India’s Growing Anti-Conversion Laws: Perspectives from an Indian Christian

War on Christianity in India

By Lyndsey Koh

India (MNN) — It has been just over a month since Uttarakhand became the seventh state in India to pass an anti-conversion bill. The growing popularity of anti-conversion laws and charges in India don’t bode well for impoverished communities and religious minorities.

Abhijit Nayak, a ministry partner with Voice of the Martyrs Canada, shares, “This is basically another political and pro-Hindu fundamentalist technique to restrict Christian ministries or churches not to have access to people who would like to change their religion.

“For example, if I am a seeker or if I am seeking to change my religion from Hindu to Christianity and I am a poor person…I don’t want to go to a court of law and file an affidavit to change my religion because I don’t have money or I don’t know the legal processes to go to the magistrate or go to a court of law to change my religion.”

Nayak says sometimes an evangelist or pastor is willing to help those who would like to become Christians with the legal process, “But they are also afraid that they will be targeted once they go to court of law with [the new Christian] and they will be blamed for forcing [them] or luring [them] to become a Christian. So this has a very negative impact on Christian missions and Christian ministries.”

According to Nayak, the difficulty doesn’t lie in Indian Christians sharing their faith with others. Opposition starts to crop up when someone who is not a Christian decides to change their religion to Christianity.

(Photo courtesy of Voice of the Martyrs Canada)

“Let’s say I want to share my faith with my Hindu neighbor next door, it’s not a problem. Sharing is not a problem. But…it comes to my Hindu neighbor when he or she decides to become a Christian, go to a church, and take baptism.”

Because of this, Christian ministries often must have access to a lawyer or have solid legal knowledge to assist new Christians with the affidavit submissions for a formal religion change.

“That becomes very difficult for the Christian ministries because sometimes Christian ministries are not willing to be in the public domain. They don’t want people to identify them being engaged in these kinds of activities. That is number one,” explains Nayak.

“And number two, the Christian ministry may face opposition in the village. If one family is coming to a Christian faith and there are 50 more families,…they may accuse the Christian mission [of] converting and creating disturbances in the community.”

Last year, Compassion International, a very large charity working in India for nearly 50 years, was forced to completely close its operations because their funding was primarily coming from outside the country. CI said 150,000 children will be worse of because they have to withdraw.

A possible contributing factor, Abhijit once told me, is that Compassion was run by non-Indians.

The changing culture in India can paint a grim picture for Christian ministry, but Nayak says it is evident that God is still moving amidst the difficulty.

“I am from Orissa (Odisha), and Orissa state was the first state in India to pass the anti-conversion law in the 1970s. So this has a huge impact but in Orissa, Christianity is growing. So in spite of the anti-conversion bill and political problems, God is at work…mainly through grassroots church planters, evangelists, and frontline Christian workers.”

Your prayers today are helping fuel missions in India through our Christian brothers and sisters there.

“We need a lot of prayers for the strength and for the knowledge and wisdom for the grassroots churches and frontline mission workers who are in the front, preaching, teaching, doing evangelism, and church planting.”

Voice of the Martyrs Canada supports Christian ministry partners like Nayak in India spreading the Good News of Jesus. Click here to learn more about Voice of the Martyrs Canada’s ministry and how you can come alongside them!

Abhijit Nayak is VP of STEP Ministries in Orissa (Odisha) which teaches single women how to sew and run a business. They also are running a school for children who can't afford to attend normal schools. Abhijit and his family are both close friends and neighbours.

A Lack of Compassion in India as it Clamps Down on Christians

By: Eric Metaxas

Why would India block foreign donations to help poor children? The answer is Hindutva.

On January 13th, Compassion International told the sponsors of 130,000 Indian children that, barring an unlikely turn of events, it would cease operations in India in mid-March.

The announcement came a year after the Indian government told the organization that “it could no longer receive funding from outside the subcontinent.”

While the news dismayed Compassion’s donors, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to those familiar with the deteriorating state of religious freedom in India.

Compassion’s announcement comes shortly after Open Doors International released its “World Watchlist,” which ranked the worst countries in which to be a Christian.

North Korea, of course, ranked first again. The next twelve countries are either overwhelmingly Muslim or, like Nigeria, are suffering from an Islamist insurgency—in this case, Boko Haram—that targets Christians.

Then at #15, just behind Saudi Arabia, is India. Why? India is neither Islamic nor a repressive dictatorship like North Korea or China.

David Curry, the CEO of Open Doors, told Morgan Lee and Mark Galli of Christianity Today that the situation in India reflects the rise of what he calls “ethnic nationalism,” in which what it means to be an Indian is defined in religious—in this case, Hindu—terms. An Indian who is a Christian or, for that matter, a Muslim, is regarded as less than truly Indian, because Hinduism is at the heart of what it means to be an Indian.

This ideology goes by the name “Hindutva,” which literally means “Hinduness.” It’s an ideology that belies the western image of India as a land of Gandhi, gurus, and nonviolence. There’s nothing peaceful or tolerant about Hindutva. On the contrary, the man who assassinated Gandhi was an adherent of Hindutva and felt that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindu community.

