New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government increasingly harassed, arrested, and prosecuted rights defenders, activists, journalists, students, academics, and others critical of the government or its policies, according to Human Rights Watch Report 2021.
The government continued to impose harsh and discriminatory restrictions on Muslim-majority areas in Jammu and Kashmir since revoking the state’s constitutional status in August 2019 and splitting it into two federally governed territories.
Attacks continued against minorities, especially Muslims, even as authorities failed to take action against BJP leaders who vilified Muslims and BJP supporters who engaged in violence.
The Covid-19 lockdown disproportionately hurt marginalized communities due to loss of livelihoods and lack of food, shelter, health care, and other basic needs.
Hundreds of people remained detained without charge in Jammu and Kashmir under the draconian Public Safety Act, which permits detention without trial for up to two years.
In June, the government announced a new media policy in Jammu and Kashmir that empowers the authorities to decide what is “fake news, plagiarism and unethical or anti-national activities” and to take punitive action against media outlets, journalists, and editors. The policy contains vague and overbroad provisions that are open to abuse and could unnecessarily restrict and penalize legally protected speech. The government also clamped down on critics, journalists, and human rights activists.
The restrictions, including on access to communications networks, since August 2019 adversely affected livelihoods, particularly in the tourism-dependent Kashmir Valley. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries estimated that the first three months of the lockdown to prevent protests since August 2019 cost the economy over US$2.4 billion, for which no redress was provided. Losses nearly doubled since the government imposed further restrictions to contain the spread of Covid-19 in March 2020.
The pandemic made access to the internet crucial for information, communication, education, and business. However, even after the Supreme Court said in January that access to the internet was a fundamental right, authorities permitted only slow-speed 2G mobile internet services, leading doctors to complain that the lack of internet was hurting the Covid-19 response.
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act continued to provide effective immunity from prosecution to security forces, even for serious human rights abuses. In July, security forces killed three people in Shopian district, claiming they were militants. However, in August, their families, who identified them from photographs of the killings circulated on social media, said they were laborers. In September, the army said that its inquiry had found prima facie evidence that its troops exceeded powers under the AFSPA and it would take disciplinary proceedings against those “answerable.”
The security forces also continued to use shotguns firing metal pellets to disperse crowds, despite evidence that they are inherently inaccurate and cause injuries indiscriminately, including to bystanders, violating India’s international obligations.
In the early weeks of the nationwide lockdown announced in March to contain Covid-19, in several states, police beat people who violated the lockdown, including those trying to get essential supplies. In West Bengal, police allegedly beat a 32-year-old man to death after he stepped out of his home to get milk. A video from Uttar Pradesh showed police forcing migrant workers, who were trying to walk home, to hop on the street to humiliate them. Police in several states also arbitrarily punished people or publicly shamed them for breaking the lockdown.
New cases of torture in police custody and extrajudicial killings highlighted continued lack of accountability for police abuses and failure to enforce police reforms. For the first 10 months, until October, the National Human Rights Commission reported 77 deaths in police custody, 1,338 deaths in judicial custody, and 62 alleged extrajudicial killings.
In June, a father and son died in police custody in Tamil Nadu state after being detained for allegedly violating Covid-19 lockdown rules. In September, the Central Bureau of Investigation, which was asked to investigate the deaths following nationwide outrage, charged nine policemen with murder and destruction of evidence.
In July, Uttar Pradesh police killed a suspect Vikas Dubey, saying he was trying to escape police custody, making him the 119th person to be killed in an alleged extrajudicial killing since the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh led by Ajay Bisht, who uses the title Yogi Adityanath, took office in March 2017. In September, the Uttar Pradesh government announced it would set up a special police force that would be empowered to search and arrest without warrant, raising further concerns about police abuse.
At least 53 people were killed in communal violence that broke out in Delhi in February. Over 200 were injured, properties destroyed, and communities displaced in targeted attacks by Hindu mobs. While a policeman and some Hindus were also killed, the majority of victims were Muslim. The attacks came after weeks of peaceful protests against the Indian government’s discriminatory citizenship policies.
