Amidst the festivities of Christmas across the world, the Christians in India have been reduced to holding clandestine religious gatherings and secret baptisms as RSS goons never tolerate the non-Hindu rituals. Any non-Hindu religion has become a liability in Modi’s India as vicious Hindutva ideology, seeking Hindu domination in India, is the guiding principle for the BJP-led Indian government. The Christian minorities feel more threatened in central and northern India, where the BJP, governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is firmly in control, and where evangelical Christian groups are making inroads among lower-caste Hindus, albeit quietly.
Narrating the account of his ordeal, Pastor Manish David in Indore told New York Times that a swarm of men dressed in saffron poured inside. They jumped on stage and shouted Hindu supremacist slogans. They punched pastors in the head. They threw women to the ground, sending terrified children scuttling under their chairs. Pastors hold clandestine ceremonies at night. They conduct secret baptisms. They pass out audio Bibles that look like little transistor radios so that illiterate farmers can surreptitiously listen to the scripture as they plow their fields.
Under the patronage of the Indian government, Hindu terrorists threaten and kill Christians and vandalize their places of worship with sheer impunity. Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers. As a result, Indian Christians are forced to hide their faith or perform religious services in secrecy. Almost 300 million Indian Christians are victims of the Hindu-terrorism. Indian Christians are blamed for religious conversions. The pattern of Christian persecution is often the same.
To Hindu fanatics, the possibility that some Indians, even a relatively small number, would reject Hinduism for Christianity is a threat to their dream of turning India into a pure Hindu nation.
According to a report by the human rights group, more than 300 attacks on Christians took place in the first nine months of 2021, including at least 32 in Karnataka. But only 30 FIRs have been registered so far in these cases. The report mentions that September alone recorded 69 such incidents, followed by 50 in August, 37 in January, 33 in July, 27 each in March, April, and June, 20 in February, and 15 in May. At least nine Indian states have planned anti-conversion laws, including Chhattisgarh, which, activists say, has emerged as a “new laboratory” for anti-Christian hatred in India.
On November 28, 2021, a newly inaugurated church in Delhi faced disruption and vandalism in its first Sunday service when members of a militant Hindu nationalist group called the Bajrang Dal stormed the meeting. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government body, recommended that India be put on its red list for severe violations of religious freedom. The report also recommended that the US should impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ or entities’ assets and/or barring their entry into the United States.
