MR Lalu
We live in an era of narrative wars. Conventional wars, fought with soldiers, arms, and armaments, remain relevant. Yet a far more insidious battlefield has emerged, the media space, especially social media, where information travels with astonishing speed and unimaginable rapidity. This space has become denser and more powerful, capable of unleashing chaos. And who wins a narrative war? Of course, those with the most convincing craft, articulation, and reach win the war comfortably. However, this does not mean that the media space is always flooded with truth. More often than not, it circulates dishonest and unreal claims, frequently without verification and of course with malicious intent.
Global media institutions across countries have often engaged in framing narratives. India, for its geopolitical and civilizational significance, has consistently been a target. Its Hindu population, which constitutes the majority, is frequently accused on international platforms for reasons that are often exaggerated or unfounded. Accusations in the media and a deliberate global outrage against Hindus have become more pronounced since India’s regime change in 2014. With a Hindu nationalist administration holding the reins, India and its Hindu majority have increasingly been projected as predatory toward religious minorities.
A recent example, heavily laden with misinformation and habitual dishonesty, appeared in The Wall Street Journal on January 2. The article titled “The Hindu Attacks on India’s Christians” attempted to mobilize popular outrage abroad against India, particularly against its Hindu majority. Tunku Varadarajan’s column represents hyperbolic reification at its peak. Overloaded with absurd claims and unsubstantiated narratives, the article accuses the Modi regime of being ruthless toward the country’s minorities.
According to the author, the regime’s sinister focus is primarily on Christians and Muslims. He claims that minorities, particularly monotheistic religious communities in India, are brutally exploited and made to suffer under a ruthless Hindu majority. Hindus, as portrayed by the writer, are depicted as being obsessed with imagined threats posed by Christians. Through this article, Varadarajan questions the Modi government, asserting that crimes against religious minorities in India go unpunished and unchecked. His particular focus was on the disruptions that took place in some parts of India during the Christmas Eve.
He further cites the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which in its 2025 annual report recommended that the Trump administration designate India as a “country of particular concern,” alleging that it remains an unfriendly landscape for minorities. The accusations and reminders continue. This raises an important question: what is the reality behind the disruptions that occurred during this year’s Christmas celebrations?
There is clearly a chasm of mistrust among different religious communities in India, but why is this mistrust widening in recent times? To understand this, one must examine the root causes behind the indoctrinated hostility that is formally supplied by reputed media houses against India and Hindus. For centuries, India has witnessed aggressive religious conversions of Hindus and other indigenous groups by monotheistic, faith-based religions. The conflict, therefore, is not between people but between incompatible ideological frameworks.
When faith-based religions forcefully entered the spiritual space of practice-based religions, disruption was inevitable. In India, this disruption was further intensified by the coercive and deceptive methodologies employed by monotheistic religions. Despite allowing alien religions to take root on their soil with an inclusive and accommodating spirit, what Hindus received in return was acrimony and destruction.
Christianity’s active advent in India began with the arrival of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. The Hindu population of that time witnessed extreme brutality from the invaders, largely in the name of religion. Hindus saw their temples demolished and idols of their deities destroyed, and their women brutally molested and killed. The Portuguese invasion and its subsequent cultural conquest of Hindu society were carried out under the pretext that Hindus needed to be elevated from their supposed state of “living in sin.” What was offered to Hindu converts was a “True God” – the Christian God.
Even today, Hindus – despite constituting the majority of the country’s population, have had to fight prolonged legal battles to reclaim their spiritual places. Many states in India have witnessed alarming levels of religious conversion. States such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and several states in the Northeast have experienced significant shifts in faith through proselytization. Among the tribal population, their conversion was fuelled by their poverty and lack of proper education.
The chaos witnessed on Christmas Eve cannot be justified. However, the fear of a decline in the population adhering to Hindu traditions has become a tangible concern. Prominent Hindu organizations are often blamed for such episodes of acrimony by fringe elements. Yet, the global projection of ‘Hindu volatility’ at this scale appears to be a deliberate attempt to cast a blot on India and the Modi regime.
The ecosystem that operates with remarkable speed in amplifying such narratives has maintained a studied silence on the ongoing brutality against minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan. A similar approach was evident when India witnessed the heart-wrenching murder of a Hindu tailor in Udaipur. Frequent disruptions during Hindu and Sikh religious events in parts of Europe and other countries are also met with the same unsentimental indifference.
Why are Hindus and followers of other Indic religions so easily targeted? And why, between Christianity and Islam, at least in India, are aggressive conversion tactics accompanied by predictable hostility rarely directed at each other? Why do both prefer to culturally hijack Hindu society through conversion? One explanation lies in their mutual acceptance of each other’s methods.
Every attempt at the socio-cultural annihilation of Indic religions has been a replica of the conquest and conversion that Hindus witnessed during the medieval era. As a result, a large number of Hindus began to sense a drastic decline in their population. They believe that the future of their generations will be imperiled, culturally eroded and socially underprivileged.
The pertinent question, then, is why religions that claim a pure belief system and the most powerful God, backed by a widely propagated monopoly over truth and virtue, resort to forceful conversion. The reason behind rampant conversion by the proselytizing religions is political; more than spiritual, their growth was marked by political ambitions and cultural provocation. Writers like Tunku Varadarajan seek to legitimize a civilizational vilification of Hinduism that has persisted in India for centuries.
(Author is freelance journalist and social worker based in Kerala. The views expressed are personal opinion of the author.)
