Veena Sikri got angry on USCIRF report, said America does not see itself!

The US has recently released a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The report was strongly criticized by a group of 275 former judges, bureaucrats, diplomats and ex-servicemen of the armed forces. India’s former High Commissioner to Bangladesh Veena Sikri has expressed her reaction on this.

Former High Commissioner Veena Sikri told IANS on this issue, “I think this USCIRF report on religious freedom is completely meaningless and one-sided. The Government of India has given a very, very strong statement against it, because there is no logic in it.

You cannot just malign institutions, you cannot malign even institutions like R&AW or RSS, which of course is an NGO, it is a logical organisation. They are doing a lot of social work.

In fact, during Covid, it was the RSS and the Gurudwaras who provided all the help to the people who were in really bad shape, going home, traveling long distances, and they were giving them food and all the resources to travel. So, these have been done very thoughtfully.”

He said, “This organization, USCIRF, looks at the rest of the world and does not look at what is happening in America. They cannot be trusted at all. We know that India has a strong judiciary, which looks at every aspect of any difficulty in the situation of minorities.

We have a strong executive, a strong legislature. And, of course, we know that in all the social welfare programs implemented by the Government of India, be it Ujjwala, Jan Dhan Yojana, in all of them, minorities get the first priority. It is they, in every village, in every district, minorities get the first priority.

There has not been a single complaint, there has not been a single complaint about favoritism in the implementation of any kind of government program or any kind of welfare scheme that benefits the people. So, how are they getting it?”

Sikri further said that if you have a system in which, you know, someone has complained, someone has said something, if a leader is making a false statement, and then you try to use that as evidence, it is completely fake, and then when you talk about things like CAA, you have the judiciary which can give its opinion.

They are there to protect the interests of the citizens, to protect the interests of all branches of government. I think such biased reports should simply be ignored. The more you ignore it, the better it will be.

He said that the more you talk about it, the more importance they will give themselves. If you look at the response among the minority community, no one has said whether this whole report is good or not, because it is not.

It is completely selective, with completely preconceived notions. They are picking anything without any logic. If you talk about RSS, I remember its chief Mohan Bhagwat, who says that Hindutva is because of minorities. We all have to live together.

That focus is that minorities are part of what you can call the Indian ethos, the Indian civilizational ethos. Every minority that has come to India, has stayed here, whether it is Jews, Parsis, Muslims, everyone, they become a part of the life of India.