A critical lens that long predates CPC
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) presents itself as an independent, bipartisan defender of religious freedom around the world. In principle, that mission is worthy. In practice, however, its treatment of India increasingly looks less like neutral analysis and more like a standing indictment. The official response in India is very fitting: “ USCIRF has persisted in presenting a distorted and selective picture of India, relying on questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts[1]. Such repeated misrepresentations only undermine the credibility of the Commission itself.”
The pattern is now familiar: selective framing, asymmetrical scrutiny, and a built-in presumption that India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a Hindu-majority political order, must be read primarily through the lens of minority victimhood and majoritarian guilt. Especially when Muslims are involved, USCIRF too often appears to begin with the conclusion and work backward to fit their narrative.
This posture did not suddenly emerge in recent years. USCIRF’s own record shows that India remained on Tier 2 from 2014 through 2019, with the commission noting in 2014 that India had already been on that tier since 2009. Then, in 2020, USCIRF escalated further and recommended that India be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC). It has repeated that recommendation every year since, including in its 2026 report.
That history matters. It shows that the severity of USCIRF’s recommendation may have changed in 2020, but the hostile lens long predated that shift.
And yet, the US government has repeatedly declined to follow USCIRF’s lead. The State Department’s most recent publicly posted CPC designations, dated December 29, 2023, do not include India. That points to a clear gap between USCIRF’s annual campaign of censure and the executive branch’s final judgment.
One standard for America, another for India
India, like every democracy, should be scrutinized, but scrutiny is only credible when it is even-handed. That is precisely where USCIRF fails.
Its India page states that it monitors harassment and violence against religious minorities, “especially Muslims.” That is really concerning, which reveals the commission’s reflexive frame. The focus is so heavily pre-set that the conclusions often feel less discovered than delivered.
Take the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). USCIRF and many Western critics present it as obvious proof of anti-Muslim discrimination. But whether one supports the law or opposes it, that is not the only interpretation available.
The CAA creates a fast-track citizenship pathway for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Critics, including USCIRF, emphasize that Muslims are excluded. They conveniently ignore the fact that non-Muslim minorities, including Hindus, in these neighboring Islamic states have faced prolonged persecution, dispossession, and demographic collapse. A fair-minded body, such as USCIRF, funded with taxpayers’ money, should engage both arguments seriously, but it largely does not.
This is where USCIRF’s double standard becomes glaring. The United States itself has long accepted religion as a relevant factor in humanitarian admissions. Under the Lautenberg framework, certain religious minorities from the former Soviet Union, and later from Iran, were granted a reduced evidentiary burden in the refugee process.
India’s CAA is not identical to the Lautenberg law. They differ in the legal systems and geopolitical contexts. But that does not erase the point. When the United States creates religion-conscious pathways for vulnerable groups, it is a humanitarian judgment. When India does something comparable for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from neighboring Islamic states, USCIRF treats it as presumptive proof of sectarian intent.
That is not consistent, but ideological selectivity.
The same double standard appears in immigration commentary. USCIRF often portrays India’s citizenship verification and deportation efforts, especially in places like Assam, as though they are inherently expressions of religious hostility. But immigration enforcement is not, in itself, persecution. The United States aggressively enforces immigration law and loudly defends its sovereign right to do so. Recent events in Minnesota at the hands of ICE agents are just one example of how aggressively immigration laws are enforced in the US.
India’s illegal migration, proper documentation, and border control should likewise be understood first as matters of governance, even where enforcement may be flawed or abused. USCIRF too often refuses that distinction. It collapses the abuse of enforcement into the mere existence of enforcement.
What USCIRF prefers not to see
USCIRF routinely presents anti-conversion laws as instruments of repression, while giving far too little weight to the argument that the state has a legitimate interest in preventing conversion by fraud, coercion, or inducement. “Love Jihad” may have been an overused phrase, but the interfaith marriages, most commonly between Muslim men and Hindu women, are structurally coerced, and later, women are forced to convert.
