Looming Genocide in Modi’s India Threatens Both Muslims & Christians

Remarks at India on the Brink Summit about threat to Indian Christians

On 24 February 2022, a state legislator from Bihar demanded, in so many words, that the government of India withdraw voting rights from Indian Muslims and “make them second class citizens.”

The politician, unsurprisingly, hails from India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Such overtly anti-minority statements probably would have been considered shocking enough to make national headlines eight years ago, before the BJP came to power, but since 2014 they have become so par for the course that it seems Indian journalists can barely be bothered to bat an eyelash over such an unvarnished demand by an elected official to disenfranchise hundreds of millions of Indian citizens.

After all, the sociopolitical landscape in India has become so desensitized to the mainstreaming of hate that it took over a month for Swami Yati Narsinghanand to be arrested after organizing a conference in December 2021 where he and other speakers openly called for launching a genocide against Indian Muslims — and he was barely behind bars for a month before getting bail.

Over the past several years of the Modi regime, beatings and lynchings of Muslims have occurred with such increasing frequency that it’s become almost impossible for even the most attentive observer to track — or recall — all the incidents.

Muslims are murdered for allegedly possessing beef. Muslims are stopped in the streets and ordered to chant Hindu religious slogans at the risk of violence — and then beaten even when they cooperate. Muslim men are attacked for being in the company of Hindu women. Muslims are physically assaulted on public transportation in Delhi, the capital of the country itself, for accidentally bumping into someone. And on, and on, and on.

Random violence against Muslims, to the extent of lynching, has been normalized as a daily occurrence in the Modi regime.

The only change that we’ve seen at the outset of 2022 is that the “New Normal” has now expanded to include incessant, explicit calls for genocide from various prominent Hindu nationalist figures, often made in the presence of BJP officials. Calls which are made so frequently that, just like the lynchings of the past eight years, it’s growing difficult to keep up with them all.

While Muslims have born the brunt of violence since 2014, over the past couple of years (and particularly in 2021), the Hindu nationalist forces not only began expanding the overtness of their rhetoric but also the targets of their violence.

Indian Christians are, increasingly, falling victim to the rising tide of hatred. Documented attacks on Christians have slowly risen, with almost every year since 2014 bringing higher numbers than the previous one. Last year was exceptionally horrific, however, with the total number of incidents being almost twice that of 2020. Violence against Christians absolutely sky-rocketed, thus it’s no surprise that leading Indian Christian groups and figures described 2021 as a “year of fear.”

Just as Islamophobic hatred has become a commonplace feature in the sociopolitical landscape of Modi’s “New India,” so too is bloodthirsty prejudice against Christians passing from the realm of the extraordinary into the ordinary of the everyday.

One need look no further than the October 2021 call issued by a swami at a rally in Chhattisgarh that was hosted two months before the now infamous Haridwar Hate Conference. Flanked by BJP officials, the swami denounced conversion to Christianity and urged his followers to “behead” anyone who tries to proselytize them. But they shouldn’t just stop at murdering those who encourage their conversion — they should, said the swami, proactively target already existing Christians with a strategy of “stop, warn, and kill.”

It was only a matter of time before Christians were destined to join Muslims as top targets of the Hindu nationalist movement. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh serves, of course, as the fountainhead of that movement, and the RSS’s “Guru” — in detailing his ideology — specifically identified both communities as “foreign elements,” “internal threats,” and, in so many words, as “traitors” guilty of joining “the camp of the enemy” merely by virtue of daring to be non-Hindus living in India.

All non-Hindus are under threat by the RSS and its Hindu nationalist agenda. In the case of Buddhists, Sikhs, and others, however, the RSS seeks to assimilate them. In the case of both Muslims and Christians, the RSS seeks to eliminate them entirely.

Indian Christians have, of course, suffered some truly horrific atrocities at the hands of the RSS-BJP in the past 20 plus years, most notably during the Kandhamal Pogrom in Odisha in 2008. One major difference from today, however, is that while Kandhamal — which saw perhaps 100 Christians fall victim to the trishul — produced a far higher body count than that we have seen suffered under the Modi regime, that pogrom, like most of the other atrocities against Christians during the past few decades, was a regionally-confined atrocity. Attacks on Christians today, in contrast, are spread across large swathes of the country and are even extending into southern India, where the community has historically lived, by and large, safe and sound.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of these nationwide attacks on Christians is that the vast majority of them are perpetrated by mobs. Mobs, oftentimes, of hundreds of people. These attacks are also, very frequently, on church services where congregations of 20, 50, 100 or more are gathering to meet. Thus, it’s important in contextualizing the level of violence to remember that, while there were 505 violent incidents recorded in 2021, each incident might be directly victimizing, at any given time, dozens of Christians or more.

Considering that so many of these are mob attacks and that the violence is no longer regionally-confined, what Dr. John Dayal, one of India’s preeminent Indian Christian activists, told me sounds quite rational. As he said: “I will not say that Christians are being massacred seven days a week. But they can be at a moment’s notice.”

While many in the global community are ignorant — willfully or otherwise — of the persecution of Indian Christians, the growing persecution has not escaped notice of international Christian human rights organizations. Nor has the source of the persecution.

Last year, International Christian Concern, a DC-based watchdog, jointly awarded India, and Modi, and the RSS’s family of organizations its ignominious “Persecutor of the Year” award. As the organization reported, anti-Christian violence is “inspired by the notion of establishing India as a Hindu nation.”

Voice of the Martyrs, a renowned nonprofit dedicated to defending the human rights of persecuted Christians, labels the environment for Indian Christians as “hostile” and blames the violence on “well-organized Hindu extremist groups” who, they explain, “view Christian converts as traitors to the Hindu homeland.”

Open Doors USA, a nonprofit which focuses on monitoring global persecution of Christians, explains that the “driving force” behind persecution in India is “an ideology that disregards Indian Christians and other religious minorities as true Indians because they have allegiances that lie outside India, and asserts the country should be purified of their presence.”

Open Doors also issues annual rankings of countries according to the level of persecution faced by Christians.

In 2013, a year before the BJP came to power, Open Doors ranked India 31st among the top 50 countries in the world where persecution of Christians is most severe. This year — and for the past four years — India has ranked as the 10th most dangerous country in the world in which to be a Christian.

That’s higher than, for instance, China or even Saudi Arabia.

Notably, while there are nine other countries where persecution of Christians does rank higher, India has three distinguishing factors from them all: first, it is the only legitimate, officially secular democracy on the list; second, as the second-most populated country in the world, its population is more than twice that of all the other nine combined; third, it is the only country which is an ally of the United States.

“The attacks on [the] Christian community continue in the year 2022 as nothing is being done by the people in power to control it,” warned AC Michael of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights in late January. That’s hardly shocking considering that, in most cases, those instigating the attacks are documented as leaders or members of RSS-affiliated outfits.

If the trend since 2014 is anything to go by, Indian Christians, in 2022, will suffer more — and ever more violent — attacks than they did in each of the previous eight years.

Modi’s regime is silently tolerating a looming genocide by forces which seek to swallow up not just Muslims but also Christians. As it has been said, silence is consent, and considering that Modi’s public life began within the RSS, it’s reasonable to conclude that his government’s silence stems from ideological alignment with the forces of hate who are pushing Indian Christians and Muslims into an existential crisis.

The global community — religious or not — must wake up to this threat before it becomes the bloodbath on the brink of which India is now teetering.