Hate Speech, Caste Violence, UAPA: The UN’s Damning Review of India

After almost two decades, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) had the opportunity to release its concluding observations about racial discrimination in India. The CERD made the most of this rare opportunity given by the Indian government and issued a scathing review, covering a comprehensive range of issues, which is not common. While the substance of its Concluding Observations is alarming, the persistent deference by the Indian government, blatant disregard for the reporting guidelines, and defiance of the observations raise more questions than answers. The Convention is truly remarkable, as it is the first major human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations System, and India played a key role in the negotiating and drafting process of the treaty.The Committee, over time, extended its mandate much beyond race to include caste as a form of descent-based discrimination, which is unique to India and a few other countries. This makes this convention uniquely significant to the Indian context. Is India’s Secular Democracy More Threatened Than Ever After SIR?The Indian government’s near-total immunity from international mechanisms, longstanding resistance to international scrutiny, such as non-ratification of optional protocols and non-acceptance of Special Procedures requests, is no surprise. Still, its history of relationship with CERD is particularly interesting and damning. CERD is a treaty body that monitors the country’s implementation of the treaty through a review process using inputs from the state, human rights institutions and civil society organisations. The reporting guidelines mandate every State Party to report on the implementation of the treaty every two years. It is only when the State reports and responds to the Committee’s questions that an effective review process takes place. India ratified this convention in 1968 and submitted its first report in 1970. Since then, it has been submitting its reports almost in a two-year cycle, with a couple of years' delays until 1986. Its next reports were submitted in 1994, 2006, and 2023. This, in practice, resulted in a 19-year gap in the Committee’s review of India, leaving racial abuses unchecked for almost two decades.More appallingly, the Committee recalled previous recommendations given in 2007 and reiterated the same in the 2026 review. With no surprise, India’s External Ministry outrightly denounced the findings, saying it “Rejects any politically motivated, highly malicious references in the report with all the contempt that it deserves”. The CERD’s observations are also remarkable because the CERD, which has taken only a narrow approach until now, has taken the widest approach possible to comment on several issues that unfolded in the last two decades. The Committee raised serious concerns about hate speech being imbibed into the language of politics by leaders to create a climate of divisive communalism and normalise Islamophobic rhetoric. The Committee specifically reprimanded the racist hate speech by politicians against ethnic and ethno-religious groups, Indigenous/Tribal Peoples, scheduled castes known as Dalits and non-citizens. As regards the legislative framework, the Committee highlighted the lack of a clear and explicit definition of racial discrimination and hate speech in the newly enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Why Must Citizens Bear the First Risk? Hate Speech and Suo Motu LimitsThe Committee expressed its concern over the inadequate legal prohibition of racial profiling and racially motivated violence and the alarming reports of racial profiling targeting ethnic and ethno-religious groups, Indigenous / Tribal Peoples, and Dalits. It rebuked the systemic failure and the ineffective implementation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and the Protection of Civil Rights Act, and the establishment of an inadequate number of Exclusive Special Courts. This resonates with the countless incidents of sheer untouchability and racial violence in different parts of the country against Dalits, Muslims, and other vulnerable groups. The invocation of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) against those who speak for Muslims, Dalits, and tribals has become very common in India, as we have seen from the sad stories of Umar Khalid, Prof G N Saibaba, Fr Stan Swamy, and countless others. The Committee was alarmed by exactly this. It was concerned about the weaponisation of UAPA, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to restrict freedom of expression, liberty, and association of individuals and organisations working to protect the rights of.As we write this, Umar Khalid is continuously denied bail, students who commemorate Prof Saibaba’s death are arrested, and the government is trying to push a more stringent FCRA bill into the parliament.A Day in Tihar Jail With Umar Khalid. Now Multiply it By 2,192Despite India’s repeated disapproval of the Committee’s jurisdiction over caste, the Committee once again reinforced its unique interpretation of caste as a descent-based discrimination. While acknowledging the enactment of the 2013 Manual Scavengers Act, it raised concern over the increasing manual scavenger deaths and the practice of delegating sewage work exclusively to scheduled caste communities. It particularly called out the persistent segregation and exclusion of Dalits from accessing shared public spaces, widespread caste-based spatial segregation, substandard living conditions in Dalit neighbourhoods, lack of proper infrastructure, and limited access to health care facilities, schools, safe drinking water, sanitation, and electricity. The Committee called out the use of the habitual offenders law in certain states to criminalise de-notified and nomadic tribes, producing the same effect as the colonial-era Criminal Tribes Act.The Committee censured the approach in the implementation of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement, Forest Rights Act, which led to forced evictions of 89, 000 Indigenous / Tribal families. It reprimanded honour killings and femicide against Dalit women and girls, the practice of bonded labour and discrimination faced by Dalit students at all levels of education, and the low representation of Dalit professors among professors in central universities. The 10th anniversary of the