Kerala vs Chhattisgarh: Nun arrests expose BJP's double standards on Christian Minorities

Indian Express

5 days ago

By Dayal Paleri and Kunal Shahdeo
The arrest of two Catholic nuns hailing from Kerala in BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh on July 25 — on charges of forcible conversion and human trafficking — has triggered a fresh political uproar. A sessions court in Chhattisgarh denied them bail and referred the matter to an NIA court. While Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai defended the arrest as a 'matter concerning the safety of our daughters,' various Opposition parties and civil society groups condemned it as an instance of 'systematic persecution' against Christian minorities.
While the Bajrang Dal was allegedly involved in mobbing the nuns at Durg railway station prior to the arrest, the incident has created a clear political dilemma for the BJP unit in Kerala. The state leadership denounced the arrest and distanced itself from the Chhattisgarh CM and the Bajrang Dal.
At first glance, the Kerala BJP's response might appear as a contradiction, an instance of political doublespeak aimed at salvaging the party's outreach to the Christian vote bank in the state. But there are two significantly deeper dynamics that the instance reveals. First, the episode threatens to expose the limits of the BJP's project of political inclusion of Christians in Kerala and the larger fragility of their minority outreach, especially at a time when the party under the new state president is attempting to rebrand itself around the language of development, inclusion, and moderation.
Secondly, and more importantly, the seemingly contradictory stances taken by the BJP units in Kerala and Chhattisgarh vis-à-vis the rights of Christian minorities may actually reflect a deeper coherence, tied less to religion than to the caste and class location of the Christian community in the respective regions. In other words, the BJP's friendliness towards Christians in Kerala and hostility and anxiety over 'conversion' to Christianity in Chhattisgarh cannot be explained through 'hypocrisy', but should be understood with respect to the differential social profiles of Christians in both places.
The BJP in Kerala has initiated a serious effort at social engineering to overcome its long-standing electoral marginality. This marginality is shaped by the state's significant religious minority population and the strong social base of the Communist and Congress parties among both upper- and backward-caste Hindus. One part of the BJP's strategy seems to be expanding its support beyond the upper castes and making political inroads into the Christian population, especially the Syrian Christians, who have shown signs of drifting away from their historical loyalty to the Congress.
Some of the BJP's recent political campaigns, including the one around 'love jihad', have found resonance among the key leadership of the Syrian Church. The open endorsement from certain Church leaders and the party's victory in the Thrissur Lok Sabha seat, which has a large Christian population, could be seen as early markers of success. Under the leadership of Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the party has carried out organisational changes, with a noticeable increase in Christian representation at local and district levels. Public gestures such as the Sneha Yatra, where BJP leaders visited Christian homes during Easter and Christmas, were seen as instances of successful outreach.
However, recent developments have revealed visible tensions that suggest the limits of this strategy. The BJP's failure to keep its promise of providing land titles to Christians and resolving the Munampam dispute has cast a shadow over its Christian appeal. Around the same time, Organiser published an article accusing the Church of land encroachment. More radical affiliates of the Sangh, such as the Hindu Aikya Vedi, continue to raise similar anti-Christian concerns in public, highlighting the internal dissonance regarding minority inclusion within the larger Hindu nationalist camp. These developments indicate that the BJP's attempt to include Christians remains constrained by ideological fault lines and unresolved dilemmas.
It is in this context that the arrest of the nuns deepens the Kerala BJP's minority dilemma. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India issued a strong statement criticising the arrest. Deepika, the mouthpiece of the Church, published a sharp editorial condemning the episode as an 'arrest of the Constitution.'
In Kerala, Christians, particularly the Syrian Catholic, occupy an upper-caste, economically entrenched position, with deep institutional roots in education, healthcare, and civil society and distinguish themselves from other Christians, including lower-caste groups within the state and communities in other parts of the country. Crucially, they pose no threat of ongoing conversion, nor do they disrupt the prevailing social order. Their political inclusion, therefore, generates minimal ideological friction within the Hindu nationalist framework and is instead read as a form of elite coalition-building with an electorally useful minority.
The dynamics in Chhattisgarh present a stark contrast. Here, Christianity is largely practiced by Adivasi communities, and conversion is viewed not merely as a matter of faith but as a disruption of social order, challenging caste dominance, state control, and the Sangh Parivar's ongoing project of culturally absorbing tribal populations into the Hindu fold. In this context, Christianity is often interpreted as a form of social dissent, a way for Adivasi communities to assert dignity, seek rights, and resist assimilation. Consequently, even routine acts of Christian charity or community engagement are swiftly criminalised, often framed as 'forced and fraudulent conversions' or violations of public order. The arrest of the nuns, then, is not an exception but a reflection of this entrenched logic of suspicion and control.
What may appear, then, as hypocrisy is in fact a regionally calibrated ideological posture. The BJP's relationship with Christianity is not defined by theological opposition, but by whether the presence of Christians reinforces or disrupts dominant caste and class arrangements. Where Christians are institutionally powerful and caste-aligned, they are accommodated; where they are subaltern and assertive, they are policed.
The arrest of the nuns thus reveals more than just the party's ambivalence toward minorities; it lays bare the fragile architecture of its minority outreach, held together by uneven calculations of caste, geography, and political expediency. What we see in the contrast between Kerala and Chhattisgarh is not an exception to the rule but a blueprint of conditional inclusion, shaped by ideological constraints that remain central to the Hindu nationalist project.
Paleri is an assistant professor of social sciences at NLSIU, Bengaluru. Shahdeo is an academic fellow at NLSIU, Bengaluru