With the rise of Hindu nationalism in India over the past decades, the issue of violence against Christians has become particularly acute. Recent reports from the Evangelical Fellowship of India suggest a four-fold increase in violence between 2014 and 2023, while noted scholar Christoph Jaffrelot argues that Indian Christians have now become the ‘prime targets’ of Hindu nationalist attacks. This development is both tragic and ironic: Christianity in India has probably never been as ‘Indianized’ as it is today; and yet it has never before been as vilified by the Hindu right as it is now. The special issue explores this phenomenon and its role in the current Hindu nationalist project. By mapping and analysing a variety of forms that anti-Christian violence has taken in different states within India’s federal system, the special issue seeks to make a two-fold contribution to current debates on Hindu nationalism, namely to (i) highlight the centrality of ‘the Christian Other’ and anti-Christian violence to the Hindu nationalist project, a theme that is often given scant attention in the wider literature; and (ii) to reflect on what the dynamics and modalities of anti-Christian violence tell us about the current configuration of Hindu nationalism.
Anti-Christian Violence
As the special issue introduction shows, there has, under the current regime, been an intentional synthesis of structural, direct and cultural forms of anti-Christian violence.
In the legal domain, several states in India have now passed anti-conversion laws. On the face of it, these laws do not show any literal indication that they were designed to target a particular religious community. But in practice, they have been passed and implemented to target Indian Muslims and Christians. In north India, for example, anti-conversion laws are routinely spoken of in media and political discourse simply as ‘love jihad laws’, demonstrating that their intended purpose is first and foremost to target Muslims. In the southern state of Karnataka, in contrast, it is the Christians that are the intended target. The most recent wave of anti-conversion laws also place a focus on Christian institutions, which could potentially lose the ability to receive money from foreign sources. Recent scholarship including our own shows that there is often a high degree of extra judicial (and violent) enforcement of anti-conversion laws by organizations affiliated with the wider Hindu nationalist movement.
Alongside the violence inflicted via law-making and vigilantism, we are also seeing the intensifying production of a more widely shared form of common sense about the fundamental ‘anti-national’ essence of non-Hindu minorities and their ‘un-belonging’ to the Hindu nation. This is a long-standing trope in Hindu nationalist rhetoric that asserts that the loyalties of Indian Christians by definition lie elsewhere. This is arguably a form of cultural violence that is part and parcel of the Hindu nationalist project, and which normalizes the stigmatization of religious minorities. Social media is integral to the production of this new political common sense. More than half of all Indians rely on social media as their main source of news, and for Gen Z the figure is as high as 90% according to some surveys. Hindu nationalist groups are very adept users of social media platforms to spread their worldview.
State-level Dynamics
The contributions to the special issue focus on the state as the unit of analysis. The study by M. Sudhir Selvaraj revisits the 2008 anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka. Using Galtung’s concept of cultural violence as an analytical tool, Selvaraj shows how discursive justifications of anti-Christian violence can travel, be adapted and amplified between states, and between the state and the national level. While the context of violence was very different in both Orissa and Karnataka, the relatively broad framing of the Christian ‘threat’ allowed it to be deployed adroitly across both contexts, blurring its moral colors. The study by Kaiser, Nielsen and Selvaraj explores the context of contemporary Chhattisgarh, demonstrating how physical violence against Christians can exist even under an ostensibly secular Indian National Congress-led state government. The Congress party’s soft Hindutva approach and its willful inaction in dealing with anti-Christian violence and intimidation is, to Kaiser, Nielsen, and Selvaraj, an indication of the existence of what Jaffrelot has described as a Hindutva ‘Deeper state’ in Chhattisgarh.
The special issue also has contributions from very different contexts where Christians have traditionally been privileged minorities, namely Goa and Kerala. In both states the Christian minority is demographically significant and has also historically enjoyed social and political influence. In such contexts, Hindu nationalist groups have engaged Christians very differently, and direct physical violence has not been pronounced. Harikrishnan shows how in Kerala, Hindu nationalist formations have tried more subtle spatial strategies designed to take over and Hinduize what used to be shared communal spaces. They have also sought to reach out to and win over the support of the Syrian Christian community, for example by claiming that both Hindus and Christians are targets of Muslim love jihad, thereby appealing to a shared sense of perceived victimhood based on anti-Muslim sentiments – and, not least, to a shared upper-caste identity that cuts across religious divides. In Goa, Nielsen’s study brings out the complexity and regional specificity of a Hindutva strategy that has so far played out largely in the cultural or symbolic domain. Here, Hindu nationalist fringe groups have promoted a more hardline version of Hindutva, while the BJP who governs the state presents a relatively more moderate face, at least for now. One thing that sets Goa apart from most other Indian states is the use of Portuguese colonialism as a dog-whistle for Christianity. As Nielsen points out, the chief minister of Goa has talked of wiping away all remaining signs of the Portuguese; of changing Portuguese-sounding names of places to vernacular ones; of rebuilding Hindu temples destroyed by the Portuguese; and so on. In light of this, it is not far-fetched to think that Catholicism is implicitly included in the category of ‘Portuguese signs’ that should be wiped away from the face of the state – even if this is never spelt out openly.
As Nilsen’s afterword to the collection points out, while the articles shed important new light on the understudied phenomenon of anti-Christian violence, they also more ominously bring out how adroitly Hindu nationalist politics and strategy move across very different social,political, and cultural terrains, adapting its key messages to localized settings without compromising on its long-term strategies for achieving its political goals.
M. Sudhir Selvaraj, University of Bradford
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, University of Oslo