WhatsApp vigilantes in India are converting Christians by force

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 marginalized 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 kilometers (900 miles) 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 went into remission.

By the time the cancer returned and took Jaldhar’s mother this past May, India was a different country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took office the same year the Kashyaps converted, had transformed the nation, emboldening the far right, and more members of Hindu nationalist groups were becoming lawmakers. That transformation, combined with expanded internet access, cheap data, and the organizing power of WhatsApp, supercharged attacks against religious minorities.

Rest of World has documented in depth how such attacks have targeted Christians in Bastar — where a vigilante mob approached Jaldhar’s house. The mob had been coordinated on WhatsApp and had one goal: to prevent the Kashyap family from burying their matriarch, Radhibai, unless they converted to Hinduism.

Name: Radhibai Kashyap.
Age: 50.
Religion: Christianity.
Cause of death: Cancer.
Location: Badaparakot village.

The morning after Radhibai’s death, Ghasiram Baghel, who lives in a quiet hut in the nearby village of Palwa, received a WhatsApp message with the above details. A poor farmer and day laborer, the 38-year-old Baghel sprung into action.

Baghel is a foot soldier with Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organization founded in 1964 to curb ideologies it labeled as alien to India — primarily Islam, Christianity, and communism. Once relegated to the margins of power, the VHP is closely linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and has a formidable presence across the country. Baghel uses WhatsApp to recruit for and manage a VHP informant network in about 50 villages. In an interview in June, he told Rest of World he’d recently used WhatsApp to coordinate the destruction of a building site for a new church — an incident confirmed by a VHP leader, interviews with a local priest and pastor, and a photo of the wreckage. Rallying supporters against Christians, Baghel said, “I feel like I am working in the national interest.”

He also used WhatsApp to organize the mob against Jaldhar Kashyap. When Baghel learned that the funeral was set for later that day, he alerted VHP leaders in the district center of Jagdalpur, 20 kilometers away, over WhatsApp. Meanwhile, he used the app to mobilize volunteers to head to Jaldhar’s house. People who adopt a religion other than Hinduism in one of Bastar’s villages, Baghel said, “have no right to live in that village.”

Christians make up just 2% of Chhattisgarh’s population, but there are concentrated pockets of them in the Bastar region. In recent years, the VHP has used funerals as a chance to target them for conversion. In India, the deceased are typically brought home from the hospital for families to bid final goodbyes before being buried or cremated the next day. Hindus generally opt for cremation, believing that it helps to free the soul, and Christians tend to bury their dead. Mobs like the one Baghel organized attempt to reach Christian families before the funeral can begin and prevent the burial until they convert.

WhatsApp’s speed of communication and mobilizing power makes it an essential tool for the VHP’s efforts. “Christians died in villages earlier, too, but we got to know of it two or three days after the incident,” Hari Sahu, a VHP leader in Jagdalpur, told Rest of World . “Even if we found out sooner, it took a couple of days and a lot of work to mobilize people. But with WhatsApp, what took us three days now takes us less than an hour.”

In Bastar, the VHP has thousands of members divided into WhatsApp groups covering about 50 villages and then into smaller, more local subgroups. Each group and subgroup is managed by a director like Baghel, who filters information up the chain of command and carries out directives traveling down it. That way, VHP can monitor citizens and rapidly execute initiatives across a region of 38,000 square kilometers. The mobs who arrive at the doorstep of a bereaved Christian family are often a mix of people affiliated with the VHP and other locals they’ve whipped up.

The VHP isn’t the only organization to leverage WhatsApp’s power in India, which is the platform’s largest global market. It entered the country in 2010, and by some accounts now has more than 500 million active users there. In India, WhatsApp is synonymous with the internet’s rapid growth, and used for everything from staying in touch with relatives and sending money to reading the news. Its power to influence everything from national elections to small business has made it a primary communication tool.

WhatsApp has also been essential to the BJP and Modi’s political dominance. The party relies on the platform to mobilize voters and disseminate propaganda and disinformation. Reporting from India, meanwhile, has laid out how Hindu nationalist groups, including the VHP, use WhatsApp to incite, coordinate, and publicize attacks against religious minorities: destroying Muslim and Christian holy sites; beating and lynching Muslims under the pretext of saving cows, which are considered sacred by dominant-caste Hindus; opposing marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men.

Interviews with Christians and Hindu nationalists in Bastar offer a unique window into the mechanics of how such campaigns function. Since 2022, according to local VHP officials, hundreds of Christian families in Bastar have been converted, most of them through funeral attacks coordinated on WhatsApp.

