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I
t was a sweltering day, but Deeksha Pal was all set for Sunday worship in northern India’s picturesque hillside town of Dehradun. Her husband Rajesh Bhoomi is a pastor, and the top floor of their two-story home has a prayer room where members of their church would gather every Sunday.
But Pal felt something was off that day in July last year, and her instincts unfortunately turned out to be right. Her home was soon overrun by a mob of over a 100 people – mostly rightwing Hindu vigilantes – who beat anyone they could get their hands on and destroyed whatever they could. By the time the police arrived later that afternoon, the house was a massive mess while several people complained of injuries.
“We have been living there for three years, we have had Sunday prayers almost every week,” a weary Pal told Asia Democracy Chronicles (ADC) months later. “But this is the first time I experienced such reprisal. This wasn’t even a church, but they barged inside our own home. It was horrifying.”
Pal and her family are Christians who happen to be living in a predominantly Hindu locality. One floor of their home is usually leased out to tenants – and that is apparently where all the trouble began.
Two days before the attack, a young Nepali woman named Jyoti Thapa had become Pal’s latest tenant and had moved in with her two young children. Thapa’s husband is Hindu while she is Christian. The whispers that went around the neighborhood, however, had Pal’s family allegedly kidnapping Thapa and her children and then forcing them to convert.
“My husband works in Delhi, he knows how and where I live,” the 27-year-old Thapa said. “He respects my beliefs and my life choices. I moved in to stay there and attend their Sunday prayer out of my own choice. I’m a grown adult, India’s Constitution gives us the right to practice our personal beliefs. If this is my faith, how am I being forced into any conversion?”
Today Deeksha Pal and her family find themselves ostracized by their neighbors, who have labeled them as proselytizers and “anti-Hindu” for merely following their own faith.
Yet their experience is only a small blip among a larger, nationwide series of attacks against religious minorities, who have also endured arrest as several Indian states enforce draconian anti-conversion laws that target non-Hindus.
Indeed, as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi marks more than a decade in power, India has seen a clear consolidation of far-right Hindu nationalism.
And while Muslims have often been the victims as documented in media reports on the rising incidents of mob-lynchings, hate crimes, and violence against religious minorities across the country, Christians in particular are ending up as the accused in many cases involving the supposed violation of state anti-conversion laws.
According to the pan-India United Christian Forum (UCF), there were 834 incidents of anti-Christian targeting in 2024 alone, or exactly 100 more than those recorded in the previous year. The UCF’s decade-long findings also show a rising graph in such violence, with a big chunk of the attacks being linked to cases of “forced conversion.”
“The alarming frequency of attacks translates to more than two Christians being targeted every day in India simply for practicing their faith,” the UCF noted in a statement issued this January.
In Uttar Pradesh (UP) state, at least 100 Christians, including pastors, are currently behind bars, supposedly for violating the state’s anti-conversion law.
Multiplying anti-conversion laws
Some 72.5% of India’s 1.45 billion peoples are Hindu while 14.5% are Muslim, and Christians 4.9%, according to the U.S. State Department, citing the World Religion Database estimates.
In its 2023 Report on International Religious Freedoms: India, the U.S. State Department, this time citing Indian government estimates, said that India’s northeastern states Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya have predominantly Christian populations, while Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Kerala also have significant Christian communities.
India is a secular state. But the BJP’s Hindu nationalist stance and accompanying rhetoric has made non-Hindus the prey of the party’s members and followers.
As of February 2023, at least 12 of India’s 28 states have passed rigid laws criminalizing religious conversions. The majority of states passing such laws are governed under BJP-led state governments, with the legislation ostensibly seeking to prevent “forced” or “unlawful” religious conversion, but effectively mandating that any act of religious conversion come with prior notice to government officials, and shifting the burden of proof on the accused.
Moreover, these anti-conversion laws use vague terms that are left undefined. UP’s anti-conversion law, for example, talks about religious conversion done under “force, fraud, and allurement,” but does not provide specifics on what constitutes these.
Uttar Pradesh is governed by the BJP. In 2021, the state’s anti-conversion law mandated that any person convicted of engaging in “illegal mass conversion” could be sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.
Amended last year, that same crime now carries a minimum jail sentence of seven years and the maximum double that.
