— The Front Lines: South Asia
India
The largest democracy is silencing Christians.
VPP is not staying silent.
India is home to over 28 million Christians — and a government whose ruling party has systematically dismantled their legal protections, defunded their institutions, and looked the other way while Hindu nationalist mobs burn churches, rape women, and murder pastors. In Manipur alone, more than 258 Christians have been killed and 60,000 displaced since May 2023. Over 20,000 Christian organizations have been defunded since 2014. A priest faces three years in prison for preaching the Gospel. VPP is on the ground — documenting, reporting, and demanding that the world pay attention.
258+
Christians killed in Manipur since May 2023
60,000
Christians displaced in Manipur
20,000+
Christian organizations defunded since 2014
13
Indian states with anti-conversion laws criminalizing Christian witness
Christianity has been part of India for two thousand years. The BJP has spent the last decade trying to erase it.
Christianity arrived in India with the Apostle Thomas in the first century. For two millennia, Christian communities — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and indigenous — have built schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social institutions that serve Indians of every religion and caste. In a country where the state has often failed its most vulnerable citizens, Christian institutions have filled the gap — educating the Dalit untouchables, caring for the sick, and advocating for those at the bottom of a caste hierarchy that has crushed human dignity for three thousand years.
The Dalit Christians
Dalit Christians — converts from Hinduism's lowest caste — face a unique form of double persecution. They are discriminated against by the Hindu caste system for being Dalit, and also discriminated against by the Indian state for being Christian. India's constitution reserves affirmative action benefits for Dalit Hindus, Dalit Sikhs, and Dalit Buddhists — but explicitly excludes Dalit Christians, a policy the Supreme Court has upheld as recently as 2026. In a single ruling, India's highest court told its most vulnerable citizens that their conversion to Christianity cost them their constitutional protections.
The Northeast's Christian communities
In India's northeastern states — Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya — Christianity is not a minority faith. It is the majority faith, brought by American Baptist missionaries in the nineteenth century and embraced by tribal communities who found in the Gospel a dignity their own society had denied them. The Kuki-Zo and Naga peoples of Manipur are overwhelmingly Christian. They are also, increasingly, targets.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): The RSS is the paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization that serves as the ideological parent of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Founded in the 1920s with explicit admiration for European fascism, the RSS has spent a century organizing India's Hindu majority around an ideology that treats Christians, Muslims, and other minorities as foreign presences to be assimilated or expelled. When the BJP came to power in 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that ideology became national policy.
Christianity arrived in India with the Apostle Thomas in the first century. The BJP has spent a decade trying to treat it as a foreign import. The Christians of India are not foreign. They are Indian. And they are suffering.