His mother had been dead less than 24 hours. A distraught Jaldhar sat beside her body in the house while his father, Budru, made calls to arrange the funeral. A Christian priest had to be summoned. A rectangular grave awaited in the village cemetery.

Then Jaldhar stepped outside to see more than 50 people marching toward his hut. Some were familiar faces from the village, while others were strangers. A few carried sticks. They stopped at the narrow entrance in the courtyard’s fence, blocking the way to the cemetery.

As Budru joined his son in the courtyard, a village elder emerged from the mob and told the pair what it would take for them to access the grave site.

“We were given an ultimatum,” Jaldhar recalled, holding back tears. “If we wanted to carry out her funeral in the village, we had to abandon Christianity.”

Jaldhar and his father were also told that if they didn’t convert, they’d be forced into a life of isolation and persecution. No one in the village would buy from or sell to them. “We were told we won’t be allowed to enter our own farmland,” Jaldhar said. “I couldn’t even speak.”

And so he and Budru sat cross-legged in their dirt courtyard for their conversion ceremony. They kept their heads down as members of the crowd encircled them, leering. A Hindu priest in a white robe used a leaf to sprinkle water from a brass pot over the father and son, chanting mantras. Soon, the stain of Christianity was erased. The village graveyard was once again open to them.

The two men carried Radhibai, wrapped in a white cloth, from the courtyard on their shoulders. The crowd followed them, offering condolences.

Ravi Brahmachari was 20 years old when VHP sent him to Bastar in 1992 to work exclusively on conversions. Now the secretary of the organization in the region, he wore his dark hair in a ponytail and a thick beard when Rest of World met him at a restaurant in Jagdalpur in April. He’d arrived in a white robe in the back of a white SUV and was accompanied by five stony-looking subordinates. His phone chimed constantly with updates on WhatsApp.

Initially, Brahmachari found Bastar a difficult assignment. The region has been in an armed conflict between Maoist guerillas and the government since the early 1980s, claiming thousands of lives. State security forces can sometimes be seen searching for landmines along winding roads carved through teak and bamboo trees.

The VHP’s pitch to Bastar residents was straightforward. Around a third of Chhattisgarh’s population comes from Indigenous tribes, and the proportion is higher in the Bastar region. They do not practice organized religion and have long been estranged from the Indian state. Most live in abject poverty with high rates of illiteracy. The VHP wants these people to identify as Hindus. It also offers membership in an organization that can provide a sense of power and the prospect of political and social advancement.

Baghel — the villager who coordinated the mob against the Kashyaps — is from a marginalized tribal community like their own. Since joining the VHP, he told Rest of World , “people in my village treat me with respect.”

In a phone interview, Vinod Bansal, national spokesperson for the VHP, denied that the organization is forcibly converting or threatening Christians — and claimed that conversions to Christianity were the real problem. “We believe that if someone was cheated and converted to Christianity, they are inspired to convert more people,” he said. “This is very dangerous.” Speaking matter-of-factly, he added, “We need to put a full stop to this business of conversion to Christianity.” Forced conversions and violence against India’s Christians and Muslims, he said, “happen because the society is waking up and standing up to the manner in which jihadis and Christian missionaries are looting our people.”

During his early years in Bastar, Brahmachari and his colleagues traveled by bicycle through narrow, rocky roads. Few homes had landlines. They met people in person and organized public gatherings, he said.

In 2019, Modi won a second term in what was dubbed “ the WhatsApp election ,” with the BJP using the app to mobilize supporters around the country. By 2021, according to one industry group, rural internet users in India outnumbered those in urban areas. Bastar was part of the trend, and the VHP began providing some members with smartphones — “a basic model of Vivo or Samsung, where they could use WhatsApp,” Brahmachari said.

Sitting in the restaurant with Rest of World , he opened the app on his phone, revealing dozens of groups, some with display images of Hindu gods. His 25 main groups had a total of more than 20,000 people. “We hold meetings in villages and are on the lookout for young people who can join our outfit,” Brahmachari said. “If we think someone is useful, we note down their number.”

According to Brahmachari, members often take videos of forced conversions and share them over WhatsApp as well as Facebook, which is also widely used in India. A video circulated on WhatsApp can go viral across Bastar in an hour, he said. “If it is a controversial video, the police request us to take it down and we do that,” he added. But by that point, he said, the videos have already been viewed and liked many times.

