The violence in Manipur, India, has brought the growing tide of religious persecution in the country to the forefront. Since May 2023, the state has witnessed violent clashes between the Hindu Meitei and Christian Kuki communities, with over 415 lives lost and tens of thousands displaced. However, what is truly alarming is not only the violence itself but also the failure of India’s leadership to take decisive action in curbing the rising tide of religious intolerance. The indifference shown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government has allowed the persecution of religious minorities, particularly Christians, to flourish unchecked. Manipur’s unrest is rooted in complex ethnic and religious tensions. The Meitei, a predominantly Hindu community, have been demanding Scheduled Tribe status, a move that has been fiercely opposed by the Kuki community, which is largely Christian. The demand for Scheduled Tribe status is seen by many as a means of securing affirmative action benefits, which would favor the Meitei population over other groups in the state, including the Christian Kukis. This has led to violent clashes, with the Kuki people bearing the brunt of the attacks. The violence has been particularly devastating for the Christian community in Manipur. Over 360 churches have

In July, more than two years after a Christian prayer service at his home was raided by police, a court in Uttar Pradesh in northern India acquitted Abhishek Gupta, a 41-year-old radiologist, of violating the state’s anti-conversion law. Legally, his victory was more than a win; it was a rout: The judge in the case cleared Gupta and a co-defendant of trying to recruit Hindus into Utter Pradesh’s tiny Christian minority, but further ruled that the complainant, a member of a Hindu nationalist activist group, was not eligible to file the case and that police investigators were “the real culprits”.But personally, the case has ruined Gupta, he said. “My entire family is Christian. I pray on Sundays. I don’t know why anyone would think I was converting anyone,” Gupta told RNS by phone from his home village in Gorakhpur, where he moved after he and his wife, a nurse, were asked to resign their jobs for fear their employers would be harassed by vigilantes. “We exhausted our life savings, and our life was turned upside down,” he said. A study by Article 14, a watchdog group, revealed that in the first year after the original 2021 statute passed, half of the 101 reported violations

Recent weeks have seen a spike in ethnoreligious violence in northeastern India’s Manipur state after a period of relative calm. Widespread unrest tore through the state in 2023, dividing residents along ethnic and religious lines and leading to hundreds of deaths, the destruction of more than 300 churches, and the displacement of at least 60,000 mostly Christian residents. According to reports, the recent violence was sparked by the murder of a young Kuki woman, whose body was found abandoned in a river. The Kuki people are a minority ethnic group concentrated in Manipur’s hill country. They are mostly made up of Christians, while the majority are Meitei, a Hindu-majority ethnic group concentrated in the state’s valley. Reports that emerged during the violence of 2023 indicated that dozens of Meitei churches were among those destroyed by Meitei attackers, suggesting that Meitei mobs and militias were targeting communities based not only on their ethnicity but also based on religion. More than a dozen people were reportedly killed in this month’s flareup, and half a dozen churches were torched. The violence in 2023 sparked when the Manipur High Court recommended that the executive branch of the state government make the majority Meitei people eligible for Scheduled Tribe benefits,