America’s watchdog body for international religious freedom is split over censuring India.
Four of the nine members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), including its chairman and vice-chairperson, have distanced themselves from the panel’s recommendation that India should be designated as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for “systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom” tolerated by the government.
CPC designation is the equivalent in religious terms of a country being named a terrorist state. America’s International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) mandates the US government to impose sanctions on CPCs.
But with nearly half the commissioners opposed to naming India as a CPC, the panel’s recommendation is expected to find its way, after due niceties, straight into the state department’s waste paper bin.
In a dissenting note to the commission’s letter to secretary of state Colin Powell yesterday recommending the designation, four commissioners said India is “a respected constitutional democracy with manifold religious traditions that co-exist and flourish under extreme economic and other conditions”.
It “has a judiciary which is independent, albeit slow-moving and frequently unresponsive, that can work to hold the perpetrators responsible, contains a vibrant civil society with many vigorous, independent non-governmental human rights organisations that have investigated and published extensive reports about the Gujarat government’s handling of the situation and the rise of religiously-motivated violence and is home to a free press that has widely reported on and strongly criticised the situation on the ground in Gujarat and the growing threats to a religiously plural society within India”.
The commission alleged in its letter to Powell that in India, violence, including fatal attacks, against Muslims and Christians was continuing and that “the government has yet to address adequately the killing of an estimated 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002”.
The letter informed Powell that several central government ministers from the BJP have publicly allied themselves with extremist Hindu organisations, “whose members regularly employ hate speech against religious minorities... and seek legislation to prohibit the religious conversion of Dalits and others from Hinduism”.
The dissenting commissioners argued that “since last year, national governmental bodies have taken a number of significant steps to rein in excesses or to correct insufficient action at the state level. The Supreme Court has forcefully denounced Gujarat state authorities’ handling of certain prosecutions, halted key trials and paved the way for changes of venue to ensure justice.
“With such visible and proactive intervention, the Supreme Court has made clear that it will take action to ensure justice…. Justice has been done this year in the state of Orissa in the widely reported case involving the 1999 murder of an Australian missionary and his sons.... Perhaps most notably, a series of actions by Indian officials during the past year have prevented similar outbreaks of large-scale religiously motivated violence in several volatile locales”.
One of the dissenters is Preeta Bansal, an Indian-American born in Roorkee, who was earlier solicitor-general of New York state and special counsel in the Clinton White House. She is the first Hindu to be on the panel and is the nominee of Thomas Daschle, leader of the Senate Democrats.
The earlier commission had a Pakistani-American, Shirin Tahir-Kheli, as a member. Indian-Americans accuse her of having been an activist in organising hearings against India during her tenure.
The dissenters got surprising support on India’s behalf from The Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, who was nominated to the commission by President George W. Bush.
The other dissenters were the panel’s chairman, Michael Young, a legal luminary, and the deputy chairperson, Felice D. Gaer, a Jew.