Maniram Mandavi, a 25-year-old VHP member in Bastar, recalled seeing a video of a forced conversion in 2022. The supportive response it received on WhatsApp, he said, helped inspire him to participate in forced conversions himself. He showed Rest of World several videos of these that he said he’d circulated on the platform. “We always take videos of our activities,” he said.

On a scorching afternoon in April, Brahmachari told Rest of World that he’d received word over WhatsApp of a new Christian death — and a potential burial. VHP members were already on the scene, but the family was resisting a forced conversion, and police had intervened.

Rest of World arrived 30 minutes later, and witnessed a rectangular white box lying abandoned in a patch of forest beneath a tree. A police officer standing nearby said he was guarding a corpse. About 200 meters away, other officers managed a crowd of nervous residents. According to one resident, the family of the woman who’d died had declared that if they couldn’t hold a Christian funeral, there wouldn’t be a burial at all.

The family was out of sight in their hut across the street, along with the VHP members pressuring them into a conversion.

One of the officers guarding the body appeared frustrated. “This has become very regular,” he said.

The family eventually agreed to convert, according to Brahmachari.

Forced conversions are illegal in Chhattisgarh. “But the laws are not applied equally for Hindus and Christians,” said Degree Prasad Chouhan, president of the state chapter of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a human rights organization.

Chouhan noted that the region’s police report to the state government, where the BJP is currently in power. But the situation was hardly better when the opposition Congress party ran the state from 2018 to 2023, he said, because of the VHP’s local influence: “They are scared to come across as anti-Hindu by targeting the VHP members.”

The state government did not respond to a request for comment.

Chouhan added that there was little other recourse to the problem. The Central Bureau of Investigation — India’s equivalent to the FBI — could technically investigate forced conversions, but such probes must be initiated at the request of state authorities or the courts. Chouhan said he was not aware of any CBI investigations into forced conversions in Chhattisgarh. The CBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview, Shalabh Sinha, Bastar’s superintendent of police, said his force focused on trying to mediate between the VHP and Christian families. “We aim to build consensus between both sides,” he said, adding that the police were focused on maintaining law and order. “In some cases, we get them to agree to a burial on private land, or we have to convince the Christian family to go to the city for their funeral. It is a tricky situation because even if we facilitate the funeral in the village, we run the risk of escalating tensions. The majority can target the minority after we leave.”

“The tribal communities have peacefully coexisted here for generations,” he said. “But lately, they have started saying we will only let people with our beliefs access the graveyards. It started from one or two places and caught on. It has been a challenge for us.”

Bastar police have made arrests for communal violence against Christians, Sinha said. This includes incidents, he added, in which forced conversions have been alleged — but in such cases the arrests were for other crimes like assault and destruction of property. He said many of the cases are still pending and none had yet resulted in convictions.

Brahmachari claimed that no VHP members have been convicted over forced conversions in Bastar. If the group suspects that police may intervene to prevent a planned attack — by detaining members or arriving at the scene in advance — it makes sure to keep all communications limited to WhatsApp, added Hari Sahu, the VHP official in Jagdalpur. “Our mobile phones are sometimes traced,” Sahu said. “But the WhatsApp calls are encrypted.”

A spokesperson at WhatsApp declined to comment, saying they would need to receive examples of specific messages or videos that had been shared on the platform in order to investigate. The platform’s policies prohibit its use to carry out crimes or incite hate. According to a recent transparency report from WhatsApp, it banned over 8 million accounts in India in the month of August alone. Yet the platform is also engaged in a legal battle with the Indian government over rules passed in 2021 that require social media companies like WhatsApp to maintain message traceability. WhatsApp has said this would force it to break end-to-end encryption and violate user privacy — and civil liberties advocates in India worry it could be used to crack down on government critics. WhatsApp has threatened to leave India if forced to comply with the traceability rule.

Prateek Waghre, executive director at Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian digital rights organization, cautioned that while WhatsApp can track which members of the VHP are using its platform, “there is no ground for them to intervene unless it is coupled with a formal state action.” And while WhatsApp can block individual accounts for violating its terms of service, “none of it will stick, because you can get a new number and create another group,” he said. “This is where the state should come in. There are, of course, complications with that in the Indian context because the state doesn’t do its job.”

Shobharam Kashyap resisted a forced conversion when a relative died of old age in June 2023.

