Odisha Christians facing boycotts, beatings, sexual assault: Fact-finding team

By A Representative 

A fact-finding team that travelled across Odisha in early May 2026 has accused the state government of failing to protect the fundamental rights of Christian citizens, particularly among tribal and Dalit communities. 

In an open letter to the chief secretary of Odisha, John Dayal, Aakar Patel, Vidya Dinker and Harsh Mander — members of a people's tribunal constituted by Karwan-e-Mohabbat and a concerned citizens’ collective — wrote that the testimonies they collected from roughly 300 people in nine districts paint an "extremely harrowing and worrying" picture of religious persecution in the state.

Under Article 25 of the Constitution, the tribunal wrote, "assault" is being waged on the fundamental right to freedom of conscience and faith. Minority Christians have been denied "protection of their life, liberty and livelihoods, and their freedom to choose where they live and work". 

But the letter singled out for particular criticism the conduct of the police, the civil administration, elected representatives and even cabinet ministers — including a representative of the constituency that contains the Ministry of Minority Welfare — who the tribunal said were complicit in persecution.

The panel documented patterns of violence across the state: physical attacks on churches, pastors and priests; forced disruption of prayer meetings; false charges of unlawful religious conversion against clergy; and their confinement in police stations and jails. In many of these cases, the tribunal said that police "joined Hindutva organizations to force them to sign 'compromise' agreements in which they undertake to give up their faith and collective worship." 

Grave criminal charges are often registered against the victims of the attacks, and there have been accounts of police direct involvement in the intimidation. Taken together, the tribunal said it sees "a complete breakdown in the constitutional machinery of the state in relation to its Christian minorities."

That assessment will resonate with months of reporting on grassroots violence in India's eastern state, which has a long and tragic history of anti-Christian persecution. In August 2008, thousands of Hindu extremists in the Kandhamal district carried out a massacre that reportedly lasted for days. Hundreds of Christians were killed, more than 600 villages were destroyed, hundreds of churches were vandalized or burnt down, and an estimated 75,000 people were displaced. 

In one especially brutal episode, 40 extremists allegedly gang-raped a Catholic nun; all were later acquitted for lack of evidence, though the attack was condemned internationally. The name of the brutal riots still hangs heavily over tribal districts like Keonjhar, where Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were burned alive in their station wagon in 1999, an event that remains seared in local memory.

Violence in Odisha has surged again in 2026, with church and Christian rights groups noting a sharp escalation since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in the state in June 2024 after 24 years of BJD rule. According to an April 2026 report by the United Christian Forum, the state recorded at least 40 incidents of anti-Christian harassment in 2024 alone, ranging from disruptions of church services and social boycotts in villages to the denial of burial of the dead.

A spate of 2026 violence has many of the same marks. In January, a Christian pastor in Dhenkanal district was reportedly beaten with bamboo sticks, feverishly paraded with a garland of shoes around his neck, forced to drink drain water and compelled to bow before a local temple after being dragged out of his home, all on the accusation of forced conversion — an accusation his wife called "entirely baseless and fabricated". Police detained nine men in connection with the attack. 

Less than three weeks later, in another village in Keonjhar district, three members of a Christian family were murdered in their home in an attack police tried to dismiss as a "land dispute." The victims' son told investigators that family members had been warned to stop attending church or face death because their conversion to Christianity was believed to be causing illness in a niece.

On Good Friday, a mob of more than 100 armed villagers stormed the Vishwa Vani Church in Keonjhar, locked the church building and forced all seven Christian families to flee their homes. A pastor said local Hindu leaders said they wanted to "cleanse" the village of Christian religion because it was "destroying" the tribal Sarna religion and culture.

The open letter singled out several "deeply worrying" dimensions of the conflict. One is the social and economic boycott of Christian believers, and in some cases the enforcement of fines on non-Christian residents who interact with them. A second is the increasingly common practice of denying burial of Christians in their traditional village grounds, often forcing their families to bury the dead on their own private land or, sometimes, in outside forest lands, with funeral prayers also forcefully prohibited. In February 2026, a 13-year-old tribal boy was reportedly buried without a cross on his tombstone after villagers agreed only on condition that no Christian symbols would be displayed. A 70-year-old Christian woman had to wait over 29 hours for cremation in her village after she converted three years ago.

The letter also described more extreme abuses, including physical assaults such as being tied to trees and beaten or put into sacks and assaulted, and at least "a few instances of sexual assault and violence and attempts to burn alive which were halted only at the last minute".

The document was signed by John Dayal, Aakar Patel, Vidya Dinker and Harsh Mander, and addressed directly to the State Chief Secretary. "We call upon the state administration led by you to uphold and defend the constitutional rights including the religious rights of every citizen in the state without discrimination of religion, caste or creed," the authors wrote.