Interviews | Politics | South Asia

“The non-stop incitement and conduct of anti-Muslim violence, in the absence of any accountability for perpetrators, has resulted in the normalization of persecution.”

Screenshot of a now-deleted Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) video showing Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma aiming a gun at Muslim men with a caption ‘POINT BLANK SHOT.’

Credit: X/Supriya Shrinate

Anti-Muslim violence in India is not a recent phenomenon. However, since 2014, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power with a strong mandate, the systematic and widespread targeting of Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, has assumed alarming proportions. Muslims are being beaten and lynched. Their homes and shops are being bulldozed and their livelihoods destroyed. Their way of living, cultural and religious practices are being systematically undermined. Muslims are routinely dehumanized even by top political leaders, who publicly incite violence against them. Laws have been enacted to strip Muslims of their Indian citizenship.

Worryingly, the violent, widespread, and systematic targeting of Muslims is being orchestrated with the active support of state institutions. As the recently released Report of The Panel of Independent International Experts to Examine Information About Alleged Violations of International Law Committed Against Muslims in Assam and Uttar Pradesh, India—2022–25 noted, there is “credible evidence of widespread and systematic human rights violations against Muslims, and reasonable grounds to believe that international crimes, including persecution, torture, and deportation as crimes against humanity, may have been committed.”  The study, which focused on the situation in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, pointed out that the chief ministers of these two states could be preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing.

Stephen Rapp, one of the three members of the Panel that carried out this study, told The Diplomat’s South Asia editor, Sudha Ramachandran, that the hate speech and persecution of Muslims may amount to a crime against humanity. A former chief of prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; chief prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, Rapp drew attention to the “normalization of anti-Muslim violence in India, where everyday violence and open calls to violence have become routinized.” India can draw lessons from the Balkans, he said, where “the descent into mass violence” began not with the war but with “narratives, and with the gradual normalization of the idea that coexistence was no longer viable.”

The report says that persecution of Muslims in the states of Assam and Uttar Pradesh may constitute apartheid, preparation for ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.  Could you throw light on the situation in these two states?

From the material we have examined, Assam and Uttar Pradesh have witnessed the most serious abuses by state actors. These include extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and torture and ill-treatment of Muslims. Across these states, authorities are also reported to be resorting to various reprisals as collective punishment against minorities and dissenters, on various pretexts. These states are also the hotbeds of anti-minority incitement and violence, with Hindu militant groups aligned to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — including groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), recently recommended for sanctions by USCIRF, and its affiliates, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Congress) and Bajrang  Dal (the Army of Hanuman) and various “cow protection” gangs — holding much sway and working in tandem with local authorities to target Muslims and other minorities.

Uttar Pradesh has been ruled by the BJP since 2017. Its government is led by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu supremacist and a monk, who has a long history of anti-Muslim baiting, including inciting hate and violence, founding violent groups, and mobilizing Hindutva actors to target Muslims and other minorities. In Assam, it is again the state Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP, in power since 2021, who plays that role, having made anti-Muslim targeting the core of his polarizing politics.

These men have used their leadership of state governments to implement the BJP’s Hindu-first ideology, with a range of discriminatory laws, policies, and programs. This has effectively licensed widespread violations and abuses of the human rights of Muslims by both public and private actors, including through physical violence.

How are the chief ministers of Assam and Uttar Pradesh preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing?

The series of public statements by Assam Chief Minister Sarma raises sufficiently serious concerns under Article III(c) of the Genocide Convention and Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute to warrant further independent investigation. Direct and public incitement is an inchoate crime, punishable even in the absence of a completed genocide, and requires public and direct encouragement of the destruction, in whole or in part, of a protected group, accompanied by specific intent that the group be destroyed in whole or in part.

