India calls UN rapporteur's report on its youth 'hearsay dressed up as a UN report'

India has rejected a report by a United Nations human rights expert on the treatment of young people, telling the UN General Assembly that its claims about Indian youth were “hearsay”.

Anuj Swarup, First Secretary in India’s Permanent Mission to the UN, made the statement in the General Assembly’s Third Committee during an interactive dialogue with Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association.

Romero’s report says that “young people from India reported retaliation or stigmatisation for discussing mental health or gender justice”. It also notes that young Indians had created a “satirical political movement”, a line read in India as a reference to the Cockroach Janta Party.

Swarup said the report relied only on “unnamed submissions” cited in a footnote. “A sweeping charge against the world’s largest youth population, resting on anonymous and unverified claims, is not evidence. It is hearsay dressed up as a UN report, and my delegation rejects it outright,” he said.

“A mandate holder who relies on anonymous inputs to generalise for 1.4 billion people does a disservice to the very mandate she holds. We urge this Special Rapporteur to verify before she vilifies,” he added.

He turned the report’s own example against it. “In which repressive State does a satirical youth party question the government, marches on the capital, and then sits across the table with senior national leaders,” Swarup asked.

He said the government had responded to student protests this summer over irregularities in public examinations by amending the Public Examinations Act within weeks, doubling punishments for paper leaks and setting up fast-track courts in every state for exam fraud cases.

India has pushed back several times this month against foreign criticism of its handling of the protests, including remarks by the UN human rights office.