The Reality of Christians in India: John Dayal on Conversion Laws, Caste and a Shrinking Space

From physics to reporting

John Dayal did not plan a career in journalism. Trained in physics at St. Stephen's College, he says such choices are accidents in the early years, made on the advice of parents and the marks one happens to get. Once he was in journalism, though, the question of what kind of journalism was his to answer: financial reporting on company chairmen, theoretical editorials, or reporting from the ground. He chose the ground. His subjects, he says, were often people who would never read his work: labourers, farmers, the homeless. He wrote knowing that the record would outlast the moment. His work on the Emergency, on violence against Sikhs, on the Bhopal gas tragedy and on Hindu-Muslim violence, including Moradabad, is still consulted, he says, because the truth he recorded was the victims' truth.

With 57 years of experience, Dayal argues that memory produces patterns and benchmarks. His example is personal: on the day he was married, in old Delhi, there was a Hindu-Muslim clash. It was brought under control in two and a half days. Then, he says, police feared an inquiry, and the authorities above them did not tell them to pick Hindus or Muslims to blame. They told them to stop those who had incited the violence. That, he argues, has disappeared, not merely diminished.

What has changed in the state

Dayal contrasts how order was once restored with how it works now. In Bhiwandi, Moradabad or Delhi, a flag march by the army brought calm, and a curfew meant milk reached children in Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods alike. Today, he says, a curfew may fall on one locality while the lanes of another stay open, and people ride around with swords and sticks and shout slogans. On paper, he says, arrests may look balanced on both sides. But the charges tell a different story: one side accused of murder, another of theft. The legal apparatus, he says, victimises selectively even when the numbers seem equal, and the biggest change in his 57 years is that the state now looks with one eye and compels others to do the same. He sees the same in international conflicts, where reporting is banned in one place and allowed in another.

He also rejects the idea that hatred is natural. Partition's wounds, he says, are neither fresh nor healed, and today's politics needs to reopen them. He recalls living among refugees in Delhi and says those who actually lost everything in the Partition, Hindu and Muslim, show less bitterness than younger people who never made the journey and only hear about it on television. He puts the difference down to a hate campaign and to media, textbooks and posters that keep the wound open.

Where Christianity in India comes from

Asked about the origins of the community, Dayal pushes back on the idea that Christianity came with the British. St Thomas, he says, arrived on the Malabar coast within a few years of the death of Jesus, coming by sea routes that had long connected the region with West Asia. Christianity stayed in Kerala for about 1,500 years, he says, until the Portuguese arrived with Vasco da Gama.

The early Kerala Christians, he says, were traders and big farmers, upper caste by his description. The Portuguese, though, converted fishermen, boatmen and small cultivators, and Christianity spread beyond the coast and, later, with the Dutch, French and English, across the country. The English came last, and ruled, he argues, by working with maharajas, nawabs and upper castes, not missionaries. He argues that when Christian missionaries preached that all are brothers and prayed together, they disturbed the social order, which is why they were resisted.

Dayal identifies two waves of mass conversion in colonial times, in Andhra and Tamil Nadu, and in Punjab from Lahore to Ambala, and says both were among Dalits and had little to do with the ruling power. He calls them a pre-Ambedkarite rejection of Brahminism.

Why people convert, and the money question

Dayal offers several reasons why people convert today. One is the healing ministry: people who are ill, exhausted and unable to afford care go where they find solace. A second is liberation from caste. He says caste remains as binding as it has ever been, citing Dalit PhD students who die by suicide and young couples killed for inter-caste marriage, and asks why so many Dalit MPs in Parliament, elected from reserved seats, have so little power to change this.

To the charge that conversions are bought, Dayal answers that Indian Christians are among the poorest in the country. If money were the reason, he says, a convert would leave when the money stopped. Foreign funds, he says, come through tithing, through donors in the United States and Britain, through the bequests of widows and through German church taxes, part of which he says is shared with Hindu institutions as well. They are spent on schools and hospitals in places the state, princely rulers and rich Indians did not reach, not on feeding Christians first. About 80 to 90 per cent of staff in a Christian school, he says, are Hindu, and most of an institution's spending goes into the general economy. He notes that FCRA is not only a Christian matter, and that many Hindu institutions hold it. Cancelling around 20,000 registrations, he says, did not affect only Christians.

The idea that Christianity can be starved out, Dayal argues, misunderstands it. The church survived before FCRA existed. He adds that the law was born under Indira Gandhi to control political opponents, and asks why Christians are now treated as political opponents to be uprooted.

Adivasis, missions and the Hindu response

On tribal communities, Dayal says Adivasis are not Hindus, and cannot be turned into Christians or Hindus by force of definition. Christian missions were among the first to enter forest regions, bringing medicine, schools and hostels where 20 children in one village and 20 in another, 40 kilometres apart, could only be taught by bringing them together. Generations have passed through such schools, and Dayal calls St. Xavier's in Odisha the best college in its region. Tribal people converted in large numbers as a result, and now, he says, are being counted as Hindus in the census.

