John Dayal's 57-Year Ledger of Violence Against India's Christians

A record kept on purpose

John Dayal, 78, opens by explaining why he became a chronicler of violence he knew those responsible would never read: "I knew that what I was writing, the people I was writing about, would not read it. But what I write will be read not today, but even 50 years from now." That conviction has largely been vindicated — his account of the 1975 Emergency is still cited whenever its anniversary comes around, and his documentation of anti-Sikh violence, homelessness, the Bhopal gas tragedy and communal violence continues to be referenced. Dayal, a physics graduate of St Stephen's College who moved into journalism, describes a 57-year career built on the conviction that even when the people affected by violence — labourers, farmers, the poor who don't read newspapers — will never see his reporting, documenting their reality could still eventually enable intervention: in Parliament, in courts, in the historical record.

That instinct for documentation is, in his telling, inseparable from a simple fact about memory: it accumulates, and accumulation produces patterns and benchmarks. Dayal repeatedly returns to a comparison from his own life. On the day of his wedding in Delhi — 7 July, decades ago — a Hindu-Muslim clash broke out in the city. It was brought under control within two-and-a-half days, the culprits identified and arrested without any political instruction to target one community over another. "Today," he says, "riots run for weeks, months." The difference, in his account, is not that violence has necessarily increased in raw quantity, but that the state's posture toward it has fundamentally changed.

What changed in the state's gaze

Dayal's central argument is that policing and administrative machinery once treated communal disorder as something to be controlled impartially — even if imperfectly, even if police still took bribes — because officers feared future inquiry. Today, he argues, curfews are selectively imposed on one community's neighbourhood while another's streets stay open for men to parade with weapons; police themselves are sometimes directed on whom to arrest, with charges calibrated by community rather than by evidence of an actual crime — a "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" form of bias that is much harder to see on paper. "It matters whose eyes carry fear and whose don't," he says, describing how, in earlier decades, an Army flag march or a curfew still allowed milk to reach children in both Hindu and Muslim areas — a basic uniformity of treatment he says has since vanished.

He extends the comparison internationally, noting that the same asymmetry of access and reporting restrictions that shape whose suffering the world sees applies as much abroad — in Gaza, or in the Iran-Israel conflict — as within India, arguing that control over what the public is allowed to witness is itself an instrument of power exercised deliberately by state authorities, in India as much as elsewhere.

A history predating the British

A recurring thread in the conversation is Dayal's insistence that the popular assumption — that Christianity in India is a colonial import — is simply wrong. Christianity arrived on the Malabar coast within a few years of the death of Jesus, brought by St Thomas via maritime trade routes that long predated European contact, into a region already tied by trade to West Asia and China. For roughly 1,500 years, Christianity remained largely confined to Kerala, spreading further only after Vasco da Gama's arrival opened a new, larger wave of conversion.

Dayal traces a caste dynamic within that history that he says is often erased: the earliest converts on the Malabar coast were, by his account, from prosperous, land-owning, trading upper-caste backgrounds who had no economic incentive to move. It was the Portuguese missionary wave — reaching fishermen, small cultivators and lower castes — that provoked internal backlash from existing elites and created what Dayal describes as the first real caste tension within the community: pointed criticism that missionaries who preached "everyone reads the same Bible, everyone is equal" were disturbing an established social hierarchy. He credits Christian missionary institutions with material achievements that shaped this spread further: schools and hospitals built deep in India's forest belts — from Rajasthan to Odisha — targeting Adivasi and tribal communities the colonial state, princely rulers and wealthy Indians alike had neglected, along with medical missions addressing epidemic disease in regions with no other access to healthcare. He also credits this history with the origins of India's nursing profession, since caring for strangers' wounds crossed caste and purdah norms that domestic women otherwise could not.

Why people convert, in his account

Asked directly why conversions happen today, Dayal lists what he calls the real, non-coercive drivers: psychological and physical distress — "peace of mind, peace of body" — amid poverty, unemployment and the psychological toll of daily life; a "healing ministry" that he identifies as the dominant driver of contemporary conversion, particularly for those who cannot afford healthcare; and liberation from caste bondage, which he argues remains as rigid today, measured by its real-world consequences, as in any earlier era — citing continuing honour killings over inter-caste marriage, PhD scholars driven to suicide, and Dalit political representation of roughly 85 reserved Lok Sabha seats that translates, he argues, into almost no actual power. He is emphatic that no one can force another person to convert against their will — "no one can pour Ganga water on someone's head and make them Hindu, or put something in their mouth and make them Muslim" — arguing that what critics call "conversion" for legal purposes is often simply formal, ritualised admission into a community whose actual, internal conversion of belief happened earlier and independently.

He is equally dismissive of claims that foreign funding drives mass conversion, walking through where money channelled via the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) actually goes: roughly 80 percent of teachers and 90 percent of support staff in Christian-run schools are Hindu, and the bulk of any FCRA money entering an institution flows straight into the local economy through salaries, maintenance and utilities — meaning, in his telling, most of the practical benefit of this funding accrues to Hindus, not Christians. He also notes, pointedly, that Germany's church tax — often assumed to fund only Christian institutions in India — is legally required to be distributed proportionately, meaning German tax revenue also reaches Hindu institutions in India, a detail he says is rarely acknowledged.

