Madrassa Education (Provincialization) Act and 2018 Assam Madrassa Education (Provincialization of Services of Employees and Re-Organization of Madrassa Educational Institutions) Act.  Implementation of the act resulted in removal of the theological content from the curriculum at 700 state-run madrassahs and converted them into regular public schools.  Theological content was also removed from the state-run Sanskrit schools, but analysts indicated that madrassahs were impacted in greater numbers.  Privately-run madrassahs and Sanskrit schools were not impacted by the state government measure.

On October 19, 2020, the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh ruled that the state’s Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act “was being misused against innocent persons” and granted bail to a Muslim arrested under the act.  Uttar Pradesh police had filed charges in 1,716 cases of cow slaughter and made more than 4,000 arrests under the act as of August.  According to Uttar Pradesh State government data, the National Security Act (NSA) was also invoked in some cow slaughter cases; observers said this was to make the charges more serious.  Persons detained under the NSA could be held up to 12 months without formal charges.  A media investigation revealed that between January 2018 and December 2020, the Allahabad High Court had annulled detention orders and freed those arrested under the NSA in 94 of 120 cases it heard under the Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act in Uttar Pradesh.

Assam (in August) and Karnataka (in February) enacted legislation imposing strict penalties for killing cattle, bringing the total states with similar restrictions to 25 (of 28).  Opposition members of the Assam legislative assembly, including from Muslim parties, protested that state’s new legislation.  Faith-based organizations said the law could negatively affect the large Christian and tribal populations in the state that consumed beef.  Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stated the law would promote harmony between Hindus and Muslims in the state, while some opposition party members said that it could stoke religious tensions, adversely affect livelihoods, and be detrimental to trade and food habits in the region.  Media reported that the new law in Karnataka would give police in the state the power to search and seize property based only on suspicion of violation of the law.

In September, the Gau Sewa Commission, a Punjabi organization dedicated to the preservation and welfare of cows, submitted a petition to the Governor of Punjab demanding the death penalty be instituted for cow slaughter.

In October, the Madras High Court ruled that displays of a Christian cross and other religious symbols and practices could not be cited as reasons to revoke Scheduled Caste (SC) community certificates, which are used by members of designated lower castes in the Hindu hierarchy to obtain government benefits.  The ruling was in response to an appeal by a Hindu medical doctor whose SC community certificate was revoked in 2013 because she married a Christian and the couple raised their children in the Christian faith.  The court ordered the restoration of her SC community certificate in October.

In February, Pratap Simha, a BJP MP, called for denying benefits of government affirmative action programs to individuals who converted to Christianity.  The MP made the remarks while attending a District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committee meeting on February 24.  The Bengaluru-based Christian Political Leaders Forum protested the remarks.

On April 6, the Gujarat High Court blocked the arrest of a Parsi man accused by a Hindu neighbor of selling land to a Muslim in 2020 in violation of the Gujarat Disturbed Areas Act, which mandates that buyers and sellers of different religions obtain permission for property transactions in specific neighborhoods.  The Hindu neighbor also said that the buyer concealed his religion and forged documents to evade provisions of the act.  There was no update by the end of the year.

In September, the government of the Muslim-majority Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir launched a program to address the grievances of migrants from the region, a majority of whom were Hindu.  Under this program, migrants who were forcibly displaced from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s could reclaim their properties in Kashmir.  According to civil society reports, members of the Hindu Pandit caste may have sold land under duress and the central government measure was a means to address the displacement in the 1990s.  In March, the national government informed the parliament that 44,167 Kashmiri migrant families, including 39,782 Hindu families, had registered with a government-appointed Relief Office, and 3,800 Kashmiri migrants had returned to the Kashmir Valley in the last six years to take up government jobs under a special program announced by the Prime Minister in 2015 for infrastructure development and economic prosperity in Jammu and Kashmir.  According to media reports, mostly Hindus applied for those jobs.  Since the state status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked in August 2019, 520 migrants had returned and another 2000 migrant candidates were likely to return during the year and in 2022, the government stated.

On August 10, thousands of Dalit Christians and Muslims observed the 71st anniversary of a 1950 petition still pending before the Supreme Court to maintain Scheduled Caste benefits such as quotas in government jobs and education.  The petition seeks to reverse a government order which limited such benefits to Hindu Dalits.  A Dalit Christian lawyer, Franklin Caesar Thomas, who has been arguing the case in the Supreme Court for 16 years, told media that Dalit Christians and Muslims continued to face caste discrimination because of their adopted faiths since they were not formally recognized as Scheduled Castes.  According to the National Council of Churches in India, approximately 70 percent of Christians in India belonged to Scheduled Castes before they converted.  A seven-member panel of Supreme Court judges formed in 2020 to hear the petition had not ruled on the matter by the end of the year.

In April, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee (All India Trinamool Congress Party) made a public appeal to Muslims to vote for her party in West Bengal elections.  Such a direct appeal from a sitting government official to voters from a particular religious group is prohibited in the constitution.  The national Election Commission reprimanded her for violating the election code of conduct.

On December 24, Asaduddin Owaisi, an MP and president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), a predominantly Muslim political party, implied in remarks to parliament that Hindus would face consequences when Prime Minister Modi and Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath, both BJP, left office.  Police filed a FIR against Owaisi for communal hate speech.  The leader later clarified that he was speaking in the context of past police “atrocities against innocent Muslims” in Uttar Pradesh and was not making a threat.

In February, ahead of elections in Assam, state Health, Education, and Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma (BJP) told media that his party did not need or want the votes of Bengali-origin Muslims because they were “openly challenging Assamese culture and language and the composite Indian culture.”

While addressing Church members on September 9, Catholic Bishop Mar Joseph Kalarangatt of the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala said Muslims were using the practices of “love jihad and narcotics jihad” to “destroy” non-Muslims.  Kalarangatt said, “In a democratic country like ours, jihadis have realized that they cannot destroy other communities by using arms.  The jihadis are using other weapons which cannot be identified easily by others.  In the perspective of jihadis, non-Muslims have to be annihilated.  When the agenda is spreading religion and eradication of non-Muslims, the ways for attaining that agenda get manifested in different manners.  The love jihad and narcotic jihad are two such ways.”  According to media reports, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said his government would not take action against the bishop.

In February, the Maharashtra state government petitioned the Supreme Court to dismiss pleas seeking a national-level CBI inquiry into the April 2020 killing of three Hindu monks by a crowd in Palghar.  The state government said it had already disciplined 18 police officials for their failure to control the crowd in that incident.  On January 16, a local court granted bail to 89 of the 201 arrested in the case.  The Supreme Court asked the Maharashtra government to submit a second charge sheet filed in the case by Maharashtra police but did not rule on the petition seeking a CBI investigation before year’s end.  In the 2020 incident, a mob pulled the three monks from a police vehicle and killed them, alleging that they were child kidnappers.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on September 12 publicly stated that earlier governments in Uttar Pradesh had favored Muslim constituents in benefits distribution.

In July, Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the RSS, which is commonly considered to be the ideological parent to India’s ruling party BJP, publicly stated that Hindus and Muslims in India had the same DNA and should not be differentiated by religion.  “There can never be any dominance of either Hindus or Muslims (in the country); there can only be the dominance of Indians,” Bhagwat said, adding that members of the Muslim community should not be afraid that Islam is in danger in India.  He also said that killing non-Hindus for cow slaughter was an act against Hinduism.

Section III.

Status of societal respect for religious freedom.

On May 17, a Hindu group in the Mewat region of Haryana stopped the car in which Muslim Asif Khan was riding, verbally abused Khan and the other passengers, yelled “kill Muslims,” forced Khan to chant Hindu prayers and killed him when he tried to escape, according to media reporting.  Police opened an investigation but made no arrests by the year’s end.

On June 20, media reported that a Hindu mob killed four Muslim men in the Khowai District of Tripura on suspicion of being cattle thieves.  According to media, the men were killed when they were intercepted at Maharanijur transporting five cows in a truck.  Police arrested three persons in connection with the killing and two others for spreading communal hatred on social media.  There were no further developments in this case reported by year’s end.

On June 21, Muslim Aijaz Dar was beaten to death in Rajouri District of Jammu and Kashmir.  He was returning home after buying a buffalo when suspected cow vigilantes attacked him with stones and sticks, according to media reports.  Police arrested five suspects, but there were no further developments reported by year’s end.

