On 26 July 2025, two Christian nuns were detained at Durg station in Madhya Pradesh. The charges against them were serious, even though the situation was straightforward—they were accompanying three women who wanted to be trained as professional nurses. An all-party delegation led by Vrinda Karat of the CPI(M) was not easily allowed to meet them. The charges related to human trafficking and religious conversion. While the state’s Chief Minister maintains the charges pertain to trafficking and attempted conversion, the parents of the women stated they had willingly permitted their daughters to seek better job opportunities.
This pattern of intimidation against Christians—on one pretext or another—has been steadily rising over the past 11 years, particularly in BJP-ruled states. Various local and global reports have documented the increasing harassment of Christians in India. Prayer meetings are attacked under the pretext that they are being held for conversions. Pastors and nuns in remote areas are especially vulnerable to being beaten or harassed on spurious grounds. Bajrang Dal activists are often active in launching direct attacks on these religious workers in far-flung regions.
Another disturbing trend concerns the denial of burial rights to Christians in shared or Adivasi burial grounds. For instance, on 26 April 2024, in Chhattisgarh, a 65-year-old Christian man died in a hospital. His grieving family faced additional trauma when local religious extremists prevented them from burying him in the village unless they "reconverted" to Hinduism. Ultimately, the family was able to conduct the burial according to Christian rites under the protection of nearly 500 police personnel, ensuring peace in the area.
“Every day we witness four or five attacks on churches and pastors, and every Sunday that number doubles to nearly ten—this is unprecedented,” said a persecuted Christian leader of a major denomination in 2023. According to him, the primary source of Christian persecution in India is the Sangh Parivar—a network of Hindu nationalist groups that includes the influential paramilitary RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the ruling BJP, and the Bajrang Dal, a militant youth wing.
Global organizations like Open Doors and Indian ones like Persecution Relief are doing valuable work in monitoring these atrocities. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream media—both print and television—either remains silent or presents these events in a distorted or negative light.
The 2020 report by Persecution Relief noted: “Hate crimes against Christians in India have risen by an alarming 40.87 percent.” This spike occurred despite a nationwide lockdown lasting three months to control the spread of COVID-19. According to Open Doors, which monitors global Christian persecution, India ranked 11th on its list of countries of special concern in 2024.
Researchers Sudhi Selvaraj and Kenneth Neilson have aptly argued that this anti-Christian violence involves “a strong convergence of direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence, involving vigilante attacks and police complicity, but also an increasingly coercive use of state law, coupled with the production of a wider cultural common sense about the anti-national essence of non-Hindu religious minorities.”
The rise in anti-Christian violence over recent decades is not a new phenomenon. It has often existed as an undercurrent, especially in remote regions. While anti-Muslim violence in India has historically been more visible and horrific—drawing significant public attention—anti-Christian violence has remained relatively hidden, barring high-profile incidents such as the murder of Pastor Graham Staines and the Kandhamal violence.
One of the first major incidents was the brutal killing of Sister Rani Maria in Indore in 1995. This was followed by the horrific murder of Pastor Graham Staines, an Australian missionary working with leprosy patients in Keonjhar, Odisha, in 1999. He was accused of carrying out conversions. Bajrang Dal’s Dara Singh instigated the mob that set fire to the jeep in which Staines and his two minor sons, Timothy and Philip, were sleeping—burning them alive.
President K.R. Narayanan described the incident as one that would be listed in the “world's inventory of black deeds.” The NDA-BJP government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the time alleged that the incident was part of a conspiracy by foreign powers to malign the government. However, the Wadhwa Commission later found that Rajendra Pal, alias Dara Singh of Bajrang Dal, was the primary conspirator. He is currently serving a life sentence.
Even before these events, the RSS had established Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams to propagate the idea that Christian missionaries were merely using education and health services as a façade for conversion. Major ashrams were set up in Dangs (Gujarat), Jhabua, and Kandhamal (Odisha), where figures like Swami Aseemanand and Swami Laxmananand spread their ideological campaigns. Several “Shabri Kumbhs” were organized in these areas to draw Adivasis into Hindu religious and cultural symbolism.
In these areas, Shabri—symbolizing destitution—was elevated to goddess status, while Hanuman was promoted for his loyalty to Ram. Temples dedicated to these figures were constructed as part of a cultural campaign. Amid all this, what is forgotten is that Christianity has a long history in India. St. Thomas is believed to have established a church on the Malabar Coast as early as 52 AD. After centuries of missionary work, Christians today comprise only 2.3% of the population—down from 2.6% in 1971—according to census data. Yet, the propaganda machinery falsely claims rampant conversions by force, fraud, or inducement. Several states have enacted anti-conversion laws, which further intimidate missionary workers.
M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS, wrote in his book Bunch of Thoughts that Muslims, Christians, and Communists are internal threats to the Hindu nation. After years of orchestrated anti-Muslim violence, it appears that the anti-Christian agenda is now being brought more forcefully into the open.
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