The "first and largest anti-conversion law"

The most striking argument in the conversation concerns Article 341 and the Presidential Order of 1950. Dayal describes this as, in effect, the first and largest anti-conversion law in independent India — one of the earliest major amendments to the Constitution, restricting Scheduled Caste reservation benefits (in education, employment and political representation) to Hindus, later extended to Sikhs and Buddhists, but withheld from Dalits who convert to Islam or Christianity. He frames this as a direct contradiction of the freedom of conscience the Constituent Assembly itself had debated and enshrined — the right to profess, practise and propagate one's faith — arguing that the same document that guaranteed this freedom was almost immediately amended to penalise Dalits for exercising it. Citing his own conversations with retired judges, he argues that a 1977 Supreme Court judgment on anti-conversion laws (in the Stainislaus case) was inadequately challenged at the time, partly on a theological point he considers decisive: no person can convert another person against their will; only the individual converts themselves, with a religious ceremony merely formalising an already-completed personal decision.

Dayal argues the practical effect of denying Dalit converts continued reservation benefits is to trap the poorest, most vulnerable citizens inside caste hierarchy regardless of what they call themselves — since neighbours, marriage networks and social status continue to identify a convert by their prior caste position regardless of new religious label. "Your world remains a Dalit world," he says, describing cases of Dalit Christians and Muslims still barred from certain jobs, still facing water and access discrimination, even while relatives across faiths in the same family remain unaffected by comparable barriers. He frames the broader anti-conversion law apparatus — including recent rhetoric around death penalty provisions from state leaders — not as protecting genuine religious sentiment, but as a mechanism to keep a captive, economically dependent lower-caste population from ever fully exiting a hierarchy that benefits those above it: "This isn't about saving religion. It's about keeping bonded labour in your court."

Enforcement without convictions

On enforcement, Dayal states that despite decades of anti-conversion prosecutions, actual convictions of Christians for forced conversion have been vanishingly rare — he cites a case in Indore in which two nuns and 20 girls were detained on conversion allegations, only for the case to collapse after ten months once it became clear the girls' entire families, including grandparents, were already Christian. He argues such cases function as harassment mechanisms rather than genuine law enforcement, serving primarily to consolidate a "Hindu vote bank" rather than address any real pattern of coercion — pointing out that if Christians were truly frightened by escalating anti-conversion legislation, conversions would have stopped, yet the same voices claim conversions continue daily regardless of the law.

Violence, geography and Manipur

Dayal draws a distinction between urban and rural vulnerability, arguing that rural Christian communities — with weaker civil society networks and greater exposure to unverified accusations of "conversion" — face disproportionate risk, citing what he says are 148 documented cases in Chhattisgarh alone of families being denied the right to bury their dead in their own villages. He contrasts this with international rankings of religious persecution, arguing that a country describing itself as a secular republic under rule of law should be judged more harshly for enabling such denial of basic burial rights than countries experiencing open civil war.

On the ethnic violence in Manipur between Meitei and Kuki communities, Dayal argues the underlying driver was land and Scheduled Tribe status rather than religious conflict per se — since Kukis are almost entirely Christian while only a small fraction of Meiteis are — but that religious framing was deliberately introduced and later extended to Naga-Kuki tensions despite both communities being Christian, which he attributes partly to competing interests around regional drug trade networks that benefit from sustained, low-level conflict.

A community without political leadership

Dayal is unsparing in his assessment of Christian political organisation in India, describing the community as "bereft of a genuine political leadership" with no real organic leadership structures, in contrast to Kerala, where Christians hold meaningful institutional power. He attributes the RSS's cultivation of a "Rashtriya Christian Manch," paralleling its Muslim Rashtriya Manch, largely to failure — a platform, he says, that draws little genuine following. He is candid that Christian civil society itself remains fragmented along denominational lines, with limited coordination between Catholic and Protestant bodies, and that younger activists have not yet emerged to build on the "critical mass" his generation once represented — a gap he describes as troubling and one he hopes younger Christians and Muslims will begin to fill, even without immediate reward.

A constitutional negotiation under strain

Dayal closes by locating the current moment within a longer constitutional story: the Constituent Assembly debates, in his account, produced a "miracle" — a negotiated citizenship framework in which fundamentally incompatible worldviews (an Ambedkarite critique of caste, a Brahminical understanding of social order, competing religious claims) were reconciled into a single founding document that gave India seven or eight decades of relative peace. That negotiation, he argues, has since been deliberately unwound by a state strategy of compartmentalising communities against one another, discouraging the kind of interfaith, cross-community dialogue that produced the original settlement. His closing message is one of qualified hope rather than despair: comparing his own decades of activism to standing steadfast in a storm — "you don't need to defeat the storm; you only need to still be standing when it passes" — while acknowledging that rebuilding a critical mass of civil society solidarity across India's religious minorities remains, in his own words, largely unfinished work.