From Anti-Conversion Laws to Dalit Christian Rights: The Reality of Christians in India | John Dayal

A Journalist's Fifty-Seven Years

John Dayal did not set out to become a chronicler of communal violence in India. A physics graduate of St Stephen's College, Delhi, he drifted into journalism almost by accident, he told Nous, moving through newsrooms that ranged from left-leaning to what he called "extreme right" without any grand design behind the moves. What kept him at it, he said, was a conviction that the labourers, farmers and displaced people he wrote about would rarely read his copy themselves, but that documenting their experience mattered regardless of who read it.

Reflecting on more than half a century in the profession, Dayal said his account of the 1975 Emergency is still read every year around its anniversary, and that his early reporting on riots in Moradabad and elsewhere continues to be cited today, because the testimony of the injured, once recorded at the time, becomes the record other accounts are checked against decades later.

That instinct for documentation has placed him at the centre of some of India's most consequential legal reckonings. He said he was involved in the effort that, decades after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, led to Sajjan Kumar's conviction, and that he helped reopen the Hashimpura massacre case, which eventually produced convictions of policemen after years without accountability. He also described presiding, in February 2020, over a Delhi High Court bench that questioned the police's inaction on hate speech during the Delhi riots — a move, he said, that preceded his transfer out of the court.

The First Anti-Conversion Law

Asked about India's contemporary anti-conversion laws, Dayal traced their origin not to recent politics but to the Presidential Order of 1950, which restricted Scheduled Caste privileges to Hindus alone. In his account, that order was in substance the country's earliest and most sweeping restriction on religious conversion, because it used the machinery of caste reservation to discourage Dalits from leaving the fold that guaranteed them, however inadequately, constitutional protection. "It was also the first and largest anti-conversion law," he told Nous.

Dayal argued that this dynamic — a state apparatus that keeps what he called a reserve pool of disadvantaged labour tied to a particular social order — has shaped much of what followed, from the assumption that Christian charitable work must mask a demographic project to the routine policing of caste identity in a Parliament that reserves 85 seats for Scheduled Castes yet, in his telling, leaves that community with almost no independent political power.

Two Christianities, Divided by Caste

Much of the conversation traced how differently Christianity took root in different parts of India, and why that history matters for understanding who is targeted today. Christianity's presence on the Malabar coast, Dayal said, predates Islam's arrival in India by centuries — tradition holds that St Thomas arrived within a few years of the crucifixion, drawn along trade routes that already linked Kerala to West Asia and China. Those early converts, in his account, were traders and large farmers who became, over the centuries, something close to an upper caste within Kerala's Christian community.

The Christianity that reached the rest of India, by contrast, arrived roughly 1,500 years later, with Portuguese, Dutch, French and finally English traders and colonisers, and drew converts overwhelmingly from among fishermen, small tenant farmers, and later, Dalits and Adivasis seeking an exit from caste hierarchy. Dayal argued that missionary schools and hospitals went precisely where government, princely states and wealthy patrons would not — into forest tracts between the Deccan plateau and Bengal that, in his words, earlier empires had left alone for centuries. Hindu reform movements that later built their own missionary institutions, he said, were themselves modelled on the Christian pattern they were competing against.

Why People Convert

Dayal was emphatic in rejecting the claim, which he said Hindutva organisations level at Christians much as they do at Muslims, that conversion in India today is a funded, coordinated demographic project. Foreign remittances that reach Christian institutions, he said, overwhelmingly move through the same regulatory channel — the FCRA — that Hindu organisations also use, and are earmarked for specific purposes such as schools or hospitals rather than for buying converts.

He pointed to poverty among Christians in Odisha, describing families living in huts too low for an adult to enter without stooping, as evidence against any narrative of conversion for profit. People convert, he argued, in search of healing, community and liberation from caste bondage — motivations he said hold whether the convert becomes Christian, Sikh or Muslim, and whichever community is doing the persuading.

The House Church Under Threat

Perhaps the most striking part of the conversation concerned where violence against Christians actually concentrates today. Dayal drew a sharp distinction between attacks on established brick-and-mortar churches in towns — which happen, but relatively rarely — and a much higher volume of attacks on informal house churches in rural India: congregations that meet in a believer's home with a visiting pastor and are, by their nature, undocumented and unprotected.

He also cited what he said were roughly 148 documented cases in Chhattisgarh in which Christian families have been denied the right to bury their dead on village land, a form of social boycott he argued constitutes as severe a persecution as any headline-grabbing riot, even though it rarely shows up in international rankings of religious freedom. "The Christian community is bereft of a genuine political leadership," he said, describing why such cases go largely unanswered.

A Mirror Image

Running through the conversation was Dayal's argument that violence against India's Christians and Muslims follows recognisably similar patterns, because both communities, in his reading of Hindutva's own foundational texts, are named among its historical adversaries — alongside communists, whom he identified as the third.

What has changed since he began reporting, he said, is not the frequency of communal violence but the conduct of the state during it. Where police once moved, however imperfectly, to end riots within days regardless of who was rioting, he argued that targeted curfews, selective policing and the weaponisation of law now allow violence to be sustained indefinitely against one community while its neighbours go about their business undisturbed.