Religious persecution remains a global scourge, and America’s nominal friends are sometimes as bad as its adversaries. Such as India, in which religious minorities suffer greatly under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The country’s underlying intolerant attitudes have been highlighted by recent Hindu nationalist criticism of Vice President JD Vance’s Catholic faith.
When recently speaking to a Turning Point USA audience at the University of Mississippi, Vance answered a question about his wife, Usha, who grew up in a culturally Hindu household. Observed Vance: “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
This comment is unexceptional for couples in mixed religious marriages — “unequally yoked,” as described by Christian scripture (2 Corinthians 6:14). Serious believers, like Vance, understandably wish to share their faith with their life partner. Indeed, such sentiments exist even between Christians — such as marriage between Catholics and Protestants. Ironically, personal tension can be even more intense when the spouses are closer in religious doctrine.
In Vance’s case, CNN quoted one Indian Hindu who complained: “It’s ridiculous and absolutely wrong,” adding: “No one should be forced or pressured into any religion.” However, Vance neither said nor did anything to coerce Usha. Nevertheless, claimed Shubhangi Sharma, an editor at India’s News18: “In a political climate so charged against Indian immigrants, this is not just personal. It’s political. It’s a presidential call to convert.” This also is nonsense. Some virulent racists have criticized his marriage, but they hate Usha’s color more than her faith. The rest of us heard him thoughtfully respond to an audience query about a phenomenon common in America.
Indeed, in a stunning example of unintended irony, Sharma held India up as a paragon of religious tolerance, arguing, “Now imagine if an Indian Hindu leader had said something similar about a Muslim or Christian wife.” Yet India’s Hindu nationalists are among the world’s most intolerant, often becoming brutally violent persecutors. Religious faith involves the most important exercise of conscience for any human being, yet India’s ruling party and the governments, national and states, that it controls are increasingly hostile to any dissenting choices. Hindu nationalists routinely target Muslims, who are tied to Muslim-majority Pakistan, India’s great geopolitical rival, and Christians, who act as reminders of India’s colonial past.
Yet in reporting on Vance’s remarks, CNN dramatically underplayed India’s malignant record: “India’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, although some critics argue that religious freedoms have been eroded under the BJP at the expense of non-Hindu minorities. The issue of changing religion remains deeply controversial, and multiple states have put in place laws restricting religious conversions for all faiths.” This is a bit like describing life in the Jim Crow South as: “America’s Constitution guarantees equal protection, although some critics argue that equal rights have been eroded under resurgent Democratic state governments at the expense of non-white minorities. The issue of integrating the races remains deeply controversial, and multiple states have put in place laws restricting integration of all races.”
Hindu nationalists increasingly use force and violence against non-Hindus. The latest report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom offers depressing detail:
In 2024, religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate as attacks and discrimination against religious minorities continued to rise. Prior to national elections in June, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, propagated hateful rhetoric and disinformation against Muslims and other religious minorities to gather political support. Such rhetoric fueled attacks on religious minorities that continued after the election, including vigilante violence, targeted and arbitrary killings, and demolition of property and places of worship. Authorities continued to exploit antiterror and financing laws, including the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to crack down on civil society organizations and detain members of religious minorities, human rights defenders, and journalists reporting on religious freedom. The government also replaced its criminal code with new legislation, leaving religious minorities susceptible to targeting if it deemed them as “endangering the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India.”
The government routinely misuses the law to penalize Muslims and Christians alike. For instance. New Delhi targets the former by denying citizenship and expropriating houses of worship. According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “[V]arious authorities, including the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), facilitated the expropriation and demolition of places of worship, including the construction of Hindu temples atop razed mosques.” Prime Minister Modi has used such projects to his political advantage.
Christians suffer disproportionately from the criminalization of religious conversion. For instance, added the Commission on International Religious Freedom, “in June and July, police in Uttar Pradesh detained 20 Christians, including four pastors, under accusations of violating the state’s anti-conversion law. In July, the Uttar Pradesh government tabled a bill to strengthen that law, expanding punishment for conversion to life imprisonment, allowing anyone to file a First Instance Report (FIR) against suspected violators, and making religious conversion a nonbailable offense.”
