Arrests, beatings and secret prayers: Inside the persecution of India’s Christians

The Christians were mid-hymn when the mob kicked in the door.

A swarm of men dressed in saffron poured inside. They jumped onstage and shouted Hindu supremacist slogans. They punched pastors in the head. They threw women to the ground, sending terrified children scuttling under their chairs.

“They kept beating us, pulling out hair,” said Manish David, one of the pastors who was assaulted. “They yelled, ‘What are you doing here? What songs are you singing? What are you trying to do?’”

The attack unfolded on the morning of Jan. 26 at the Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra Christian centre in the city of Indore. The police soon arrived, but the officers did not touch the aggressors. Instead, they arrested and jailed the pastors and other church elders. The Christians were charged with breaking a newly enforced law that targets religious conversions, one that mirrors at least a dozen other measures across the country that have prompted a surge in mob violence against Indian Christians.

David was not converting anyone, he said. But the organised assault against his church was propelled by a growing anti-Christian hysteria that is spreading across this vast nation, home to one of Asia’s oldest and largest Christian communities, with more than 30 million adherents.

Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshippers. 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.

Read | VHP demands nationwide anti-conversion law

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.

“I just don’t get it,” said Abhishek Ninama, a Christian farmer, who stared dejectedly at a rural church stomped apart this year. “What is it that we do that makes them hate us so much?”

The pressure is greatest in central and northern India, where the 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. 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.

Since its independence in 1947, India has been the world’s largest experiment in democracy. At times, communal violence, often between Hindus and Muslims, has tested its commitment to religious pluralism, but usually the authorities try, albeit sometimes too slowly, to tamp it down.

The issue of conversions to Christianity from Hinduism is an especially touchy subject, one that has vexed the country for years and even drew in Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who fiercely guarded India’s secular ideals. 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% of the population, are part of a broader shift in India in which minorities feel less safe.

Read | Rising intolerance

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.

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 organisations. 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 ostracised villagers for believing in Jesus. Last year, in one town, they stopped people from gathering on Christmas.

“Christians are being suppressed, discriminated against and persecuted at rising levels like never before in India,” said Matias Perttula, the advocacy director at International Christian Concern, a leading anti-persecution group. “And the attackers run free, every time.”

For Dilip Chouhan, part of a growing network of anti-Christian muscle, just the mention of Christians makes his face pucker, as if he licked a lemon.

“These ‘believers,’” he said, using the term derisively, “they promise all kinds of stuff — motorcycles, TVs, fridges. They work off superstition. They mislead people.”

Read | With Congress cornered, Karnataka Assembly passes anti-conversion bill

Chouhan lives in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, which this year passed an anti-conversion law that carries prison sentences of up to 10 years for any person found guilty of leading illegal conversions, which are vaguely defined. Energised by this law, Chouhan, 35, and scores of other young Hindu nationalists have stormed a string of churches. Some of the raids were broadcast on the news, including footage of Chouhan barging into one church with a shotgun on his back.

Chouhan said his group, which uses WhatsApp to plan its raids on upcoming church services, has 5,000 members. It is part of a constellation of Hindu nationalist organisations across the country, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, as well as many members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP.

Christians in states such as Kerala and Goa, which have large historic Christian communities, face much less persecution, if any at all.

But in tradition-bound rural areas where Christians are a tiny minority and community means everything, the pressure is intense. Village elders in Bilawar Kalan, in Madhya Pradesh, recently instituted the equivalent of a $130 fine for any family that allows Christians in their home. At the same time, they are trying to force the few Christian families to convert to Hinduism, warning that otherwise no one will marry their children, attend their funerals or sell them anything at the market.

“They want to remove us from society,” said Sukh Lal Kumre, a threadbare farmer and a Christian, who sat on a dry log in a field just outside the village.

When asked about the social boycott, elders in Bilawar Kalan were not evasive or apologetic.

“We are doing this to coerce them back to society,” explained Mesh Lal Chanchal, who is also one of the village’s top BJP members. “If we didn’t intervene, they would have converted this whole area by now.”

After India’s independence from Britain, Christian leaders helped persuade the framers of India’s Constitution to include protections for religious freedom, even as Hindu nationalists kept trying to pass anti-conversion laws. When the debate landed in Parliament in 1955, Nehru, India’s iconic prime minister, argued against such anti-conversion laws, presciently predicting that they “might very well be the cause of great harassment.”

In the decades that followed, Hindu nationalists tried to restrict conversions. Secularists within Nehru’s Congress Party tried to check them. A few states, including Madhya Pradesh, where Hindu nationalists have long enjoyed broad support, passed their own anti-conversion laws, but enforcement was limited and desultory.

In 2014, all that changed.

Modi swept into power. Part of his appeal were his promises of economic reform and a more powerful India on the global stage. But many Indians were also attracted to Modi’s deep roots in Hindu nationalist groups such as the RSS.

A few years ago, after Catholic churches in New Delhi, the capital, had been vandalised, Christian leaders pleaded with Modi for help. He was disinterested, mocking them and never addressing the attacks, according to three clergymen who attended an important meeting at the prime minister’s residence in December 2014.

“He acted like a don,” said the Rev. Dominic Emmanuel, a former official with the Delhi Catholic Church who now lives in Vienna.

When asked about the meeting, a spokesperson for Modi said these were “unsubstantiated allegations” and pointed to a speech in which Modi said he would “not allow any religious group, belonging to the majority or the minority, to incite hatred against others” and that his government would be one “that gives equal respect to all religions.”

In October, Modi met Pope Francis at the Vatican and invited him to visit India. Some analysts saw that as progress. Others dismissed it as a cynical ploy for Catholic votes.

Emmanuel does not believe a papal visit will change much. Attacks have shot up over the past few months and have spread to the southern state of Karnataka. The extremists say they are acting to stop illegal conversions. Christian leaders say that is just an excuse to stir up a mob.

“Just like they have terrorism to beat the Muslims with,” Emmanuel said, “they have conversions to beat the Christians with.”

He added, “I’m worried and very sad that in this beautiful country, with a lovely culture, where we have lived together for centuries, majoritarianism is gaining the upper hand, and people are being put against one another based on religion.”

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