The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday dismissed a United States religious freedom panel’s call for sanctions against members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, describing the organisation as “biased” and lacking credibility.

On Wednesday, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said that RSS leaders should not be given high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies. The statement came ahead of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s planned visit to the US.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The panel’s chair, Asif Mahmood, said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member of the RSS. He also described the RSS as an umbrella organisation “whose sub-groups have perpetrated attacks on religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims”.

On Friday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that the US panel had been making “misleading and provocative statements” about India for years.

“The organisation you are talking about is known to everyone as a biased organisation,” Jaiswal said. “We should stay away from such organisations because they have their own agenda and at the same time have no credibility.”

Panel says India a ‘country of particular concern’

In March, the panel had recommended in its annual report that the US government designate India as a “country of particular concern” over alleged systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom.

This was the seventh time that the panel had made this recommendation.

The March report also recommended targeted sanctions against individuals and entities, including the RSS and India’s Research and Analysis Wing, including by freezing their assets or barring them from entering the US. The Research and Analysis Wing is the country’s foreign intelligence agency.

The commission is an independent US government agency that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion and makes policy suggestions to the White House. The suggestions are not binding.

In an India-specific issue update released in November, the commission had noted that the “interconnected relationship between the RSS and BJP allows for the creation and enforcement of several discriminatory pieces of legislation, including citizenship, anti-conversion and cow slaughter laws”.

India rejected the report in March, describing it as a “distorted and selective” picture of the country based on “questionable sources and ideological narratives”.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

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