by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Disturbing statistics are coming out of India, where the fruit of nationalism has been an uptick in severe persecution against Christians.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that advocates on behalf of oppressed Christians internationally, said that 218 instances of persecution against Christians were recorded in India this year, with the monthly rate having risen to 27 incidents per month compared with only 20 per month last year.
“Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took control of India’s central government” in 2014, William Stark, regional director of South Asia for International Christian Concern, told FaithWire, “attacks on Christians in India have more than doubled.”
According to statistics from the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), 351 and 325 incidents of persecution against Christians occurred in India in 2017 and 2018 respectively, dwarfing the 147 incidents that transpired the year the BJP took power in 2014.
Stark said the main impetus to the persecution ideologically has been the BJP emphasis on Christians as custodians of “foreign faiths” and thus “anti-national” impulses that threaten the unity and cohesiveness of the nation.