New Delhi: Highlighting India’s worsening human rights records, a new Congressional Research Service report notes differing views among US policymakers and analysts on addressing this concern, while courting New Delhi as a strategic counterweight to China.
The report ‘India: Religious Freedom Issues’ released earlier this week charts the basis of India’s secular constitution and explains the religious and political fault-lines that have fuelled the growth in social disharmony and what it has meant for India-US ties.
“After a decade of BJP rule at the federal level and expanded BJP power in state governments since 2014, Hindu chauvinism and bigotry are more visible in India, with rates of communal violence on the rise in recent years,” said the report.
It also spotlighted the recent accusations made against the Indian government by Canada, as well as US prosecutors, of alleged transnational acts. “These developments severely disrupted India-Canada ties and could yet affect the tenor and trajectory of the U.S.-India partnership. They also have attracted congressional attention.”
Earlier this year, the Senate foreign relations committee chair had “explicitly linked his approval of a pending U.S. arms sale to India to Biden Administration assurances that India’s government was committed to a thorough investigation leading to ‘credible accountability’ in the case”.
The report underscores that for the past two decades, US and Indian officials “have consistently identified shared values as the basis of the bilateral partnership,” with democracy, freedom, human rights, and pluralism prominently featured in joint statements since 2000. Reflecting on independent analysts’ views, it states, “From this perspective, India’s poor human rights record could lead to a weakening of that country’s role as a US partner.”
It further went on: “A perceived Modi/BJP project to codify religious majoritarianism in the country through Hindu nationalist policy, if continued, ultimately may erode the credibility of the Indian state, in part by widening and even making permanent the existing fault lines among its religious communities”.
The “argument” goes, the report says, that India’s desired great power status requires societal harmony, and that the US should insist on it. At the same time, other analysts have said that the shared US and Indian interests, rather than values, would be at the core of policymaking. “The implications here may be most relevant to expectations among some in the U.S. capital that shared values alone would lead India to “ally” with the United States in a potential conflict in the western Pacific.”
Referencing a 2024 Carnegie report, the CRS noted that many analysts have said that there is also a view that “calls to “prioritize human rights” in US policy are based on a false assumption that values and security interests must be “balanced,” an alleged fallacy that inevitably leads to favoring the latter.”
Instead of a “misplaced deference to the defense establishment,” some analysts urge human rights advocates to emphasise the interlinkages between rights-respecting policies and national security interests while generating their own (non- militarised) conception of the US national interest.
In its chapter on “considerations for Congress”, the report noted that the US Commission for International Religious Freedom had recommended since 2020 too designate India as a “country of particular concern”.
It also proposed nine suggestions for Congress to address freedom issues in India which include raising concerns through hearings, delegations, and conditioning aid on improved human rights conditions, encourage reforms to laws such as the UAPA and FCRA, support for facilitating USCIRF visits to India and advancing legislation aimed at addressing human rights issues both domestically and globally.
The report also noted that the “Indian government may become less inclined to maintain or deepen its partnership with the United States if the US government forcefully presses it on human rights”.
“Actions such as CPC designation, the targeted sanctioning of individuals (most especially government officials), and the conditioning of aid or defense sales to India likely would vex the New Delhi government and potentially be challenging to the goal of deepening a values-based US-India partnership,” the report observed.
