By Sardar Khan Niazi
Religious tolerance has long been a contentious issue in Hindu-majority India. Christians constitute just over 2% of India’s 1.4 billion population, a demographic that has not significantly changed over the decades, and Muslims make up roughly 15%.
Narendra Modi’s 2014 ascension to the premiership has corresponded with a significant increase in incidents of hostility and violence against members of the Muslim and Christian communities in recent years.
The violence against these minorities has increased as politicians from the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have pushed controversial anti-conversion laws.
The persecution of Christians is not new. Since 2017, BJP-ruled states have passed or updated anti-conversion law – sometimes known as freedom of religion acts – that prohibits religious conversion by force or deception.
Nine Indian states have such laws today. Anti-conversion rhetoric remains a powerful motivator for Hindutva groups. In the central state of Chhattisgarh, several rallies attended by the BJP and opposition leaders focused on the issue of forced religious conversions and promoted violence against Christians.
In one Chhattisgarh village, a large group assaulted several fellow villagers for refusing to renounce their Christian faith. The families were threatened, locked out of their homes, and pressured to leave the village.
In many villages, Hindu nationalists deny Christians and other minorities water from community wells, and government food rations, and ostracize them from the community. The police and local administrations often do not take adequate action against perpetrators.
India is witnessing a spike in attacks on Christians, churches. Rights groups record hundreds of attacks on Christians and their religious places.
At the onset of 2023, over a thousand tribal Christians in Narayanpur and Kondagon districts in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh were forced to flee their villages due to threats of violence.
Hindus see Christians as the bearers of a foreign, individualistic culture who seek to undermine Indian identity by converting nonbelievers to their faith. Most Christian converts are Dalits who are looking for a way out of their disadvantaged status in the caste system.
Hindu mobs have vandalized churches, attacked missionary schools, disrupted prayer meets, and assaulted pastors and practicing Christians, accusing them of forced conversions.
The violence and hostilities against Christians have been largely concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka.
Mohan Bhagwat, head of the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) the ideological mentor of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), warned Hindus about religious conversions and alleged demographic changes in India’s northeastern states, which have a large Christian population.
The RSS aims to create an ethnic Hindu state out of India. As the head of Sangh Parivar, the umbrella group of Hindu nationalist organizations including the BJP, Bhagwat’s speech is considered an agenda-setter for the year.
As things later unfolded, Bhagwat’s speech was supplemented with violent attacks on Christians and churches in different parts of India, with mobs making open calls to behead them and stop conversions of Hindus.
Parmatmanand Maharaj, a far-right Hindu leader addressing the gathering in the Surguja district of Chhattisgarh, urged the people to arm themselves with axes to teach Christians indulging in conversions a lesson.
“Why do you keep an axe? Behead them,” he said, asking the crowd to follow a “stop, warn and kill” dictum against the Christians.
According to human rights groups, hundreds of incidents of anti-Christian violence have taken place in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, in Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh, in tribal-dominated Jharkhand, and in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh. In Karnataka, a BJP-ruled state, attacks on Christians have escalated in recent years.
Hindutva seeing non-Hindu religions as a threat to Indian culture and identity betrays the promise of a secular democracy made by India’s founders. Modi government should stop using force and vigilante action to generate fear. When will it show common sense?
