Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday said that the perception that Muslims do not face discrimination in India does not hold ground as the community’s numbers in the population have grown since 1947.
She claimed that those claiming that Muslims face discrimination have no idea about ground realities.
Sitharaman made the statement during an interaction with think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC. The president of the institute, Adam S Posen, had asked her whether she believed that perceptions of violence against Muslims were harming investments in India.
In response, the Union minister urged prospective investors to “come and look at what’s happening in India rather than listening to perceptions being built by people who’ve not visited the ground but writing reports”.
Sitharaman said that since Independence, the Muslim population in India has increased, whereas in neighbouring Pakistan, minorities have been “decimated”.
The share of the Muslim population in India has increased from 9.4% in 1951 to 14.2% in 2011, according to Census figures. However, data from the National Family Health Survey-5 released in May showed that the fertility rate among Muslims has seen the sharpest decline among all religious communities over the past two decades.
The fertility rate is the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime.
“If there is a perception or if there’s a reality [that] their [Muslims’] lives are difficult or made difficult with the support of the State, which is what is implied in most of these write-ups, I would ask, will the Muslim population be growing from what it was in 1947?” Sitharaman asked.
The Bharatiya Janata Party leader said that although Pakistan declared itself an Islamic country, it said that minorities would be protected.
“Every minority has been dwindling in its number, or if I may use the word which is harsher, decimated in Pakistan,” she said. “Even some of the Muslim sects have been decimated. Violence prevails against Muhajirs, Shias and every other group you can name, which are not accepted by the mainstream...I don’t know, Sunnis, probably.”
Sitharaman added that law and order in India is a state subject, and police forces are run by elected governments in the states. “So, that itself tells you how these reports have no clue of the law and order systems in India,” she said.
US reports flagging violence against minorities in India
Notwithstanding Sitharaman’s claims, several reports by entities in the United States have expressed concern about violence against Muslims in recent years.
In April 2022, a report released by the US Department of State had said that Muslims in India are vulnerable to communal violence and discrimination.
The report had mentioned discrimination against minorities in India, extrajudicial killings, degrading treatment or punishment by the police and prison officials and arbitrary arrests and detentions by government authorities among other concerns.
The report had referred to the targeting of Muslims using laws against religious conversions. It had also referred to the exclusion of Muslims from the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which provides an expedited path to Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
In November, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom had said that religious freedom and the human rights related to it were threatened in India for several reasons, including the failure of government policies to protect minorities. The commission is an independent American government agency that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion and makes policy suggestions to the White House.
The panel had reiterated its recommendation from April last year that the United States government should designate India as a “country of particular concern”.
In July, the Indian government had rejected the findings of the commission made in April, calling them biased and inaccurate.
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