Report: 'Muted Response' Letting China, India Violate Religious Rights

The Catholic charity organization Aid to the Church in Need denounced an “increasingly muted response” by the world to growing religious persecution in China, India, and other “strategically important” countries in its annual World Religious Freedom report, published last week.

Aid to the Church in Need, which helps persecuted Christians around the world with both humanitarian aid and advocacy for their human rights, publishes a regular volume of its World Religious Freedom report using various metrics, including both government abuse of people of faith and criminal violence against them that goes unpunished. The report classifies countries into three tiers of persecution: “red” countries, where the most severe repression takes place; “orange” countries, where discrimination exists but less aggressively than in red countries; and “under observation” countries, where government and civil society trends have elicited alarm from religious freedom advocates.

The 2023 report covers the period from May 2021 to December 2022. Aid to the Church in Need found that 28 countries, housing over half of the world’s population, merited the “red” classification. Around the world, 47 countries received worse grades on religious freedom than they did in the 2022 edition of the report, while only nine improved.

“Religious freedom was violated in countries where more than 4.9 billion people live. We count 61 countries where citizens faced severe violations of religious freedom,” the report observed.

The world’s two most populous countries, China and India, both fell under the “red” category. In China, repression was top-down and driven almost exclusively by Chinese Communist Party policies, including the genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims and ongoing persecution of Christians who refuse to attend communist-led services, often known as “house Christians.” In India, mob violence largely ignored, and sometimes encouraged, by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party, has made it increasingly dangerous to be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, or non-Hindu generally in the country.

The report was published in the same week that President Joe Biden engaged in two high-profile diplomatic overtures to both countries: sending Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing for talks with genocidal dictator Xi Jinping, and welcoming Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a lavish celebration at the White House. Religious freedom received a passing mention during Modi’s visit and did not appear as a topic in Chinese government readouts of Blinken’s discussions with Xi and other senior Communist Party officials.

The World Freedom Report lamented that international pressure on countries deemed “strategically important” had appeared to wane in the year the report covered. In addition to China and India, Aid to the Church in Need identified Nigeria, home to increasingly gruesome jihadist violence, and Pakistan, where mob lynchings of Christians often occur with no government intervention, as countries of concern.

“An increasingly muted response from the international community towards atrocities by “strategically important” autocratic regimes (China, India), demonstrated a growing culture of impunity,” the report reads. “Key countries (Nigeria, Pakistan) escaped international sanctions and other punishment following revelations of religious freedom violations against their own citizens.”

“No Western nation can truthfully claim it doesn’t know about the abuses occurring on the Arabian Peninsula, China, Pakistan and Nigeria,” the report continued. “With the West looking the other way, often motivated by the need to guarantee the provision of natural and energy resources, the perpetrators become more assertive and make local legislation more restrictive.”

“In this way,” it concluded, “impunity is tacitly granted to perpetrators by the ‘international community.’”

Aid to the Church in Need condemned both India and China for “controlling access to jobs, education and health services, installing mass surveillance, imposing financial and electoral obstacles, and failing to impose law and order when faith communities come under attack from local mobs or terrorists.”

“Those wielding power, both state and nonstate (terrorist) actors, implement a strategy with the same ultimate objective: eliminating the competing authority held by the undesirable religious community,” the report observed.

In China, Xi Jinping has for the past decade implemented a repressive policy his government has dubbed “sinicization,” in which all legal religions – Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant Christianity – must promote the interests of the Communist Party. Religious leaders or even civilians believed to adhere to a faith they put above the Communist Party face varying forms of persecution, from elimination at a concentration camp to the bulldozing of their places of worship.

In India, BJP leaders have turned a blind eye to growing waves of mob violence against Christians and Muslims. Christian communities, most recently under extreme persecution in northern Manipur, India, regularly denounce that police do little to protect churches and other community sites. The BJP government has also allowed regional governments to use the law to increasingly elbow non-Hindu religions out of the public sphere.

“The freedoms of religious minorities, especially Christians and Muslims, are severely undermined and especially the practice of religious conversion and cow slaughter invite severe repercussions,” the World Freedom Report narrated. “The BJP also supports restrictions on religious freedom through the Freedom of Religion Acts (or anti-conversion laws). These are state-level statutes designed to regulate non-Hindu religious conversions allegedly accomplished through forcible and fraudulent means.”

The Biden administration has prioritized improving bilateral ties with Modi’s India to elevate the country as a counterweight to China, whose belligerence and illicit international activities are a threat to both countries. During Modi’s state visit last week, Biden received only minimal calls from Democrats, and no significant Republican pressure, to address religious rights in his meetings with Modi. Four Democrats – Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tliab (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Summer Lee (D-PA) – boycotted Modi’s address to Congress, receiving little attention for the move.

Modi addressed religious concerns during a press conference with Biden on Thursday during which Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui asked about global alarm regarding the erosion of rights in his country.

“I’m actually really surprised that people say so. And so, people don’t say it. Indeed, India is a democracy,” Modi said. “We have always proved that democracy can deliver. And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Siddiqui has since been the recipient of a barrage of threats and harassment from Hindu nationalists on social media, which the White House condemned this week.

In Beijing, Blinken claimed to have mentioned human rights in his meeting with Xi Jinping on June 19, but the Chinese government did not include any such conversation in its summaries of Blinken’s talks with Xi, Foreign Minister Qin Gang, or other leaders.

“China respects U.S. interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the United States. In the same vein, the United States needs to respect China and must not hurt China’s legitimate rights and interests,” the Foreign Ministry claimed Xi told Blinken. “He called on the U.S. side to adopt a rational and pragmatic attitude, and work with China in the same direction.”

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