Even before the escalating BJP campaign against religious conversion (away from Hinduism, which accounts for the vast majority of cases), the Alliance Defending Freedom International published a detailed report on anti-conversion laws. These are not just minor “restrictions” on freedom of conscience. They are legal prohibitions intended to prevent disaffected former believers from addressing the transcendent as they understand it.
According to ADF: “Government officials and the police, in line with increasingly nationalist politicians and lawmakers, selectively enforce these laws, effectively banning conversion from the majority religion to a minority religion, in particular Christianity and Islam. … anti-conversion laws violate basic human rights because they have vague and overly broad terms, target minorities, and restrict the fundamentally personal decision to change one’s religion.”
Muslims and Christians alike are vulnerable to mob violence, especially that involving the cattle trade. Detailed the Commission on International Religious Freedom: “Authorities wielded discriminatory state-level anti-conversion laws and cow slaughter laws to target religious minorities.” The most brutal persecutors may be the so-called “cow vigilantes,” who often kill. In their fervor, they sometimes even mistake Hindus for Muslims or Christians. Last year a 19-year-old Hindu student, Aryan Mishra, was chased down and murdered by members of the Cow Protection Association. They thought he was a Muslim. Nor is he the only Hindu victim. According to Al Jazeera:
This is India’s new normal: that the act of killing in itself is not a mistake, killing a Hindu is. Only three days after Mishra was shot dead, a 26-year-old Muslim ragpicker, Sabir Malik, was lynched by a mob on August 27 in Charkhi Dadri, a town in Haryana, about 130km (80 miles) from Faridabad, over suspicions he had consumed beef. Malik was a migrant worker from the eastern state of West Bengal. He lived in Charkhi Dadri with his wife and two-year-old daughter, according to media reports. News reports cite the police as saying that there was a rumour in the area where Malik lived that some migrant workers had consumed beef. A group of men called Malik to a shop on the pretext of selling empty plastic bottles and beat him severely. When bystanders objected to the assault, the attackers took him to another village where he was beaten to death. When asked about Malik’s killing, Haryana’s Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, from the BJP, said: “Who can stop them?” Moreover, in a pattern familiar with such cases, Saini blamed the deceased instead for allegedly violating cow protection laws.
Much blame falls on Modi. He was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a radical Hindu nationalist group. As the leader of Gujarat state, he likely encouraged mob violence that killed 1,200 or more Muslims. When he was first elected prime minister, he was under sanction by Washington and could not legally visit the U.S., a restriction soon lifted for obvious political reasons.
He has done much to turn what once was a largely secular democracy into what author Kapil Komireddi believes “now functions as a de facto Hindu state.” One U.S. organization with which I work promotes religious freedom but will not publicly criticize New Delhi out of fear for its India-based employees. In 2023, the Religious Liberty Commission of Evangelical Fellowship of India cited “an unfortunate increase in divisive rhetoric and inflammatory language. The same was not adequately addressed by official channels and sometimes it seemed to have been condoned in large and sensitive states of the Union. The resulting sense of immunity in sections of society has led to a painfully large number of incidents of violence against the Christian Community, and religious minorities in general.” The BJP’s 2024 election campaign emphasized Hindu nationalism. Although Modi is serving what is expected to be his last term, his successor could be even more extreme and authoritarian.
India is gaining global influence. Its economy is growing fast, and its population has passed that of China. Modi has gained international stature, recently joining Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping for three-way talks in Beijing. However, India is unlikely to become great unless it is also good, especially toward all of its citizens, including those who do not share their rulers’ Hindu faith. And despite the brickbats tossed by Hindu nationalists at Vice President Vance, there is much they could learn from America’s imperfect but nevertheless determined protection of the religious liberties of all.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and author of several books, including Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics and Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
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