We can legitimately ask, what right does the United States of America has to comment on the internal affairs of India? The fact is that we are a sovereign nation and we are not answerable to any country, though we are signatories to some international statutes like on human rights and are, therefore, expected to value those covenants. 

The United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is a body constituted under the US law to advise the US government on how countries have been treating their religious minorities. The commission’s recommendations are not binding on the US government, which can accept or ignore them at its sweet will.

The latest report has designated India, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and 11 other nations as “countries of partial concern” with regard to religious freedom. The Indian government has not taken kindly to the report and a Union minister tried to pick holes in the report by mentioning that some hate crime occurred in the US too.

What the minister forgot to mention is that the crime he mentioned had no official sanction in the US, unlike in India where religious persecution happens at the hands of the official machinery, often at the instigation of those who enjoy official patronage. When a Sikh or a Muslim is attacked by a white supremacist in the US, he is immediately arrested and given the severest punishment.

It was two years ago that African-American George Floyd was killed by a white policeman named Derek Chauvin, when the latter pressed the former to the ground with his knee on his neck for nine minutes and a few seconds. Did anyone support the policeman? Was he garlanded like the lynchers in Jharkhand were garlanded, among others, by a Union minister? He has been given imprisonment for 23 years.

When a Sikh police officer, the first to be allowed to wear a turban in the US, was shot by a criminal in Texas, the people of the country stood up as one man to pay homage to him. His family was given a huge compensation, contributed by both the state and the people at large.

Yes, crime occurs in every country. It was just a few days ago that a Malayali woman reached the police station with the severed head of her husband. When a husband kills his wife or a man kills his daughter-in-law and grandchildren, the state cannot be held responsible. There are many reasons for such incidents, which social and religious leaders should look into. Let’s return to the US report. 

A Hindu organisation in the US described the USCIRF as a body full of Hinduphobic and Indophobic members. In that case, the commission members should be described as haters of 15 nations, including India. Is that the case? The USCIRF has been in existence for many years and it is only in recent years that India has been getting a derogatory mention. Why is that so?

Let’s not bother about what the US says. Instead, let’s worry about what happens in the country. Can anyone say that everything is hunky-dory in India? Take the Jahangirpuri incident in the national Capital. To call the procession that some hotheads took out in the area as religious is to challenge common sense.

How can those who wield batons, daggers, knives, swords and sundry weapons be described as the devout of any religion? That their only aim was to create trouble became apparent when they barged into a mosque and tried to hoist a saffron flag there. If someone breaks into our house and behaves like them, can we remain mute spectators? Can they be called congenital rioters when they reacted?

To take out a religious procession, permission of the police is a must. They did not have any such permission. All of them can be identified as there are video recordings of the procession? How many of them have been identified and arrested?

When the incident occurred, the local BJP leader wrote to the North Delhi Municipal Corporation asking for summary punishment of the “rioters”. That is how nine bulldozers were pressed into service to destroy the business establishments of the Muslims living in Jahangirpuri. No, theirs were not big shops.

Some of them had only a cart on which they sold their wares. One of them sold fruit juice to make a living. He lost Rs 20,000 when the bulldozer ran over his establishment. It may not be a big sum for many of my readers but for Niyaz, it is like the Rs 10,000 crore invested in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

Was there any inquiry conducted to identify the rioters? Nothing at all. Yet, bulldozers were used against the Muslims. True, some Hindus also suffered collateral damage but the target was certainly the Muslim community. Even after the Supreme Court ordered the stopping of the bulldozers, the operation continued for nearly two more hours.

Had there been no judicial intervention, the operation might not have stopped at just the gate of a mosque. It could have destroyed the houses of the Muslims. Media, especially social media, have been used to portray the Muslims as Rohingyas. Earlier the stock phrase used against them was that they were Bangladeshis.

The Muslims are as indigenous as any other resident of Jahangirpuri. It is the old fascist technique to portray a group of people as the source of evil and to turn the majority community against them. That is how the ordinary Germans were conditioned to become Hitler’s “willing executioners”. The Jews were portrayed as the ones who kept the German progress under check. In Khargone in Madhya Pradesh something similar happened. There, the police did not want a Hindu procession and tried to stop it. In the ensuing violence, some policemen were injured because of stone-pelting.

The next day, the police reached the place with bulldozers and razed to the ground several houses around a mosque. One of the houses belonged to a Hindu but since it stood on a mosque land, it too was not spared. One of the houses was built with the financial support obtained from a Prime Ministerial housing scheme. Again, no inquiry was conducted before using the bulldozers.

