Christians in India are facing increased violence, social antagonism and legal scrutiny, according to advocacy groups. Attacks on Christians have been almost daily this year. These affect families, pastors and tiny congregations in multiple states.
From January to July 2025, the Evangelical Fellowship of India’s Religious Liberty Commission documented 334 verifiable incidences of violence, harassment and discrimination.
Such attacks against Christian individuals and institutions have grown five-fold over the past decade — from 139 cases reported in 2014 to 834 in 2024.
United Christian Forum, which runs a national helpline, reported 579 incidents by September this year. These included violent assaults during worship, church damage and arrests under state-level “Freedom of Religion” acts, which govern religious conversions.
This discrimination extends even to death.
On Oct. 22, 2024, Madhu Harijan, a 27-year-old Dalit Christian from Menjar village in Odisha’s Nabarangpur district, died of illness.
“What should have been a simple burial became a strange negotiation over the faith of a dead man.”
What should have been a simple burial became a strange negotiation over the faith of a dead man. The majority non-Christian villagers refused to allow his body into the common graveyard unless it was first “converted” back to Hinduism.
“No Christian can be buried in our common graveyard. If you want to bury him here, first make him Hindu again,” the family was told.
For two days, the family requested and begged in front of the villagers. The corpse laying on the ground started decomposing while the family pleaded with the village and the administration.
Arun Suna, the Christian priest in the village, said when they complained to authorities, the Umerkote tehsildar said a burial could be arranged in a Christian-majority village instead.
In the end, the coffin was discarded, the body wrapped in a mat, carried on bamboo poles without a single prayer, and buried according to Hindu rites that the dead man never had followed in his life.
This is not an isolated atrocity; it is the logical endpoint of a decade-long campaign to decide, by force and humiliation, which religions India’s poorest citizens are permitted to practice.
Odisha went from five recorded cases of abuse in 2023 to at least 10 in the first seven months of 2025, rapidly catching up with Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The victims are overwhelmingly Adivasi and Dalit converts — the very communities the Constitution promised special protection after centuries of exploitation.
Yet protection is precisely what is being withdrawn, village by village, graveyard by graveyard.
When the family of Madhu Harijan were told to take their loved one’s body to a Christian-majority village, that was a polite way of saying, “Your dead have no place here.” There are no Christian-majority villages nearby.
“Villages put up boards declaring that pastors and ‘converted’ Christians are not allowed to enter.”
This is the new normal in large parts of rural India. Villages put up boards declaring that pastors and “converted” Christians are not allowed to enter.
In November, the Chhattisgarh High Court upheld eight such boards on the grounds that they were meant to stop “forcible conversion by allurement or fraud.”
The judges did not explain how a blanket ban on the entry of any Christian — converted villager or priest — could be reconciled with Articles 14, 15 and 25 of the Constitution of India. They did not have to. Tribal customs, real or invented, now trump fundamental rights if the customs are asserted loudly enough by the majority.
The political blame-game is predictable. Opposition leaders point to the arrival of the Bharatiya Janata Party in power in Odisha in 2024 and note that incidents have become more frequent and brazen. BJP leaders reply that attacks on Christians happened under previous regimes too and recite the party’s formal commitment to sarva dharma samabhava — equal respect for all religions.
Both sides are right, and both miss the point.
Violence against Christians did not begin in 2024, but its character has changed. Earlier incidents often were sporadic, triggered by a particular conversion campaign or land dispute.
What we are seeing now is systematic social boycott backed by informal state approval. The police are either absent or reduced to recording statements after the damage is done.
Lower courts and sometimes even high courts are interpreting the right to propagate religion (Article 25) as practically nonexistent when the audience is tribal.
And the message from the ground is unmistakable: If you leave the “original” faith of your tribe, you also leave the rights that come with belonging to the village — rights to burial, rights to water sources, rights to festivals, sometimes even to residence.
“This is not religious freedom; it is religious apartheid enforced by the mob and tolerated by the state.”
This is not religious freedom; it is religious apartheid enforced by the mob and tolerated by the state.
The irony is bitter. Many of the aggressive “defenders” of tribal religion are themselves recent converts to a muscular, homogenised Hinduism that would have been unrecognisable to their grandparents. The Kondh, the Saura, the Kui once had richly animistic traditions that accommodated ancestor worship, nature spirits and a fluid relationship with the sacred.
To be an “authentic” Adivasi now means submitting to a faith imposed from above, while the Christianity many adopted voluntarily — often because missionaries provided the only schools and clinics for miles — is branded foreign and fraudulent.
Anti-conversion laws, originally sold as protection against coercion, have become weapons to criminalize ordinary worship. A pastor visiting a believer’s home can be accused of “allurement.”
In Rajasthan, a September 2025 case accused missionaries of “allurement” for visiting homes, with the burden of proof on the accused.
Distributing a Bible or praying over a sick child is evidence of fraud. The burden of proof is inverted: The Christian must prove no allurement took place, a logical absurdity when the accusation itself is enough to trigger arrest and prolonged trial.
In several states, bail is routinely denied on the grounds that freedom to practice religion is less important than the feelings of the majority community.
The result is a slow, relentless extrusion of Christians from the social fabric of the village. Burial grounds are only the most visible site of struggle. Christian children are harassed in government schools.
Christian families are denied ration cards or water connections until they “return” to the fold. Pastors are paraded with shoes around their necks. And when the victims approach the police, charges are filed against the victims for “hurting religious sentiments.”
We are witnessing the creation of internal refugees within India — citizens who must choose between their faith and their home.
The Constitution envisioned something radically different. The framers knew Dalits and Adivasis had suffered millennia of exclusion in the name of religion.
That is why they wrote Article 17 abolishing untouchability, Article 25 guaranteeing freedom of conscience, and Article 15 prohibiting discrimination on grounds of religion, caste or place of birth. They knew these rights would be resisted, which is why they made them fundamental and non-negotiable.
“The claim of widespread fraudulent conversion collapses under the simplest scrutiny.”
Seventy-five years later, those rights are being negotiated away in village shamianas and police stations.
Defenders of the new order argue that mass conversions in tribal areas are the result of inducement and therefore illegitimate. Even if that were true in some cases — and the evidence is far weaker than claimed — it cannot justify collective punishment of entire communities.
A crime, if it has been committed, must be investigated and punished individually, not used as a license to deny an entire group the right to pray, marry or bury their dead.
Moreover, the claim of widespread fraudulent conversion collapses under the simplest scrutiny. Tribal Christians in Odisha have been baptized for three generations in many cases. Their churches are made of mud and thatch, not marble.
Their pastors often earn less than agricultural laborers. If conversion really was about rice and jobs, the flow would have reversed long ago; instead, the Christian population in these areas has grown steadily through natural increase and conviction.
What we are seeing is not protection of tribal culture but its weaponization in the service of a larger political project: the transformation of India into a state where one nation, one culture and, increasingly, one religion are the only legitimate options.
A dead man’s religion is not a matter for majority vote. A village graveyard is not private property. And the right to die — and be buried — in the faith you lived by is not negotiable.
Zaid Malik is a Delhi-based independent journalist from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. He writes on health care, conflict, culture, gender, art and religion. He has worked with national and international outlets.