According to media reports, on September 28, Muslim Arbaaz Aftab Mullah was decapitated in Khanapur village in the Belgavi District of Karnataka due to his relationship with a Hindu woman.  Police arrested 10 individuals, including members of the Hindu organization Sri Rama Sene, described as radical, the woman’s parents, and the man hired to kill Mullah.  There were no further developments by year’s end.

On April 3, police in Mangaluru, Karnataka arrested four Hindu activists and members of the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal who were accused of stabbing to death a Muslim man traveling with a Hindu woman.  The woman who filed the police complaint against the assailants stated the victim was her friend for many years and was accompanying her on a bus to a job interview when he was killed.  She said the assailants stopped the bus, then attacked her and the other victim.  After police made the arrests, local Bajrang Dal members reportedly defended the attack claiming that they wanted to save the woman from “falling prey to love jihad.”  One local Bajrang Dal leader told media, “Our responsibility is to rescue girls from our community.”

According to EFI, a group of Hindus killed Pastor Alok Rajhans in the Balangir District of Odisha on May 20.  Police opened a case and arrested two suspects, but they were released shortly thereafter, according to Irish NGO Church in Chains.

On May 20, according to ICC, a group of Hindu nationalists attacked the family of Pastor Ramesh Bumbariya at his home in the Bansawra District in Rajasthan, killing the pastor’s father and beating the pastor and other family members when they refused to renounce their Christian faith.  The police arrested seven persons for the killing and the investigation continued at year’s end, according to Church in Chains.

Terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiyaaba and Hizbul Mujahideen killed several civilians and migrant laborers belonging to the minority Hindu and Sikh communities in the Muslim-majority Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir during the year.  In October, 11 civilians including two schoolteachers – Supinder Kour and Deepak Chand – were killed in targeted attacks.  Kour, a Sikh, and Chand, a Hindu, were killed on October 7 after terrorists forcefully entered their school in Srinagar and identified them as belonging to minority communities.  On October 5, local businessman Makhan Lal Bindroo, a member of the Hindu Pandit caste, was fatally shot at his pharmaceutical shop.  According to media reports, the killings caused widespread fear among Hindus and Sikhs in the Kashmir valley, leading hundreds to depart Jammu and Kashmir.

On October 15, Sikh farm laborer Lakhbir Singh was killed, and his mutilated body tied to a barricade.  In several videos released on social media, Nihang Sikhs claimed responsibility for the killing, saying Singh insulted the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book.  Police arrested four members of the Nihang Sikh community and charged them with murder.

On December 19, an unidentified man was reportedly beaten to death by a group of Sikhs at a gurudwara (temple) in Kapurthala, Punjab, on suspicion that he had insulted the Nishan Sahib, the Sikh flag.  Police and Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi stated that there was no evidence that the victim had committed sacrilege.  Police arrested gurudwara caretaker Amarjit Singh on charges of murder.

On September 23, two Muslim men in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, were beaten for carrying meat in their vehicle.  According to media reports, members of a cow-vigilante group attacked the two and posted video of the assault on social media.  The attackers claimed the Muslim men were carrying beef in violation of the state’s anti-cow slaughter law and the state government’s order banning the sale and transport of any meat in Mathura.  Police arrested the victims under the anti-cow slaughter law and violation of the meat ban order.  None of the attackers were arrested.  A Mathura council member said the two lacked the permit and refrigerator required to transport perishable goods such as meat.  He also said the two men had been jailed.  There was no further information available on the case by year’s end.

In September, the BBC reported views from freelance journalists and political opposition members that the number of attacks against the country’s Muslim community had increased in recent years as well as their views that the government often declined to condemn such attacks.

According to UCF, the number of violent attacks against Christians in the country rose to 486 during the year, from 279 in 2020.  According to UCF, most of the incidents were reported in states ruled by the BJP and included attacks on pastors, disruptions of Christmas celebrations, and vandalism.  A joint report entitled Christians under Attack in India , drafted by NGOs United Against Hate, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, and the UCF, noted that more than 500 incidents of violence against Christians were reported to the UCF hotline during the year.  The report stated that 333 of 486 incidents were recorded in Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka States.  The report stated that only 34 FIRs were filed against the perpetrators through the year.  At the end of the year, 19 cases were pending against Christians in nine states under the conversion restriction laws, although no Christian had been convicted in the country for illegal religious conversion during the year, according to the report.

In a December New York Times article, Hindu nationalist Dilip Chouhan, who was recorded on video breaking into a church in Madhya Pradesh with a gun strapped to his back, said that senior police officials told him authorities would not pursue charges against him.  Instead, several local pastors were arrested on charges of illegal conversions.  Chouhan said his organization has more than 5000 members.  BJP youth leader Gaurave Tiwari said opposing forced conversion was an important issue for the party.  In Chhattisgarh State, BJP youth conducted several anti-Christian marches.  In September, a group of young BJP workers from the same chapter entered a Chhattisgarh police station, hurled shoes at two pastors and beat them up, reportedly in front of police officers.  Rahul Rao, an office holder in the BJP youth cell, was charged with assault by police and released on bail.  The article also quoted a leaked letter from a top police official in Chhattisgarh ordering police to “keep a constant vigil on the activities of Christian missionaries.”  Media reported the Chhattisgarh government transferred the senior police official from the station hours after the incident.  The investigation continued at the end of the year.

On September 18, media reported police arrested Christian pastor Ravi Gupta from Bihar’s Supaul District was arrested for converting 30 Hindu families to Christianity in his native village.  Members of Vishna Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu nationalist organization affiliated with the RSS, detained Gupta and handed him over to police.  There were no further developments on this case reported by year’s end.

On September 21, according to media reports, a village council in Mangapat Sirsai in the West Singhbhum District of Jharkhand ostracized three tribal families who converted to Christianity.  In the presence of local police officials, the council reportedly asked the families to convert back to the local tribal Sarna religion and subsequently barred them from free movement inside the village when they refused to do so.  According to the district president, the council took the action to counter the influence of Christian missionaries, whom he said had been quite active in the area, luring tribe members with land and money to convert them.

On June 30, approximately 20 members of the Hindu organization Bajrang Dal allegedly attacked Pastor Hemant Meher in the Jajpur District of Odisha, according to a July 10 report from ICC.  The report said the group filmed the incident and beat the pastor before handing him over to the police and saying he had been forcibly converting people to Christianity.  According to ICC, police released Meher without charge, urging him to file a complaint against his assailants.  ICC said Bajarang Dal members attacked Meher again on July 1, forcing him to flee the area.

In April, media reported that a Muslim man posed as a Hindu to marry a Hindu woman in the Fatehabad District of Haryana.  The man allegedly revealed his religious identity seven years into the marriage and attempted to forcibly convert her to Islam.  When his wife refused, he forced her and their child out of their home.  She pressed the local police to take action.  Initially they took no action, but later, according to media reports, police opened an investigation and promised to take action against the police personnel who refused to register her original complaint.  There was no further action reported on this case by year’s end.

The Union of Catholic Asian News service and major international media reported that on January 26, approximately 100 Hindu activists attacked a prayer service at the Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra, a Catholic media center in Indore in Madhya Pradesh, accusing the center of conducting religious conversions.  The pastor told media the assailants beat worshippers and yelled at them.  He said when police arrived, they only jailed the pastors and other church elders for violating Madhya Pradesh’s new law outlawing conversions.  The pastor said he and eight other church leaders were jailed for two months before being released, and still faced charges.  According to national media, police pressed trespassing charges against 15 persons and opened investigations into the incident.  Their cases were pending in court at year’s end.

On January 5, according to media sources, members of the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal disrupted a Christian prayer meeting in Uttar Pradesh.  The pastor told media the group beat them and forced them to chant Hindu prayers, threatening to kill them if they did not.  The Hindus turned the pastor and four others over to police, who charged them with forced conversion, based on the comments of one of the Hindus.  Police also seized copies of the Bible and musical equipment, according to media reports.  On January 6, the pastor and eight others filed a police report.  There were no further developments reported on the case during the year.

On January 6, a Christian group in Uttar Pradesh filed a complaint against members of VHP for disrupting a prayer meeting.  The Christians said 20 VHP members, including one police officer, entered their meeting uninvited, beat some worshippers, and damaged the facility.  Police charged five of the Christians with illegal conversion, according to media reports, but there were no further developments on this case reported by year’s end.

