Witnesses at a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom hearing on Thursday, May 7, called on the American government to take urgent action against what they described as systematic persecution of religious minorities in India, including Christians, Muslims and Sikhs.
The hearing, chaired by USCIRF Chair Vicky Hartzler and Vice Chair Asif Mahmood, drew former diplomats, academics, lawyers and civil society representatives to Capitol Hill. A recording of the proceedings is available on the USCIRF website.
Hartzler said India’s trajectory on religious freedom had continued to decline. “The Indian government, at both the national, state and local levels, continues to facilitate and tolerate religious freedom violations through the use of discriminatory legislation, arbitrary detention of religious leaders, and failure to intervene in attacks against religious minorities,” she said.
Vice Chair Mahmood described a pattern extending beyond India’s borders, citing “surveillance and monitoring of advocates, and at the most extreme end, assassination attempts predominantly of Sikhs in North America.”
A proposed amendment to India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act drew sharp criticism from multiple witnesses. The bill, expected before Parliament during its Monsoon Session from July 21 to August 12, would allow the government to seize the entire assets of NGOs whose licences to receive foreign funds lapse, are denied or are not renewed, including retroactively.
Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, in a written statement, said the temporary 2022 suspension of the FCRA licence of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity illustrated what such powers could produce. Under the proposed amendments, he said, assets could have been seized outright and permanently lost even though the licence was eventually restored.
David Curry, president of David Curry and Associates, described the FCRA framework as one element of a broader architecture of pressure on minority faith communities, noting that over 20,000 NGO licences had been cancelled in recent years.
Smith urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio, expected in New Delhi for a Quad Foreign Ministers meeting, to raise the FCRA amendments directly with Indian officials.
Raqib Naik, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate, told the Commission that India currently ranks fourth out of 168 countries in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project’s 2025 assessment for risk of intrastate mass killings, behind only Myanmar, Chad and Sudan.
His organisation’s 2025 monitoring recorded 1,318 in-person hate speech events across 21 states. Eighty-eight percent occurred in jurisdictions governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Twenty-three percent of those speeches contained explicit calls for violence.
Naik also documented a 555 percent increase in incidents of violence and intimidation against Christians between 2014 and 2024. Open Doors recorded over 60 attacks on Christians during the 2025 Christmas period alone.
New anti-conversion laws passed in March 2026 by Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra drew particular attention. The Chhattisgarh law defines “mass conversion” as involving two or more persons, requires a 60-day advance notice open to public objection, mandates a police inquiry of the convert, and prescribes life imprisonment as the maximum penalty.
Curry noted that when the Chhattisgarh law was announced, the state’s police chief declared conversions to Christianity “the biggest emerging security threat” in a state where Christians form less than two percent of the population.
Naik pointed out that in Uttarakhand, of 62 cases registered under a 2018 anti-conversion law, only five had reached full trial by September 2025, and all five ended in acquittals. “These laws are designed not to secure convictions but to subject minorities to the punishment of process,” he said.
An anonymous written submission from a former pastor who served Dalit Christian communities in India for over a decade, now living in the United States, described beatings of pastors, sexual violence against women during attacks on Christian communities, and denial of burial rights to families who refused to reconvert to Hinduism.
He described the “Ghar Wapsi” literally translated as ‘homecoming’ or reconversion movement, not as a voluntary return but as coercion enforced through social exclusion, economic pressure and physical intimidation.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice and former chief prosecutor at the international tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone, said a panel of international legal experts had found reasonable grounds to believe that international crimes, including persecution, torture and deportation as crimes against humanity, may have been committed against Muslims in Assam and Uttar Pradesh.
He drew a direct comparison between a video posted on the official BJP Assam social media account in February 2026, appearing to show Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma aiming a rifle at Muslim men in the crosshairs, with the slogan “No mercy” scrolling across the screen, and incitement propaganda he prosecuted at the Rwanda Tribunal.
“The message was sent, there was no accountability, and so it was understood,” Rapp said.
He called on the International Criminal Court Prosecutor to open a preliminary examination into the forcible deportation of Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam into Bangladesh.
Georgetown Law professor Arjun Sethi and the Sikh Coalition both addressed what they described as an Indian state campaign of transnational repression reaching into North America.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Indian national Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in a New York federal court in February 2026 to his role in a murder-for-hire scheme targeting Sikh American activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. A superseding indictment had earlier charged Vikash Yadav, a former officer in India’s external intelligence agency RAW, with coordinating the plot. Yadav remains at large under a U.S. federal arrest warrant.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated in October 2024 that it had “strong evidence” tying a broader campaign of violence on Canadian soil to the “highest levels” of the Indian government.
“We’ve long noticed the unmarked cars and suspicious figures at our community gatherings,” Sethi told the Commission. “Now it has escalated into a documented, life-or-death reality.”
The hearing follows USCIRF’s 2026 Annual Report, released in March, which recommended for the seventh consecutive year that the State Department designate India a Country of Particular Concern. New Delhi had rejected the report. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal called it “a motivated and biased characterisation of India” and said USCIRF had relied on “questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts.”
The State Department has declined to act on USCIRF’s India designation every year since 2020.
