WhatsApp vigilantes in India are converting Christians by force

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

It was the day of his mother’s funeral, but Jaldhar Kashyap knew the dozens of people descending on his home weren’t there to offer condolences.

When his mother was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, the family panicked. They were subsistence farmers from a marginalised tribe in the hills of Central India, and their prospects for good medical care were bleak. A neighbor told them that adopting Christianity would provide fellowship and prayer that might help with her illness.

“We were all alone [and] didn’t know what to do,” Jaldhar, a lean and shy 32-year-old, told Rest of World in June. He was sitting beneath a tree outside his one-room, hay-covered hut in the densely forested Bastar region of Chhattisgarh state, over 1,450 km south of Delhi. “We needed a sense of community. [Christianity] gave us hope.”

Back then, becoming Christian came with risks from Hindu vigilante groups who considered this an affront to India’s majority religion. But Bastar’s rugged terrain and low internet penetration meant that news about conversions often didn’t spread widely. Meanwhile, Jaldhar’s family found hope and solace in their new church; they also mortgaged their farmland to pay for his mother’s treatment. Her cancer...

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