“Lack of Knowledge” Claims Meet Hard Numbers

Reported statements by Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, as reported in De Volkskrant put the internal governmental pathing of India under fresh European scrutiny just as a time when the democratic barometers are already being kept under a sustained watch internationally. His mention of press freedom, which is being put under strains, and minority rights, which is being put under severe strains, is not an isolated diplomatic statement but rather is concurrent with a growing corpus of institutional evidence as captured by the global watchdogs in the last decade or so.

The most quoted international to standard is the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. India is a 159th ranked country in its 2024 evaluation, which draws 180 countries. RSF ascribes such positioning to structural factors, as opposed to the episodic events: concentration of media ownership, legal pressure on journalists, and the rise of self-censorship in politically sensitive journalism.

An array of pattern appears in case-level documentation. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented repeat cases of arrest of journalists or extended criminal prosecutions under such acts as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), sedition laws (before their partial judicial review) and laws against public order. Although their provisions are on national security and the maintenance of law and order, they have in many cases been mentioned in international evaluations as being chilled to the spine of investigative journalism.

One interesting case is the arrest of journalists in relation to the coverage of communal violence or criticism of government policy law where the court procedures can take months or even years to be tried. The fact that these cases take a long time to solve themselves is a deterrent in and of itself, and reinforces what RSF and CPJ refer to as a preventive self-censorship mechanism throughout newsroom ecosystems.

Telecom shutdowns are also reported to be a common mechanism of interfering with information flow. Internet restrictions were observed in various states during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 20192020. Likewise, the 10-30-month long communication block in Jammu and Kashmir as a result of the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 is one of the most widespread digital suppressions on record in a democracy, a comparison of data sets of Access Now and the Internet Shutdown Tracker. These are not single policy choices but rather a concept of a wider stream of governance in which the controls of information are crossing with the political turbulence.

The mentioning of the pressures on minorities by the Dutch Prime Minister is consistent with the evaluations that have been made by various international surveillance organizations. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has repeatedly called on the designation, as a Country of Particular Concern, of India due to the issue of religious freedom protections, hate speech patterns and communal violence.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is another one of the most mentioned regions of legislation, passed in 2019. The critics such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have held that the legislation has caused discrimination in citizenship basis by religion a factor that resulted into mass demonstrations in the Indian cities. By responding with massive policing, arrests and even prosecutions of participants, international witnesses witnessed the beginning of a particularly elevated confrontation between the state and citizen on matters of identity-based laws.

Cases of communal violence have affected the international perceptions as well. The 2020 Delhi riots that killed more than 50 people according to human rights organizations came under the spotlight as the human rights organizations deconstructed, analysed the interplay behind political rhetoric, the response by the police and the follow-up by the judiciary. HRW and Amnesty International raised the issue of the slow response to accountability and the implementation of investigative processes in an unequal manner.

Concurrently, instances of hate speech based on political and religious polarization have been reported by India civil society monitors contributing to what UN Special Rapporteurs have characterized as an environment in need of increased protection of vulnerable communities.

Hindu nationalism as a political ideology has often been used to analyze the policy agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. This system highlights the concept of civic identity based on Hindu cultural dominance, which critics feel stands to raise a constitutional line between the constitutional status of state neutrality and religious identity.

Ideology is not judged by international observers in abstract terms; it is based on its institutional results. In the case of India, the issues brought up by the foreign governments and multilateral organizations are likely to find common ground on three quantifiable grounds; media freedom, freedom of dissent and enforcement of minority rights. The comments made by the Dutch Prime minister are consistent with this evaluative frame as opposed to presenting a new story.

Global attention was heightened in 2021 when the Pegasus spyware allegations emerged. An alliance of investigative reporters suggested that NSO Group surveillance technology development was used to spy on journalists, activists, and political leaders in India. Although the government denied any claims of illegal surveillance, the incident triggered the demand by UN Special Rapporteurs to have independent investigations to govern digital surveillance.

The stance of the Netherlands is another symptom of a wider European Union diplomatic approach: the more partners India and the European Union discuss matters, the more they make reference to governance standards. This does not herald disengagement but conditional further development of relationships with trade, technology collaboration as well strategic alignment, existing alongside a coordinated dialogue on human rights.

These concerns not only are said to be continuously brought up on bilateral forums but also have the provenance of the continuity and not sporadic critique within institutions. In the diplomatic hypothesis, repetition of distribution in the agenda implies that matters have ceased existence in the fringe of observation to the permanent policy discussion.

Placing the comments of the Dutch Prime Minister into the greater context of the evidentiary environment, press freedom rating, case work in the CPJ, religious freedom evaluation by the USCIRF, reporting on legislative and communal hot spots by HRW, and communications of the UN Special Rapporteur, a pattern of analysis is discernible.

This trend is not based on one narration source but on coinciding data in independent institutions. It shows a long-standing international interest in press freedom restricting trends and minority rights issues in India, now echoed in senior diplomatic words of European governments.

What is important about Jetten comments is not that they are newly made, but that they resonate with an already known global monitoring agreement that is still monitoring the structural changes occurring in the democratic institutions and civil liberties paradigm in India.