Media reported that on August 29 a group of more than 100 individuals targeted a Christian pastor for alleged religious conversion in Polmi village in Kabirdham District of Chhattisgarh.  The reports stated that the group physically abused the pastor and vandalized his residence during a prayer service.  Police opened an investigation into the incident.

On October 3, according to Catholic news agency Agenzia Fides , there were 13 instances of violence and threats committed by Hindus against Christian communities in Uttarakhand, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh states, and in New Delhi.  Drawing on reporting from EFI, Agenzia Fides said these incidents included disrupting worship services and prayer meetings and beating worshippers; police arresting pastors for forced conversion, based on complaints filed by Hindus; and Hindu groups vandalizing Christian places of worship.

In October, Giani Harpreet Singh, leader of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, a Sikh religious organization, and head priest of the Sikh community, said that Christian missionaries were “running a campaign for forced conversions in border areas of Punjab.”

NGO Sabrang reported that in Uttarakhand on October 3, 200 local members of Hindu organizations Bajarang Dal, VHP, and the youth wing of the BJP disrupted a worship service in Roorkee, shouting Hindu slogans, beating worshippers, and ransacking their meeting room.  According to media, police charged the assailants with rioting, vandalism, trespassing, and deliberately injuring others.

In September, Vellappally Natesan, a prominent Hindu Ezhava leader and patron of the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena political organization in Kerala, stated it was not the Muslim community but Christians who were at the forefront of conversions and “love jihad” in the country.

According to media, Hindu nationalist groups disrupted nine Christmas prayer meetings, six in Uttar Pradesh, two in Haryana, and one in Assam, vandalizing church property in some of the incidents.  In Agra, Uttar Pradesh, the regional general secretary of Bajrang Dal told the media that Christian missionaries used the season to “allure children by making Santa Claus distribute gifts to them and attract them towards Christianity.”

The investigation continued into the September 2020 killing of Hindu woman Priya Soni.  Soni was beheaded reportedly for refusing to convert to Islam after marrying Muslim Ajaz Ahmed in a civil ceremony, in Sonbhadra, Uttar Pradesh.  Police arrested Ahmed and Shoaib Akhtar, also a Muslim, for the crime and they remained in custody at year’s end.

In June, the Sikh minority community in Jammu and Kashmir protested over allegations of the forced conversion of two Sikh women, who subsequently married Muslim men.  A Sikh delegation met national Home Minister Amit Shah and requested passage of a conversion restriction law “similar to the one in Uttar Pradesh” in Jammu and Kashmir.

On August 6, according to The Christian Post , a Sikh family in Punjab attacked a Christian woman, her sister, and mother for their beliefs.  The report said that the attackers choked one victim unconscious.  Police opened an investigation, but there were no further developments by the end of the year.

On October 6, Sikh leaders in Punjab started a campaign in rural areas to counter the potential conversion of lower income Sikhs to Christianity.  The head priest of the Punjab Sikh community said, “Christian missionaries have been running a campaign in the border belt for forced conversions over the past few years.  Innocent people are being cheated or lured to convert.  We have received many such reports.”  He also called forced conversions [to Christianity] “a dangerous attack on the Sikh religion.”

In its Freedom in the World 2021 report, Freedom House downgraded the country from free to partly free due to “rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population” and crackdowns on dissent.

A Pew Research study “ Religion in India:  Tolerance and Segregation ,” released in July and based on interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020, found that 84 percent of those surveyed across different faiths said that “respecting all religions was very important to truly being Indian”; 80 percent said that “respecting other religions was very important to their religious identity”; and 91 percent said they were “very free to practice their own religion.”  These numbers ranged from highs of 93 percent of Buddhists and 91 percent of Hindus, and lows of 82 percent of Sikhs and 85 percent of Jains saying they are very free to practice their religion, with Christians and Muslims at 89 percent.  The survey also showed, however, that 83 percent of all respondents believed communal violence between religious groups was “a problem” for the country.  The study’s overview stated that Indians’ commitment to tolerance was accompanied by a strong preference for keeping religious communities segregated, which was true even for religious minority communities.  Large majorities of those surveyed said they did not have much in common with members of other religious groups, and large majorities in the six major religious groups said their close friends came mainly or entirely from their own religious community.  Nearly two-thirds of Hindus (64 percent) said it was very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian.  According to the report, Hindus who strongly link Hindu and Indian identities were more likely to also support religious segregation.

In its report covering the year, Christian NGO Open Doors said that overall violence against Christians and pressure against Christians “in all spheres of life” remained “very high.”  The NGO said the persecution of Christians had intensified as Hindu nationalists “aim to cleanse the country of their presence and influence.”  This led to the targeting of Christians and other religious minorities, including the use of social media to spread disinformation and stir up hatred.

On December 17-19, during a gathering in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, several Hindu leaders and activists called publicly for violence against religious minorities.  Yati Narasinghanand, characterized as a Hindu extremist, announced a reward of 10 million rupees ($135,000) for any Hindu leader who would lead a militant movement against Islam and Christianity.  Narasinghanand also called upon Hindus to “take up weapons” against Muslims and wage a war against “Islamic jihad” for the protection of Hindus.  Another Hindu religious leader, Sadhvi Annapurna, called for creation of a nation exclusively for Hindus and for raising an army against Muslims.  Uttarakhand police subsequently booked seven persons including Narasinghanand and Annapurna, on multiple charges under the criminal code, including promoting enmity between religious groups, deliberately intending to outrage religious feeling by insulting religious groups, and acting prejudicial to social harmony.  The spokesperson for the Uttarakhand government and director general of police condemned the statements and said that police would “take required action” against those responsible.  On December 26, a group of attorneys, including a former judge on the Patna High Court, wrote the Supreme Court urging action in the case, and stating that the speeches made at the event in Haridwar were not merely hate speeches but “an open call for the murder of an entire community” which not only posed “a grave threat to the unity of the country, but also endangered the lives of millions of Muslim citizens.”

According to media reports, on October 1, Hindu nationalists held a rally in the Surguja District of Chhattisgarh to protest a perceived spike in forced conversion of Hindus to Christianity in the area.  Media reported that World Hindu Congress leader Swami Parmatmanand attended the protest and called for those who engage in forced conversions to be beheaded.  Police took no action against him, according to the Chhattisgarh-based Christian community.

On August 8, a video was widely circulated on social media of a group shouting threats to kill Muslims and demanding that Muslims convert to Hinduism to remain in the country.  The incident took place during a demonstration near parliament in New Delhi in which the crowd was protesting colonial-era laws still in force, according to media reports.  MP Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim, stated in parliament that “genocidal slogans” were used against Muslims during the incident.  Media reported that several prominent Hindu activists took part.  Police officials told the media they were viewing video to identify suspects and had filed an FIR against “unknown persons” for shouting the threats.

On June 29, Hindu religious leader Mahamandaleshwar Yatindra Nath Giri in New Delhi stated that parliament should adopt a new constitution banning madrassahs, declaring religious conversion a crime, and punishing couples that have more than two children.

On October 15, Muslim cleric Abbas Siddiqui said persons who insulted the Quran should be “beheaded.”  Siddiqui’s comments were aired in a video shown by media.

Media and one NGO reported that on October 20, Hindu groups affiliated with the RSS, Hindu Jagran Manch, and the VHP attacked and vandalized at least six mosques and more than a dozen shops and houses belonging to Muslim communities across Tripura State, reportedly in retaliation for attacks on minority Hindus in Bangladesh during the Durga Puja festival there.  The NGO Centre for Study of Society and Secularism reported that attackers damaged 11 mosques, six shops, and two homes.  The NGO also said that the authorities took stronger action against the journalists and activists who were reporting the violations than on the rioters themselves.  The government rejected this claim and stated that action was taken against journalists for their “inflammatory social media posts” about the event.  Tripura police registered a case against Ranu Das, a leader from the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (the youth wing of the BJP) who allegedly threw stones at a mosque and burned Muslim properties, for provocation to cause riot, intent to hurt religious feelings, and causing public enmity.  The suspect fled and had not been arrested by year’s end.

According to media reports, on October 2, unidentified individuals vandalized a Hindu temple in the Anantnag District of Jammu and Kashmir.  Police opened an investigation into the incident.

