A Miracle on This Christmas Day!

Miracles in Christianity are deeply believed and also globally contested beliefs. In my lifetime, I saw a strange miracle on Christmas Day 2025 in India. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its sister organisations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were born and brought up opposing Christianity. Their father theoretician Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva was meant to drive out Christianity and Islam from, what he calls, father land, India.

I have seen several attacks on Christianity from my student days in the early 1970s by members of the same school of thought. The Christians would go on organising candlelight processions in city after city. The Congress or the other coalitional regimes that ruled India from 1947 to 1999 could not stop such attacks because of the fear of allegations of collusion with a foreign religion. The idea that India was/is Hindu and other religions should have equal rights, was not part of the Hindutva ideology and campaign.

In 2014, the RSS-BJP came to power with a silent propaganda that the Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh’s 10 year- rule handed over the nation to Christian values. Their rights-based policy decisions were seen as part of Christian values. Sonia Gandhi was openly attacked as an Italian Christian who had captured India. But we have not seen Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh visiting any Cathedral on any Christmas Day, praying to Jesus with folded hands.

From Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, no Prime Minister visited a Cathedral on Christmas Day and sang carols with a book of songs in hand.

Prime Minister Narendra Damodar Das Modi did that on this Christmas Day in New Delhi. He sat along with Christian devotees on a bench in the Delhi Cathedral of Redemption. He held the book of songs in his hands along with the others, as if he was asking for redemption. The idea of seeking redemption is central to Christian belief. Not that Modi and the Prime Minister’s Office do not know the name of the cathedral. They know that and he chose, perhaps, by himself to go to the Cathedral of Redemption.   

Two bishops, under the leadership of Paul Swarup, lead the prayers in English—not in Hindi or Sanskrit. PM Modi stood with folded hands.

Is it not surprising that PM Modi did this amidst attacks on Christmas celebrations across the country by Right-wing forces? He did not condemn them, but like a Christian himself, he prayed in the church.  

Read Also: India 2025: Plight of Christian Minority

Some time ago, in a podcast discussion, when the interviewer asked Modi what he would do after he moved out of this comfort zone (the PM’s office), he said he would go and spend time in a temple doing pooja. In his biography, it is said that he ran away from home after his school education to become a Hindu monk. But he was not welcome by the saints and poojaris in many spiritual places, perhaps, because he was not a Brahmin. However, he landed up in the RSS office and rose to become a controversial leader in fighting against Muslim culture. Though Modi did not speak in harsh language against Christian culture, he treated it as foreign religion, no doubt.

His frequent visits to different Hindu temples in the country are well known. 

During his 11-year rule now, most Christian Non-Governmental Organisations have lost their FCRA (Foreign Currency regulation Act) permissions to get funds from outside India. Even churches have lost the scope to get financial assistance from other Christian countries. Thousands of Christian and non-Christian people have lost jobs because of his government’s anti-Christian policies.

Many Christian tourists were deported to their own countries from airports with a view that many such people have been coming to India to convert people from Hinduism to Christianity. Under the PM's nose, the Uttar Pradesh government has not declared this Christmas as holiday for school children of the state.

Modi has repeatedly said that English education in India was a colonial contribution. His government took a strong stand against English and now makes laws only in Hindi. His government is sanctioning huge amounts of money to Sanskrit language education that has no use value in India or abroad.

But suddenly the PM in his official capacity attends a prayer meeting in the cathedral in English language. Isn't that a miracle?

From Nehru to Manmohan Singh, no Prime Minister attended a Christmas prayer meeting, singing carols, but Modi did.

Imagine if Rahul Gandhi, as Leader of Opposition, were to do this? What would have been the response of the BJP-RSS leaders and activists across the country? He would have been asked to go to Italy or become a bishop in the Holy See State. Since Modi did this, there is no word about it.

Is it also not a miracle that Modi has such a grip on the party and the government? There is a feeling that he functions like the Pope in the Vatican.

Why did PM Modi do this? Is it because he wants to send a message to the Christian West that his government is not against Christianity as a religion in the context of the Pan-Christian world that sees India 'as a country of concern’ for Christian persecution. The conservative Christian forces in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and so on, are also responding to Indians living in those countries in a communal manner.

In the situation of growing communal calculations of nations after this Christmas, does Modi want to send a message that India will follow the secular path, as institutionalised by the founding fathers and mothers of our Constitution? Because, of late, from the RSS-BJP ranks, the demand for removal of the word ‘secular’ from the Preamble of the Constitution is increasing.  Modi’s act certainly seemed to send a message to Western secular democracies, which, in terms of religion, are Christian nations, that India will not de-secularise itself. If that is the intention, it is good for the nation.

Does his prayer in the Cathedral of Redemption lead to stopping persecutions and change the policy of thumb rule on Christian socio-economic and spiritual life. Let us hope so.

The writer is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is the ‘Shudra Rebellion’. The views are personal.