Interviews with Dr. Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, Director of Global Strategy and Research for Global Christian Relief.
RBM is one of the world’s experts at reading the world through the lens of Christian persecution trends. His book, Faith that Endures: The Essential Guide to the Persecuted Church was the first comprehensive text on how to understand, support, and learn from the persecuted church in the world today. He is pioneering high level courses that strengthen believers under pressure and is creating through GCR new research instruments that uniquely capture the dynamics of religious persecution around the world today. This includes the recently launched Violent Incidents Database.
We spoke to him after the recent elections in the world’s largest nation… India!
What is the significance of the election results from India this month?
The Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will form a third consecutive government, which is historic. However, more significantly, they no longer form a majority government on their own. They must enter into a coalition with more regional parties for the first time under Modi’s tenure. That changes a lot.
Was this a surprise?
It came as a seismic shock. Narendra Modi had campaigned on increasing the BJP members of the national parliament from 303 to 400 with his slogan, Abki Baar 400 Paar, meaning “this time surpassing 400.” They were super confident, if not of getting four hundred, which was frankly a bit unrealistic, but definitely around 350 or 370. And even the exit polls confirmed a landslide. Then to their shock, the BJP garnered only 240 seats, down from sixty-three from the previous election. A government must command at least 272 seats the parliament to form a government, so they will be reliant as never before on other political parties. Also, the opposition coalition, with Congress as the main party, garnered 233 seats, way over what was predicted too.
Is this a huge blow for Modi?
His aura of invincibility is gone within a stroke. He had a huge personality cult. And it came from success. The BJP before him always had to find coalition partners to govern because the appeal of hard Hindutva was too limited, but Modi added populism to the ideology. With his mesmeric communication skills, he convinced many of the absolute poor and lower caste millions to vote for him, thus giving the BJP absolute majorities in the last two elections. It is a fact that most Hindus in India are not fans of a Hindu supremacy narrative, as the ideology is very Brahminical, meaning high caste. So, it takes something special for groups of people who are not included in this communal and sectarian vision for India to back it. Modi was the alchemist that found this extra appeal. Part of it was his personality. Part of it was his promise to prosper India for all. And part was preying on fears of Muslim domination and attack. For the first time in ten years, he has lost his touch. The poor have taken their revenge on him. Modi will never have the same aura again. In fact, the knives will be out for him in his own party.
How could they misread so badly?
There is a word you will hear a lot about India under the BJP: corporatization. Essentially it means that much of the institutions of the country have been sold off to business elites, often the buddies of Modi from Gujarat. The country is in thrall to the corporates, goes the argument, and that means only the rich are getting richer. Take the media, for example. Two billionaire friends of Modi control 82% of all Indian media – never in the history of the world have two people controlled what over 1.4 billion people see and read. And this new media is set up to toady to the BJP and to Modi himself. So, no wonder they missed the story – they were too busy following the party line that the BJP were heading for a landslide. That made the shock all the more brutal, but that is what you get when you create a corporatized institution – it cannot tell you the truth anymore because it has learned to stick to safe, ideological shibboleths.
So what happened? Why did the BJP lose so much ground?
Two major factors reared their heads. One was that the poor decided that the BJP were not running India any more in their interests. There are three hundred million Dalits in India, those who fall below the caste system, and a further three hundred Other Backward Castes, or low caste. Unemployment has been super high among those groups. They see India booming, but its not booming for them. They no longer voted BJP in big numbers, especially in the Hindu nationalist heartland of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. The other was that the opposition Congress party in particular ran a warning narrative, that the BJP were gunning for the pluralistic character of the Constitution and would attempt to change it in order to declare India a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation. At the moment the Constitution binds the State to be neutral between India’s various religions, a healthy secularism that has been under attack. This also gained some traction even though the BJP never said in as many words that they were out to alter the Constitution, and the skullduggery of the BJP rebounded on them when they concocted bogus reasons to freeze the bank accounts of Congress just prior to the election campaign.
Has India changed that much since Modi took power in 2014?
Modi is an unabashed Hindu nationalist, and even level-headed Christian leaders think that he has created a new ruling class, even a new India. As one of them said as recently as March, “It is no longer easy to affirm that I am a Christian and I am an Indian.” Nationalism has come to the fore so that the distinction between Hindu-ness and Indianness has been severely eroded. So the considerable Muslim and Christian minorities have felt culturally marginalized like never before. On the ground, its worse, and there is no doubt that BJP rule unleashed a hard edge of unaccountable violence against religious minorities. As one Christian leader put it last year, “The BJP have normalized hated.” The Evangelical Fellowship of India tracked violent incidents against pastors and churches, and last year recorded their highest ever count, of 601 incidents. It’s a mark of how much India has changed that I cannot quote the persons who spoke out about this, as they may be endangered by speaking out about this trend. Prior to 2014, this was not an issue.
When it comes to persecution, how is the Indian church persecuted in particular?
