US group that sought Modi visa rejection behind call for sanctions on Shah

USCIRF's calls for sanctions against Amit Shah were preceded by at least four warnings about the anti-Muslim nature of NRC and CAB

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) yesterday called for sanctions against India’s home minister Amit Shah and “other principal leadership” without directly naming either the Indian Prime Minister or any other minister in his cabinet. The trigger for the calls on Amit Shah was the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday. 

USCIRF is the same body that had successfully convinced the US government not to issue a tourist visa to Modi in 2005. In 2008, the commission again stated, “We urge the U.S. State Department to reaffirm its past decision to deny a tourist visa to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who has been invited to attend a conference in New Jersey this August celebrating Gujarati culture. Modi was previously denied entrance to the United States due to his role in the riots that overtook the Indian state of Gujarat from February to May 2002. We have not seen changes that would warrant a policy reversal.” In 2016, when Modi was the PM, India denied a visa to the commission’s members to visit the country for a study on religious freedom here.

USCIRF, a US federal government commission established by the Bill Clinton administration in 1998, has issued dire warnings about the National Register for Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam since April this year. In one such warning, the commission had noted, “Widespread concerns have been raised that the NRC update is an intentional effort to discriminate, (and) has the effect of discriminating against Muslims, and that the discretion given to local authorities in the verification process and in identifying perceived foreigners to be excluded from the draft list will be abused.”

A few days before the final NRC list in Assam was published on August 31, the USCIRF commissioner Arunima Bhargava issued a statement saying, “The National Register of Citizens verification process must not become a means to target and render stateless the Muslim community in north-eastern India. Proposed policies that suggest that Muslims – and Muslims alone – will face a higher burden for verification, (Which) along with worrisome rhetoric, (will) create a negative and potentially dangerous climate for the Muslim community in north-eastern India.”

Then, in November this year, before the final warning for sanctions against Amit Shah was issued, the commission specifically targeted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its ‘anti-Muslim bias’ in implementing the NRC. It noted, “The BJP has indicated its intent to create a religious test for Indian citizenship that would favour Hindus and selected religious minorities but exclude Muslims. The NRC as a tool to target religious minorities and, in particular, to render Indian Muslims stateless, has become one more example of the downward trend in religious freedom conditions within India.”

It described the CAB as a piece of legislation that would enable “Bengali Hindus and other non-Muslim religious minorities – even if they had been deemed foreigners and excluded from the NRC– to not be classified as illegal immigrants. And therefore they would not be subject to detention and deportation. The illegal immigrant label, and the potential statelessness that comes with it, would be reserved for Muslims.”

Before the Americans had started expressing their concerns over NRC and CAB, the Europeans had first flagged the issue in 2018. The Geneva-based United National Human Rights Commission flagged the NRC exercise. A group of special rapporteurs issued a statement saying, “We are seriously concerned about the lack of clarity regarding what will happen to those left out of the finalised NRC. There is a risk that persons not part of the NRC could become stateless, be at risk of deportation, or be subject to large-scale migration detention. It is feared that this entire process is increasing inter-ethnic tensions in a region that has already experienced a tumultuous history of identity-based conflicts, and suffered from strained inter-communal relations, including multiple outbreaks of serious violence and instability, as well as have extremely grave consequences in the recognition and protection of the human rights of millions of minority men, women and children.” One of the members of this UN group of special rapporteurs was former Maldivian foreign minister Ahmed Shaheed.