ICC Note:
In recent years, the state of religious freedom in India has significantly deteriorated. On Open Doors USA World Watchlist, which ranks the worst countries for Christian persecution, India has climbed to number 15, just behind Saudi Arabia. In 2016, ICC documented over 360 attacks on Christians in India marking one of the worst years for Christians in India’s history. See why India has become such a tough country for Christians. 
01/31/2017 India (Christian Post) – Why would India block foreign donations to help poor children? The answer is Hindutva.
On January 13th, Compassion International told the sponsors of 130,000 Indian children that, barring an unlikely turn of events, it would cease operations in India in mid-March.
The announcement came a year after the Indian government told the organization that “it could no longer receive funding from outside the subcontinent.”
While the news dismayed Compassion’s donors, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to those familiar with the deteriorating state of religious freedom in India.
Compassion’s announcement comes shortly after Open Doors International released its “World Watchlist,” which ranked the worst countries in which to be a Christian.
North Korea, of course, ranked first again. The next twelve countries are either overwhelmingly Muslim or, like Nigeria, are suffering from an Islamist insurgency — in this case, Boko Haram — that targets Christians.
Then at #15, just behind Saudi Arabia, is India. Why? India is neither Islamic nor a repressive dictatorship like North Korea or China.
David Curry, the CEO of Open Doors, told Morgan Lee and Mark Galli of Christianity Today that the situation in India reflects the rise of what he calls “ethnic nationalism,” in which what it means to be an Indian is defined in religious — in this case, Hindu — terms. An Indian who is a Christian or, for that matter, a Muslim, is regarded as less than truly Indian, because Hinduism is at the heart of what it means to be an Indian.
This ideology goes by the name “Hindutva,” which literally means “Hinduness.” It’s an ideology that belies the western image of India as a land of Gandhi, gurus, and nonviolence. There’s nothing peaceful or tolerant about Hindutva. On the contrary, the man who assassinated Gandhi was an adherent of Hindutva and felt that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindu community.
The current ruling party in India, the BJP, is ideologically committed to the idea of Hindutva. As Vice News put it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in addition to being implicated in the 2002 massacre of 2,000 Muslims while governor of Gujarat, has also been “accused of promoting India’s majority religion of Hinduism to the detriment of Christianity, Islam, and other faiths.”
The ruling party’s commitment to Hindu supremacy is perhaps best reflected in the various laws prohibiting religion conversion that I told you about on BreakPoint a year ago. Six Indian states have enacted laws in the past several years that effectively ban conversions from Hinduism to Christianity or to Islam.
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