Instead of needling India, here’s why USCIRF should designate United States as a ‘country of particular concern’

It is curious that while Donald Trump has clipped the wings of the US Deep State, the USAID, put paid to the global NGO industry, or taken a knife to the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, Office of Net Assessment, he has miraculously spared the USCIRF, the jobless federal advocacy group that apparently ‘monitors global religious freedom’ and issues ‘recommendations’ to the US president, secretary of state, and US Congress that are then routinely fed to the office shredder.

Perhaps Trump sees some value in a tool that through its fabricated reports turns the attention outward when the polarized American polity is a collapsing pack of cards. Or, maybe, the Christian supremacist propaganda of Ku Klux Klan ’lite’ keeps the evangelist lobbies satiated.

Either way, the USCIRF, a pack of bigoted clowns that creates bad blood between the US and countries targeted by it, is a global laughing stock. In 2025, India’s ministry of external affairs had said “it is the USCIRF that should be designated as an entity of concern.”

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I am a little conflicted whether this loony advocacy group, with no legal authority and zero credibility, deserves the attention (albeit negative) it gets. And yet, since it is powered by the might of the United States of America, the bigotry, malevolence and hypocrisy must be called out every time.

Besides, these narrative-building tools are the building blocks of predatory hegemony. The annual issuing of these skewed narratives creates the fake moral superstructure that make it easy for the US to “spread democracy” through military intervention.

This time, however, the charlatans have targeted India’s external intelligence wing, R&AW, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), calling for “targeted sanctions on individuals and entities” and has asked the Trump administration to freeze the assets of entities and individuals “and/or barring their entry into the United States”. This marks an escalation and a major provocation.

India has reacted with disdain. The MEA, in its latest reaction, has stated: “For several years now, USCIRF has persisted in presenting a distorted and selective picture of India, relying on questionable sources and ideological narratives rather than objective facts. Such repeated misrepresentations only undermine the credibility of the Commission itself.

“Instead of persisting with selective criticism of India, USCIRF would do well to reflect on the disturbing incidents of vandalism and attacks on Hindu temples in the United States, selective targeting of India, and growing intolerance and intimidation of members of the Indian diaspora in the United States, which merit serious attention.”

We shall presently dive into the reasons why the United States should instead be designated as the “country of particular concern” (CPC) but first a few words on the members of USCIRF and its chair, Vicky Hartzler.

A Republican politician, Hartzler is a Christian supremacist who believes the United States is a Christian nation and should reflect “conservative Christian values”.

She is a staunch opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage and famously wept on the House of Representatives floor in 2022 while pleading with colleagues to vote against same-sex marriage. Much of her work in Congress focuses specifically on ‘persecution of Christians’, and she has been a vocal critic of India’s anti-conversion laws as they interfere with Christian proselytization. The conflict of interest is stark.

The USCIRF vice-chair is Asif Mahmood, a Pakistani-American ‘activist’. One of the staff analysts at USCIRF is Sema Hasan, another Pakistani-American. Hasan is a ‘senior policy analyst’ at USCIRF and is primarily responsible for monitoring and reporting on religious freedom in South Asia, with a specific focus on India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is a lead researcher behind the USCIRF ‘annual reports’ and helps draft the recommendations that the organization makes to the US State Department.

Need I say more?

This is a commission whose foundational DNA is Christian missionary proselytization, whose commissioners are either Christian supremacists or bigoted Islamists and is based in a country where Hindu temples are vandalized with impunity, where a sitting vice-president repeatedly expresses desire to convert his Hindu wife to Christianity before tens of thousands of cheering supporters, and where a Republican politician calls a sacred Hindu moorti a ‘false god’ and demands the removal of a lawfully erected Hanuman statue from American soil.

While the USCIRF is fantasizing about sanctioning India’s external intelligence apparatus, Hindu temples across the US are being subjected to a relentless wave of vandalism, desecration, and targeted hate crimes.

In August 2025, the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple in Greenwood, Indiana, was vandalized with spray-painted slogan ‘Hindustan, Modi Murdabad’ -- marking the fourth BAPS temple in less than a year to be attacked. Local cops classified the incident as ‘criminal mischief’ that downgrades the religiously motivated hate crime against a minority faith community into a petty criminal act.

This is a textbook definition of religious intolerance. And not an isolated incident. BAPS temples in Melville, New York, Sacramento and Chino Hills, California, had all been previously vandalized with similar anti-India and anti-Hindu graffiti.

