Christians cautioned to remain vigilant around Christmas

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and human rights advocates gathered at the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels on 4 December to discuss atrocities against Christian communities across South Asia, and highlighted a dramatic escalation of targeted attacks against Christians in India. They pointed to the United Christians Forum (UCF)’s registration of more than 600 incidents of violence between January and October 2025 alone, averaging two attacks per day, including mob assaults, public humiliation, church disruption, and the demolition of homes.

Twelve Indian states now enforce anti-conversion laws, often used to intimidate and criminalise peaceful religious activity. This year, 123 criminal complaints have been filed against Christians, and several believers remain in prison across the country.

“Christians in India are punished not for wrongdoing but for simply gathering, praying, or helping their neighbours,” explained ADF International’s Tehmina Arora. “Even the Supreme Court of India recently noted how the anti-conversion laws are misused to wrongly prosecute Christians.”

The Christian minority – estimated at around 32 million, or 2.2 per cent of the 1.46 billion Indian population – is apprehensive about anti-Christian violence and rhetoric by Hindu extremist groups like Bajrang Dal, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Hindu Mahasabha. Hindu vigilantes deem Christmas festivities as provocations to attack churches and Christians, including priests and nuns, disrupt congregations, destroy property, and storm schools to tear down Christmas decorations, vandalise classrooms and terrify teachers and pupils found celebrating.

The Brussels gathering, on Targeted Violence against Christians in South Asia, was organised by the Christian legal advocacy group, ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom) International. The panel brought together first-hand witnesses and experts to brief policymakers on the urgent need for stronger EU engagement on freedom of religion or belief.

The EU has been particularly alarmed by the ethnic violence that has been raging in the north-eastern state of Manipur since 2023 between the majority Hindu Meitei tribals and the minority Christian Kukis. Over 250 lost their lives, a thousand others have been wounded, around 67,000 displaced, and hundreds of churches and thousands of homes destroyed. Many women were raped before being murdered.

The independent, bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) too has repeatedly “recommended” – as it has done this year too - that the US Department of State designate India as a Country of Particular Concern, for engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations.

“The Indian government, at the national and state level, tolerates and at times fuels widespread harassment and violence against religious minorities,” notes USCIRF in its November report on Systematic Religious Persecution in India. “The BJP-led government has introduced and enforced discriminatory legislation that disenfranchises religious minorities, including the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), and various state-level anti-conversion and cow slaughter laws - for alleged systemic violations of religious freedom, particularly targeting minorities like Muslims and Christians, with issues including anti-conversion laws and Hindu nationalist rhetoric.”

 “The RSS’s primary mission is to build a ‘Hindu Rastra’, or Hindu state,” states the report. “It promotes the notion that India is a Hindu nation, excluding Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Parsis, and other religious minorities.” While the Commission’s recommendations are not binding, they highlight growing international scrutiny over India’s religious tolerance.

Videos have surfaced on social media showing Hindutva activists brutalising principals of schools that have pupils reciting Christian prayers, as had happened in 2023 to Father Alexander Reid of the D.Y. Patil High School near Pune city. Mobs at times also parade effigies of Santa Claus that they thrash with chappals (sandals) in a Hindu act of humiliation, and set aflame, as happens especially in north India.

Goons systematically raid homes of people they brand as Christian converts, thrashing them and seizing all religious items like Bibles, crosses, Christ idols and rosaries. They abuse and force the victims to profane Christianity and to chant Hindu prayers instead, while pledging to be forever Hindus. In Jharkhand, BJP leader Gunjan Yadav, accompanied by a mob, led a raid on a Christian family’s home last July, accusing them of conducting religious conversions. Acting on their complaint, local police detained 12 individuals and seized Bibles and other religious material as “evidence”.

Leaders like the All-India Catholic Union’s Elias Vaz and the All-India Christian Council’s Madhu Chandra have spoken out about a pervasive “climate of hate” being kindled by rumours of forced conversions.

In July, two Catholic nuns from Kerala, Sisters Preeti Mary and Vandana Francis, accompanying three adult tribal women, were arrested in Chhattisgarh on charges of human trafficking and forced conversion. Church sources stated the nuns were taking the women to Agra for salaried kitchen-helper jobs. Police are often complicit with the culprits, as for instance in March when VHP activists assaulted two Catholic priests inside a police station, in the presence of police personnel.

The UN General Assembly last year circulated a submission by Christian legal advocacy group European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) urging the UN “to hold India accountable and cited India’s ranking as the 11^th most dangerous country in the world for Christians to live in, with the last five years seeing “a dramatic increase in violence against Christians”.

The ECLJ finds that such savagery makes Prime Minister Modi’s “boast” mere “empty words” when he says that his “government will not allow any religious group, belonging to the majority or the minority, to incite hatred against others, overtly or covertly”.

(SAROSH BANA is Executive Editor of Business India in Mumbai, and Regional Editor, India/Asia-Pacific, of Germany’s Naval Forces.)