Indian Christians Facing Rising Persecution Look To America For Help

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Amit recounted a familiar story for Christians in his region of India: pastors jailed; parishioners afraid to worship in public.

The situation, Amit said, is getting worse “day by day.”

Almost two millennia after St. Thomas the Apostle brought Christianity to the subcontinent, believers in northern India bear witness to a rise in persecution. Laws on religious conversion and physical attacks, including during the 2025 Christmas season, have driven fear into sanctuaries of love and faith.

Deepak, another Christian in northern India, said “there’s a lot of intimidation and harassment going on.”

He said Hindu radicals regularly “attack or disrupt [Christian] gatherings or go to mob violence.”

As a condition of speaking with The Epoch Times, both Amit, who has worked in Uttarakhand, and Deepak, who is based in Delhi, requested that their names and the details of their activities be anonymized out of fear of reprisal.

Statistics from the United Christian Forum, published on local website, The Wire, reflect an increase in violence against Christians in India in recent years. They documented 734 attacks targeting Christians in 2023. In 2024, that figure climbed to 834.

Genocide Watch, the Voice of the Martyrs, and other organizations have also chronicled anti-Christian trends in the country, in line with a similar pattern of growing violence against Muslims and other non-Hindu Indians.

Amit, Deepak, and others who spoke to The Epoch Times linked what is happening to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political party that has ruled India since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They decried the influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a street-level Hindu nationalist group associated with the BJP.

Much of the organized, sometimes violent opposition to Christianity is concentrated in northern India, a BJP stronghold.

Nigel Barrett of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India, the episcopal conference for India’s Latin Catholic bishops, told The Epoch Times in an email that “the persecution is not confined to northern India,” citing attacks in the western state of Rajasthan after it passed a conversion law, in the southern state of Karnataka, and elsewhere across the country.

Henry Hiinii, another Indian Christian in Delhi, told The Epoch Times that “the governments are not doing much to help the Christian community” as it comes under attack.

The BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

Some Indian Christians and close observers hope President Donald Trump—the man who has pledged to save Christians worldwide—will respond.

Commissioner Stephen Schneck of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom told The Epoch Times that the U.S. government should “issue targeted sanctions against Indian government officials and entities who participate in or tolerate egregious religious persecution of Christians, Muslims, and others.”

Escalating Hostility

Scott Bledsoe, who served as a pastor for 28 years, has visited India twice, cultivating relationships with Christians there. He said his latest visa to visit this past summer was denied.

Bledsoe told The Epoch Times he started to hear about anti-Christian persecution “in the last 10 years,” describing local mob violence against groups attempting to build churches.

Over the same period, major Christian nonprofits operating in the country faced setbacks and scrutiny, often tied to their receipt of money from abroad, including from the United States.

In 2017, Compassion International, a humanitarian organization headquartered in Colorado Springs, said it left India under pressure from the government.

The Missionaries of Charity, the group founded by Mother Teresa, sustained a serious blow in 2021, when it was barred from receiving foreign funding.

Deepak said these incidents are a bad sign for the homegrown Christian missionaries planting and nurturing small churches, including in unfriendly parts of the country.

“If you can go after them, then smaller organizations don’t have any chance,” he said.

In recent years, states across India have passed laws against forced conversion and numerous Christians, accused of coercing people into accepting their faith, have been jailed under the statutes.

Some Christians believe the opposition even extends to a kind of low-level surveillance enforced by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and similar groups. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh alone is estimated to have 4 million members nationwide.

“There are spies and people that are always watching what you’re doing,” Deepak said.

He said some believers worry that singing a religious song in their own home could draw scrutiny from neighbors, leading to arrests and prosecution under forced conversion laws.

Deepak recounted a visit to a church where that fear meant services were kept very quiet.

“I did a small devotion with them from the Bible and how the church was persecuted,” he said.

A wave of attacks on Christmas celebrations in late 2025, linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and similar groups, renewed concerns about the safety and freedom of Christians in India.

“Christians are actually afraid to celebrate Christmas openly now,” Deepak said.

Amit said Christmas services were restricted in many parts of northern India.

Schneck described “a sharp increase in targeted attacks against religious minorities” over Christmas 2025.

“Similar attacks have continued into the new year,” he said.

Amid rising tensions late last year, Modi attended a Christmas service at New Delhi’s Cathedral Church of the Redemption.

The Indian Christians who spoke with The Epoch Times, however, were skeptical of the sincerity of that gesture, attributing it to concerns over votes.

“It is disturbing to see limited official condemnation from the political authorities,” Barrett said.

However, a recent judicial decision on a conversion law drew praise from them.

In December 2025, judges on the Allahabad High Court ruled that merely preaching Christianity and distributing Bibles does not run afoul of a forced conversion statute in Uttar Pradesh, a heavily Hindu state in northern India.

Hiinii described the ruling as “good news” but said many people do not yet know about it.

American Response

The plight of Indian Christians has started to attract the attention of American political leaders.

In a Dec. 19, 2025, op-ed in The Hill, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom leaders asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern, a designation outlined in the International Religious Freedom Act. They cited its controversial conversion laws and the resultant mob violence.

A 2023 State Department report on religious freedom in India noted Christians’ concerns about those laws and their reports of harassment.

That same year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held a forum on religious freedom in India.

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