Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Hindu
Politics and Religion
Do USCIRF Commissioners Understand India Before Judging It?

Do USCIRF Commissioners Understand India Before Judging It?

Last updated on: November 3, 2026 at 8:21 pm by Vijendra Agarwal

0 Comments

Do USCIRF Commissioners Understand India Before Judging It? 2026-11-03T20:21:25-07:00 Vijendra Agarwal

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

USCIRF’s Collective Civilizational Competence and India

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) annual reports are widely cited by governments, legislators, advocacy organizations, scholars, journalists, and religious communities.| Image created for Patheos.

The nine USCIRF Commissioners are entrusted to judge religious freedom in countries worldwide. These countries are highly diverse, with radically different histories, religions, cultures, political systems, and civilizations. USCIRF standards may be universal, but the societies being evaluated are not identical. Among them is India, a country of extraordinary religious diversity, a modern constitutional democracy, and one of the world’s oldest continuously developing civilizations.

Building on our posts, Civilizational India (Bharat): Beyond the Western Optics and Understanding USCIRF: Religious Freedom in India and Beyond, we analyze USCIRF’s collective civilizational competence in judging India’s religious freedom.

Historically, USCIRF commissioners have included lawyers, judges, clergy, scholars, diplomats, physicians, human-rights advocates, and public officials. The Commission was created to bring together various kinds of expertise, but an unanswered question is:

Do USCIRF commissioners have collective competence and knowledge necessary to evaluate ancient civilizations like India fairly and accurately?

Understandably, USCIRF’s commissioners have legal expertise and knowledge of international human-rights law. Their religious-freedom advocacy, diplomacy, and foreign-policy experience are all valuable. But are their human-rights experiences and knowledge of religion, history, philosophy, culture, constitutional development, and the lived experience of India’s extraordinarily diverse communities enough? India is a particularly demanding and complex case.

It is a modern constitutional democracy with a civilization whose intellectual and religious traditions extend back thousands of years. It is home to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, as well as significant Muslim and Christian populations and smaller Jewish, Parsi and other communities. India’s social and religious tapestry is shaped by history, philosophy, pilgrimage, sacred geography, languages, regional traditions and institutions which cannot always be understood through contemporary political categories alone.

What would civilizational competence look like?

We use the term civilizational competence not to mean being sympathetic to India, being Hindu or Indian, and/or not to be agreeing with the Indian government. What it means visually is as follows:

The four circles (A.I. generated) do not quantify four qualifications that every commissioner must possess. They represent different forms of knowledge, which, when overlapped, can produce something deeper than professional expertise alone.

And that distinction became the starting point for our research.

We began looking closely at the people who have served on USCIRF, their titles and professional accomplishments, and their education and religious background where publicly documented. We reviewed their international experience, India and South Asia connections, writings, statements on India, and assessed what may have led to their appointment to the Commission.

The purpose was not to search for commissioners who were “pro-India,’ but those who understand India before judging India. We believe that a deeply knowledgeable observer may be highly critical of India.

What does the record show?

The answer is more complicated than either supporters or critics of USCIRF might expect.

Clearly, the Commissioners have considerable expertise in law, religious freedom, human rights, American public policy, and international affairs. That is exactly what one would expect from an American federal commission with a global mandate.

But it is a different matter if we look for commissioners with meaningful connections to India. They include a relatively small subset of the much larger universe of professional expertise represented at USCIRF. Who are they?

One particularly interesting example is Tenzin Dorjee, a Tibetan who spent more than three decades in India. He brought something unusual to USCIRF: extensive lived experiences of Indian society. He experienced India not as a country appearing only in briefing papers, but as the place where he had actually lived his life.

In his 2019 individual views on India, Dorjee described India as a great civilization and discussed its religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity from his own experience. More significantly, he did not simply reproduce the Commission’s position. He dissented from important aspects of its assessment of India.

He acknowledged India’s religious freedom problems. But he was unwilling to accept some of the Commission’s broader conclusions about the direction and character of religious freedom in India.

That is precisely the sort of evidence our research uncovered and not a résumé alone.

Another kind of India experience is Anurima Bhargava, who provides a different example.

Bhargava, a civil-rights lawyer, served USCIRF from 2018 to 2022. She had substantial experience in India’s local-government system before attending law school. USCIRF itself highlighted her work in India assisting women elected to local government when announcing her appointment.

Bhargava’s India-related experience is valuable, but it does not automatically qualify as civilizational competence. Someone can have significant professional experience in India without having studied India’s religious traditions or historical development in depth.

Conversely, a scholar of Indian philosophy might possess deep civilizational knowledge without working for the Indian government or in public policy.

This is why simply counting “India experts” can also be misleading.

The quality and nature of the experience matter.

The most revealing evidence may be disagreement among USCIRF Commissioners.

The Commissioners have not always agreed about India. For example, in 2004, four commissioners, Preeta Bansal, Archbishop Charles Chaput, Felice Gaer and Michael Young, dissented from the recommendation that India be designated a Country of Particular Concern. Their dissent is particularly interesting because it was not to defend everything happening in India.

The commissioners explicitly expressed concern about the violence in Gujarat and the failure to deliver justice to victims. But they also emphasized India’s constitutional democracy, independent judiciary, civil society, free press, and “manifold religious traditions.” They concluded that India’s legal and democratic institutions must be given due weight for classifying the country.

In other words, they did not say that India had no problem, but asserted that India must be understood as the society it is.

That distinction is significant.

It suggests that disagreement within USCIRF has sometimes been less about whether religious-freedom violations matter and more about how India’s institutions, history, and social complexity should be interpreted.

This is where the commissioner database may become interesting beyond the current Commission. We are building a historical database of commissioners and examining their professional backgrounds. It will also analyze the publicly documented religious identities, India and South Asia experience, writings and statements concerning India, appointment pathways, and instances in which commissioners have publicly disagreed with USCIRF’s assessment of India.

The goal is to see the collective institutional knowledge of USCIRF commissioners when making judgments about India’s designation as CPC.

The graphic above (A.I. generated) captures an important point: understanding a civilization is cumulative rather than compartmentalized knowledge about a country’s history, religion, and Constitution. Even the ‘Lived experience’ alone is insufficient. The more important question is what happens when these forms of knowledge come together. Equally important is asking conversely what may be missing when they do not.

It is not unusual to ask whether a person has the expertise necessary for the job.

For example, we would expect someone to evaluate a complicated medical condition with medical knowledge and a judge to decide on a highly technical engineering dispute with expert assistance.

Yet international religious-freedom assessment asks a small group of people to judge societies/countries with entirely different historical experiences of religion, state, community, and identity. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask whether USCIRF has the expertise necessary to make the judgments it has been entrusted to do.

The current evidence indicates that there have been only a handful of commissioners with meaningful India experience who demonstrate an unusually sophisticated understanding of India’s complexity. Other commissioners have dissented from USCIRF’s assessments and explicitly invoked India’s constitutional and civilizational context.

The commissioner database may confirm our initial suspicion or complicate it. Either outcome would be useful. But it does not change the argument that:

Before we judge India or any other country, perhaps we should first ask how well we know that country beyond the newspaper/social media clipping or even short visits.

The overarching policy questions for the U.S. include what we are gaining from the USCIRF’s annual reports and whether they bring any meaningful change in any country being evaluated. Let us wait until we have the complete database on commissioners vis-à-vis USCIRF’s repeated judgments, or misjudgments, about India. Who knows what else such an exercise may reveal?

Hinduism as Civilization

Uncategorized

Previous Post

August 7, 2026

Understanding USCIRF: Religious Freedom in India and Beyond