USCIRF frames Waqf reform largely as anti-Muslim encroachment, while giving insufficient attention to the government’s stated rationale of improved transparency, record-keeping, dispute resolution, and oversight in the management of Waqf properties. For example, based on recent data from the digitization process on the UMEED portal (end of December 2025), about 70–75% of properties registered under Waqf have either weak, incomplete, or missing documentation. One may disagree with Waqf reforms and criticize them, but a neutral USCIRF should test the stated rationale, not simply wave it away.
The pattern does not stop there. Most revealing is USCIRF’s discomfort in fully naming anti-Hindu violence or deliberately changing the narrative when Hindus are the targets.
USCIRF’s framing is especially revealed in the April 2025 Pahalgam massacre. It did not explicitly condemn the perpetrators, three Muslim gunmen allegedly from Pakistan, in the strongest words. The report just acknowledged that those killed were selected after being asked to recite an Islamic verse. These were civilians who were murdered in front of their families, including children. Such an atrocity should be named with moral clarity.
The commission’s broader pattern has been to give insufficient analytical weight to the wider reality of anti-Hindu terror and the militant Islamist networks. Reuters later reported that India formally charged Lashkar-e-Taiba and The Resistance Front for the tourist killings, but USCIRF ignored it. A genuinely balanced analysis would hold two truths at once: anti-Hindu terror must be named clearly, as well as a call for preventing anti-Muslim retaliation. USCIRF, however, appears far more comfortable with one side of that equation than the other.
USCIRF’s imbalance is not incidental. Its neutrality is not proven simply by criticizing the majority communities. It is proven by the willingness to see the whole field clearly: majoritarian excess where it exists, minority victimhood where it exists, and anti-Hindu terror where it exists. USCIRF too often sees only one category sharply.
From investigation to presumption
This is why USCIRF is increasingly seen not as a neutral body, but as a commission locked into a script. It is fair to ask whether USCIRF gives comparable analytical space to Hindu concerns about terror, coercion, illegal migration, or the misuse of religious protections and institutions. Too often, the answer is no.
None of this is to deny that prejudice, inflammatory rhetoric, and abuse of power can exist in India, just as they can in the United States or elsewhere. But that is exactly the point. If USCIRF wants to be taken seriously, it cannot apply one interpretive standard to America and another to India. It cannot defend religion-conscious humanitarian distinctions when Western governments make them, then denounce them as civilizational wrongdoing when India does. It cannot treat immigration enforcement as sovereignty in one setting and sectarianism in another.
And it certainly cannot recommend India for CPC status year after year, fail to persuade the US government to agree, and still expect to stand above suspicion. USCIRF has the right to criticize India, but not to demand deference while operating with visible asymmetry.
For India, USCIRF has increasingly moved from investigation to presumption. Its annual CPC campaign since 2020, combined with only one dimension of India’s religious and political reality, has made USCIRF’s claim to impartiality harder to sustain.
For many observers, including this author, who has monitored USCIRF reports for nearly a decade, USCIRF looks less like a neutral monitor of religious freedom and more like an advocacy institution that decides the narrative of what India is supposed to represent.
India’s CPC designation today by USCIRF will be more fitting as a “Confident and Pluralistic Country,” and its own Commissioners being prejudiced and Hindu-phobic.
USCIRF’s real problem is not its criticism of India but its double standard.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
Reference:
[1] Official Spokesperson’s response to media queries regarding the 2026 Annual Report of United States Commission on International Religious Freedom – Mar 16, 2026, MEA
[2] 2023 USCIRF Report and Bharat (A country of profound confidence) Part 4: USCIRF, FCRA, and NGOs – Jan 12, 2024, PGurus.com
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Formerly, a researcher in Italy, Japan, and France, he has widely travelled and came to the US in 1978. He was a faculty and academic administrator in several different universities in PA, TX, NJ, MN, WI, and NY, and an Executive Fellow in the White House S&T Policy during the Clinton administration.
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