Modi-led leadership enabling systematic repression of minorities in India, rights expert tells US panel
Washington: A US-based expert tracking Hindu hate crimes targeting Muslims, Christians, and marginalised castes, in his testimony before a US government commission, presented a record of human rights abuses against minorities in India and called for targeted Global Magnitsky sanctions against leaders of the ruling party.
According to Kashmir Media Service, in his testimony before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) on the situation of Muslims and Christians in India, Raqib Hameed Naik highlighted senior political leaders’ role in enabling hate and violence, private construction firms’ complicity in demolishing minority properties, social media platforms’ amplification of hate speech, and the growing transnational repression targeting critics abroad.
The persecution “bears the sanction of the country’s top political leadership led by Prime Minister Modi” and is carried out through the state apparatus and the militant networks of the Hindu nationalist movement (the Sangh Parivar / RSS ecosystem, including the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Naik, who currently serves as the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), told USCRIF.
He described this systematic repression as “embedded in bureaucracy, codified in law, shielded by absolute impunity, and steadily more ruthless in execution,” naming specific leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and figures from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) such as Yogi Adityanath and Himanta Biswa Sarma, as enablers of this persecution.
Rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, say abuse of minorities has risen in India since Modi took office in 2014, pointing to a religion-based citizenship law the UN calls “fundamentally discriminatory,” anti-conversion legislation that challenges freedom of belief, the 2019 removal of Muslim-majority Kashmir’s special status, and the demolition of Muslim-owned properties.
“India today stands fourth out of 168 countries assessed by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project for the risk of intrastate mass killings” Naik told the USCIRF in his testimony.
“State-led violence and dispossession against Muslims have reached an unprecedented scale. The clearest example is India’s northeastern Assam state, where between 2021 and 2026 the BJP state government conducted at least 33 documented forced eviction operations, demolishing over 22,000 homes and other structures and displacing 20,387 families with nearly 100,000 people, mostly Bengali-origin Muslims, a community estimated at over 10 million in Assam and around 36 million nationwide. 40 percent of those displaced lost their homes to demolitions in 2025 alone.”
Should this institutionalised dispossession continue, it risks creating one of the country’s largest populations of internally displaced persons, Naik told the commission.
He cited a 2025 report documenting 1,318 in-person hate speech incidents against Muslims and Christians across 21 Indian states, representing a 97 percent rise since 2023. “That is a shocking four hate speeches per day, and a 97 per cent increase over 2023,” he said.
He also provided evidence of dehumanising language used in public events, where minorities were referred to as “termites,” “pests,” “snakes,” or “pigs”, and documented instances of sword and knife distributions and firearm training for Hindu militant recruits.
Naik testified that “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) of electoral rolls is being used alongside the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to disenfranchise millions of Muslim voters, specifically citing 9 million excluded voters in West Bengal state.
He highlighted that half of the states in the world’s largest democracy have passed anti-conversion laws that he says are weaponised to incarcerate minority Christians and Muslims.
The rights defender presented evidence of punitive demolitions of Muslim-owned properties, noting that these continue despite a 2024 Supreme Court order. He said that machinery from major companies like JCB, Caterpillar, Tata, and Mahindra is being used in these expulsion drives. “The machinery used to carry out these unlawful demolitions, in violation of Indian and international laws, mostly includes excavators and bulldozers manufactured and supplied by British company JCB, Caterpillar of the US, CASE, owned by the Italian-American conglomerate CNH Industrial, Tata Hitachi, an Indian-Japanese company, Mahindra, an Indian company and Hyundai of South Korea,” he said.
His testimony also highlighted violence linked to beef consumption and cattle transport. “We have identified active networks of Gau Raksha Dals operating across at least seventeen states. These groups patrol state and interstate highways, where Muslim truck drivers carrying cattle or meat are routinely assaulted, in many cases suffering life-threatening injuries and in some cases killed, while their cattle and vehicles are seized,” he said. The absence of consequences has emboldened these groups to publicly broadcast their crimes, Naik testified. “Vigilantes routinely film the assaults and upload the videos to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where they circulate widely, allowing other vigilantes to copy new tactics. We have documented over 4,000 such videos in the past three years alone,” he added.
About persecution of Christians, Naik said they face “assaults on pastors and worshippers, the forcible closure of churches, denial of burial rights, and arrests on fabricated conversion charges.”
The United Christian Forum recorded a 555 per cent increase in incidents of violence and intimidation against Christians, from 127 incidents in 2014 to a record high in 2024, he noted. Open Doors documented over sixty attacks on Christians during the 2025 Christmas period alone, and its India partner reported more than 2,900 incidents of Christian persecution between January and November 2025, he told the US commission.
Naik also named social media platforms, stating that “Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X serve as a central infrastructure for spreading this hate and bigotry and incitement to violence.”
Transnational repression
He further highlighted the growing pattern of the Indian government’s transnational repression targeting critics and activists abroad. “In December 2023, the Washington Post revealed that a covert Indian intelligence-led disinformation campaign had targeted American critics of the Modi regime and of Hindu nationalism, including myself, my work, and several former USCIRF Commissioners. The campaign was led by an Indian intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dibya Satpathy. Both of my co-panellists today have been targeted by the same network. My India-focused minority-rights research initiatives, Hindutva Watch and India Hate Lab, were banned by the Modi regime through an emergency order in January 2024, which I am currently challenging in the Delhi High Court,” he told the commission.
As personal evidence, Naik presented a letter sent to X by the Indian government demanding his GPS location data just six weeks prior to the hearing at USCIRF, characterising it as an attempt to silence critics living abroad.
Naik urged the US government to impose Global Magnitsky sanctions against Indian politicians and far-right militant groups such as RSS, Bajrang Dal, and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Global Magnitsky sanctions are a US-led, worldwide programme targeting foreign individuals and entities involved in serious human rights abuses and significant corruption.
Naik also recommended that the US designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for its “severe violations of religious freedom”.
