Author: Utpal Kumar
Publication: Firstpost.com
Date: April 26, 2022
URL:      https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/uscirf-has-deep-pakistani-links-but-why-is-west-so-willing-to-push-vacuous-anti-india-narrative-10598681.html

The United States wants a democracy in India that’s subservient to its interests. Narendra Modi’s India isn’t that. And that is the crux of the problem

On 3 February 2022, Professor Gautam Sen wrote an article in Firstpost, asking why there’s a sudden surge in international efforts to destabilise the Modi government. He made a persuasive case that the international campaign against the Modi government was primarily “sponsored by Western governments as well as the Sino-Pakistani alliance even if the visible face of the downstream protagonists may appear more innocuous”. He singled out the Islamophobia bill to say that it aimed singularly against India, and “would require the disreputable USCIRF, dominated by evangelists, to report India’s alleged depredations against its Muslim population”.

Less than three months down the line, 25 April to be precise, USCIRF, better known as US Commission for International Religious Freedom, came out with its 2022 Annual report, and predictably, India — the same India whose democratic credentials where invoked by the high priests of liberalism in the West on the issue of Ukraine — found itself clubbed with some of the most dangerous, fundamentalist and secretive nations of the world. Quite similar to the USCIRF’s 2021 report!

So, what exactly does the report say? For 2022, based on religious freedom conditions in 2021, USCIRF recommends that the State Department:

• Redesignate as CPCs (Countries of Particular Concern) the following 10 countries: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan;

• Designate as additional CPCs the following five countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, Syria, and Vietnam;

• Maintain on the SWL (Special Watch List) the following three countries: Algeria, Cuba, and Nicaragua;

• Include on the SWL the following nine countries: Azerbaijan, CAR, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

So, the USCIRF clubs democratic India with communist China, Islamist Pakistan, autocratic North Korea, fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, and terror-infested Syria and Afghanistan. Even more ironically, Iraq, Cuba, Nicaragua, Malaysia, etc, find themselves better placed than India.

It’s intriguing to see the USCIRF put India, where the Muslim population has increased from about 10 per cent at the time of Independence to 14.2 per cent now, as per its own report, in the list of countries like Pakistan, where the Hindu population has declined from 12.9 per cent in 1947 to 1.9 per cent today. The USCIRF has placed India, which till a few years ago pursued the official policy of minorities having the first right to the nation’s resources, with Pakistan where minorities constantly live under the fear of attack, conversion or blasphemy accusations.

In the backdrop, it would be interesting to find out the basis on which the USCIRF has questioned India’s democratic, liberal and secular credentials? The report says, “In 2021, religious freedom conditions in India significantly worsened. During the year, the Indian government escalated its promotion and enforcement of policies — including those promoting a Hindu-nationalist agenda — that negatively affected Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and other religious minorities.”

Let’s take the example of Dalits. In this year’s much-talked-about Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP won 63 out of 84 SC reserved seats. And if pure statistics are to be believed, the saffron party’s hold over the Dalit community has only strengthened over the years. According to the CSDS post-poll study, the BJP’s Jatav base went up from 5 per cent in 2012 to 21 per cent in 2022. Its non-Jatav base went up from 11 per cent in 2012 to 41 per cent in 2022. A party that discriminates against Dalits won’t get this kind of support from the so-called discriminated. But then it’s difficult to explain Indian politics to those fly-by-night analysts who confine themselves to the luxuries of New York high life and their only source of information are those out-of-job India experts who were on the payroll of the last regime!

The USCIRF diatribe continues: “The UAPA and Sedition Law have been invoked to create an increasing climate of intimidation and fear in an effort to silence anyone speaking out against the government. Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest and longtime human rights defender of Adivasis, Dalits, and other marginalised communities, was arrested on dubious UAPA charges in October 2020 and never tried. He died in custody in July 2021 despite repeated concerns raised about his health.”

Ironically, this “longtime human rights defender of Adivasis, Dalits, and other marginalised communities”, as per the National Investigation Agency’s 10,000-page charge-sheet, was one of the central figures behind the 2017 Bhima-Koregaon violence. Letters and documents submitted by the NIA to the court suggest that Stan Swamy received Rs 8 lakh through a comrade to set up CPI-Maoist units and carry out its terror activities.

Last but not the least, for all the ‘administrative apathy and atrocities’, Stan Swamy died in a hospital where he was treated at his own request. What else do woolly-headed liberals in the West, who as this article would later showcase readily work on behalf of Islamist Pakistan and communist China, expect the Government of India to do with a criminal associated with Left-wing extremism which, as per the Union Home Ministry data, killed 8,527 people in different parts of India between 2004 and 2021. The majority of the civilians killed were poor tribals, often branded as ‘police informers’ before being brutally tortured and killed.

