The Pope’s protest about conversion laws in India is weird. Vatican does not take the permission of New Delhi to make laws.  Indian legislatures are sovereign and are elected by the people, unlike the Pope who is elected by a college of cardinals. They, (Indian legislatures) not only do not need his permission but are duty-bound to protest remarks made by the Pope to the Indian envoy in Vatican. A Reuters report mentions Pope Benedict XVI as condemning “Hindu fundamentalist attempts to ban religious conversions in India.” No organization however powerful can do that except the State. If as the Pope says anti-conversion laws are "unconstitutional and contrary to the highest ideals of India's founding fathers," the Supreme Court of India is there to quash them suo motu.

The response of the External Affairs Ministry to this effrontery is weirder than the Pope’s barbs. Like a schoolboy, a South Block spokesman referred to “the Indian Constitution, which stated that all persons were equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice and propagate their religion.” In the first place, the response should have come from the External Affairs Minister himself and in the second, stronger words should have been used.  Christians in India are not the constituency of the Pope, though Vatican exercises hegemony over the Indian church with the complicity of some Indian priests.

This episode comes closely in the wake of another such intervention in the country’s internal affairs and the abject failure of the South Block to react. While India was rejoicing its election to the United Nations Human Rights Council as recognition of its commitment to promotion and protection of human rights last week, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) administered a hard rap on the knuckles of our South Block mandarins.  The commission which reports on the status of religious freedom to the State Department and Congress, last week reported that although India should not be under watch, it was being "monitored closely." It is puzzling why the South Block does not react to these annual American judgments on a purely domestic situation.

The commission has doubtful secular credentials, born as it is under pressure from Christian right to help missionaries abroad in their evangelical work. The Clinton regime passed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), a law to create the commission, in order to enlarge the Democratic constituency, much the same way as some of our political parties do to enlarge their minority vote bank. The commission has won plenty of enemies for the US among its allies, including France, Germany and Belgium. It is so ridiculous that a country with minimum respect for international treaties and institutions should try to deliver sermons to other countries.

Maybe, the ruling Congress is happy with the left-handed compliment the report pays in these words: “The positive developments in India affecting freedom of religion or belief that began in 2004, when parliamentary elections resulted in installation of a coalition government led by the Congress party, continued in the past year.” Assume that the State Department report is true. Does India outsource an internal security job to a foreign country? Look at the number of agencies at home that can deal with threats to religious freedom. The President who is a sentinel of the Constitution, Parliament led by a coalition with ‘impeccable secular’ credentials, the media that have adopted minorities as their constituency, not to mention the hundreds of NGOs who are vigilant to attacks on minorities. This is what three prominent members of the commission said in a dissent note: “India has the legal and democratic traditions to deal with religious intolerance and should be strongly encouraged to do so."

The USIRF report itself concedes that “unlike many of the other countries that draw commission’s attention, India has a democratically elected government, is governed generally by the rule of law, and has a tradition of secular governance that dates back to the country’s independence, India has a judiciary that is independent, contains a vibrant civil society with many vigorous, independent nongovernmental human rights organizations that have investigated and published extensive reports on the rise of religiously motivated violence. It is also home to a free press.” What is the problem then? Why cannot South Block ask the commission to mind its business? In fact, these reports provoke fringe groups, leading to religious conflict.

Even as the commission complains that “several of the BJP-led states including Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Chattisgarh, as well as Arunachal Pradesh, still have laws against ‘forced’ or ‘induced’ religious conversions,” it admits that “reports of persons having been arrested, still less prosecuted, under these laws are not common.” The question, however, is not whether some persons have been prosecuted or jailed. It concerns the right of democratically elected governments to pass laws and the total immorality of an outside agency questioning that right. The Indian Constitution does not permit conversion and the Supreme Court of India clearly defined the limits of religious freedom. The silence of our foreign office is baffling because that encourages every passing diplomat to deliver sermons to us.

Some prominent Indian personalities have appeared before the commission and deposed against their country. They have every right to criticize the policies of their country but how does it help to complain before foreign tribunals? How do we transfer national jurisdiction to an alien body? Those who appeared before the commission did so all the time knowing that the State Department can do nothing beyond chuckling in our discomfiture. Two years ago, in a reaction that bordered on the bizarre, a Foreign Office spokesman of the NDA ministry told the media what he should have told the State Department. He said that any abuse of religious rights was handled by “our own internal processes which include the judiciary, the press, the civil society, the National Human Rights Commission, and so on.”

The USCIRF is redundant because the State department publishes a Human Rights Report every February and covers the entire globe. From smaller countries like Uzbekistan to Asian giants like China, every country has dismissed these reports with the anger they deserved. Beijing trashed US criticism of its religious policies and freedoms as skewed and warned the US against interfering in that country’s internal affairs. “The USCIRF should stop interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, so as not to further harm its own reputation or create obstacles in relations between the United States and other countries and in the exchange between it and other relevant parties”, a Chinese spokesman said. Egypt refused to allow the commission to visit Cairo saying, "This is no goodwill tour or peace mission; it is outright
foreign intervention in our internal affairs."