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Christians are being suppressed, discriminated against and persecuted at rising levels like never before in India, and the attackers run free, every time. At least 300 attacks have been reported on Indian Christians in 2021. Police and the government are helping attacks that target minorities thanks to the country’s new anti-conversion law, a new report says.
Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers. In many cases, the police and members of India’s governing party are helping them, government documents and dozens of interviews revealed. In church after church, the very act of worship has become dangerous despite constitutional protections for freedom of religion.
To many Hindu extremists, the attacks are justified — a means of preventing religious conversions. To them, 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. Many Christians have become so frightened that they try to pass as Hindu to protect themselves, according to Nytimes.
But across India, the anti-Christian forces are growing stronger by the day, and they have many faces, including a white-collar army of lawyers and clerks who file legal complaints against Christian organizations. They also devise devastating social boycotts against isolated Christians in remote villages. According to extensive interviews, Hindu nationalists have blocked Christians from community wells, barred them from visiting Hindu homes and ostracized villagers for believing in Jesus. Last year, in one town, they stopped people from gathering on Christmas. The anti-Christian wave in the country is also powered by a group of lawyers and clerks who file complaints against Christian organisations , Trtworld mentioned.
Amid increasing attacks on minorities across India, Christians have resorted to holding clandestine religious gatherings and secret baptisms due to the fear of Hindutva mobs. 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.
In the past few years, Modi and his Hindu nationalist party have tugged India far to the right, away from what many Indians see as the multicultural foundation Nehru built. The rising attacks on Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the population, are part of a broader shift in India, in which minorities feel less safe.
“They want to remove us from society,” a Christian farmer said of Hindu extremists. Rising attacks on Christians are part of a broader shift in India, in which minorities feel less safe. 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. Despite India’s constitutional protections for religious freedom, approximately one-third of India’s 28 states limit or prohibit religious conversion to protect the dominant religion from perceived threats from religious minorities. These anti-conversion laws are too often the basis for false accusations, harassment and violence against non-Hindus that occur with impunity, Tribune told.
In many cases, authorities did not prevent these abuses and ignored or chose not to investigate pleas to hold perpetrators accountable. Modi is facing increasing international pressure to rein in his supporters and stop the persecution of Muslims and Christians. 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” — a charge the Modi administration strongly denied.
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 Washington 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.
