{"id":1140681,"date":"2026-01-03T18:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.app.com.pk\/?p=1140681"},"modified":"2026-01-03T18:00:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T13:00:43","slug":"india-witnesses-breathtaking-rise-in-violence-against-minorities-since-modi-in-power-says-wsj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/2026\/01\/03\/india-witnesses-breathtaking-rise-in-violence-against-minorities-since-modi-in-power-says-wsj\/","title":{"rendered":"India witnesses breathtaking rise in violence against minorities since Modi in power, says WSJ"},"content":{"rendered":"
ISLAMABAD, Jan 3 (APP):Since Narendra Modi became India\u2019s prime minister in 2014, the country has seen a breathtaking rise in violence against religious minorities by groups aligned with his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party.<\/div>\n
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India\u2019s Muslims, who are 14% of the population, have borne the brunt of the most brutal physical attacks, said an article published in Wall Street Journal.<\/div>\n
They face active discrimination in employment, education and housing, and are often prevented from voting and pursuing businesses in Hindu-majority areas. They have been ghettoized. But as several ugly events in recent weeks have shown, Christians\u2014a mere 2.3% of Indians, many of whom belong to the poorest sections of society\u2014are also subjected to widespread hatred and thuggery.<\/div>\n
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Although Hindus are 80% of India\u2019s population, radical Hindus are obsessed with the imagined dangers of Christianity. As many as 12 states have laws prohibiting religious conversion by \u201cforce, fraud, or allurement\u201d\u2014the last term often defined as any form of evangelical persuasion. Attacks on Christians are invariably justified as measures to stop conversions.<\/div>\n
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Christmas has been a public holiday in India since independence, along with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh holidays. Radical Hindu ideologues\u2014including Yogi Adityanath, BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India\u2019s most populous state\u2014believe it shouldn\u2019t be.<\/div>\n
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His government even ordered schools open on Christmas. Mobs of Hindus assembled outside churches in his state\u2014at precisely the time of Christmas Eve services\u2014and chanted \u201cDeath to Christian missionaries\u201d while also screaming Hindu prayers aloud.<\/div>\n
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In recent days, almost every Indian with a cellphone has seen clips of a BJP leader in the state of Madhya Pradesh barge into a church, disrupt a Christmas feast, and assault a young blind woman, accusing her of abetting the conversion of Hindus to Christianity.<\/div>\n
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In Raipur, a city in the state of Chhattisgarh, Hindu chauvinists trashed Christmas displays at a mall, decapitating images of Santa Claus with iron rods. Incidents of this kind occurred in almost every Indian state governed by the BJP. Citizens for Justice and Peace, an Indian human-rights group, keeps tabs on religious violence in the country, and says that this Christmas became \u201ca national flashpoint for majoritarian assertion.\u201d The attack on the mall, it says, was \u201cnot a spontaneous outburst. It was symbolic violence\u2014targeting Christmas imagery in a public commercial space to send a message: Christian visibility itself is unacceptable.\u201d According to the United Christian Forum, a coalition of Indian Christian organizations, anti-Christian attacks rose from 139 in 2014 to 834 in 2024. In 2025, as of November therewere 706 recorded incidents. In its annual report for 2025, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the Trump administration designate India a \u201ccountry of particular concern\u201d for allowing \u201cegregious religious freedom violations\u201d to go unchecked and unpunished. It cited examples of attacks that have occurred with impunity. In August 2024, \u201ca Hindu mob of over 200 people attacked 18 Christian families in Chhattisgarh as police did not intervene.\u201d Last December eight village councils in that state passed a joint resolution requiring Christians to renounce their religion or leave. This Christmas, Mr. Modi made a show of attending Mass at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption in New Delhi. \u201cThe service reflected the timeless message of love, peace and compassion,\u201d he said. \u201cMay the spirit of Christmas inspire harmony and goodwill in our society.\u201d To Indian Christians, and to their many secular compatriots, those words were risible, as packs of Hindu activists ran riot against Christians in places far removed from New Delhi\u2014places without the veneer of cosmopolitanism to which the Indian capital can only barely lay claim. India\u2019s secularism\u2014enshrined in its constitution in 1950\u2014has been flawed even in the best of times. It has always been skin-deep, grafted onto an instinctively sectarian population by the Western-educated elites who shepherded the country to independence from Britain. But it was more than a hollow shibboleth in the years before Mr. Modi came to power. With unfortunate exceptions, governments made sincere efforts to curb the worst majoritarian excesses and ugliest assertions of Hindu chauvinism.<\/div>\n
But under Modi, all pretense at secularism has ceased. For all his soothing bromides after Mass, the prime minister hasn\u2019t said a word against the Hindu radicals who attacked Christians. Some of his defenders argue he can\u2019t control every thug in a vast country. But what stops him from condemning their actions, from saying that their violence is unacceptable in a civilized country.<\/div>\n
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ISLAMABAD, Jan 3 (APP):Since Narendra Modi became India\u2019s prime minister in 2014, the country has seen a breathtaking rise in violence against religious minorities by groups aligned with his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party. India\u2019s Muslims, who are 14% of the population, have borne the brunt of the most brutal physical attacks, said an article published…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1140682,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","_speechable_audio":"","_speechable_word_timings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1099,1100,1101,1102],"post_template":[],"top_category":[],"class_list":["post-1140681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-against-minorities","tag-india","tag-violence","tag-wall-street-journal","pmpro-has-access"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1140681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1140682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1140681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1140681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1140681"},{"taxonomy":"post_template","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_template?post=1140681"},{"taxonomy":"top_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.app.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/top_category?post=1140681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}