EFI said that on January 20, members of the Bajrang Dal demolished the boundary wall of a church in the Mahabubabad District of Telangana, saying the church building was too close to a Hindu temple.

According to Pastor Upajukta Singh, in June Hindu villagers destroyed the homes of eight Christian families, expelling them from Ratagaya village.  The victims filed a police complaint.

In May, Hindu Jatav Dalit community villagers of the Muslim-majority Noorpur village in Aligarh District of Uttar Pradesh stated to media that Muslims were harassing them and discriminating against them.  The villagers also said Muslims stopped a marriage procession from passing in front of a mosque in the village.

Section IV.

U.s. government policy and engagement.

During the year, embassy and consulate officials met with government officials to discuss religious freedom and emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue.  Embassy officials, including the Chargés d’Affaires, also engaged with members of parliament and politicians across diverse political ideologies on the importance of religious freedom and the responsibility of democracies to ensure the rights of religious minorities.

Embassy and consulate officials met with leaders from religious minorities, NGOs, civil society members, academics, and interfaith leaders to discuss the perspectives about the status and experiences of religious minorities.

On October 1, the Consul General in Chennai joined Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan at the Sri Vishnu Mohan Foundation’s annual Peace and Reconciliation Conference.  Speaking to a gathering of religious and civil social leaders, government officials and academics, the Consul General emphasized the importance of respecting religious freedom and interfaith dialogue.

On May 7, the consulate general in Hyderabad hosted a virtual panel discussion during Ramadan that highlighted interfaith and cross-cultural experiences during the holiday period.

Throughout the year, the Chargés d’Affaires engaged with members of religious communities, including representatives of the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh faiths.  In May, the Chargés d’Affaires organized a virtual interfaith dialogue during Ramadan in which he emphasized the importance of religious freedom.  Members of academia, media commentators on interfaith issues, NGO interfaith activists, and representatives of multiple faiths participated.

In July, the Secretary of State met with several leaders from the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Baha’i, and other faiths.  He highlighted the value of the country’s diversity and religious pluralism and the importance of protecting it.  The Secretary addressed the importance of freedom of religion and belief in his public opening remarks and listened to the views and concerns of the religious minority and civil society leaders.

On This Page

• Section I. Religious Demography
• Section III. Status of Societal Respect for Religious Freedom
• Section IV. U.S. Government Policy and Engagement

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“Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation”, a Pew Center report on religious attitudes in India stated that Indians value religious freedom, not integration.

• It is a major survey of religion across India.
• It is conducted by Pew Research Center.
• It is based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020.

Key Findings

• Religious Freedom: The report finds that Indians of all these religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths. 

Image Courtesy: TH

• Tolerance: Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be “truly Indian.” Tolerance is a religious as well as civic value. 
• Not only do a majority of Hindus in India (77%) believe in karma, but an identical percentage of Muslims do, too. 
• A third of Christians in India (32%) – together with 81% of Hindus – say they believe in the purifying power of the Ganges River. 
• In Northern India, 12% of Hindus and 10% of Sikhs, along with 37% of Muslims, identity with Sufism, a mystical tradition most closely associated with Islam. 
• And the vast majority of Indians of all major religious backgrounds say that respecting elders is very important to their faith.
• The majority of Hindus see themselves as very different from Muslims (66%), and most Muslims return the sentiment, saying they are very different from Hindus (64%). 
• There are a few exceptions: Two-thirds of Jains and about half of Sikhs say they have a lot in common with Hindus. But generally, people in India’s major religious communities tend to see themselves as very different from others.
• Affinity to Own Group: Indians generally stick to their own religious group when it comes to their friends. Fewer Indians go so far as to say that their neighbourhoods should consist only of people from their own religious groups. Still, many would prefer to keep people of certain religions out of their residential areas or villages.
• Indians’ concept of religious tolerance does not necessarily involve the mixing of religious communities. 
• Indians seem to prefer a country more like a patchwork fabric, with clear lines between groups.

• Being Hindu important to Indian identity for many Hindus: Most Hindus think two dimensions of national identity – being able to speak Hindi and being a Hindu – are closely connected. An identical percentage of Muslims and Hindus (65 per cent each) saw communal violence as a very big national problem.
• The Partition sentiment: The survey found that while Sikhs and Muslims were more likely to say the Partition was a ‘bad thing’, Hindus were leaning in the opposite direction.
• Caste is another dividing line in Indian society, and not just among Hindus: Religion is not the only fault line in Indian society. In some regions of the country, significant shares of people perceive widespread, caste-based discrimination.
• Religious conversion in India: This survey finds that religious switching, or conversion, has a minimal impact on the overall size of India’s religious groups. Other groups display similar levels of stability. Changes in India’s religious landscape over time are largely a result of differences in fertility rates among religious groups, not conversion.
• Religion is very important across India’s religious groups: The vast majority of Indians, across all major faiths, say that religion is very important in their lives. And at least three-quarters of each major religion’s followers say they know a great deal about their own religion and its practices. 

(Image Courtesy: PewForum )

• India’s massive population is diverse as well as devout.
• Not only do most of the world’s Hindus, Jains and Sikhs live in India, but it also is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and to millions of Christians and Buddhists.

Source : TH

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Religious Tolerance and Social Harmony

• June 9, 2022

Social Issues

Context: The atmosphere of religious intolerance which has seen a sharp rise in the last several years has been a serious cause for concern in the country.

• India is the beloved home for practitioners of all major religions in the world . Indian culture accepts diversity of faiths and beliefs .
• Religious harmony and social cohesion are two core elements for progress and development.
• As per Pew Research Survey 2021 , Indians of diverse religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths
• But there is growing intolerance towards diverse religions leading to communal violence and ripples in social harmony.

Instances of intolerance

• Recent incident of ruling party spokesperson commenting on Islam and the Prophet
• Haridwar Hate speech incident
• Frequent use of National Security Act (NSA) for ‘cow slaughter’ by some state governments
• As per pew research on the question of inter-religious marriage , most Hindus (67%), Muslims (80%), Sikhs (59%), and Jains (66%) felt it was ‘very important’ to stop the women in their community from marrying outside their religion

Why is there raise in intolerance?

• Political parties polarize naive voters in the name of religion
• Various cultural organisations are misinterpreting and propagating truths to affirm revivalist predispositions
• Irresponsible Reporting by Media: Many a times media broadcasts unconfirmed, sensitive and often biased reports on national television
• For instance: Tablighi Jamaat case during first Covid lockdown
• State’s support: India has many hostile neighbors , who wish to make it weak through a communal divide.
• Struggle for identity

Consequences

• Threat to minority: Rise in intolerance and communal disharmony lead to majoritarianism
• Mob-violence: Rise in disharmony has led to targeting of religious minorities and led to a rise in mob-violence
• Threat to Rule of law: With rise in incidence of mob lynchings, there is a threat to rule of law – Lynching on cow smuggling, lynching of youth in golden temple
• Freedom of speech: It has also impacted freedom of speech-shows of comedians being banned by vigilante groups
• Regionalism: The anti-national elements get adequate opportunity to fan regional feelings and work on creating an atmosphere to break the cohesiveness of our society.
• Damage social fabric: The social fabric of the society gets irreparably damaged and the conditions of mistrust serve as a catalyst for future conflicts
• Degrading International image where countries are losing faith in India’s diverse credentials

Way forward

• Political and moral support to the minorities
• Effective administration – fair probe, media guidelines
• Implementation of constitutional and legal safeguards

We, the people of India, must strive hard to generate compassion, strength, sincerity and commitment to ensure the safety and security of the people of India. And uphold the values which are synonym with the word “INDIA” – tolerance, compassion and peace.

Source: Indian Express

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United States Institute of Peace

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Combating Religious Discrimination in India and Beyond

As India’s new citizenship law escalates religious tensions, a new USIP project seeks a comprehensive solution.

By: Jason Klocek

Publication Type: Analysis

Last month, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed India as a “country of particular concern” for the first time since 2004. The decision reflects increased religious hostility and sectarian conflict in India, which have been stoked further by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed last December. In the five months since, the CAA’s use of religious identity as a criteria for citizenship has sparked widespread opposition and protest both within India and abroad. But while controversial, it is far from an isolated policy. It connects to a steady increase in religious discrimination and violence within India , throughout South Asia, and across the globe —raising important questions for policymakers and activists alike.