Violence broke out soon after a local BJP politician, Kapil Mishra, demanded that the police clear the roads of protesters. Tensions had been building for weeks, with BJP leaders openly advocating violence against the protesters, whom some called “traitors” to be shot. Witness accounts and video evidence showed police complicity in the violence. A July report by the Delhi Minorities Commission said the violence in Delhi was “planned and targeted,” and found that the police were filing cases against Muslim victims for the violence, but not taking action against the BJP leaders who incited it.
In Uttar Pradesh, authorities continued to use allegations of cow slaughter to target Muslims. By August, the Uttar Pradesh government had arrested 4,000 people over allegations of cow slaughter under the law preventing it, and also used the draconian National Security Act against 76 people accused of cow slaughter. The NSA allows for detention for up to a year without filing charges.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric surged following the outbreak of Covid-19. In March, after Indian authorities announced that they found a large number of Covid-19 positive cases among Muslims who had attended a mass religious congregation in Delhi, some BJP leaders called the meeting a “Talibani crime” and “CoronaTerrorism.” Some pro-government media had screamed “CoronaJihad” and social media platforms were flooded by calls for social and economic boycotts of Muslims. There were also numerous physical attacks on Muslims, including volunteers distributing relief material, amid falsehoods accusing them of spreading the virus deliberately.
According to 2019 government data, crimes against Dalits increased by 7 percent. This, Dalit rights activists said, was in part as backlash by members of dominant castes against any efforts toward upward mobility or what they might perceive as a challenge to caste hierarchy. In August, 40 Dalit families in Odisha were socially boycotted when a 15-year-old girl plucked flowers from the backyard of a dominant caste family. In July, a Dalit man was stripped and beaten along with his family members in Karnataka for allegedly touching the motorcycle of a dominant caste man. In February, a Dalit man was beaten to death by members of dominant caste in Tamil Nadu for defecating in their field. In September, a Dalit lawyer was killed over his social media posts critical of Brahminism.
In August, several United Nations experts raised concerns over the government’s proposed revision to the environmental impact assessment process that exempts several large industries and projects from public consultation and allows post-facto clearance for projects that began without obtaining the required permissions. Environmental activists worry that diluting the provisions for public consultation and allowing post-facto clearances would undermine the rights of tribal communities, already facing a violation of rights due to the illegalities in forest clearances.
Indian authorities brought politically motivated cases, including under draconian sedition and terrorism laws, against human rights defenders, student activists, academics, opposition leaders, and critics, blaming them for the communal violence in February in Delhi as well as caste-based violence in Bhima Koregaon in Maharashtra state in January 2018. In both cases, BJP supporters were implicated in the violence. Police investigations in these cases were biased and aimed at silencing dissent and deterring future protests against government policies.
In September, the parliament passed amendments to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the foreign funding law already used to harass outspoken rights groups. The amendments added onerous governmental oversight, additional regulations and certification processes, and operational requirements, which would adversely affect civil society groups, and effectively restrict access to foreign funding for small nongovernmental organizations. In September, Amnesty International was forced to suspend its India operations after the government froze the organization’s bank accounts, accusing it of violating laws related to foreign funding. Amnesty said it was a “reprisal” for its work and that the government’s actions were the latest in “the incessant witch-hunt of human rights organizations.”
Several journalists faced criminal cases, arrest, threat, or even physical assault by mobs or police for reporting on Covid-19. In many cases, they were independent journalists working in rural India, targeted for their criticism of the government’s handling of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, authorities continued to use sedition and laws related to national security against journalists. In September, journalist Rajeev Sharma was arrested under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly selling sensitive information to Chinese officials. The Press Club of India condemned the arrest, pointing to the police’s “dubious” past record of arresting journalists under the law without basis. In August, Uttar Pradesh authorities arrested journalist Prashant Kanojia over a post on Twitter, accusing him of disrupting communal harmony. Kanojia was also arrested last year over social media posts critical of the state’s chief minister but was granted bail.
In August, the Supreme Court convicted prominent lawyer Prashant Bhushan for criminal contempt of court for two social media posts, prompting widespread condemnation from former judges, retired bureaucrats, and lawyers who called it a “disproportionate response” that would have a “chilling effect” on people expressing critical views of the judiciary. Human Rights Watch
