India’s Human Rights, Religious Freedoms in Crisis Through 2025
Washington, D.C. (January 29, 2025) – The Indian American Muslim Council’s (IAMC) 2026 Annual Report documents the severity with which human rights and religious freedom in India continued to deteriorate throughout 2025, including through paramilitary violence, hate speech, mob lynchings, targeted property demolitions, attacks on democratic institutions and civil rights, and transnational repression. Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis all continued to face systemic as well as interpersonal violence.
The report summarizes recent, comprehensive research on the relationship between state policy and the growing risk of genocidal violence against Muslims and Christians in India, with the goal of informing foreign policy decision-making. Throughout 2025, Prime Minister Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and police forces under their control worked in coordination with a wide range of paramilitary groups to intimidate, disenfranchise, and strip citizenship rights from Indians whose religious or political views conflict with Hindu nationalist ideology.
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. As a result of the continued and widespread proliferation of hate speech from government leaders, 2026 saw hundreds of lynchings, rapes, and assaults on religious minorities across the nation. 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.
The Modi regime supplanted this physical destruction with attacks on core democratic principles, resulting in India’s designation as a “hybrid authoritarian state” by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation and its downgrade from “free” to “partially free” by the internationally respected watchdog Freedom House. Over the past year, the government enacted legislation expanding its authority to permanently bar opposition lawmakers, surveil journalists, and prevent critical media organizations from distributing content on social media. In 2025, India continued to lead the world in government-imposed internet shutdowns and suspended approximately 8,000 accounts on X, including those belonging to the Reuters news service.
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 the country’s democratic system.
The report concluded by issuing a suite of recommendations to the United States, the United Nations, and Indian politicians, which include sanctioning individuals who promote hate in India, conditioning military aid to India, and designating India a Country of Particular Concern.
“This report makes clear that religious minorities in India are being pushed toward the precipice of mass violence by Hindu extremist forces – a risk recently highlighted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” said IAMC President Mohammed Jawad. “Absent meaningful international accountability, this widespread erosion of human rights and religious freedom in India will continue to deepen, with devastating consequences not only for vulnerable communities, but for the future of India’s democracy itself.”
