Tens of thousands of Christians marched through Jagdalpur in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh on 13 April 2026, to protest an amendment to the state’s anti-conversion law that had taken effect less than a week earlier. With their concerns unaddressed by the government, the minority community continues to live in heightened fear amid rising hostility and the prospect of the law being misused.
The amended legislation, formally titled the Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Bill, was passed by the state assembly and signed by Governor Ramen Deka of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It came into force on 7 April. Chhattisgarh is one of 13 states in India to have introduced anti-conversion legislation.
Anti-conversion laws
The law prohibits religious conversions involving fraud or force. However, local sources told Christian Solidarity International (CSI) its language was vague enough to be applied against ordinary Christian worship gatherings.
Penalties run from seven to 10 years in prison. Longer terms are an option where minors, women, or members of Scheduled Castes (Dalits, or those from lower castes in the country’s rigid caste system) or Scheduled Tribes (indigenous people) are involved. Indigenous people account for over 30 percent of Chhattisgarh’s population.
Further, gatherings of two or more people that authorities classify as “mass conversions” can draw sentences of 20 years to life imprisonment.
The law explicitly exempts what is locally called “Ghar Wapsi”, a ceremony through which Hindus who had left the faith are returned to it. The ceremony is held mostly to promote the Hindu nationalist narrative that Christian missionaries use money or force to convert Hindus to Christianity. According to the 2011 census, Christians made up 1.92 percent of Chhattisgarh’s population of roughly 30 million, or roughly 490,542 people.
Forced reconversions, expulsions and violence
Field testimonies gathered by CSI’s local sources documented a pattern of forced reconversions, expulsions and physical violence against Christian families in the Bastar Division, the southern third of the state.
In late December 2024, roughly 160 Christians in a village about 100 kilometres (roughly 62 miles) north of Jagdalpur were compelled to participate in a Ghar Wapsi ceremony. This involved having cow urine sprinkled on them. Members of Hindu nationalist groups accompanied the Hindu priests and outnumbered the Christians present.
One man, identified as Lokesh Mishra, a pseudonym, said that he and his wife and four children were the only members of the village to escape the ceremony. He hid while the group searched for him, and his wife was beaten with sticks when she refused to disclose his whereabouts.
“When the radicals left for a moment, I managed to call her, urging her to gather what she could and flee immediately with our children,” he said. The family fled to the outskirts of Jagdalpur, losing their farmland in the process. Mishra now works as a daily labourer.
Mishra said that Christians who remained in the village were barred from attending church or openly practising their faith, and faced losing access to their agricultural fields if they refused to take part in Hindu rituals.
Displacements
A couple identified as Bholoaram and Jyoti, also pseudonyms, were expelled from their village after converting to Christianity and forced to live in a makeshift dwelling outside it.
One night, a group that included Jyoti’s father broke in and threatened to kill their child if the family did not surrender him. They insisted the child should not be raised as a Christian. The couple and their child fled immediately with the help of a fellow Christian.
Four years later, they live on the outskirts of a town in Chhattisgarh. Bholoaram said that potential employers turn him away once his faith becomes known.
A local Christian leader told CSI that he is personally aware of around 300 families forced out of their villages across the Bastar region in the past two years, and that expulsions continue.
He attributed the pattern in part to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, (World Hindu Council, or VHP), and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, (India’s chief Hindu nationalist organisation, or RSS). He said these Hindu nationalist organisations were encouraging indigenous Adivasi communities to reject Christians as a threat to local land, culture and deities.
Billboards at the entrances of many villages in the Bastar Division announce that Christian clergy and converts from outside are barred from entering for religious purposes. The signs cite the Panchayat Provisions Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, or PESA, a law originally intended to extend self-governance rights to tribal, or indigenous, communities through village assemblies. The Christian leader said that the act is now routinely misused to justify exclusion of Christian families and restrictions on worship.
Discrimination and sexual violence
The displacement’s impact on children is severe. “Because many families have fled their villages, their children’s education has been completely disrupted,” explained a local Christian.
“Even when children manage to attend school, they often face serious discrimination. Other students refuse to play with them, eat with them, or participate in activities together. As a result, Christian children experience isolation and bullying, which sometimes causes them to drop out of school.”
Local Christians also complained about sexual violence against women. A woman identified as Madhuri said that in October 2025 four men broke into her family’s home and sexually assaulted her sister. When their mother intervened, the attackers beat her so severely that hospital staff feared she would not survive.
When Madhuri and her sister reached the nearest police station, she said, their attackers had arrived ahead of them and accused them of disturbing social harmony. No meaningful legal action followed; just two of the four men were later detained. The three women eventually relocated to a town where they struggle to survive.
Police inaction
Police inaction is a recurring concern in the near-weekly reports CSI receives from its local partners detailing expulsions and violence against Christians. Officers are said to routinely refuse to register formal complaints from Christians. They also record violent incidents as community disputes rather than criminal offences, leaving perpetrators without legal accountability.
The BJP, which has been accused of promoting anti-minority sentiments among people in Chhattisgarh and other states, has governed Chhattisgarh since December 2023.
In several villages, Christian families have been denied the right to bury their dead, with mobs reported to have disrupted burials and forcibly exhumed bodies while police watched without intervening.
India’s Supreme Court issued an interim order prohibiting the exhumation and relocation of buried bodies, but CSI’s partners say denial of burial rights by village assemblies remains common in Chhattisgarh.
