Christians wary amid targeting of Sunday services in Indian state

Christians in India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state have expressed serious concerns over the rise in targeted attacks on Sunday prayer services by hardline Hindu mobs and arrests, detentions of pastors, among others, by the police.

On Jan. 4, Sunday services were disrupted at five locations across the state.

“It is a very strange, fearful situation. We cannot pray in our churches or homes,” said a local Christian leader who did not want to be named, fearing retribution.

Pastor Ravi Joseph, who was leading a prayer service in Harahua village in Varanasi district, was arrested for allegedly trying to convert poor people, he told UCA News.

Three other people were detained along with Joseph, but they were released the same day, he added.

In another incident, police detained Pastor Mithilesh Singh along with his family members in Mirzapur district.

Unidentified individuals entered the church without permission and recorded part of the prayer service. Soon after, a police team arrived and took Singh and his family into custody.

Police said they are interrogating the pastor and his family and seized two copies of the Bible, a couple of mobile phones, and a laptop.

Police also sealed the church, according to a local Christian.

In yet another incident reported from Unnao district, activists of the Bajarang Dal, a right-wing Hindu group, forced their way into a Sunday service and tried to disrupt it.

Pastor Neeraj Kumar, who was leading it, was accused of conversion, but those attending the service confronted the Hindu mob.

Police intervened to defuse tensions between the two sides but did not initiate any legal action, a Christian leader said.

In Sonbhadra district, Pastor Rajnath Prajapati was taken into custody for interrogation following allegations of conversion by a mob.

In Lakhimpur Kheri district, some people claiming to be media persons entered a prayer service, video recorded and streamed it on Facebook without permission.

Pastor Deepak, who identified himself by a single name, said police refused to take their complaint, and they feared the video recording would be misused against them.

“This is nothing new in Uttar Pradesh, but there appears to be a pattern this time in strangers forcefully video recording Sunday prayer services and in one case, streaming it on social media,” said Pastor Joy Mathew, who assists persecuted Christians in legal matters.

He said this is “very dangerous, as the privacy of our people is being violated.”

It is also clear that the police are “hand in glove with the intruders” and instead of detaining them, were questioning the pastors and those attending prayer services, Mathew told UCA News.

Meanwhile, the All India Catholic Union (AICU) appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take decisive steps to ensure the safety of Christian communities, saying the past two years “have been marked by fear, intimidation, and violence” from them.

In its Jan. 2 statement, the group said the Modi government should “urgently address” what it described as “a hostile climate facing Christians in several parts of the country.”

The organization representing around 16 million Catholics in India warned that the continuing attacks pose a serious challenge to India’s secular and pluralistic values.

Christians in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha, all ruled by Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), endured a particularly difficult year in 2025. Many faced harassment, disruptions of prayer services, vandalism of churches and homes, and physical assaults, the AICU said.

Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, has become a hotspot for Christian persecution and is among 12 states, most of them BJP-ruled, to have strict anti-conversion laws that criminalize religious conversion.

Christians make up less than one percent of Uttar Pradesh’s more than 200 million people, 80 percent of them Hindus.

This article was originally published  on https://www.ucanews.com/news/christians-wary-amid-targeting-of-sunday-services-in-indian-state/111478