US Fee for Worldwide Spiritual Freedom (USCIRF) has introduced it should maintain a listening to on spiritual freedom in India subsequent week.
Approaching the heels of two profitable bilateral conferences between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joe Biden – the Official State Go to of the Indian chief in June and a bilateral assembly in New Delhi in September – USCIRF in its announcement of the assembly mentioned the Congressional listening to is on how the US authorities can work with the Indian authorities to handle violations.
Fernand de Varennes, United Nations Particular Rapporteur on Minority Points, has been invited to testify earlier than the Fee together with Tariq Ahmed, Overseas Regulation Specialist, Regulation Library of Congress; Sarah Yager, Washington Director, Human Rights Watch; Sunita Viswanath, government director, Hindus for Human Rights and Irfan Nooruddin, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Indian Politics at Georgetown College.
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Modi’s state go to to Washington, DC, displays the shut bilateral relationship between the USA and India.
Nonetheless, during the last decade, the Indian authorities has enacted and enforced discriminatory insurance policies concentrating on spiritual minorities, together with anti-conversion legal guidelines, cow slaughter legal guidelines, laws granting citizenship preferences based mostly on faith, and restrictions on overseas funding for civil society organisations, USCIRF mentioned.
Current traits embody the eruption of violence between Hindus and Muslims in Haryana in July and focused assaults towards Christian and Jewish minorities in Manipur, highlighting the necessity for brand spanking new methods to mitigate violence towards spiritual minorities in India, it mentioned.
Since 2020, USCIRF has really useful that the US Division of State-designate India as a Nation of Explicit Concern (CPC) for its systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of non secular freedom, it mentioned.
Witnesses will focus on the Indian authorities’s authorized framework and enforcement of discriminatory insurance policies, clarify present spiritual freedom circumstances, and supply coverage choices for the USA to work with India to fight abuses of non secular freedom and associated human rights within the nation, USCIRF mentioned.