Contrary to what is being fed in international media about India, the freedom of religion is alive and well in India, writes Salvatore Babones, an associate professor at the University of Sydney in Quadrant Online.
He cracked open the conspiracy by the West to manufacture the impression that democratic India has become a kind of Hindu Rashtra (nation). Recently, in January this year, BBC released the documentary film titled ‘India: The Modi Question,” which features the Gujarat riots of 2002. The film caused controversy for alluding to the leadership of Modi as chief minister during the riots while disregarding the clean chit given by the Supreme Court.
Targeting the UK, Babones cited the example of an arrested 45-year-old woman in Birmingham on December 6, 2022 for praying silently, while in India, people of many different religions regularly pray in public, often very loudly.
“In a country where most elections are decided on razor-thin margins, people with complaints about religious discrimination or harassment don’t have to turn to the US State Department for help. The ballot box offers a surer, swifter, more immediate redress,” said Babones.
According to the highly-respected Pew Research Center, the worst country in the world for social hostility to religion is … India.
Notwithstanding their own surveys showing that “the vast majority of Indians say they are very free today to practice their religion” and “relatively few Muslims say their community faces ‘a lot’ of discrimination” in the Hindu-majority country, Pew rated India the worst country in the world for “acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society”.
The Pew Research Center because of its perceived objectivity has become an institutional target for the opponent of India.
Other targets include the United States Department of State’s Office of International Religious Freedom (OIRF), the American government-sponsored United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the semi-official American think tank Freedom House, and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).