This rise in religious discrimination is not only noteworthy in its scale, but also its consequences. In many settings, increased government regulation of religion preceded an increase in political instability and conflict. Now, with the CAA sparking religious violence in one of the world’s largest countries, it is vital for peacebuilding practitioners to develop new ways of integrating religious freedom into broader strategies for development, democratization, and peacebuilding.

To that end, USIP has established a project called “Closing the Gap: Analyzing the Relationship Between Religious Freedom and Political and Economic Development.” In partnership with USAID’s Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives , the study will examine the CAA and other pressing issues related to international religious freedom.  

The CAA, Hindu Nationalism, and Growing Religious Tensions in India

As a matter of policy, the CAA provides expedited Indian citizenship to migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan that belong to select religious minorities and entered the country without a valid visa or overstayed their visa prior to December 2014. Absent from the list are Muslims and religious minorities from other parts of South Asia, such as Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has long drawn on Hindu nationalism to consolidate their power. Critics of the CAA claim the law is another piece of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda and will undermine India’s secular foundations and further marginalize and disenfranchise the country’s sizeable Muslim population, as well as other religious minorities.

The Indian government, however, maintains that the CAA gives millions of illegal migrants, who were vulnerable to detention and deportation, an accelerated path toward citizenship. They also defend the exclusion of Muslims by saying they are unlikely to face religious persecution in neighboring countries like Pakistan, where Islam is the official state religion.

Despite the Indian government’s explanations , the CAA has evoked impassioned dissent, as thousands of Indian citizens across the country took to the streets in protest. In New Delhi, these demonstrations led to some the city’s worst bloodshed in decades when Hindu gangs, encouraged and abetted in part by the Home Ministry and the ruling BJP party, targeted Muslims and cracked down on anti-CAA protesters of all faiths.

The Latest Concern in a Global Trend

India’s CAA is perhaps the most noteworthy instance of religious hostilities being codified into law—but it’s not the only one. In neighboring Nepal, the introduction and implementation of new anti-conversion laws followed the steady rise of interreligious tensions over the past half-decade. In Pakistan, the Election Act in 2017 retained the practice of placing Ahmadis on a separate voter registration list for non-Muslims. And the Pew Research Center’s 10th annual report on religious restrictions found that the number of countries imposing “high” or “very high” levels of restrictions increased by 30 percent between 2007 and 2017—with government favoritism of certain religious groups, such as through citizenship rights, standing out as one of the most prevalent practices.

Meanwhile, religious violence is also being used to justify more government regulation of faith communities. This has become a common practice in South Asia and has also been seen in Nigeria, Russia, and China. In Myanmar, for instance, the increase in violence that has disproportionately targeted Muslims—and the Rohingya Muslim community in particular—was followed by an uptick this past year in religious discrimination of not only Rohingya and other Muslims, but Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus as well.

A similar pattern in India, the world’s largest democracy, may mark the start of an even more sweeping cycle of religious repression and violence. Once praised for its religious pluralism, rapid economic growth, and multiethnic democratic system, India has many rethinking a conventional view that religious freedom inevitably leads to a more prosperous and peaceful society.  

Current events in India also underscore the need to know more about the consequences of religious discrimination. Many argue that the suppression of minority religions creates grievances that lead minorities to fight back. In India, however, the majority of violence to date has been initiated by Hindu gangs. In other contexts, such as Kuwait, Iran, Vietnam, and China, the repression of minority religions has increased resentment but not led to disorder and intergroup violence. When and why repression leads to instability and conflict, therefore, remains an open question.

How Can Peacebuilders Respond?

Over the next year, the Closing the Gap project will investigate the relationship between religious freedom, political stability, and socioeconomic development through statistical analysis and country case studies. While a considerable amount of new data on government restrictions of religion has been collected in recent years, we still know relatively little about the causal relationship between religious freedom and the above-mentioned structural conditions, how this varies across different contexts, and when these factors complement or counteract one another.

In addition to these questions, we will also explore whether, when, and how interfaith peacebuilding and faith-based development activities in divided societies correspond with an expansion of religious freedom.

Traditional peacebuilding practices can be—and are being—applied today to help mitigate this shift toward religious discrimination. For example, interfaith groups play an important role in promoting dialogue, reducing mistrust, and building bridges between community members of different religious traditions. And activists are drawing on nonviolent resistance tactics, such as with the street protest in India, to oppose discriminatory legislation.

But in order for policymakers and activists to rise to the scale of the problem, we need a more comprehensive understanding of how religious freedom can effectively intersect with sustainable peace and development. Ultimately, the goal of the Closing the Gap project is to identify a broader set of conditions that will complement the current tactics and lead to a more nuanced, strategic, and impactful policy and practice of advancing religious freedom.

Jason Klocek is a senior researcher with the Religion & Inclusive Societies program at USIP and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society.

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Narendra Modi was sworn in on June 9 for his third consecutive term as India’s prime minister. Public polls had predicted a sweeping majority for Modi, so it came as some surprise that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost ground with voters and had to rely on coalition partners to form a ruling government. Although India’s elections were fought mainly on domestic policy issues, there were important exceptions and Modi’s electoral setback could have implications for India’s regional and global policies.

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Creative and academic freedom under threat from religious intolerance in India

Dean of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology

Disclosure statement

Meena Vari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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When asked what made him such a prolific painter, even at the age of 91, MF Hussain, known as the Indian Picasso, said it was three things: “not worrying about critics and fundamentalists, working every day, and never wearing shoes”. The great painter went into self-imposed exile after threats from Hindu fundamentalists angry at his paintings of nude gods. He died in 2011 with an unfulfilled wish to come back to his home country, even if it was just for one afternoon.

From the publication of books, paintings and cartoons to ideas expressed on Facebook, public life for artists in India is tied up with censorship and threats of legal action. There was a time as Indians when we were proud of our values of pluralism and tolerance; now that is under attack along with academic freedom of expression.

“For a country that takes great pride in its democracy and history of free speech, the present situation is troubling,” Nilanjana Roy , a columnist and literary critic, said. “Especially in the creative sphere, the last two decades have been progressively intolerant.”

Religion and communal sentiments are often invoked in today’s censorship battles, although many of the underlying reasons for the attacks seem selfish, rather than stemming from a genuine interest for society.

In December 2014, Anand Patwardhan’s 1992 documentary film Ram Ke Naam was supposed to screen at the Indian Law Society college in Pune. The film, about the politics of religion that drove the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, is one of India’s most significant socio-political documentaries.

However, the screening was called off after the college received threats. Another documentary maker, Sanjay Kak, whose 2007 film Jashn-e-Azadi is critical of the army’s role Kashmir, has also seen attacks on venues that planned to show his film.

Curricula under pressure

In academia, one of the biggest controversies in recent years centred around an essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations , by well-known historian A K Ramanujan about different versions of the Ramayana, a religious text.

The essay was included in the University of Delhi’s BA History syllabus in 2006 to highlight the fact that there are Dalit, feminist, and other popular versions of the text in other Asian countries. One of the students made a complaint and a right-wing political party took up the issue, which led to a petition filed at the Delhi Supreme Court to drop the essay.

Even though three of the four members of the committee established by the court recommended the continuation of the essay as part of the syllabus, the university’s academic council decided to abandon it.

Some artists have made the decision to bow out of public life because of the attacks on their work. In January, Perumal Murugan, a well-known novelist in the Tamil language, announced on Facebook that he was giving up writing:

Perumal Murugan, the writer, is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He has no faith in rebirth. As an ordinary teacher, he will live as P Murugan. Leave him alone.

This came after virulent protests by Hindu and local caste-based groups over his novel, Madhorubhagan . They complained the novel denigrated Hindu deities and women. The protests started four years after it was published in Tamil, but Murugan has said he believes it was the English translation, One Part Woman, published at the end of 2014 that started the uproar.

The right to freedom is one of the fundamental rights in the Indian constitution that also includes the freedom of speech and expression. This means, in principle, there is creative freedom. But the lines are blurred as to whether Indians have the privilege to use religion as a context, resource or reference point in their creative outputs.

