2 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Aug 27, 2026 04:54 AM IST
India on Wednesday rejected a report by a UN panel that alleged discrimination against various ethnic and religious groups in the country.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD) flagged concerns on Tuesday over human rights violations against people belonging to scheduled tribes, scheduled castes and Rohingya refugees.
It also called for action against those involved in “hate crime” in India.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said India rejects “any politically motivated highly malicious references in the report with all the contempt that it deserves”.
He said India’s commitment to combating racial discrimination “remains unwavering”.
“During the review, we highlighted India’s constitutional safeguards, robust legal framework, pluralism and sustained efforts to protect disadvantaged communities,” he said.
“While we will respond to the committee’s observations through the established procedure, the inter-ministerial delegation, which was led by the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, had already rejected the sweeping generalisations, unsubstantiated allegations, or tendency to exceed the Convention’s mandate during the review meeting,” he said.
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The United Nations (UN) human rights panel had raised concerns about violations against marginalised communities in India, and urged New Delhi to protect them from alleged abuse, torture, extrajudicial killings, and stripping of citizenship.
It also sharply criticised the implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and raised concerns about the subjecting of Bengali-speaking Muslims to “systematic and structural racial discrimination”.
The NRC implementation was leading to mass arbitrary deprivation of citizenship, it said, while expressing concerns about Bengali-speaking Muslims being categorised as “non-original inhabitants”.
It had called for India to suspend the NRC and review its legislative framework.
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The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process was also called out in the report, with the committee raising concern that Bengali-speaking Muslim voters were reportedly disproportionately impacted in West Bengal and Assam.