The Hindu Attacks on India’s Christians

HOUSES OF WORSHIP

By Tunku Varadarajan

Since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, the country has seen a breathtaking rise in violence against religious minorities by groups aligned with his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party.

India’s Muslims, who are 14% of the population, have borne the brunt of the most brutal physical attacks. They face active discrimination in employment, education and housing, and are often prevented from voting and pursuing businesses in Hindu-majority areas. They have been ghettoized.

But as several ugly events in recent weeks have shown, Christians—a mere 2.3% of Indians, many of whom belong to the poorest sections of society— are also subjected to widespread hatred and thuggery. Although Hindus are 80% of India’s population, radical Hindus are obsessed with the imagined dangers of Christianity. As many as 12 states have laws prohibiting religious conversion by “force, fraud, or allurement”—the last term often defined as any form of evangelical persuasion. Attacks on Christians are invariably justified as measures to stop conversions.

Christmas has been a public holiday in India since independence, along with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh holidays. Radical Hindu ideologues—including Yogi Adityanath, BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state—believe it shouldn’t be. His government even ordered schools open on Christmas. Mobs of Hindus assembled outside churches in his state—at precisely the time of Christmas Eve services—and chanted “Death to Christian missionaries” while also screaming Hindu prayers aloud.

In recent days, almost every Indian with a cellphone has seen clips of a BJP leader in the state of Madhya Pradesh

Modi stays silent as chauvinists in his party assault the religious minority.

barge into a church, disrupt a Christmas feast, and assault a young blind woman, accusing her of abetting the conversion of Hindus to Christianity. In Raipur, a city in the state of Chhattisgarh, Hindu chauvinists trashed Christmas displays at a mall, decapitating images of Santa Claus with iron rods. Incidents of this kind occurred in almost every Indian state governed by the BJP.

Citizens for Justice and Peace, an Indian human-rights group, keeps tabs on religious violence in the country, and says that this Christmas became “a national flashpoint for majoritarian assertion.” The at--tack on the mall, it says, was “not a spontaneous

outburst. It was symbolic violence—targeting Christmas imagery in a public commercial space to send a message: Christian visibility itself is unacceptable.” According to the United Christian Forum, a coalition of Indian Christian organizations, anti-Christian attacks rose from 139 in 2014 to 834 in 2024. In 2025, as of November there were 706 recorded incidents.

In its annual report for 2025, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the Trump administration designate India a “country of particular concern” for allowing “egregious religious freedom violations” to go unchecked and unpunished. It cited examples of attacks that have occurred with impunity. In August 2024, “a Hindu mob of over 200 people attacked 18 Christian families in Chhattisgarh as police did not intervene.” Last December eight village councils in that state passed a joint resolution requiring Christians to renounce their religion or leave.

This Christmas, Mr. Modi made a show of attending Mass at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption in New Delhi. “The service reflected the timeless message of love, peace and compassion,” he said. “May the spirit of Christ--mas inspire harmony and goodwill in our society.” To Indian Christians, and to their many secular compatriots, those words were risible, as packs of Hindu activists ran riot against Christians in places far removed from New Delhi—places without the veneer of cosmopolitanism to which the Indian capital can only barely lay claim.

India’s secularism—enshrined in its constitution in 1950—has been flawed even in the best of times. It has always been skin-deep, grafted onto an instinctively sectarian population by the Western-educated elites who shepherded the country to independence from Britain. But it was more than a hollow shibboleth in the years before Mr. Modi came to power. With unfortunate exceptions, governments made sincere efforts to curb the worst majoritarian excesses and ugliest assertions of Hindu chauvinism.

But under Mr. Modi, all pretense at secularism has ceased. For all his soothing bromides after Mass, the prime minister hasn’t said a word against the Hindu radicals who attacked Christians. Some of his defenders argue he can’t control every thug in a vast country. But what stops him from condemning their actions, from saying that their violence is unacceptable in a civilized country?

I think we know the answer. Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.