Creative practitioners – writers, artists or the filmmakers – are typically not interested in exploring the faith, philosophy or the devotion attached to religion. They use the stories, rituals, customs and history. For example, in his novel , Murugan used folklore, which had originated as part of the Hindu chariot festival, about a mating ritual where one day a year there can be consensual sex between any man and woman.

The author has explained there is no historical evidence for the ritual, which was part of the oral stories that had been passed down through the generations. He had used this aspect in his novel not to create religious tensions, but to highlight the discriminatory powers of the caste system and the situation for women.

No logical thinking

Personally, I believe that being Indian means being confident in our roots. This is not just about what language you speak or religion you practice, but the entire social and cultural set-up. My family comes from Kerala, so my mother tongue is Malayalam, but I was born in Uttar Pradesh, so the first language I spoke is Hindi and English became my working language. I was born into a Catholic family and married a Hindu. I always thought when I grew up things would be very different. Yet it is quite paradoxical that in this age and era, we stop to think logically when it comes to religion.

Indians are happy to borrow, buy or develop progressive ideas in order to grow the economy faster. Wider roads, new shopping malls and buildings are coming up every day; the old cities are being torn down to make way for new ones. Modernity is slowly moving in; but when it comes to freedom to speak about religion, reason has taken a back seat.

A section of this article appeared in the summer 2015 special report of the Index on Censorship magazine, focusing on academic freedom.

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What is fuelling intolerance in India?

India’s government is under pressure to curb growing hate speech and attacks against religious minorities.

Human rights organisations around the world are sounding the alarm on India.

They say hate speech is fuelling violence and intolerance against minorities to levels never seen before.

Keep reading

The indian economy is growing fast, but problems loom, india restricts foreign funding for mother teresa’s charity, foxconn delays reopening its india iphone plant.

Recent attacks against Muslims and Christians have been some of the worst seen in the country.

Some politicians, especially those with ties to the ruling BJP, have been accused of inciting and also promoting violence against minority groups.

The government is under pressure to curb this trend.

But will it do so?

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Conflict between freedom of expression and religion in india—a case study.

1. Background

2. hindu fundamentalism, 3. islamic fundamentalist, 4. secularism and multiculturalism, 5. public sphere and reasoning, 6. religion and human rights, 7. theoretical discussion, 8. contextual secularism, 9. indian contextual multiculturalism, 10. indian contextual secular-multiculturalism, 11. background of the research, 12. research methodology, 13. narrative analysis, 13.1. thematic categorization of hindu student’s narratives and analysis, 13.2. emerging themes from the narratives of muslim student, 14. personal observations, 14.1. hindu students, 14.2. muslim students, 15. analysis, 16. conclusions, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Singh, A. Conflict between Freedom of Expression and Religion in India—A Case Study. Soc. Sci. 2018 , 7 , 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7070108

Singh A. Conflict between Freedom of Expression and Religion in India—A Case Study. Social Sciences . 2018; 7(7):108. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7070108

Singh, Amit. 2018. "Conflict between Freedom of Expression and Religion in India—A Case Study" Social Sciences 7, no. 7: 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7070108

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The many shades of religious intolerance in India

Home » The many shades of religious intolerance in India

• August 19, 2021
• Indian Society

The Pew Research Center launched its report ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’.

GS-I: Indian Society (Demography, Social Issues, and Developments in Indian Society), GS-II: Polity and Governance (Constitutional Provisions, Fundamental Rights)

Mains Questions:

Does the concept of religious tolerance require the mixing of religious communities? Discuss. (10 marks)

Dimensions of the Article:

Religious diversity in india, secularism in india, pew research centre’s ‘religion in india: tolerance and segregation’ report, geographical factor of religious tolerance: pew research centre’s report, has india been historically tolerant.

• India is one of the most diverse nations in terms of religion, it being the birthplace of four major world religions: Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism.
• Even though Hindus form close to 80 percent of the population, India also has region-specific religious practices: for instance, Jammu and Kashmir has a Muslim majority, Punjab has a Sikh majority, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram have Christian majorities and the Indian Himalayan States such as Sikkim and Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh and the state of Maharashtra and the Darjeeling District of West Bengal have large concentrations of Buddhist population.
• The country has significant Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Jain and Zoroastrian populations.
• Islam is the largest minority religion in India, and the Indian Muslims form the third largest Muslim population in the world, accounting for over 14 percent of the nation’s population.
• Secularism is a principle that advocates separation of religion from civic affairs and the state.
• The term means that all the religions in India get equal respect protection and support from the state.

• The report found that 91% of Hindus felt they have religious freedom, while 85% of them believed that respecting all religions was very important ‘to being truly Indian’.
• Also, for most Hindus, religious tolerance was not just a civic virtue but also a religious value, with 80% of them stating that respecting other religions was an integral aspect of ‘being Hindu’.
• Other religions showed similar numbers for freedom of religion and religious tolerance. While 89% of Muslims and Christians said they felt free to practice their religion, the comparative figures for Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains were 82%, 93%, and 85% respectively.
• On the question of religious tolerance, 78% of Muslims felt it was an essential aspect of being Indian, while 79% deemed it a part of their religious identity as Muslims. Other religious denominations scored similarly high on religious tolerance.
• The survey also revealed a number of shared beliefs that cut across religious barriers. For example, while 77% of Hindus said they believed in karma, an identical percentage of Muslims said so as well.
• Despite shared values and a high regard for religious tolerance, the majority in all the faiths scored poorly on the metrics for religious segregation: composition of friends’ circle, views on stopping inter-religious marriage, and willingness to accept people of other religions as neighbors.
• On the question of inter-religious marriage, most Hindus (67%), Muslims (80%), Sikhs (59%), and Jains (66%) felt it was ‘very important’ to stop the women in their community from marrying outside their religion (similar rates of opposition to men marrying outside religion). But considerably fewer Christians (37%) and Buddhists (46%) felt this way.
• The majorities in all the religious groups were, hypothetically, willing to accept members of other religious groups as neighbours, but a significant number had reservations. About 78% of Muslims said they would be willing to have a Hindu as a neighbour. Buddhists were most likely to voice acceptance of other religious groups as neighbours, with roughly 80% of them wiling to accept a Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Jain as a neighbour, and even more (89%) ready to accept a Hindu neighbour.

• Geography was a key factor in determining attitudes, with people in the south of India more religiously integrated and less opposed to inter-religious marriages.
• People in the South “are less likely than those in other regions to say all their close friends share their religion (29%),” noted the report.
• Also, Hindu nationalist sentiments were less prevalent in the South. Among Hindus, those in the South (42%) were far less likely than those in Central states (83%) or the North (69%) to say that being Hindu was very important to being truly Indian.
• Also, people in the South were somewhat less religious than those in other regions: 69% said religion was very important to their lives, while 92% in Central India held the same view.
• Religious identity and nationalism
• The survey also found that Hindus tend to see their religious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined, with 64% saying that it was ‘very important’ to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian.
• Most Hindus (59%) also linked Indian identity with being able to speak Hindi. And among Hindus who believed it was very important to be Hindu in order to be truly Indian, a full 80% also believed it was very important to speak Hindi to be truly Indian.
• The survey endorses that India has historically been a tolerant country and is now increasingly turning into an intolerant one. It states that, since Indians were tolerant in the past, they must remain so now and in future.
• However, untouchability has been practised for ages in India and remains widespread in both urban and rural areas. And untouchability is an act of extreme intolerance.
• But the ideas of caste and intolerance are empirically, conceptually and historically deeply entwined.
• Society has been following intolerance against Dalits in an organised way as a custom.
• Various articles surfacing after the Pew Research Center launched its report ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’ suggest that: while the survey presents comparative data pertaining to four other major religions: Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism, its conclusion broadly confirms the growing influence of Hindutva politics on India’s social fabric.
• According to the report, India’s concept of religious tolerance does not necessarily involve the mixing of religious communities. However, examining the conceptual foundations on which the report is premised could lead to a vastly different understanding of tolerance in India.
• The issue of tolerance is not seen in connection with caste and is argued exclusively in the context of inter-religious communities. In discussions on prejudices or violence between Hindus and Muslims, the word ‘tolerance’ seems to have increasingly replaced the word ‘communal’.

