By Monitoring Desk
The scenes from this Christmas in India were hard to ignore, and they point to a troubling shift under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Uttar Pradesh, the country’s biggest state, crowds of Hindu activists showed up at churches right as Christmas Eve services got underway. They shouted “Death to Christian missionaries” and blasted Hindu chants to throw everything off. This wasn’t just some random flare-up; it fit into a larger wave of trouble for Christians, who make up only a sliver of the population.
A Wall Street Journal article laid out the details, describing how violence against religious minorities has shot up since Modi became prime minister in 2014. The groups behind much of it are tied to his Bharatiya Janata Party, which pushes a Hindu-first agenda. Muslims, at 14 percent of Indians, have taken the worst of the beatings, along with barriers to jobs, schools, homes, and even voting or running shops in areas dominated by Hindus. Many end up stuck in isolated neighborhoods.
But Christians, just 2.3 percent and often from the poorest groups, find themselves in the line of fire too. The Journal pointed out that extreme Hindus fixate on Christianity as some kind of threat. As many as 12 states have rules against switching religions through “force, fraud, or allurement,” and “allurement” can mean just about any push to join the faith. Assaults on Christians usually get spun as stopping these supposed conversions.
Christmas has been an official day off in India since the country broke free in 1947, right alongside Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh festivals. But some hard-liners, like Yogi Adityanath, the BJP chief minister in Uttar Pradesh, don’t think it should be. His administration told schools to stay open that day, stripping away the holiday for kids and teachers. In his state, those mobs outside churches made their point loud and clear. Over the last few weeks, word spread fast about a BJP figure in Madhya Pradesh who burst into a church, broke up a Christmas meal, and went after a young blind woman, claiming she was helping Hindus switch to Christianity. In Chhattisgarh’s capital, Raipur, a bunch of Hindu nationalists wrecked Christmas setups at a shopping center, smashing Santa Claus statues with metal bars. Things like this happened in just about every state run by the BJP.
Citizens for Justice and Peace, a group that tracks religious clashes in India, told the Journal that this Christmas turned into “a national flashpoint for majoritarian assertion.” They said the shopping center raid wasn’t just spur-of-the-moment anger. It was “symbolic violence—targeting Christmas imagery in a public commercial space to send a message: Christian visibility itself is unacceptable.” The United Christian Forum, which brings together Christian groups, shared figures with the Journal showing attacks on Christians climbed from 139 in 2014 to 834 in 2024. By November 2025, they had counted 706 cases.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its 2025 report, urged the Trump team to call India a “country of particular concern” because it lets “egregious religious freedom violations” slide without any real pushback or punishment. The report, as the Journal mentioned, brought up cases that went nowhere, like a crowd of more than 200 Hindus going after 18 Christian families in Chhattisgarh in August 2024, with police doing nothing to step in. Last December, eight village councils there put out a statement saying Christians had to give up their beliefs or get out. Modi did make a point of going to Mass at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption in New Delhi this Christmas. He called it a reflection of “the timeless message of love, peace and compassion,” and hoped “the spirit of Christmas” would bring “harmony and goodwill in our society.” For Christians across India and plenty of others who value fairness, those lines came off as empty, especially with Hindu hard-liners causing chaos in spots
India wrote secularism into its constitution back in 1950, but it’s always been shaky at best—more of a thin layer put on by the educated leaders who led the fight against British rule, over a society prone to dividing along faith lines. Still, before Modi, it meant something real. Governments, for the most part, stepped in to check the roughest edges of majority bullying and the meanest displays of Hindu pride.
With Modi in charge, though, that effort has dropped away. He puts out nice words after his church visit, but he hasn’t spoken out against the people attacking Christians. Some who back him say it’s impossible for one man to handle every troublemaker in such a huge place. Fair enough, but why not at least call out what they’re doing? Why not say flat out that this kind of behavior has no place in a decent country?
The Journal wraps up by suggesting we already know why. Modi’s hold on power depends on stirring up exactly this sort of division. Speaking against it would undercut his whole approach. If India keeps heading this way, it risks losing what little remains of its promise as a place where everyone can belong.
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