As well as the cultural marginalisation that has taken place, there are two main tactics used that really stand out. First, the BJP have deliberately starved the churches of their foreign funding on a vast scale. The mechanism the government began using was the suspension or cancellation of licences under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) which permits non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to receive funds from abroad. In the past nine years more than 16,000 NGOs have had their FCRA registration cancelled due to “violations” according to The Hindu newspaper, and this has forced major Christian charities like World Vision and Compassion International to stop most of their activities. This has seriously compromised the ability of the churches to help the poor and vulnerable in India. The second tactic is to smear the whole concept of mission and concoct criminal charges against prominent Christians. These are old lies. It is claimed that Christians only convert others by unethical means, for example by offering food or assistance in exchange for a conversion decision. Or the lies take a bald and bizarre turn too, that Christians are agents of Western powers seeking to take over India. The criminal lies levelled against pastors usually focus on fraud. They need not be proven, and indeed rarely are, but they smear reputations, and spread disunity, and on occasions, stop ministries. It has been quite tough. Sure, India is a big place, and persecution is patchy when it comes to violence. But when the violence erupts, it is terrible. Last year, we saw a BJP inspired plan to take over lands from a Christian tribe, the Kuki, in the NE State of Manipur. Coordinated violence in two days in the capital, Imphal, saw hundreds killed, dozens of churches burned, and 60,000 Kuki Christians permanently displaced. Most sickening was to see police turn up to protect a church from an organized mob only to stand down after receiving a phone call from the BJP authorities who are in charge in the state. There will be another Manipur for sure in the next few years.
Will persecution reduce as a result of this election result?
I think we can say that the agenda to alter the Constitution is stopped for now, and the formally plural character of India as a nation will remain intact. A lot will depend on the BJP’s electoral partners, two of whom come from regions where there are large Christian and Muslim minorities, and they have little love for the Hindutva ideology. Many Christian leaders are breathing a huge sigh of relief. However, there are two responses I suspect we will see that will make things harder.
First of all, the BJP will continue with stealthy institutional capture of the key institutions of society – education, the judiciary, the media. Indeed, they might even redouble their efforts here. The past ten years have seen them hollowing out these areas and compromising their power to hold the government accountable. For example, who is going to reinstate 16,000 FCRA’s?
Secondly, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which translates to National Volunteer Association, will respond with a “bottom layer blitz.” The RSS is one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations and is the guiding force behind the Hindutva ideology. They have an estimated three million members in 60,000 daily meetings. They have been humiliated by this result. They should have known the Dalits particularly were losing their faith in the BJP, and they didn’t. Now they will get back to those places where the BJP did not do well, and work at the village level to bolster support for the hard Hindutva messaging they stand for. It’s a hugely efficient organisation. When the BJP unexpectedly lost the national election in 2003, they fanned out into the villages and replaced the Christian churches as the primary providers of education in the country. This was crucial to Modi’s success in 2014, and indeed he is an RSS member since he was eight years old. We can expect a response on focusing on the community level now. I was recently in Varanasi and heard of them sending out teams into the countryside to teach Hindus how to make police complaints about the numbers of new Christians in the villages. The ideology of Hindutva is in their hands, not Modi’s, who may be more egotist than ideologue.
Is the Christian church ready for what lies ahead?
India is full of capable Christian leaders, but they would all admit that (a) they have been outclassed, out-organized, and out-thought by the Hindu nationalists so far and (b) they are not co-ordinated enough in their response to be effective as yet. This result will give them hope, but most of the church still needs to wake up to what is going on. I heard a great Indian church leader thunder in Delhi recently, “We need to create communities of faith that are uncomfortable with the situation in India; the best place to go to ignore this is the church, where people hear the comfortable stuff – we just refuse to accept our nation has changed, and not in a good way.” I talked to Catholic priests as far away from Delhi as you can get, and they were puce with embarrassment at the Catholic Archbishop of Delhi’s unseemly grovelling at Modi when the Prime Minister deigned to attend a Christmas service. Also, they will need to rehabilitate the connection between Christianity and democracy as the fight for the soul of India going forward. And they will need to get smarter tactically.
India is a growing church right, and Hindus are becoming Christians because they want the dignity Christianity provides?
The Indian church is one of the great wonders of the Christian world right now. I heard a top leader of a Christian College (again, cannot give the name, sorry) sum it up in this amazing way: “We took 200 years to get to 2.3 percent, and only twenty to get to seven percent.” That is referring to the fact that there has been a great revival in India in the past twenty years, and its mostly among Hindus. Fact is, 7% is enormous, and right now we do not have statistical back up for such statements but remember that would put the Christian church in India at over one hundred million. Most even estimate around seventy million in the meantime, but it is more accepted that about thirty million Hindus have become Christ-followers in the last twenty years. They are called Christ-followers because they do not register as Christians. Nor are they baptised Christians. In many cases this is because they are low caste and do not want to forfeit their “reservation” status. But there is another reason too, as put by a famous Catholic priest, who said, “I have come to believe that Christians have left Jesus spiritually behind.” These new believers have encountered Jesus as a healer first and foremost and they see no purpose in membership of a church if they can receive all of Jesus as they are. They also enjoy the equality that Christianity offers, in contrast to Hinduism where untouchable castes are not even allowed to approach temples at all. Everyone is equal in worship. Lastly, they get dignity, but that comes after healing and equality. It is an amazing story, and up there with the growth of the sub-Saharan African church and the Chinese church as one of the great trends in the Christian kingdom. Look to India, and underneath the pressure, there is such a lot to be thankful for.