India With the BJP having come to power at the centre, and having emerged as a formidable force all over North India, Christians are now fast joining Muslims and Dalits as one of the principal victims of Hindutva terror. Recent months have witnessed a sharp escalation of attacks on Christian priests and nuns, and the destruction of churches, particularly in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. More recently, in Orissa, an Australian missionary and his two sons were set ablaze by a mob reportedly shouting "Bajrang Dal Zindabad".
Christians account for a little less than 3 percent of India's population, but their contribution to the development of the country, in the field of social service, education and health care, has been quite out of proportion to their numbers. Traditionally, Indian Christians have kept a low profile, preferring constructive social engagement to agitational politics. Their relations with other religious communities too have, by and large, been peaceful and relatively free of controversy.
What, then, accounts for the growing Hindutva fury against Christians? While it is true that Hindu communalists have always been stiffly opposed to Christians, preferring to see them as 'anti-nationals' and agents of Western powers, that does not explain the rapid spread of anti-Christian violence from the mid-90s onwards. There are many factors at work, one of the most significant being the changing orientation of the Church in India in recent years, due to which vested interests are feeling increasingly threatened.
Barring the Syrian Christians of Kerala, who trace their conversion to the first century AD and to St Thomas, one of the apostles of Jesus, almost all of India's Christians owe their conversion to European missionaries—first, the Portuguese and the Dutch and then the English—who arrived in India in the wake of the establishment of European colonial rule in the region. Till 1947, the church in India was modelled completely on the European pattern, and missionaries saw the dissemination of European culture as inseparable from their task of spreading the Christian gospel.