India Fails to Release Full Data on Hate Crimes
Activists accuse the government of suppressing information about Hindu-on-minority violence. Officials say the data is “prone to misinterpretation.”
ByKai Schultz, Suhasini Raj, Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
NEW DELHI — When India released its annual crime report this week, more than a year behind schedule, certain pieces of data were conspicuously missing.
Officials in the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had tracked many types of crimes, but they selectively released results, choosing to share figures about attacks committed by left-wing extremists but not religious-based crimes or violence against journalists.
This comes at a time when there has been a proliferation of caste-based and religious-based hate crimes. Hindu mobs continue to beat up and kill members of India’s Muslim minority and its lower castes, and human rights activists accuse Mr. Modi and his political allies of stoking an atmosphere of Hindu nationalism that has contributed to the violence. Most often, the attackers go unpunished.
Some Indians saw the omissions in the crime data as more evidence that the Modi government is withholding information it considers incriminating.
“They are suppressing it very blatantly and very shamelessly,” said Roma Malik, a tribal rights activist. “The government is shutting down voices of dissent and shrinking democratic space.”
Hate crimes have spiked since Mr. Modi took office in 2014. Between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 44 people were killed by cow protection groups, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch.
Most of the victims were Muslims accused of storing beef or transporting cattle for slaughter. Many Hindus, who are about 80 percent of India’s population, consider cows sacred.
In almost all of the attacks, Human Rights Watch found, the authorities have delayed investigations, and in some cases justified the attacks or filed charges against the victims’ families.
The Indian Home Affairs Ministry has issued an annual report on crime data since the 1950s. Compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau, the report pools together data on thefts, assaults, homicides and kidnappings from police precincts across the country.
But the 2017 report, which officials planned to expand with a few dozen new categories, was delayed for more than a year because of what the Home Affairs Ministry called “errors” and “inconsistencies.”
On Tuesday, the ministry said that data for new categories on crimes against journalists, human rights violations by security forces and attacks by cow vigilantes, among others, had been withheld because it was “unreliable” and “prone to misinterpretation.”
This is not the first time that Mr. Modi’s government has been accused of burying bad news.
In January, the government tried to suppress the release of a damning jobs report that showed unemployment hitting a 45-year high. The report was eventually leaked to the Indian news media.
Since then, economic malaise has intensified. Every day brings distressing headlines: the worst auto sales in a decade, banks on the brink of collapse, soaring unemployment. Mr. Modi remains popular, partly because he has stoked nationalistic feelings, but that popularity may be beginning to slip.
On Thursday, early results from state-level elections in two important states, Haryana, which nearly surrounds the capital, and Maharashtra, the state that includes Mumbai, indicated that although Mr. Modi’s party was still the top vote-getter, it had lost several seats. Analysts said it was the economy.
“The economy is in dire straits, and there isn’t even an acknowledgment,’’ said Zoya Hasan, a former professor of political science in New Delhi. “They are in complete denial.’’
Data on hate crimes is becoming a very sensitive subject in India. A “hate tracker” database published by the newspaper Hindustan Times was abruptly shut down in 2017, several months after going up. Last month, a data journalism outlet that compiled similar information about religion-based attacks pulled down its reporting, too.
“The state denies that these crimes are happening,” said Vrinda Grover, a lawyer in the Indian Supreme Court.
It is unclear why some new crime categories were included in the new report, which tops 1,300 pages, and others were not.
One that did make the cut was crimes by “anti-national elements.” Perpetrators defined as left-wing extremists and “jihadi terrorists” were responsible for almost 500 attacks across India in 2017, according to the report.
In recent years, the National Crime Records Bureau has expanded how it studies crime, according to Ish Kumar, who served as its director from 2017 to 2018. He said the new categories were intended to make the report more comprehensive and that much of the data could have been left out because “the police and staff on the ground are not sensitized enough to handle and report on certain categories.”
Vasudha Gupta, a spokeswoman for the Home Affairs Ministry, would not answer questions about the data omissions, nor about how officials had concluded that the “anti-national elements” category could be included, but not the others.
“Everything is based on fact,” she said. “We do not have opinions.”
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