In June, Bindu Sodhi, a 32-year-old tribal woman from a small village within the densely forested state of Chhattisgarh, in central India, was killed by her neighbors.
Sodhi was tilling her ancestral land together with her family when irate villagers — armed with bows and arrows, axes and knives — attacked her with stones and killed her on the spot. The villagers stoutly warned her family to not set foot within the village unless they gave up their Christian faith.
Local police shrugged off Sodhi’s killing as a land dispute, despite the indisputable fact that, over the past 4 years, Hindu extremists and even a few of Sodhi’s close relatives had been pressuring her to resign her Christian beliefs.
Attacks on Christians, who constitute only 2.3% of India’s 1.4 billion people, have risen sharply over the previous few years. The predominant perpetrators of those crimes are extremists who imagine Hinduism, India’s most prevalent faith, is synonymous with Indian identity and citizenship.
Last yr, the United Christian Forum, a human rights group based in New Delhi, recorded 733 incidents of violence against Christians, with a median of 61 incidents every month. This yr, 361 incidents targeting Christians have already been recorded by the UCF.
“There is a surge in violence against Christians,” said AC Michael, the group’s national convener. “Anti-conversion laws are being weaponized to focus on us and strip us of our rights.”
On July 20, UCF leaders met with Kiren Rijiju, minister for minority affairs in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet, to debate the rise in attacks, however the meeting yielded few guarantees, in response to Michael Williams, UCF’s national president.
“There’s a whole breakdown of religion within the Modi government,” said Williams. “The government is doing little to curb police and mob brutality against Christians accused under anti-conversion laws and the undue violation of our rights.”
Targeting of Christians has been occurring in India because the Nineteen Nineties. The gruesome murder of Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines, along together with his two minor sons, by Hindu extremists in 1999 brought the world’s attention to the violence being meted out against the community. But with the rise of Modi, head of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the dimensions and magnitude of those threats have increased significantly.
Sweeping anti-conversion laws have been enacted across 11 Indian states by the BJP government, whose supporters allege that Christians and Muslims scheme to lure Hindus into their faiths through deceit or marriage.
The anti-conversion laws mandates that only an affected person can register a grievance. However, the police often arrest Christians based on complaints from self-described Hindu nationalists claiming prior knowledge of “forced conversions.” In that way, the laws have enabled harassment, discrimination and vigilante violence against minorities.
A report published by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in March 2023 noted that India’s state-level anti-conversion laws violate international human rights law’s protections for the precise to freedom of faith or belief.
The charge of forced conversion, say Christian leaders, is now getting used to focus on peculiar Christians. They cite attacks on church properties and institutions by which vandals paint over church partitions with inflammatory slogans, harass pastors and shut down prayer meetings. In rural areas they prevent Christians from accessing common facilities similar to wells and burial grounds.
In extreme cases, the attacks have led to murder, rape, molestation and illegal detentions.
In early July, nearly two dozen Hindu radicals wearing saffron scarves stormed a prayer meeting in Uttarakhand state after accusing a pastor and his wife of carrying out conversions, brutally attacking the worshippers and hurling verbal abuses at them.
“They dragged me by my hair and beat up my relatives,” said Deeksha, the pastor’s wife. “We were just praying at home and causing no trouble to anyone within the neighborhood.”
In Manipur, where greater than 200 people have been killed in ethno-religious violence since last yr, congregations have closed down and pastors have been silenced. Elsewhere, schools, hospitals and institutions run by Christian missionaries are recurrently targeted by right-wing Hindu nationalist groups. Religious extremists have also raided private gatherings, birthday and farewell parties on the pretext of forced conversions.
Law enforcement agencies often side with the perpetrators of violence reasonably than the victims, which emboldens the extremists to perform more attacks.
“We live in an environment of constant fear,” said a priest and peace activist from Varanasi who asked to stay anonymous. “Members of small and independent churches are uncertain about what to do or who to show to for help.”
Modi has not visited Manipur even once because the outbreak of violence last yr although he’s made greater than 160 visits to other states across the country.
On July 12, nearly a month after Modi was elected as prime minister for the third consecutive term, Christian leaders, led by the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, visited the prime minister to specific their concerns over the harassment and exclusion of Christians, in addition to the gross misuse of anti-conversion laws.
“The prime minister said he’ll look into our problems,” said the Rev. Robinson Rodrigues, public relations officer for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference. “There isn’t any point in being in denial since the records and newspaper reports are there for all to see.”
Christian leaders who’ve lost faith within the Modi government said they hope India’s judiciary will help broker peace and deter the religious fundamentalists.
“Christians today are only political baggage in India, where the Hindu nationalism project is getting used to polarize society and reap political dividends.” said Vijayesh Lal, secretary general of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. “Our only hope is the upper judiciary.”
But while the courts have largely protected the Christian community and presented Christian legal interests with significant wins, they’ve sometimes safeguarded majoritarian interests, fueling fear amongst minorities.
Earlier this month, a judge on the Allahabad High Court remarked in response to a bail application: “If this process (conversion) is allowed to be carried out, the bulk population of this country could be within the minority someday, and such religious congregations must be stopped where conversion is going down and changing the faith of residents of India.”
Still, many civil society leaders aren’t caving to the multiplying threats and intimidations.
“Since Stan Swamy’s death, we have been organizing many advocacy programs,” said AC Michael, referring to a Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist who died in 2021 in state custody for his work helping religious minorities. “Catholic leaders have turn into far more vocal now and civil society is supporting us against all odds.”
© Religion News Service
