During the months of August and September 2012, five separate cases of church vandalism and Christian attacks in India have been reported via correspondence to the All India Christian Council, a council based in India and dedicated to the protection of Christians in the country. These acts of assault speak to the larger issue of hostility towards foreign minority religions in India, especially Christianity. As a state with a vastly heterogeneous population, India houses a variety of religions. The most dominant and home-grown are Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, with most of the population subscribing to the first. While India continues to espouse secularism in state politics despite the fact that freedom of religion is a right enshrined in the state’s constitution, religious persecution continues to exist against different religious minority groups. Particularly Christians and those who have converted from Hinduism to Christianity receive severe backlash.
Since 2002, there has been an increase in communal violence against Christians because of the rise of Hindu nationalist organizations, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Once in power, as noted by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom 2012 (USCIRF), the government has failed to adequately protect religious minorities due either to inadequate police action or to corruption. The policing deficiency and corruption has only exacerbated the tensions between contentious religious groups: the lack of sufficiently trained police on the ground to patrol the streets, complemented with the police’s personal biases lead to a lack of religious protection.
Perhaps the most recent and controversial example of religious strife on a large scale is the outbreak of communal violence in the state of Orissa between 2007 and 2008. The fomentation of religious persecution had built up from years of struggle between the two dominant Hindu and Christian sects in the region, with religious adherents of the separate religions living side by side. The situation was ignited by the burning and killing of Christian homes and residents by Hindu nationalist groups. Exacerbating the situation was the assassination of local Hindu leader Swami Lakshmanananda and of others by Maoist guerillas who identified themselves as Christians. As a result, Christians became the scapegoats for the acts of minority radicals, and fighting increased on both sides. In the end, more than 18,000 people in Orissa were injured.
Why has religious violence been targeted at Christian minorities in India? Generally, Hindu nationalists such as those in Sangh Parivar are overwhelmingly unfriendly towards Christianity. They view Christianity as a result of Christians bribing the Hindus with education and housing improvements. These Hindu nationalists believe that religious conversions are an expression of outside interventionist forces seeking to forcefully bring western influence into predominantly Hindu Indian communities and to destroy the traditional Hindu way of life. Anti-conversion laws, therefore, have been instituted in order to curb forced Christian conversions and communal violence. These laws, however, also act as an apparatus to intimidate Christians and to force them to reconvert to Hinduism, despite the fact that some Indians choose to become Christians voluntarily. The anti-conversion laws, which have been adopted by various states, have consequently circumvented the right for all Indian citizens to practice and proselytize their faith, which is protected under Article 25 of the Indian Constitution. Since 2011, five states have instituted anti-conversion laws, including Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Gujarat. In Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, the laws have been passed but have not been implemented.
Anti-conversion laws and Christian conversions in India remain a contentious issue that raises not only questions about the effectiveness of legislation in protecting religious minorities, but also about the problem of enforcing such rights. On a wider scope, the attacks and persecution of religious minorities in India, especially that of Christians, points to the problem of how Indians should and can live peacefully together given the diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds of the population.
