Churches Under Siege: Hindutva and the Assault on Christian Life in India
This post signals the release of a new CARE working paper on religious freedom in India and the lived experiences of Christian communities under Hindutva.
On Christmas Eve in 2025, a mob stormed Magneto Mall in Raipur, tearing down festive decorations and intimidating staff, using a state-wide bandh as cover to attack the visible presence of Christians in public life. Days earlier, in Kanker district in Chhattisgarh, a dispute over the burial of a Christian tribal man turned into an organized riot. Mobs attacked the grieving family, burned down a home and three church buildings, and clashed with police. A family seeking to bury its dead became the target of coordinated violence.
These scenes anchor a new CARE working paper on religious freedom in India, drawing on documented evidence of the sustained assault on Christian communities through 2025 and into 2026. The paper reads these events through the culture-centered approach, situating the violence within the broader Hindutva project of manufacturing a homogenized Hindu nation.
The numbers tell a story of escalation. The Evangelical Fellowship of India's Religious Liberty Commission verified 747 incidents of hostility, intimidation, and violence against Christians in 2025, up from 640 in 2024, and a dramatic rise from the 147 cases documented in 2014, the year the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power. Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh consistently reported the highest numbers, states where stringent anti-conversion enforcement converges with active mobilization by Hindutva organizations such as the RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal. The incidents span physical assaults on worshippers, the burning of Bibles and church property, the disruption of Sunday services and private prayer meetings, and social boycotts that cut families off from water, work, and community life.
The Christmas season served as a flashpoint. In the weeks surrounding Christmas 2025, monitoring groups reported over fifty incidents. Across Assam, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, nativity scenes were destroyed and carol singers harassed. The pattern reflects a deliberate campaign to erase Christian observance from public space, to mark Christians as outsiders in the nation of their birth.
Alongside the street-level violence sits the machinery of law. As of early 2026, thirteen states have enacted so-called Freedom of Religion acts. These anti-conversion laws have become primary instruments for restricting minority religious life. Terms like allurement and inducement are defined so loosely that charitable work, the provision of free education, healthcare, or humanitarian aid, can be criminalized. The laws reverse the burden of proof, forcing defendants to establish their innocence against unsubstantiated claims lodged by third-party complainants with political agendas. The process itself is the punishment. Even when charges are eventually dropped, the cycle of detention, bail hearings, and court appearances inflicts lasting social, economic, and psychological harm.
The culture-centered approach directs our attention to the interplay of structure, culture, and agency. Read through this lens, the attacks on Christians in India cohere as a systemic nationalist project rather than a scattering of random acts. Hindutva works to equate Indianness exclusively with Hindu identity. By labeling Christian practice as foreign and anti-national, Hindutva organizations relegate Christians to conditional citizenship, a citizenship perpetually under suspicion, perpetually required to prove its loyalty. This is the everyday work of epistemic violence. Nationalist rhetoric erases the histories of tribal and Dalit Christians, framing their faith as a colonial import, and in doing so justifies the dismantling of the community structures that offer education, support, and solidarity to those at the margins.
The state is present throughout as a structural enabler. When police stand by as mobs attack prayer gatherings, and then move swiftly to prosecute the pastors who were attacked, the message is unambiguous. The legal and policing apparatus validates the ideology of the attackers and signals that the state participates in the cleansing of religious diversity from the public sphere.
My own work documenting Hindutva, in India and in its diasporic circuits here in Aotearoa, has taught me that these projects of erasure travel. The disinformation infrastructures that render Christians as threats in Chhattisgarh are kin to the networks that target critics of Hindutva across the diaspora. Naming the ideology, tracing its structures, and centering the voices of communities living under its violence is the work of public scholarship.
The working paper closes with the question of transformative agency. Responding to this assault requires more than documentation. It calls for the strengthening of voice infrastructures, the community-anchored networks of legal, social, and emotional support that sustain those facing erasure. Christian communities across India are building precisely these infrastructures, often at great risk, and their organizing offers the ground from which any meaningful defense of Indian pluralism will emerge.
The Supreme Court of India is currently weighing the constitutional validity of anti-conversion statutes. Whatever the Court decides, the struggle underway is larger than any single judgment. It is a struggle over who counts as a citizen, whose histories are honored, and whose lives are rendered disposable in the making of the Hindu nation.
The full CARE working paper is available on the CARE website.
The working paper compiles publicly reported evidence as of early 2026, with data subject to final audits by the respective monitoring bodies.