The current ruling party in India, the BJP, is ideologically committed to the idea of Hindutva. As Vice News put it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in addition to being implicated in the 2002 massacre of 2,000 Muslims while governor of Gujarat, has also been “accused of promoting India's majority religion of Hinduism to the detriment of Christianity, Islam, and other faiths.”

Conversion to Christianity banned

The ruling party’s commitment to Hindu supremacy is perhaps best reflected in the various laws prohibiting religion conversion. Six Indian states have enacted laws in the past several years that effectively ban conversions from Hinduism to Christianity or to Islam.

This is the political and cultural context in which Compassion’s decision must be seen. The Indian government knows that the money coming from outside of India is highly unlikely to be replaced by donations from within India.

It also knows that it can use all the help it can get: 44% of Indian children under five are underweight and 72% of its infants suffer from anemia.

And more than 50% of children are sexually abused!

So why block Compassion International? Because nationalism in the form of Hindutva trumps helping malnourished children.

Of course. Children have no voice! They don't vote! But it seems to always be the children who suffer from man's evil and folly.

What can we do about it? The good news is that, unlike North Korea or Somalia, we do have some political leverage. India wants to increase its annual trade with the USA five-fold “over the near term.” Christians should let the Trump administration know that such increases must be accompanied by a greater respect for religious freedom on the subcontinent.

And of course we should pray. Curry told Christianity Today that he would feel “much better” if he felt that the “American church” was “at least praying” for persecuted believers.

At least, indeed.

Indian Government Forcing Children's Aide NGO Out

India becoming more and more hostile to Christians

Compassion Has 'Very Little Hope' for India,

Sets Deadline to Shut Down Sponsorships

About 145,000 children have already lost its assistance

with food, education, and health care

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra 

Compassion Has 'Very Little Hope' for India, Sets Deadline to Shut Down Sponsorships Compassion International

“We want to be honest with you, there is very little hope.”

So wrote Compassion International to its 130,000 sponsors of Indian children this past Friday.

One week after sharing the good news of four nations no longer needing child sponsors due to the passion of millennials, the ministry shared the bad news of another nation that will probably not need child sponsors due to government interference.

A little more than a year after the Indian government told Compassion that it could no longer receive funding from outside the subcontinent, the humanitarian organization will likely be closing its last operations there.

“Since we can no longer distribute funds to our field offices, we have just had to notify our India country staff that we must formally close our field offices in India by March 15,” Compassion told sponsors by email. “Should nothing change, that means an end to our sponsorship program in India in the next 60 days.”

Compassion, which has been working in India for more than 48 years, said it has tried everything in the last 10 months to stay afloat. The email listed its efforts, which include:

Seeking the advice of legal experts in both the US and India

Leveraging influential relationships, including US representatives and senators, the former US Secretary of State, the former and current ambassadors to India and the White House Office of Faith-based Affairs, as well as members of Parliament in the United Kingdom

Asking Compassion sponsors to pray and to write Congress (more than 35,000 letters were sent)

Testifying in front of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee

Leveraging personal relationships within the US and India

Compassion’s 580 Indian-staffed development centers care for more than 145,000 children. That’s only about 8 percent of the 1.9 million children assisted by Compassion worldwide, but also more than any other of the 25 countries where it works.

The Indian government objects to Compassion’s Christianity, according to the ministry’s testimony to US lawmakers. Hindu nationalists have put increasing pressure on Christians in India since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. The subcontinent has been steadily moving up Open Doors’ list of places where it’s hardest to be a Christian, from No. 28 in 2014 to No. 15 this year, the highest rank it has ever held.

Hostile acts against Christians

“An average of 40 incidents were reported per month, including pastors beaten, churches burned and Christians harassed,” stated Open Doors. “Of the 64 million Christians in India, approximately 39 million experience direct persecution.”

There doesn’t appear to be a government plan to pick up Compassion’s care for Indian children. More than 1 in 3 of India’s 1.2 billion people are children, yet India spends less on health and education than comparable emerging economies.

Of India’s roughly 472 million children, 33 million are child laborers, 80 million are out of school, and 97 million are undernourished, according to a recent petition asking Modi’s administration to spend more on children.

But while the government may not have a plan in place, that doesn’t mean the children will be abandoned entirely, said Compassion spokesperson Becca Bishop.

“[The children] may have lost Compassion’s support, but they haven’t lost the support of their local church,” she said. “Those churches, if they have the funds, may still be able to carry out a lot of the services.”

World Vision, which sponsors more than 245,000 children in India (about 6 percent of its global total), also partners with local churches, though not exclusively, spokesperson Amy Parodi told CT. So far, World Vision isn’t having problems getting foreign funding into the country, she said.

CT covered Compassion’s cash crunch in December, including how the Indian government squeezed off its foreign funding. With no way to pay for materials or staff, the organization began paring down programs last summer.

“Our staff in the India field offices have stretched every last penny beyond what we thought possible to extend the programs for our children, while we in parallel explored alternative delivery methods to provide funds, yet a solution has not been discovered within the needed timeframe,” stated Compassion’s email to donors.

The news comes on the heels of Compassion’s largest surge of sponsorships, when students attending the 2017 Passion Conference eliminated the list of children waiting for sponsors in four countries.