-Source: The Hindu

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Conflict between Freedom of Expression and Religion in India—A Case Study

The tussle between freedom of expression and religious intolerance is intensely manifested in Indian society where the State, through censoring of books, movies and other forms of critical expression, victimizes writers, film directors, and academics in order to appease Hindu religious-nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist groups. Against this background, this study explores some of the perceptions of Hindu and Muslim graduate students on the conflict between freedom of expression and religious intolerance in India. Conceptually, the author approaches the tussle between freedom of expression and religion by applying a contextual approach of secular-multiculturalism. This study applies qualitative research methods; specifically in-depth interviews, desk research, and narrative analysis. The findings of this study help demonstrate how to manage conflict between freedom of expression and religion in Indian society, while exploring concepts of Western secularism and the need to contextualize the right to freedom of expression. Ancient India is known for its skepticism towards religion and its toleration to opposing views (Sen 2005; Upadhyaya 2009), However, the alarming rise of Hindu religious nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and consequently, increasing conflict between freedom of expression and religion, have been well noted by both academic (Thapar 2015) and public intellectuals (Sorabjee 2018; Dhavan 2008). Conflict between freedom of expression and religion in India is well known. The censoring of books and films by the State, and the victimization of writers, film directors, and academics by Muslim fundamentalist and Hindu religious-nationalist groups are well noted. In this context, the Indian Constitution not only empowers media and free thinkers, but also those who are religiously offended. Desire among many people to prohibit religiously hurtful speech (or expression) has become a focal point of conflict between religious-fundamentalist groups and free thinkers. Indian Penal Code provisions 298 and 295A have resulted in the harassment of many writers, journalists and academics. In addition, use of violence and fatwa is also being used to suppress freedom of expression by Muslims and Hindu fundamentalist groups. 2. Hindu Fundamentalism The main objective of Hindu religious-nationalists is to establish Hindu rule in India: To spread Hindu values and to defend Hindu society from alien religions, cultures, and ideologies. Among prominent Hindu fundamentalist groups are, R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), V.H.P. (Vishva Hindu Parishad) and Shiv Sena. Since the early 1980s, these groups, to a certain extent, have been responsible in inciting communal violence against religious minorities in India (Chatry 2012, p. 214).

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McComas Taylor

India has a long history of religious activists using laws, some dating back to the 1860s, to block publications and works of art that they find objectionable. On the other side of the fence, writers, academics and artists perceive this movement as a threat to freedom of speech and artistic expression, which the Law, politicians, the publishing industry, universities and civil society seem unable or unwilling to defend. This article explores the latest wave of citizen-censorship in India, described by one writer as India’s ‘Ice Age for scholarship’. It looks at the main players, places these events in context, describes some of the drivers and looks gloomily at the future of free speech in India.

Fazal Rahman

These three articles document the increasing violence of extremist Hindu mobs against the Christians and Muslims in India, as well as state repression against political activists there, under the government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

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In recent times, we have witnessed a spike in cases of hate speech, delivered either by the politicians or by the media that has resulted in violence among the public. Sensational reporting and discourse on critical issues just for the sake of viewership and notoriety has resulted in the tarnishing of an individual or community's image. This research examines the work of various authors and columnists, published on reputable websites. It is done in order to check the contemporary state of freedom of expression and the critical conditions of working journalists in India. The research also studies the status of freedom of the press and the upsurge in instances of hate speech in current times. The purpose of the study is to answer how the Indian government is restraining the individual's right to express, how the Indian politicians and media are liable for hate speeches by presenting biased views and prompted news, respectively. It demonstrates instances of hate speech where a ...

Rupa Viswanath

Commentary on the Doniger affair has focused overwhelmingly on the principle of freedom of speech and the illiberal character of censorship (Shainin 2014). There is a degree of valuable analytic abstraction to this discourse, which allows scholars and free speech advocates to compare the Doniger case with instances of the censorship of writing and art earlier in Indian history (for example, with the Rushdie affair; Malik 2014), and with cases elsewhere in the world. But the abstraction comes at the price of bracketing out the specific economy of forces within which freedom of speech is regulated in India. After all, not all offensive speech is challenged, and not all challenges result in successful silencing of the putative offender, as was the case with Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. In what follows I trace the regulation of what Indian legal language describes as " hurt religious sentiments " to its colonial origin, demonstrating that historically, the mandate of rulers has been to favor the powerful by reinforcing their capacity to silence the weak. To discern patterns in the contemporary governance of offense,

Shivam Kaushik

The study is to shed light on the troublesome aspect of ‘Freedom of Religion in India’. How it has acted as a deterrent in the modernization of Indian society and has outweighed other rights conferred by the same part of the constitution. It also highlights the inability of judiciary and legislature in implementing and more importantly regulating freedom of religion as a fundamental right so far. The research draws upon mostly from judicial decision, legislations, and opinions of eminent jurists. The author highlights two major issues of national importance where the freedom of religion has been interpreted too much liberally to justify his thesis. The study traces the journey of Uniform civil code and tries to find out that how much the state has succeeded in fulfilling its constitutional obligation of ‘endeavoring to secure for all citizen a uniform civil code’ as mandated by article 44 of Indian Constitution. It also exhibits the judicial endeavor in banning ‘Santhara’ a religious practice related to Jain religion and how eventually even judiciary succumbs to public pressure.

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There is no doubt that India is far from perfect when it comes to religious freedom. Indeed, India’s religious freedom problems have become an increasing focus of scholarly and policy attention. However, almost all of this attention is directed at one particular subset of religious freedom problems—i.e., restrictions imposed on the religious freedom of India’s minority communities, and particularly Muslims and Christians. Meanwhile, serious religious freedom challenges experienced by members of India’s Hindu majority population tend to be ignored. In this article: (1) I first describe the religious freedom situation in India as a complex terrain that requires a multi-dimensional mapping. (2) I then survey existing, influential studies of the religious freedom situation in India and identify their tendency to generate flat, one-dimensional mappings, and their consequent failure to analyze restrictions on the religious freedom of India’s Hindus, including both Hindu individuals and in...

javeria fatima

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Jijo James Indiparambil

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Growing Religious Intolerance Explained for UPSC IAS Main Exam GS Paper I

Secularism is the mentioned in the preamble of the constitution of india and it is the basic fabric of the indian society. people of indian are famous for their welcoming nature and tolerance towards others. this is one of the reasons that our invaders settle down in india. but in recent times there is a visible decline in the tolerant character of the indian society..

“ State of India is practising secularism; citizens are yet to become secular ” Religious tolerance has been the basic precept and feature of India's ancient civilisation and history. For centuries, people practising various religious faiths have lived side by side in peace. India's varied tradition of religious plurality has been a symbol of social and religious harmony. However, such utopian social situation has been changing in recent times as religious intolerance has emerged as an overriding factor in parochial politics of India. Religious violence, communal polarisation and intolerance have increased in contemporary India. The organised violence, inhuman acts and atrocities against religious minorities are being carried out with full impunity under the eyes of law enforcement authorities. The growing environment of religious intolerance and violence has been on the spree of claiming many lives in India.

Constitutional Provision  

Indian constitution has been the most prominent source not only of rule of the land but also as a guarantor of our religious right, equality rights and even moral rights. Article 25 of the Indian constitution provide all individual “equally entitled to freedom of conscience” and has the right “to profess, practice and propagate religion” of one’s choice. Practicing religion or the act of propagating it should not, however, affect the “public order, morality and health.” Similarly, as per the Indian constitution, it is the fundamental duty of an Indian citizen to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood among all the people of India, transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities.

These were thought to be enough for our forefathers to provide India the continuum of diversity in religion, religious tolerance and fraternity among different faiths. Unfortunately all such norms are being violated amidst petty politics and malicious propaganda. Partition of India in 1947 on religious line however, is still considered to be the source of ongoing religious hatred by many intellectuals.

The religious hostilities between the two major communities of India appear far from healing even after almost 70 years. Contemporary intolerance can also be considered to be an offshoot of the same unfortunate event. Many political parties are adopting shameless acts and methods to polarise naïve voters in the name of religion. Various cultural organisations are misinterpreting and propagating half-cooked truths to affirm revivalist predispositions.

India is reputed for its diverse ethnicity, community, religion, language and culture, which few nations can boast of. Assimilation with accommodation, stable patterns of pluralism, inequality and integration etc. constitute the basic fabric of Indian society. Among which Secularism acts as a special and critical pillar, which has been loudly supported by people like Gandhi, Swami Vivekanand and even preamble of our constitution.