This bulldozer politics started first in Uttar Pradesh where Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was nicknamed the Bulldozer Baba, which he considered as a badge of honour. Alas, it had some social sanction, as is borne out by the result of the February-March elections in the state that brought the Baba back to power, of course, with a reduced majority.

Demonising the Muslims has become a pastime for some. Unfortunately, no action is taken against them. All right-thinking people were stunned by what the speakers at a Hindu Sansad said in Haridwar. Some of those who wore saffron gave a call for the genocide of Muslims. They wanted Hindus to take their cue from the way Rohingyas were treated in Myanmar.

They did this in the presence of the police. The Chief Minister of the State was seen touching one of the leaders of the meeting. Small wonder that no action was taken against them till there was some judicial heat on the police. No bulldozers were used against the speakers, who preached hatred. In a recent case, one Hindu seer threatened that he himself would rape Muslim women if any Hindu woman was touched.

When the police filed a case against him, he came out with a statement that he said it on the spur of the moment. But when he was granted bail by the court, the man repeated his first statement. Nobody asked him how a Swami, conditioned by his mind to control his sensory perceptions, could even think of raping a woman. Now the question is: Has anyone in authority condemned such characters? On the contrary, their silence is an encouragement for the hooligans to take the law into their own hands.

It was a big news in 2015 when Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched to death at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly keeping “beef” in his fridge. Nobody heard him when he insisted that the meat was mutton, not beef. Before long, he breathed his last. Lynching is no longer news in the country.

Early his month, a Hindu was lynched to death at Dwarka in New Delhi. The police arrived at the farm house, where a cow was allegedly slaughtered. They saw the gau-rakshaks attacking and killing him. The police was prompter in arresting the man’s accomplices for allegedly slaughtering the cow but not in arresting the lynching mob. If anything, it showed the priority of the police. Alas, murder has become a lesser crime than cow slaughter!

There have been several incidents in which Christians found themselves at the receiving end. In Karnataka, a Christian school, which at one time had 70 per cent Christian students, used to ask them to bring the Bible to the school. This practice was stopped.

Yet, on this pretext, the state education department has formed a committee to check whether lessons from the Bible are imparted in any of the Christian schools in the state. I heard the local bishop claiming in a television interview that there has never been a single case of a student having been converted. A small issue has been blown out of proportion to put the Christian community in the dock.

The same education department is not bothered about some Muslim girl students, who do not want to attend classes without the hijab. There is no bar on anyone wearing a cross, or a tilak or a turban, which are all symbols of his or her religion but Muslim girls can’t attend schools wearing the headscarf.

The pity is that even the courts have found ingenious arguments to deny the girls their constitutional right to wear the dress of their choice. Similarly, Muslims do not compel anyone to eat halal meat and, yet, an issue was raked up. The idea is to drive them to a corner.

Recently, the 400th birth anniversary of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji was celebrated. He was the father of the 10th and last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh Ji. He never preached hatred against anyone. One of the famous quotes attributed to him is: “For whom praise and dispraise are the same, and on whom greed and attachment have no effect. Consider him only enlightened whom pain and pleasure do not entrap. Consider such a person saved." He was truly such a person.

True, he was ordered to be executed by Aurangzeb from the Red Fort. That is the only reason why Narendra Modi went to the Red Fort to address the nation on the Guru’s 400th birth anniversary. Yes, Modi is today the successor of Aurangzeb. However hard the present dispensation tries to obliterate the Mughal period from the books of history, it will never succeed. The Mughal dynasty ruled India effectively from 1526 to 1707. The Mughal rule was not an unmitigated disaster.

It introduced a centralised system of governance which paved the way for integration of states and formation of what is today the Indian nation. The Mughals ruled the country using local human and material resources. They were not inimical to Hindus who found their rightful presence in the system of administration.

Today as references to Mughal rule are removed from school and college textbooks, the poor Muslims who are under-represented in most walks of life are being threatened with even more marginalisation. In independent India, we had Muslims as President, governors and chief ministers and even as Union Home Minister. Today, the most popular Muslim leader in UP is behind bars!

Is it any wonder that the US Commission has clubbed India with several countries for being less fair to its minorities? Instead of calling the commission members names, the Indian government would do well to improve the state of affairs in the country. The minorities, including the Muslims, need nothing more than equal treatment, as guaranteed by the Constitution. The rest will automatically fall in place.

ajphilip@gmail.com