He says missionary activity within Hinduism arose later and in competition, with Ram Mohan Roy, the Ramakrishna Mission and Vivekananda modelled on Christian missions, and argues that the state today has itself become a missionary. He does not object to missions as such. What he objects to, he says, is a mission carried out with the sword or the mob.

House churches, burial and the law

Dayal says the most vulnerable Christians are rural. House churches, a Sunday gathering in a hut, are open to attack because a neighbour, a policeman or a newspaper can claim that conversion is taking place, and then a crowd gathers with police standing by. Urban churches are attacked too, but less often. He describes Chhattisgarh, where he says 148 cases of Christians being denied burial of their dead have been recorded. Comparing rankings such as the Open Doors World Watch List, he says persecution is relative, but he asks how, in a country that calls itself a civilised secular republic, a poor Christian woman's body can be left on a road for 14 days, and says he would rank that first. He notes that the Supreme Court has held that the right to life includes the right to die with dignity, to be buried or cremated.

On anti-conversion laws, Dayal says nobody converts another person: conversion is a personal act, and what a priest does is ritually admit someone. The laws, he says, exist to harass, and to consolidate the Hindu vote. He recounts a case in Indore in which two nuns and 20 girls were detained even though their parents and grandparents were Christian; all were released after ten months. He says he knows of only two conversion convictions, both of Muslim men in so-called love jihad cases. When leaders speak of the death penalty for conversion, he asks whom they mean to frighten, since no court would apply it.

The host asks about the 1977 Supreme Court judgment holding that the right to propagate does not include the right to convert. Dayal says the case was not fully prepared, and that a theological point was missed: conversion happens in the heart of the person who converts.

Article 341 as an anti-conversion law

One of Dayal's central arguments concerns the Presidential Order of 1950 under Article 341, which limited Scheduled Caste benefits to Hindus. He calls it the first and largest anti-conversion law: a person who leaves Hinduism loses reservation, and so is punished for a spiritual decision. The assumption behind it, he says, is that conversion frees a Dalit from caste. Reality shows otherwise. A Dalit Christian is still identified by neighbours as before, can marry only within caste, and lives where Dalits live. He describes officers from reserved categories who, in his account, are given non-executive posts and refused the top jobs, and a family in Gurdaspur in which two sons-in-law, a Hindu and a Sikh, can get jobs but the Christian cannot.

He argues that the government cannot restore Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Christians without shaking a structure that depends on Dalits remaining within Hinduism, and that, together with FCRA restrictions and anti-conversion laws, it forms a cage.

Manipur, Kerala and the limits of politics

On Manipur, Dayal says religion was significant, since the Kukis are almost entirely Christian and the Meiteis largely not, but that the conflict was over land, including the Meiteis' wish for Scheduled Tribe status and access to tribal land. He says the emerging rivalry between Nagas and Kukis, both largely Christian, has since diluted the religious element.

In Kerala, he says, a BJP victory in Thrissur came partly from Christian support, driven by competition between Christians and Muslims over jobs, scholarships and politics and by Islamophobia in some churches. But he says the BJP misreads the community in thinking it can control it through a few bishops photographed with the Prime Minister, since no Christian votes on a bishop's word. He also says that Indresh, who set up the Rashtriya Muslim Manch, runs a Rashtriya Isai Manch as well, and that it draws little attendance.

A community without leaders

Asked whether the community has a mature civil society response, Dayal is candid. Outside Kerala, he says, the response is firefighting: activists in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha working case by case, with no link between denominations such as the CNI, CSI and the Catholics, and no shared discourse. Bishops gather for rallies, but on the ground there is no exchange. Political leadership is emerging only in tribal areas. "The Christian community is bereft of a genuine political leadership," he says, and he adds that he has seen no rising cohort. He notes that in Parliament few people can raise the community's questions, and that he cannot recall a Christian minister at the Centre for many years.

He is equally frank about other movements. Dalit discourse, he says, guards its space and rarely names Christians even within the "Bahujan", partly from fear of losing what Ambedkar's legacy gave them. Civil society, meaning largely Hindu society in his usage, is afraid of Muslims, and needs to be reassured, not lectured.

The way forward

Dayal argues for rebuilding a critical mass of about 20 per cent that has been fragmented, on common platforms that do not frighten civil society. Interfaith theological debate, he says, has gone on for a thousand years and will not help. What is needed is a revival of the spirit of the Constituent Assembly debates, in which communities with opposing universals negotiated a text that has kept peace for 70 or 80 years, a feat the host calls a miracle of composite nationhood, and one that is easy to undo.

To the host's worry that young activists are absent, he says the young must avoid low-hanging fruit and jobs alone. He is not without hope: someone walking alone today, he says, may be joined by others tomorrow. Asked about the role of documentation, he says the archive is the memory of the community and the basis for any claim to justice, and that a few pages of that history will carry his signature. To stand in the storm, the host says in closing, is itself a victory.

This piece reports the views of Mr. Dayal and the host as stated in the conversation; figures such as the number of burial cases and FCRA cancellations are his and have not been independently verified here.