ICC Note:

For many years, Hindu radicals in India have claimed that Christians are using illegal means to forcefully convert Hindus to Christianity. These claims have become so widespread that several of India’s states that are ruled by the Hindu nationalist party BJP have enacted laws that make forced conversions illegal. Despite these claims, recently released census data in India doesn’t support the claims of Hindu radicals. If anything, the census data disproves these claims of widespread forced conversions. 

8/26/2015 India (UCA News) – India’s Christian community has grown more slowly in the last decade than the country’s overall population, according to new government data, disproving allegations that there have been widespread forced Christian conversions.

The coalition federal government, led by the pro-Hindu Bharatatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Aug. 25 released religion-based data collected for the 2011 decennial national census. The data shows the percentage of Hindus fell marginally while Islam grew faster than any other religion during the 10 years between 2001-2011.

The Muslim population grew by 0.8 percent against the overall population, while Hinduism declined by 0.7 percentage points. Muslims still make up a mere 14.2 percent of the population compared with Hinduism’s 79.8 percent.

“There has been no significant change in the proportion of Christians and Jains,” added an official statement.

The data “exposes the sham and hollowness of the Hindu fanatic charge against conversion,” said John Dayal, a Catholic lay leader in India.

Christian and Muslim leaders say the BJP and fanatic Hindu groups have made politically motivated statements that increasing Christian and Muslim populations threaten to end the Hindu majority in India and destroy their culture.

“While Muslims are presented as pro-Pakistan and terrorists, Christians are said to be secessionists and devouring Indian cultural values,” said Dayal, who is also a member of ucanews.com’s board of directors.

“As part of this, various Hindu groups have been calling for the disenfranchisement of Christians, curbs on Muslims and are exhorting Hindu women to have more children in this demographic war.”

India has only 27.8 million Christians in a population of 1.21 billion people, but they are the second-largest religious minority, after Muslims, who number at least 170 million. Among minorities, there are 20 million Sikhs, 8.4 million Buddhists and 4.5 million Jains, data shows.

In the past decade, Christian missioners, especially in BJP-ruled states like Madhya Pradesh, have been accused of converting tribal people and those from the beleaguered “untouchable” caste. Laws were enacted to end conversion, police cases were filed and missioners attacked in the name of conversion activities.

Church leaders like Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal, based in the capital of Madhya Pradesh state, said the data proves otherwise.

“I want to ask all those who accused us of converting gullible people to Christianity: where are those whom we converted,” Archbishop Cornelio said.

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