Anti-Hindu hate crimes in California rose for the fourth consecutive year according to the state’s Department of Justice. FBI's own data recorded 25 anti-Hindu hate crime incidents in 2024 alone. Researchers documented nearly 2,700 posts promoting racism and xenophobia against Indians and Indian Americans in a single month, with a sample of 128 hateful posts between December 2024 and January 2025 generating 138.54 million views on X (formerly Twitter).

Not a single USCIRF report, not a single press note has been devoted to the plight of Hindu Americans being harassed, threatened, and having their places of worship desecrated in USCIRF’s own backyard.

According to IAAC, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to documenting hate incidents against Indian Americans, the community in the US is “experiencing an unprecedented surge of hate incidents, online harassment, and institutional discrimination.” Between 2023 and 2025, there has been 115% rise in anti-Indian slurs, 75% spike in online hate against Hindu-Americans in early 2026, and 50% reported personal discrimination since 2025.

The IAAC’s hate-tracker records that between January and February 2026, “anti-Indian rhetoric surged across social media platforms, spilled into public forums, and coincided with significant policy actions affecting Indian American workers and families.”

The 2026 Carnegie Endowment ‘Indian American Attitudes Survey’ (IAAS), a “nationally representative” online study of 1,000 Indian American adults conducted between November 25, 2025, and January 6, 2026, found Indian Americans are victims of “widespread perceptions of bias, frequent encounters with online racism, and marked levels of personal harassment or discrimination.”

One in every two Indian Americans reported “personal discrimination since start of 2025”, causing many respondents to preemptively change “how they live, speak, or participate in public life to avoid harassment”.

According to the survey, among the Indian Americans who report such discrimination, “skin color emerges as the most frequently cited reason (36%), followed by country of origin (21%), and religion (17%).”

One wonders why the US doesn’t ‘qualify’ as a culprit for “engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations” -- as defined by this year’s USCIRF report.

The Carnegie survey also finds that “anti-Indian hate is not necessarily confined to the online arena; a substantial minority of Indian Americans report direct experiences with harassment or hostility. Since the start of 2025, one in four respondents have been called a slur.” This is causing what social scientists call “behavioral modification.”

“Roughly one-fifth (21%) report avoiding leaving and re-entering the United States, refraining from displaying political signs or bumper stickers (21%), or avoiding publicly wearing Indian dress or attire (19%) and 18% also report avoiding political rallies or protests,” says the survey.

The hypocrisy does not stop at the grassroots. It climbs all the way to the second-highest office in the land.

VP Vance at an October 2025 event on the campus of the University of Mississippi, attended by nearly 10,000 MAGA faithful, openly stated a desire for his wife, Usha Vance, a practicing Hindu, to convert to Christianity: “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way”.

This was not a quiet quip in a private setting. It was announced before a roaring MAGA crowd in a public political theatre. Vance went on to add that the “United States of America is and always will be a Christian nation” at a subsequent event in Phoenix.

The Carnegie survey of Indian Americans cited these statements by Vance to participants and found that “clear majorities agree that the statement raises broader concerns about religious inclusion and representation in American public life.

“Roughly 73% say the statement makes them feel that Indian Americans need stronger representation in U.S. politics, and a similar share report feeling uncomfortable about how Indian religious backgrounds are viewed in American society, and even more striking, more than four in five respondents (82%) agree with the statement that politicians should be careful about making public statements regarding their spouse’s religious beliefs.”

The USCIRF report, that claims to highlight “misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech” in India, expectedly remains silent on the virulent, racist attacks directed at Hindu American community by influential American political actors and Christian MAGA supremacists.

The most striking example occurred in Texas following the August 2024 unveiling of a 90-foot-tall statue of Hanuman that was met with a wave of religious bigotry. ‘Christian activists’ publicly labelled the idol as “demonic filth,” while right-wing media outlets warned of the “wrath of the One True God” for building “demonic idols”. Social media accounts identifying as ‘Christian Nationalists’ used dehumanizing tropes to describe the Hindu article of faith and its worshippers.

The latest report has the audacity to suggest “sanctions” on R&AW and the RSS that, if carried out, would constitute imperial intervention and a profound violation of India’s sovereignty. That the bilious buffoons even dared to make such a suggestion should make New Delhi reach out to the Trump administration through proper channels to express displeasure.

Born of Christian evangelical advocacy, staffed by Islamists and chaired by a Christian culture-war activist, institutionally blind to the religious persecution occurring on its own soil, USCIRF functions not as a watchdog of any sort but a tool of geopolitical pressure dressed in the language of human rights.

Its ‘annual reports’ should be carefully segregated and dropped into the nearest green bins meant for wet, organic, and biodegradable waste.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)