The Sangh Parivar and Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments have come under severe attack from a US commission which said the Indian government should hold to account the perpetrators of the 2002 Gujarat riots to display the country's return to its tradition of religious tolerance.
Although positive developments affecting freedom of religion and belief have been witnessed in the country since the United Progressive Alliance government came to power, the US Congress-mandated commission said, "Concerns about religious freedom in India remain" despite the "improved situation".
Attacks on churches and individuals largely perpetrated by those associated with "extremist Hindu nationalist groups continue to occur", it said citing a mob attack on a Catholic school in Maharashtra and some other incidents in Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.
In its annual report, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said violence against minorities continues to occur in the states where BJP heads the government and names these as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
The US should press India to make "more vigorous and effective efforts to halt the violent attacks" against religious minorities that "continue to occur with troubling regularity", it said in the report whose release coincided with violence in Vadodara which left six people dead.
It recommended that the government of India should "hold state governments accountable" for the violence and other unlawful acts that occur in the states.
It suggested taking steps to "prevent and punish communal violence, including by following through on a pledge made in 2004 to enact a law criminalising inter-religious violence".
Observing that India has traditions of democracy, secular governance and rule of law that date back to the country's independence, the commission, however, said that despite these "religious minorities have been victims of violent attacks, including killings".
It noted it had recommended to US government to designate India as a "country of particular concern".
"In the late 1990s, there was a marked increase in violent attacks against members of religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, throughout India", it said adding, it coincided with the "rise in political incluence of groups associated with the Sangh Parivar".
The commission said the "ascent of power in 1998 of the Sangh Parivar's political wing, the BJP, helped to foster a climate in which violence against religious minorities was not systematically punished".
It said although the BJP-led central government was "not directly responsible for instigating the violence" against religious minorities, it "clearly did not do all in its power to pursue the perpetrators of the attacks and to counteract the prevailing climate of hostility against these minority groups, especially at the state and local levels".
Referring the February 2002 Gujarat riots of "particular concern" to it, the commission said the Narendra Modi-led BJP government was "widely accused of being reluctant to bring the perpetrators of the killings of Muslims to justice".
Contending that "few persons had been arrested and held to account for the deaths", it said in the wake of "failures" of the Gujarat government, the Supreme Court had declared in October 2003 that it had "no faith left" in the state's handling of the investigations.
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