Additionally, UP’s anti-conversion law allows for any individual to report any suspicious conversion activity to state and police authorities, opening the space for a wave of false cases. With such a law in force, virtually any collective gathering of Christians is increasingly being demonized and portrayed as an attempt to lure people into Christianity.
This was what members of the far-right Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) said was happening on April 14, 2022 at the Evangelical Church of India (ECI), located near the Broadwell Christian Hospital in UP’s town of Fatehpur.
It was Maundy Thursday; Pastor Vijay Masih was holding a prayer service at the church for some 50 faithful when over 200 VHP members barged in and accused the churchgoers of carrying out “forced conversion” activities.
What followed were over two years of legal cases and pressure from local rightwing groups, with the Evangelical Church painted as a hub of “conversion” activities. Police booked the churchgoers, as well as pastors Masih and Ajay Samuel, and confiscated religious books as proof of “conversion.” They also booked members of the nearby hospital. Both the ECI church and Broadwell Hospital were spotlighted as alleged dens of illegal conversion activities.
Pastors Masih and Samuel were actually arrested twice. The first time was on the day of the attack on their church, but both men made bail a few days later. Six months on, they were again picked up by the police and put under arrest.
They remained incarcerated till June 2023. Now out on bail once more, Masih and Samuel have stopped services and moved away from Fatehpur.
Masih and his wife currently live 120 kilometers away, in a slum on the outskirts of the city of Lucknow. Masih has been taking on odd jobs as a laborer since they moved. He told ADC that the police and rightwing groups had accused him and Samuel of being funded by foreign missionaries, and implied that money was part of their supposed conversion tactics, along with other forms of financial aid and admission to good schools.
Pointing to the shack he shares with his wife, in an area that lacks electricity and basic sanitation, Masih said, “This is where we live, and you are saying we are bribing people to force them to convert?”
Then again, the notion that prayer congregations lure “innocents” and fool them into conversion by promising them money and riches has been used by Hindu vigilantes not only against Masih and Samuel, but also against other Christians, pastor or not.
Faith and hate
The assumption may have partly stemmed from the fact that — as a 2021 survey by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center revealed — most Christian converts in India come from “poor backgrounds.” That, in turn, is because most converts belong to lower castes, which means their chances of landing jobs with good pay range from slim to none.
Interestingly, among the findings of the survey, which was conducted between November 2019 and March 2020, was that “Indians of all … religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths.”
“Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation,” Pew’s report on the survey also said. “Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be ‘truly Indian.’ And tolerance is a religious as well as civic value: Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.”
Yet, at the same time, the survey revealed that “Hindus tend to see their religious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined.”
“Nearly two-thirds of Hindus (64 percent) say it is very important to be Hindu to be ‘truly’ Indian,” the Pew report said.
It is therefore not hard to see how someone with such a view develops what writer and activist John Dayal has described as “targeted hate” once exposed to the constant hate-mongering propagated by Hindu nationalists – including India’s highest officials — and which has even seeped its way into laws.
That Christian sects (and Muslim ones) proselytize while Hindus claim not to may have also fed fears of potentially massive conversions. The 2021 Pew report, however, noted “stability in the share of religious groups,” with only 0.4 percent of its survey respondents saying they were former Hindus before converting to Christianity.
Ironically, Hindu vigilantes have not been shy of forcing conversions of Christians. In the central state of Chhattisgarh, the deep forest interiors where tribal Christians bury their dead have become sites of coerced conversion to Hinduism. A well-oiled network of vigilantes has created a grassroots response across remote villages in the Bastar region there, resulting in Christians being forced to convert by their own Hindu neighbors just so they can bury their loved ones.
Back in Dehradun, Deeksha Pal’s husband now holds prayer services online. Jyoti Thapa and her children are living elsewhere in the community. But no one has been punished for the attack; the police have still not pushed for action against anyone, even if many of those who participated in the vicious incident posted videos of it on social media and exposed their own faces.
Pal herself is still in disbelief that it actually happened. “Is a prayer meeting in our own home a crime now?” she wondered aloud. “Belief is a matter of the heart, it’s an individual’s personal choice. How can they read into someone’s heart if someone wants to attend church or a Sunday prayer?”
“Simply being Christian or Muslim is enough to be accused of ‘forced conversion’,” Pal said. “This is all about their politics.” ◉
Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist presently based in Mumbai, India. She is interested and curious about issues of law, human rights, culture and gender, and has reported mainly on the same.
