Fact-finding team reports rising violence, discrimination, and police complicity targeting Christians in Odisha, raising alarm over rights.
Newsroom (07/05/2026 Gaudium Press ) A fact-finding delegation of prominent activists and journalists has reported a sharp escalation in violence and systemic discrimination against Christians in India’s eastern state of Odisha, warning of what it described as a “complete breakdown” of constitutional protections for the minority community.
The team, convened under the People’s Tribunal, visited 12 districts earlier this month and interviewed approximately 300 Christians. Their testimonies detailed a pattern of physical assaults, social boycotts, forced displacement, and alleged police intimidation. In a letter dated May 6 to Odisha’s chief secretary, the state’s top civil servant, the delegation described the findings as “extremely harrowing and worrying.”
The delegation included veteran journalist and activist John Dayal, political commentator Aakar Patel, activist Vidya Dinker, and author and human rights advocate Harsh Mander. Drawing on field interviews, the group documented what it said were widespread and coordinated forms of persecution.
“The fact-finding team has documented patterns of violence across the state: physical attacks on churches, pastors and priests, forced disruption of prayer meetings, false charges of unlawful religious conversion against clergy, and their confinement in police stations and jails,” Dayal said on May 6.
He further alleged that law enforcement agencies in several instances acted in concert with Hindu nationalist groups. According to Dayal, Christians were pressured into renouncing their faith through coercive “compromise agreements.”
“In many cases, police joined Hindutva organizations to force them [Christians] to sign ‘compromise agreements’ in which they undertake to give up their faith and collective worship,” he said.
The report accuses state authorities—including police, civil administrators, elected representatives, and ministers—of failing to protect victims or uphold the rule of law. “Taken together, there is a complete breakdown in the constitutional machinery of the state in relation to its Christian minorities,” the letter stated.
Particularly affected, the report noted, are Christians from Dalit and indigenous tribal communities, who face repeated violations of their rights to religious freedom, residence, and livelihood. The delegation described organized campaigns of social and economic exclusion in multiple districts.
According to testimonies collected, Christians have been ostracized from village life, denied employment opportunities, and in some cases forcibly expelled from their homes. The report also alleges that non-Christians who continued to trade with, employ, or shelter Christians faced fines imposed by local groups enforcing informal boycotts.
Accounts of violence included severe physical abuse. “Sometimes, this takes the form of tying them to a tree and beating them or putting them in sacks and physically assaulting them, along with a few instances of sexual assault and violence and attempts to burn them alive,” Dayal said.
The findings come against the backdrop of a long history of anti-Christian violence in Odisha. In 2008, coordinated attacks by extremist Hindu mobs in Kandhamal district left hundreds of Christians dead and an estimated 75,000 displaced. More than 600 villages were destroyed, and hundreds of churches were attacked. Earlier, in 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were burned alive in Keonjhar district in a case that drew international condemnation.
Christian rights groups now warn that such violence has intensified since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party formed the state government in June 2024, raising fresh concerns about the safety and rights of minority communities in the region.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from UCA News
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