Political and Human Rights Situation in India 2024

December, 2024
Status report for the European Parliament

 

Read the full fact-sheet here.

India is the world’s largest democracy and a strategic partner of the European Union, with whom it is increasingly planning free data and technology exchanges and trade. Yet, investigations have shown worrying trends in India. In 2014, Narendra Modi was elected as India’s Prime Minister. Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is also the ruling party in most Indian states. The BJP openly embraces Hindu nationalism, or “Hindutva”. India is witnessing a steep marginalisation and curtailment of the rights of its (religious) minorities through laws, the weaponisation of law, and hate and violence incited by political leaders against minorities. Genocide scholars have identified ‘signs and processes’ of an approaching genocide in India against the Muslim community. Other religious minorities, like Christians also face serious threats with violence against #Christians rising by 81% between 2020 and 2021 alone. Recent reporting shows how platforms, which are increasingly regulated in the EU, such as Facebook and Instagram, are used to spread hate speech and organise violent attacks against minorities. Additionally, India’s ruling party has used political ads, a lack of platform accountability, and troll networks to amplify attacks on minorities’ human rights. There is ample evidence of police torture, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings, and expansion and the weaponisation of anti-terror laws, against religious minorities and political dissidents especially. The global civil society alliance, CIVICUS ranks India’s civic space as “repressed” due to the government’s misuse of anti-terror laws to suppress and jail activists, authorities’ actions to block funding for NGOs, and the weaponisation of other laws to silence dissent. The V-Dem Institute still categorises India as an “electoral autocracy”. Adding to these concerns, which are covered both in this report and the previous one, we expand the landscape of human rights abuses to include the rights of India’s indigenous (Adivasi) population whose rights are increasingly under threat in part due to extractivist desires to grab their land. The displacement and even the violent and deadly repression of their movements to defend their land proceed with the tacit permission of the state. They face severe violence at the hands of paramilitary groups, while their rights to protest and mobilise are further stripped by the government and authorities.