Apart from Stan Swamy, the report cites just one name — a Kashmiri activist called Khurram Parvez, who was arrested in a terror funding case by the NIA. As per the agency’s findings, Parvez worked as “Lashkar-e-Tayyeba operator” who would recruit “overground workers” for the “Kashmiri cause”. One may question the agency’s version, but what one cannot is that Pervez openly called the Amarnath Yatra a “militarised” and a “political” pilgrimage that is a “manifestation of Hindutva nationalist movement”. One can easily gauge his disdain — if not abhorrence — for India and the ancient tradition.

Apart from these two names, whose credibility is in doubt any way, the USCIRF report couldn’t muster any other name; after that it’s all about vacuous statements on CAA, NRC, anti-conversion laws, inter-faith marriages, et al. What the report doesn’t say, deliberately or otherwise, is that all these acts are reactive in nature — they are aimed at self-preservation of the old Indic way of life which is facing an existential crisis at the hands of missionaries and the Church. The irony is that the West is invoking secularism to protect the Church, against whom the very idea first germinated in Europe in the late medieval times.

But what makes the report dubious is the deep nexus USCIRF has with Pakistan. One can understand the obvious Pakistani/Chinese slant from the fact that in 2014, the USCIRF showed India’s map without Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

Nadine Maenza, the current USCIRF Commissioner, had earlier worked for US politician Rick Santorum, an old Pakistan supporter who, as per Foreign Affairs, wanted the United States “to continue foreign aid to Pakistan and maintain good relations with the nuclear-armed country”.

Soon after joining USCIRF in 2018, Maenza came in touch with Shaik Ubaid and his rabidly anti-India organisation, Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC). Ubaid had been associated with Jamaat front active in USA-ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), which has deep links with Pakistan-based terrorist outfits.

Maenza is also president of ‘Patriot Voices’, an organisation founded by Santorum in 2012. There she worked with Terry Allen, who is the founder of a lobby firm called Fidelis Government Relations (FGR), which was hired by Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) to lobby with USCIRF to target India. For its services, sources say, IAMC paid FGR $40,000 in 2013-14.

One needs to remember that IAMC has been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) by the Tripura police for spreading a series of fake news during the communal violence in Tripura in November 2021. Interestingly, the 2022 Annual Report mentions the Tripura violence despite credible evidence suggesting it was fake news. The report says in a Gobbelian mode, “In October, mobs attacked mosques and torched properties of Muslim residents in Tripura, which borders Bangladesh.”

FGR was also hired by Burma Task Force (BTF), another anti-India front founded by Shaik Ubaid, who gave $267,000 to FGR between 2018 and 2020 to lobby against India with the US Congress. Maenza has regularly been associated with both the IAMC and BTF, and this makes USCIRF’s call for designating India as CPC dubious, to say the least.

The link is further extended to hatred for Prime Minister Narendra Modi too. BTF, for instance, hosted ISI agent Ghulam Nabi Fai, known for lobbying on behalf of Kashmiri separatists. Fai is closely associated with so-called human rights activist Angana Chatterji, who too has worked with Maenza in a company called Hardwired Global. Chatterji had played a big role through her organisation, Coalition Against Genocide, in association with BTF, believed to be another front for Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in getting then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s US visit banned in 2005.

Apart from them, there are people like Harrison Akins, a policy analyst with the organisation, who played a crucial role in the 2020 USCIRF report that called for blacklisting India. Akins’ self-confessed mentor is Akbar Ahmad, a former Pakistani high commissioner to the UK. Or, Naila Mohammad, another Policy Analyst of USCIRF; her mother is the president of New England Chapter of APPNA, whose political lobbying wing PAK PAC has openly lobbied for Kashmir’s ‘independence’. For Waris Husain, another analyst at USCIRF, the connection is even more direct: His father hails from Pakistan.

In this backdrop, are we surprised with the USCIRF’s stand vis-à-vis India? It’s obvious the organisation has a clear and perceptible Pakistani slant. Islamabad, however, is just a pawn in the larger game of diplomacy and geo-strategy. The real problem is the US-led West: It wants New Delhi by its side, as has been obvious during the Ukraine crisis, but it is vehemently opposed to the idea of a strong and powerful India. It wants an ally against rising China, but more in the line of Ukraine vis-à-vis Putin’s Russia. To its misfortune, India isn’t Ukraine. And Modi definitely isn’t Zelenskyy.