As the growing religious extremism and increasing violence against religious minorities in India is putting the secular credibility of India at risk, which has been one of the founding virtues of the land of Buddha and Gandhi. In these backgrounds, religious groups, communal political parties and various other cultural organisations in India have the responsibility to desist from spreading communal hatred and false religious propaganda. People of this great nation should be reminded of the value and guiding principles in life that have nurtured compassion, forbearance and accommodativeness in the people of the subcontinent from time immemorial.

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Is Old India’s legacy to Bangladesh religious intolerance?

Pakistan moves towards secularism, as india moves towards communalism — each despite their constitutions. what will bangladesh do.

Aakar Patel

Events in Bangladesh and the overthrow of the government have come with predictable violence, especially against minorities, particularly Hindus. Attacking minorities is for some reason a pillar of nationalism in South Asia’s post-Independence states.

Also Read: ‘This is not the Bangladesh we fought for’

All nations here also contend with an unresolved identity crisis. The Constitution of Bangladesh opens with the phrase ‘< Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim ’. Article 2A says that ‘the state religion of the Republic is Islam, but the State shall ensure equal status and equal right in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions’.

A 2010 order from Bangladesh’s Supreme Court apparently restored secularism. It said that the ‘preamble and the relevant provisions of the Constitution in respect of secularism, nationalism and socialism, as existed on 15 August 1975, will revive’. However, it left the text on the State’s religion untouched. And so, we have the unusual situation of a nation whose Constitution opens with a Quranic verse in the name of Allah, yet its preamble pledges ‘that the high ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism shall be the fundamental principles of the Constitution’ — while there is also a state religion, which is Islam.

Like Dubai, Bangladesh has its weekend holidays on Friday and Saturday, and is one of the few nations that works on Sunday. This is a practice that even Pakistan does not follow.

At Independence, Pakistan integrated religion into law because it felt this would lend a positive impulse to the nation. Explaining this, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, said material and scientific development had leapt ahead of the development of the human individual. The result was that man was able to produce inventions that could destroy the world and society. This had happened only because man had chosen to ignore his spiritual side — if he had retained more faith in God, this problem would not have come up.

Also Read: Nehru's Word: There can be no fence-sitting on the question of a secular state

It was religion, he said, that tempered the dangers of science and, as Muslims, Pakistanis would adhere to Islam’s ideals and make a contribution to the world. The nation-state  enabling Muslims to lead their lives in alignment with Islam did not concern non-Muslims, so obviously they should not have a problem with a reference to that, he held.

What actually happened instead, though, was that the laws concerning Pakistan’s Muslims fell away in time. Early Islam existed at a time when there were no jails. Punishment for criminal offences was usually corporal; there was no ‘detention’. Pakistan introduced amputation of limbs as punishment for theft and trained a set of terrified doctors to carry these out. But Pakistan’s judges, trained in a common law like India’s, were reluctant to pass these sentences. So the laws remained frozen and unused. Pakistan introduced stoning as a punishment for adultery — yet nobody there has been stoned to death.

A brief period of enthusiasm for lashing those accused of drinking alcohol ended. In 2009, the Federal Shariat Court read down the punishment for lashing, with the judges saying drinking was a lesser crime. Under President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan changed the punishment for rape — which was conflated with fornication if the survivor could not produce witnesses to the act — from Shariah back to the penal code.

The law enforcing zakat by debiting 2.5 per cent from the bank accounts of Pakistan’s Sunnis failed because people withdrew their money just before it was due to happen. The Shia, who have a hierarchical clergy to whom they give the money directly, had previously objected and were exempted. A Shariat court order demanding a ban on interest in the banking system has been ignored by successive governments.

The law enforcing fasting during Ramzan — quite needless, because most subcontinental Muslims observe the fast anyway — ran into opposition after Muslim restaurant owners and multiplex owners complained. The last major attempt to Islamise Pakistan was over two decades ago, under Nawaz Sharif: the so-called 15th Amendment, which was defeated in the Senate. Pakistan remains insufficiently Islamic and, with no hierarchical clergy like Iran’s, can never become theocratic. Unlike Saudi Arabia, it has never had a moral police because Pakistanis are culturally South Asians with local practices.

While Pakistan has moved towards secularism, India has moved substantially in the other direction. This has been true since the 1950s, but far more so in recent times.

In 2015, BJP states began criminalising the possession of beef, triggering a series of beef-related lynchings — even with no actual beef involved.

In 2019, India’s Parliament criminalised the utterance of triple talaq in one sitting, punishing Muslim men for a non-event (because the Supreme Court had already invalidated triple talaq earlier).

Also Read: A steep descent from secular heights

After 2018, seven BJP states criminalised interfaith marriage by disallowing conversions and invalidating such marriages, including the applicability of inheritance laws to children born within such relationships. Conversions to Hinduism — defined as the ‘ancestral religion’ — are exempt and not counted as conversions in the BJP states of Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. Many states have been squeezing Christians through anti-conversion laws as well. Yet nobody has ever been convicted of forced conversion — so surely laws are not required; the intent is to harass. In 2019, Gujarat tightened a law that keeps Muslims ghettoised by preventing them from purchasing and leasing property belonging to Hindus. In effect, foreigners can buy and rent properties in Gujarat that Gujarati Muslims cannot.

We need not get into the treatment of Kashmiris here, because the collective punishment imposed on them no longer arouses our interest. Pakistan wanted to be constitutionally communal; India wanted to be secular but is communalising itself.

All three nations share a penal code given to them by Macaulay a century and a half ago. But each has amended its laws to enable the state to specifically target minorities. This is today happening in India and is something Pakistan has already been through.

One hopes that Bangladesh, with its second chance at a new beginning, moves towards the secularism that is the inevitable destiny of all three nations that comprised Old India.

Also Read: Is Bangladesh becoming East Pakistan?

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Are Hindus Being Targeted in Bangladesh Due to Religious Intolerance?

India remains stable amid global turmoil, from Bangladesh to Ukraine, despite minor internal unrest. In a discussion with Abhijit Iyer Mitra, we explored how external forces attempted to destabilise India, but Prime Minister Modi successfully countered these efforts. The conversation covered various tactics used, from protest toolkits to manipulated economic reports.

There have been revenge attacks against Awami League supporters in Bangladesh. This is partly due to the 300 people who died in protests leading to the downfall of the government. Both Muslim and Hindu supporters of the Awami League have been targeted.

In Dhaka, elements of Bengali culture have been suppressed. Attacks on Awami League supporters who are Hindu are not necessarily because of their religion.

Pramit Pal Chaudhary, head of India Practice Group at Eurasia Group, discussed the recent reports of Hindu communities being targeted in Bangladesh. He explained that these incidents are not isolated but indicate a broader pattern of religious intolerance.

Targeted attacks are likely led by groups like Jamaat or other Islamic factions. These groups oppose the presence of non-Muslim minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians. They argue for a fully Islamic nation with Sharia-based civil code.

Sheikh Hasina has long opposed Jamaat due to their role in her family's murder in 1975. Her government has kept them in check and even persecuted them. However, recent attacks seem politically motivated as well.

The Awami League has strong minority support, especially from Hindus. This is because it espouses a secular political philosophy. Attacks on Awami League supporters include both Muslims and Hindus.

Drawing up lists to target specific groups is not uncommon. This tactic was used during the 1971 war when the Pakistani military targeted Bengali intellectuals and political leaders.

Bangladesh has a history of struggle between its Bengali and Islamic identities. Nasrud Islam, a national poet, wrote about both Allah and Kali. However, his works on Kali are suppressed in Bangladesh.

The current political developments favour the Islamic identity element. This has led to increased violence against minorities.

The Indian government and international community need to raise awareness about this issue. The interim government in Bangladesh lacks control over large parts of the country, making it difficult to maintain law and order.

Restoring order and having a stable government would be crucial steps. Once a stable government is in place, it would be easier to apply pressure or persuade them to take action against violence targeting minorities.

If an elected government comes to power with a coalition between the BNP and Jamaat, there could be more attacks on minorities. In such cases, economic measures like restricting garment exports could be considered as a last resort.

Pramit Pal Chaudhary emphasised that restoring order and having a stable government would be crucial steps in addressing this issue.

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