India rejects UN rapporteur’s report on youth as “hearsay,” urges her to “verify before she vilifies”

Spread love

By TRH World Desk

Swarup cited the government’s response to student protests over exam irregularities this summer. He said Parliament amended the Public Examinations Act, doubled punishments for paper leaks and created fast-track courts in every state.

New Delhi, October 17, 2026 — India has sharply rejected a UN report that says young people in the country face retaliation or stigma for speaking about mental health. At the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, First Secretary Anuj Swarup said the claims rest on anonymous, unverified inputs.

Swarup spoke during the interactive dialogue with Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, at the 81st session. Romero had said ahead of the presentation that youth are an important actor and many states repress, stigmatize and exclude them.

Swarup said Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees assembly, association and expression to every citizen, protected by an independent judiciary, a free press and the National Human Rights Commission. He said Romero’s mental-health claim cited only unnamed submissions in a footnote, calling this “hearsay dressed up as a UN report,” which India rejected outright. He said a sweeping charge against the world’s largest youth population cannot rest on anonymous claims. He closed by urging her to bring “rigour and fairness” to her reports and to “verify before she vilifies.”

He also pointed to a detail in the report itself, that young Indians had created a satirical political movement. He asked in which repressive state such a party could question the government, march on the capital and then sit across the table from senior national leaders.

While Swarup has trashed the UN Report, the youth activists continue to face police actions as they carry out protests. Even while Swarup spoke in the UN, Delhi Police detained the CJP leader Abhijeet Dipke. The police had also detained AISA president Neha Bora.

Some of the CJP leaders have been sent to five-day judicial custody, and they are in high security cells of the Tihar Jail in New Delhi. Scores of journalists were also detained while they covered the youth protests.