India, South Asia
Population: 1,129,866,154
Christians: 2-3%
Dominant Religion: Hinduism
Persecution Ranking: 26th
Political Leader: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
Religious Freedom in Constitution: Yes
National elections in May of 2004 replaced the radical Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with a Congress Party government, and a Sikh prime minister. This was in answer to diligent prayer. From 1998 until it was replaced in 2004, the BJP Party initiated and aggressively pursued an extremist form of Hindu nationalism called "Hindutva," to purge the country of its non-Hindu religious minorities. The BJP succeeded in portraying Christianity as a suspect "foreign religion," and in passing legislation to effectively limit the rights and activities of Christians in some Indian States. Under the Congress Party during its initial months in power, some of that legislation was reversed. Yet, in 2005, four additional states have proposed legislation to inhibit the constitutional rights of citizens to exercise their freedom of religion by choosing Christianity. The Dalit community in particular (encompassing the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes), remains very responsive to the Gospel, in spite of the fact that Dalits will lose their rights to hold many government jobs allotted to them if they were to remain Hindus. In January, 2004 the government released the official religious statistics from the 2001 census, indicating India's Christian population to be approximately 2.4%. However, in January 2005, a news article appeared in a prominent nationally syndicated newspaper with an unsubstantiated report of 6.8% of the population following Christianity. Whether or not this information is correct, the fact remains that the Church continues to grow at a phenomenal rate with most of the new growth taking place in North India, a region historically referred to as the graveyard of missions.