A 45-year-old farmer, Shobharam’s extended family had converted to Christianity 25 years earlier when his young son was suffering from fits and other health problems. (He is of no relation to Jaldhar and Budru Kashyap; the last name is common in the region.)

“We treated him at a government hospital, but we needed support from the community,” Shobharam told Rest of World . “That’s when my uncle suggested I accept Christianity. I have been regularly attending church since then.”

Shobharam believed that his faith had helped him through tough times, and decided to stand up to the VHP-incited mob that appeared outside his older sister’s house, where the body of her mother-in-law awaited burial. The family wanted to lay her to rest in the graveyard of the village where they’d lived for generations, but were rebuked by members of the crowd. Then they offered to bury her on private land, but were told by the crowd that this would defile the soil. Eventually, the police intervened with a solution: a funeral at a Christian cemetery 30 kilometers away in Jagdalpur, which took place that evening.

The family’s ordeal, though, was just beginning.

The mob had been organized on WhatsApp, according to Gulshan Kumar, the VHP administrator of the relevant block of villages in its network on the platform. (One of his WhatsApp groups is called “Freedom by Conversion,” and he said the area’s VHP operation is especially potent.) He said that the VHP typically threatens to socially and economically isolate families who resist forced conversions — a tactic confirmed by other members of the group. “If people don’t listen, it gets physical,” Kumar said. After the funeral — either because they were incensed at Shobharam or feared retribution if they didn’t join in — residents carried out a boycott of the family, forcing them to leave the village even to buy groceries.

The harassment campaign included destroying some of the family’s crops and stealing others, Shobharam said, causing them a financial loss equivalent to their annual income. Then, as Shobharam prepared to plant rice one morning this past June, he said, another mob numbering nearly 100 people arrived and beat him with sticks and the blunt end of an ax.

Police told Rest of World the assault was borne of a land conflict, but Shobharam believes it was more payback for his resistance to conversion. The same day, a separate group of women attacked his sister, Puso Mandavi, while she was out in the fields. (Kumar, the VHP administrator, said the organization wasn’t involved in these assaults but that it supported the villagers’ boycott.) In total, nine members of the family were admitted to the hospital with injuries. Shobharam and Mandavi have since moved to a relative’s home in another village.

When Shobharam met Rest of World in his relative’s home, he sat on a cot with his right leg in a white cast. “We miss our home and farm,” Mandavi said. “But we are terrified to return. We received no protection from the police. They even made videos of us getting beaten up, and circulated them on WhatsApp. It is humiliating.”

Ratnesh Benjamin, vice president of the Chhattisgarh Christian Forum, has built his own network of several thousand people spread over various groups on WhatsApp. It helps him know to alert the police when tribal Christians are targeted by Hindu extremists, and get himself and other activists to the scene.

During the three days Rest of World traveled with him in June, his WhatsApp buzzed often with disturbing developments from around Bastar. He received a gruesome picture of a young Christian woman who was hacked to death by her Hindu relatives because of her faith. He received word that around a dozen Christians were assaulted for participating in a rally in Jagdalpur that called for an end to violence against tribal Christians. He heard that a man had been prevented from burying his mother in a village cemetery, forcing him to find a spot for her on private land.

“I have around 2,000 pastors on my WhatsApp in various groups,” Benjamin said. “They update me whenever something goes wrong. If it’s a major issue, I spend my own money and travel to the spot. But the problem is that my contacts are a fraction of the network of the Hindu groups. So we end up figuring out what to do after an incident. I am unable to prevent most of the attacks.”

One village that stands out for a lack of incidents, Benjamin said, is called Dasapal, where a church sits across the street from a Hindu temple. That’s because, in the absence of state protection, locals have decided to ensure peace for their Christian neighbors.

“We visit each other’s place of worship, and the entire village pools in money for a religious festival regardless of the faith,” Gopi Singh Thakur, a Hindu member of the village council, told Rest of World , adding that Dasapal also has a common graveyard where people of both faiths join together for funerals. “We don’t subscribe to the ideology that has divided not just villages but also families.”

For many of Bastar’s Christians, however, converting is the only way to find peace.

After Jaldhar Kashyap buried his mother, he offered a pair of chickens to his village temple as an apology for his 10-year absence. The chickens were made into a feast for the community. He has an amicable relationship with all of his neighbors now, gets invited to every village function, and is assured of support in emergencies. But this harmony has come at the cost his conversion brought to his conscience. “I can’t turn back now,” he said in his courtyard, wiping away tears. “I did what I had to do.” ▰

Parth MN is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, India.