India’s dark side: How Modi is cracking down on minorities Pakistan Observer article

Pakistan’s newspaper Pakistan Observer has published an article by Muhammad Khan, a professor of political science at the International Islamic University Islamabad, focusing on the persecution of minorities in India. Caliber.Az presents the article to its readers.

Under the cover of secularism, India has been exploiting its minorities throughout the post-colonial period. Through a well-planned strategy, the areas inhabited by people other than the Hindu majority were kept backward and deprived of basic facilities of life. The worst among all was economic deprivation and denial of basic education to poor minority masses. Among Hindus even, the low-caste Dalits face discrimination alongside the minorities. Dalits constituting about 17 percent of India’s total population. They face all sorts of violence, discrimination and humiliation at the hands of upper caste Hindus, tainted by birth into a caste system that deems them impure and less than human.Sikhs forming less than 2 percent of the total Indian population are being discriminated against and relegated in all spheres of life in Hindu-dominated India. Today, the Indian government, its agencies, and the RSS are directly targeting the Sikh community both inside India and abroad. The situation has now crossed India’s borders entirely. Indian authorities have been implicated in acts of transnational repression, including the 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist in Canada.

India denied any connection but acknowledged Nijjar as a terrorism suspect. This was not an isolated incident. Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, was convicted in the United States in May 2026 for plotting to assassinate a Sikh political activist at the direction of an Indian government official. Christians forming almost 2.3 percent of Indian population are equally discriminated against and humiliated. They are also facing the fanatic onslaught of Hindutva and RSS for forcible conversion into Hinduism. In September 2025, Uttarakhand’s legislative assembly passed the State Authority for Minority Education Act, which dissolved the Madrasa Board and placed educational institutions for Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians under strict state control. This is direct state interference in the religious and educational affairs of minorities, aimed at gradual erasure of their distinct identities.

Through a massive and sustained campaign major minority group in India, the Muslims — over 17 percent of the total population— continues to face discrimination, humiliation and forced conversion. In May 2025, the Indian government passed the Waqf Amendment Act, restructuring the management of Islamic endowments including mosques, seminaries, and graveyards effectively bringing Muslim religious properties under state control. The Act’s passage led to deadly protests in West Bengal in which three people lost their lives. This amounts to a systematic assault on religious autonomy of Indian Muslims. The logic of the Hindu majority remains unchanged: since Indian Muslims were converted from Hinduism during Muslim rule, they must reconvert. They are barred from eating beef, with punishment for cow slaughter ranging from five years to life imprisonment.

In 2025 alone, 27 Muslims and one Dalit were killed by Hindu extremist groups in religiously motivated hate crimes across India. Throughout the first quarter of 2026, extrajudicial killings, mob lynchings, and targeted assaults against Muslims continued with alarming regularity. During Ramazan in March, a truck driver was shot dead by cow vigilantes in Rajasthan. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2026, stated that the Indian government had normalised violence against religious minorities, marginalised groups, and critics through discriminatory policies, hate speech and politically motivated prosecutions.

The international response has grown sharper. In its 2026 Annual Report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended that India be designated a Country of Particular Concern for engaging in systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations for the seventh consecutive year. More significantly, USCIRF called for targeted sanctions against the RSS and India’s external intelligence agency RAW for their responsibility in severe violations of religious freedom. This is an unprecedented development. Never before has a US federal body called for sanctions against the RSS by name. As per Pew Research Center analysis, out of 198 countries, India ranked as the fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. In February 2026, UN Special Rapporteurs on torture and extrajudicial killings warned of systemic policing failures in India, citing a pervasive pattern of excessive and lethal use of force by police, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, with Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis disproportionately affected.

The exploitation of the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 further demonstrated the pattern. The Indian government seized the aftermath of the attack to justify mass deportations of religious minorities it considers illegal migrants, expelling hundreds of Bengali-speaking Muslims and Rohingya refugees. Exploitation of minorities and Indian secularism are antitheses of each other. The international community and the United Nations must not allow this exploitation to continue unchecked. Muslims in India are facing all sorts of discrimination, alienation, and humiliation; being killed, dispossessed, and pressured to convert. Other minorities are equally being endangered and oppressed. The time for symbolic concern has passed. Concrete action by the international community is now a moral and legal imperative.