India rejects UN racial discrimination findings as politically motivated

India on Wednesday rejected observations by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, calling politically loaded passages “highly malicious.” Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the government would reply through the treaty process and that the Indian delegation had already rejected “sweeping generalisations, unsubstantiated allegations, or tendency to exceed the Convention’s mandate” in the room.

CERD finished India’s 11th periodic review in Geneva on 11 and 12 August and adopted concluding remarks on 19 August. A communication dated 25 August listed the concerns. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta headed the inter-ministerial team. India ratified the convention in 1968 and had filed combined 12th and 21st periodic reports before the sitting.

What the committee wrote

The panel said it had received reports of large-scale violations by law-enforcement officers against ethnic and ethno-religious groups, indigenous and tribal peoples, Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes (particularly Dalits) and non-citizens. The list of alleged acts included racially motivated violence, excessive force, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence.

It also pointed to an increase in operations against Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers after a 2017 Home Ministry order and after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack. It asked India to act on hate crimes and hate speech.

On the Andaman and Nicobar Islands the committee went further. It recommended that India “suspend the implementation of the projects on the Great Nicobar and Andaman Islands until a full and independent environmental, economic, social, cultural and spiritual impact study has been completed.” It said current law does not recognise indigenous rights to own, use, develop and control traditional lands in line with international standards, and it asked for a review of the Forest Rights Act on that point.

How New Delhi answered

Jaiswal said India had taken part “in a spirit of constructive engagement” and had used the two days to set out constitutional protections, the legal framework and measures for disadvantaged groups. He reserved the formal reply for the established written procedure. The public line on Wednesday was shorter: India “rejects any politically motivated highly malicious references in the report with all the contempt that it deserves.”

Treaty-body reviews do not create binding court orders. They do create a paper trail that other UN mechanisms, foreign legislatures and campaign groups quote. The Great Nicobar recommendation is the most concrete item on that trail because it names a live infrastructure project and asks for a halt. The Home Ministry order of 2017 and the Pahalgam reference give the migration passages a date stamp that Indian officials treat as security policy, not racial policy.

Mehta’s presence was itself a signal. Sending the Solicitor General rather than a joint secretary put the legal defence at the top of the table. The Wednesday statement keeps that defence inside the convention’s own process while refusing the tone of the press note. The next document that matters is India’s written response to the concluding observations, not another briefing-room sentence.