The deterioration of religious freedom in India is 'perhaps the steepest and most alarming' of all the negative developments identified globally by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the group's vice-chairperson says.
Commission member Gary Bauer, a Trump appointee, dissented from the USCIRF conclusion on India, saying it placed the country"in a gallery of rogue nations in which it does not belong" and cited the country's status as"our ally." Another member, Tenzin Dorjee, appointed to the commission by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also dissented, saying that as a Tibetan refugee who lived in India for years, he and his fellow Buddhists"enjoyed complete religious freedom.
The Indian government, which has long had an acrimonious relationship with the USCIRF, angrily rejected the commission's conclusions. A Foreign Ministry,"[The commission's] biased and tendentious comments against India are not new. But on this occasion its misrepresentation has reached new levels.
The USCIRF report also highlighted China's detention of 1.8 million Uighur Muslims, the plight of nearly a million Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh, North Korea's reported imprisonment of about 50,000 Christians and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, among other instances of religious freedom violations. Two countries, Sudan and Uzbekistan, were said to have made"important progress" on religious freedom issues.
The USCIRF was established under the terms of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act as an independent, bipartisan federal government commission.
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