The material we have reviewed indicates that, across multiple speeches and public communications, Sarma repeatedly portrayed Bengali-speaking Muslims as “infiltrators” and an existential threat, invoked imagery of setting “fire,” framed events as a “last battle of survival,” and called for conditions to be “explosive” while facilitating arms licenses for Hindus in predominantly Muslim areas. Delivered at rallies, to the press, and through mass media, these statements were public in nature and direct in form, and would readily be understood by their intended audience as referring to Bengali-speaking Muslims. When assessed against the broader context documented in this report, it is clear that the content of the speeches meets the threshold required for the crime of direct and public incitement to genocide.

It is less clear whether Chief Minister Sarma can reasonably be regarded as displaying genocidal intention (that the targeted group be destroyed in whole or in part), though his words do expressly support ethnic cleansing. While the Panel does not find specific intent in relation to genocide, we emphasize that India’s erga omnes obligation to prevent genocide is both salient and extremely urgent in these circumstances – warranting urgent measures to hold the chief minister accountable and stop such violence-inciting speech in the future.

Do you find a similar pattern at the national level?

By focusing on Assam and Uttar Pradesh, we wanted to highlight how government practices, laws, and majoritarian mobilization — in sum, majoritarian governance — have advanced the furthest in the two states, amidst similar trends setting in other BJP-ruled states, nationally. The focus on Assam and Uttar Pradesh is also important because the two states are central to the situation of Muslims in India.

Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest province; Muslims (44 million, 2011 Census) make up close to 20 percent of its population, the largest Muslim population in the country. Likewise, Muslims in Assam, at some 11 million (2011 Census), constitute close to 35 percent of that state’s total population, with Muslims forming a majority in 11 out of its total 27 districts.

How do your findings in the latest report compare to those in the previous report that was published in 2022?

Since the publication of the Panel’s 2022 report, human rights abuses against Muslims in India seem to have continued apace and arguably worsened. In the three years since, Muslims have been reported suffering widespread targeting by militant Hindu groups and frequent crackdowns by authorities, especially in BJP-ruled states — including extrajudicial killings, torture, and arbitrary detentions. There also seems to be a pattern emerging of large-scale targeting of Muslims for physical destruction, often in reprisal as collective punishment, in the form of arbitrary demolition of homes and businesses, mass evictions, and removal from habitations, as well as expulsions, including unilateral deportations.

A national security architecture — including draconian laws such as the National Security Act, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, Uttar Pradesh Gangsters Act, and Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, besides the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, among others — continues to be weaponized by authorities to target Muslims disproportionately. Dehumanization of, and incitement to violence against, Muslims accompanies much of the abuse, with senior elected officials and Hindu religious leaders often leading these campaigns to harass, boycott, expel, often assault, and sometimes kill and destroy Muslims.

In effect, there seems now to be a settled pattern of inhumane acts against Muslims, in some states at least, that is widespread and systematic, amounting to severe deprivation of fundamental rights of Muslims by reason of their Muslimness.

What was the methodology/process used by the panel to investigate and assess violence against Muslims?

We reviewed materials prepared by legal researchers and experts who gathered information from victims, civil society organizations, and journalists in the two states. We assessed the evidence under international human rights law and international criminal law, analyzing whether credible information indicated the commission of violations and, where possible, identified alleged perpetrators. We also examined whether independent and effective domestic proceedings and remedies had been pursued. The investigation covered the period July 2022 to January 2026. The source of information we relied on was documentation from victim groups, national and state authorities, court records, and social media. We analyzed the information on the basis of applicable rules and principles of international law — in particular, treaties ratified by India, including the UDHR, ICCPR, ICESCR, ICERD, CEDAW, and the CRC. The analysis under international criminal law drew on definitions contained in the Rome Statute, including crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide, also drawing on the Genocide Convention and the Apartheid Convention, noting that India is not a party to the Rome Statute. As standard of proof, we applied the threshold generally justifying the commencement of formal investigations, namely, the existence of credible information of violations of law. The Panel did not seek a response from the Government of India and did not attempt to weigh defensive material.

In previous decades, studies pointed to pogroms in India. Is the situation now more serious, and why?