death of Rohit Vemula and the perpetuation of similar incidents, protests over UGC anti-discrimination regulations and the rising honour crimes are living testaments to the Committee’s findings.Is Vagueness, Misuse Really the Reason Upper Castes Want UGC Rules Rolled Back?The most repressive part of the story is violence by the state agents themselves. The Committee worried about the invocation of AFSPA in northeastern states and unimaginable violence and human rights violations against vulnerable groups protected by CERD. The Committee condemned racially motivated violence and excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and ill-treatment, rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by law enforcement agents Indigenous / Tribal Peoples, including scheduled tribes, with members of armed groups as “fake encounters”, without providing any evidence on such claims. It also flagged the total impunity for these abuses and the enormous number of cases pending against state agents for these atrocities. It flagged the lack of effective establishment of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), a mandate by the Supreme Court in 2006, a year before the previous review. The Committee recalled the sorry state of the NHRC, as reflected in the recommendation of the Sub-Committee on Accreditation of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) to downgrade NHRC from ‘A’ to ‘B’ status. The commission’s accreditation plays a key role in the assessment of the effective functioning of the body to check abuses by state agents. The Committee expressed its grave concern about the way in which the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens were implemented, which perpetuates systemic racial discrimination against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers through complex procedures. It censured the mass deprivation of citizenship and the government’s approach in categorising Bengali-speaking Muslims as “non-original inhabitants”. The Committee rebuked the process of Special Intensive Revision, which allegedly removed 52 million names from the electoral roll, where a total of 9.1 million names from West Bengal alone were reportedly deleted from the register ahead of the State elections that took place in April 2026.The review is particularly significant for more than one reason. After 19 years, the Committee got the opportunity to review India, a country very relevant to the treaty and instrumental in the making of the treaty. The rareness of the opportunity unravels the systemic disregard of India for international mechanisms, despite which India is a member of the UN Human Rights Council, a membership based on a country’s human rights record and respect for international law. India has not ratified any of the optional protocols to the treaties, meaning that individuals cannot pursue claims before the body if the domestic avenue fails.In that case, the only possible mechanism is the country submitting its own report, which the corresponding treaty body reviews. The CERD Committee was deprived of this opportunity as India made an inordinate delay in sending its periodic report. Another appalling aspect of this review is the width of the range of issues the committee has addressed. The Committee in its previous review did not deal with hate crimes (including hate speech), honour killing, civic space, racial profiling, human rights defenders, functioning of accountability institutions such as NHRC & PCA and the weaponisation of laws such as UAPA, PMLA, AFSPA, FCRA, among others. This reveals two important aspects: one about the Committee and the other about the country. The Committee has adopted a valiant approach in addressing every possible issue related to racial discrimination, even from a remote intersectional lens, as it is rarely given this opportunity to comment on the situation in India. Next is the introduction of new themes such as civic space, hate speech, among others, reveals a severe attack on racial equality in the country in the last two decades. Wrongful incarceration of human rights defenders, forceful eviction of indigenous people from their lands, and systemic racial violence against minorities, Dalits, and tribes continue to steadily increase in the country, which is alarming. The Committee's findings, comprehensive as they are, will change little to nothing on the ground as they are not binding, and India has already rejected it. The irony can’t be missed. A state that negotiated and shaped this Convention, and now evades the obligations and opt out of the very architecture of accountability it once helped build. The next periodic report is due in January 2030. Whether India meets that deadline, or lets another decade pass in silence, remains to be seen. Until then, will the abuses catalogued in this report continue unchecked? Will the Committee be made to wait for another couple of decades for the next review? We don’t know. But hope is powerful. It has driven this democracy through the colonial era, post-emergency period and will do so even now. Let’s hope that the Indian judiciary, which often deals with the issues dealt with in these comprehensive concluding observations, considers incorporating the language in its judgments, reminding us of India’s role in the drafting of the CERD Convention. It is time for the NHRC, just before its alteration on accreditation that is to take place in November 2026 by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), to take efforts to undertake the translation of India’s reports to the Committee of 1994, 2006, and 2023 and publish them along with the corresponding and contradicting concluding observations as consistently recommended by the Committee. Using its powers to review laws, the FCRA 2026 and many other laws referred by the Committee require to be urgently reviewed by a competent expert committee. As a key player at the international affairs and a crucial contributor to the convention, India must start listening to the committee, not just to abide by international law, but also to stay true to the constitutional promise of this soil. (Henri Tiphagne is a senior human rights lawyer and the Executive Director of People's Watch, a human rights organisation based in Tamil Nadu. Edgar Kaiser is a human rights lawyer at People’s Watch. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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