Annual Report 2026
IAMC’s 2026 annual report summarizes comprehensive contemporary research into the nexus between state policy and looming genocidal violence against Muslims and Christians in India, with the aim of helping policymakers make informed foreign policy decisions. Throughout 2025, Modi, the BJP, and the Indian police under their control collaborated with a broad swathe of paramilitary groups with the aim of terrorizing, disenfranchising, and denaturalizing Indians whose religious and political beliefs are at odds with their state sanctioned ideology: Hindu nationalism.
In its most overt form, Hindu nationalists’ campaigns of terror consisted of members of Modi’s BJP and its allied paramilitary groups exhorting violence against Muslims and Christians. Given the overwhelming presence of hate-speech from government leaders, it was no surprise that India saw hundreds of lynchings, rapes, and assaults on religious minorities throughout the year. Gruesome lynchings played out across India’s highways, many of them carried out by members of paramilitaries belonging to the same family of organizations as the BJP, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar. In addition to supporting lynchings police and other government forces in BJP-led states carried out the demolition of hundreds of Muslim and Christian owned-homes, churches, mosques, and other properties set aside for the faithful. In Jammu and Kashmir, state forces exploded homes belonging to family members spuriously charged with being related to perpetrators of the earlier violence. In Chhattisgarh, government forces bulldozed the homes belonging to pastors.
The Modi regime supplanted this physical destruction with attacks on fundamental Indian democratic principals, earning the country the designation of “hybrid authoritarian state” from the New York based Human Rights Foundation, and its downgrade from a “free” to “partially free” ranking from internationally respected watchdog Freedom House. 2025 saw the passage of laws making it easier to permanently ban opposition legislators, monitor the movements of journalists, and ban critical media organizations from sharing their work on social media. The ongoing implementation of the National Register of Citizens continued to jeopardize the voting rights and citizenship of Indian Muslims nationwide, while BJP electoral fraud, especially that influencing key elections in Karnataka, threatened to undermine India’s democratic system. In 2025, India continued to lead the world in the number of government-enforced internet shutdowns, suspending 8,000 X accounts including those belonging to Reuters news service.
The Indian government also deployed its authoritarian tactics within North America. As detailed in our earlier report on Transnational Repression, the Indian government has spied on, denaturalized, and launched assasination attempts on Indian dissidents in the U.S. and Canada. Indian consulates have fought tooth and nail against American legislative campaigns promoting human rights issues in India, and used their powers to intimidate critics of the Indian government’s annexation of Kashmir. Indian Intelligence also launched an extensive disinformation campaign spreading falsehoods about American human rights organizations, including IAMC.
HCT Feb 2026