Since about 2014, we are seeing a normalization of anti-Muslim violence in India, where everyday violence and open calls to violence have become routinized, with private groups aligned to the RSS family working in collusion with local authorities, engaging in these — including so called “lynchings,” violent mobilization and attacks during Hindu religious festivals and public events, and economic threats and boycotts. In BJP-ruled states, violence by authorities themselves — extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, custodial torture, mass evictions and house demolitions, some in reprisal, as collective punishment against Muslims — have become a common occurrence. Senior-most public officials in BJP-ruled states and at the federal level create a permissive environment for the violence, through their dehumanizing language against Muslims, often including direct threats of violence.

The non-stop incitement to and conduct of anti-Muslim violence, in the absence of any accountability for perpetrators, has resulted in the routinization of violence, to the point that media do not report it; civil society actors are not mobilizing against it; the justice system, including the highest courts, mostly disregard it; and politicians, including opposition parties, seldom raise these concerns in their campaigns. When Muslim communities themselves raise these concerns, they face the heavy hand of the state, with protests on the streets or in the media attracting penal provisions, including terrorism and sedition charges, and worse, home demolitions.

The report recommends measures to be taken by the U.N. Human Rights Council, Special Advisers on Prevention of Genocide and R2P, etc. Why? Wouldn’t this be counterproductive? It is well known that, especially in post-colonial countries, foreign/Western intervention strengthens the forces of ethnic and other nationalism.

Given the utter breakdown of the rule of law in India, the failure of domestic mechanisms for justice and accountability, and the unwillingness of domestic stakeholders to raise concerns about the situation of Muslim minorities in India, it is imperative that international actors with a responsibility for human rights and justice step in. International actors also have a duty and the mandate to act, because of the nature of the violations being committed — many, in our assessment, rising to the level of international crimes, of incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity, of persecution and apartheid. These crimes, given their seriousness are those against the entire humanity, and it is incumbent on all states to try to prevent and punish those, even though the principal obligation is that of the state in question.

To that end, we call for accountability through prosecutions under international criminal law.  This includes a preliminary examination by the ICC, for forcible deportation of Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam into Bangladesh, and ICC State Party, which is the same jurisdictional basis upon the ICC Prosecutor has sought an arrest warrant against Myanmar’s supreme leader, Min Aung Hlaing, for the forcible deportation of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar into Bangladesh.  We also call for investigations and prosecutions in third countries through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, as we have seen with Syria.

You have also studied ethnic violence in Rwanda, Myanmar, and the Balkans. What lessons can India draw from these situations? What lies ahead?

I was the prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone that prosecuted Charles Taylor and others for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Before that, I was at the Rwanda Tribunal, and specifically there, as the senior trial attorney, I prosecuted the media trial, the trial of the two founding directors of RTLM Radio, often called “hate radio.” In that case, we obtained the first convictions in history for direct and public incitement to genocide. In the context of the two states that we’re talking about here, Assam and Uttar Pradesh, we are close to seeing the commission of that crime, where the chief ministers in these two states, whom we quote in our report, make a number of statements that use similar coded language.

There are also lessons for India to learn from other situations, such as the Balkans. In the former Yugoslavia, the descent into mass violence didn’t begin with the war. It began with narratives, and with the gradual normalization of the idea that coexistence was no longer viable. This was followed by legal and administrative practices that categorized populations, differentiated rights, and framed certain communities as demographic or security threats. Only later did these processes culminate in ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide, as we witnessed in Srebrenica in 1995. There were many signals, but unfortunately, the international community reacted only after it took place.

The purpose of invoking this history is not to suggest equivalence. India today is not Bosnia. Its institutions are different; its scale and complexity are vastly greater. But the value of comparison lies in identifying patterns in early warning signs that transcend specific contexts. The measures in Assam and Uttar Pradesh targeted at Muslims that we document are not isolated; rather, they constitute the early stages of a process which, if left unchecked, could escalate into more systematic forms of violence.  The lesson from the Balkans is clear. Such trajectories are not inevitable, but neither are they self-correcting. Early warning signs matter precisely because they offer a window for prevention. And that is what we are urging the international community to do with respect to India.