In the 1970s, Christians in Arunachal Pradesh watched their churches burn while officials insisted nothing had happened. As a 1978 law wakes from its long sleep, the forgotten story of how a state learned to call a church a hut has never mattered more.
By Thokmay Dorjee, Research Scholar in History, SRM University Sikkim
A Christmas that never came
In October 1978 a Catholic priest in North Lakhimpur, on the Assam plains, wrote to the deputy commissioner at Ziro. He asked for permits for himself and for Bishop Joseph Mittathany, who wanted to celebrate Christmas in the villages of the green Apatani valley. On 27 November the answer came back. Because the visit was for conducting religious services, the officer wrote, no Inner Line permit could be issued.
Christmas, in other words, was the reason to keep a bishop out.
That letter survives only because a member of Parliament read it aloud in the Lok Sabha four months later. It is one small piece of a story most Indians have never heard. Between 1968 and 1979, in the hills along India’s border with Tibet and Burma, churches were burnt, granaries torched, believers beaten and stripped, and preachers expelled from their own districts. Officials, when asked, almost never denied any of it. They simply called it something else.
In 1969 the Home Ministry told Parliament that what Christians described as ten burnt churches were really three thatched huts, pulled down by villagers ‘enraged at the misbehaviour of some of the paid workers of some missionaries’. That one sentence holds the whole story. This is the history of how a state learned to look at a church and see a hut, and why, nearly fifty years on, it suddenly matters again.
A frontier built to keep missionaries out
The hills that became Arunachal Pradesh were sealed long before 1978. Since 1873 the British Inner Line had required outsiders to carry a permit to cross from the Assam plains into the hills. After independence the line quietly took on a new job. It kept missionaries out.
Verrier Elwin, Nehru’s adviser on tribal affairs, insisted this was neutrality, since Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim missionaries were barred exactly as Christians were. The political scientist Nani Bath has pointed out the catch. No other missionaries were knocking at the gate, so a rule that sounded even-handed fell on Christians alone. Nehru’s own formula was that the tribes should develop ‘along the lines of their own genius’, and he linked foreign churchmen to the Naga demand for a separate state.
In November 1963 the policy acquired teeth. A circular to every political officer declared religious propaganda of any kind undesirable. Land for religious buildings needed prior sanction, and no new centre of religious activity could open in a fresh village without permission. The circular did not ban Christianity. It did something subtler. It made every new church an unauthorised structure, existing on sufferance.
By 1970 the question had moved into the language of national security. The State Archives of Arunachal Pradesh, whose confidential files were placed online only in June 2026, list a twenty-seven-page file from that year with a revealing title, ‘National Integration-Protection of culture and religious faiths of the people of NEFA’. Its pages are still restricted. Its title alone tells us where officials had filed the faith of tribal Christians.
A faith that walked home
The persecuted were not, for the most part, foreign missionaries. They were Nyishi, Adi, Galo and Apatani villagers who had met the faith at mission schools just outside the hills, like John and Eva Firth’s school at North Lakhimpur, and carried it home in the holidays. The census of 1951 found no Christians in the territory at all. By 1971 there were only a few thousand, less than one per cent of the population.
Marbom Tasar’s story shows how it happened. In 1968 he and his friend Tai Tatu became Christians while staying with relatives at Roing. They went home to Lete, a Galo village, and prayed for neighbours sick with dysentery. When some recovered, their families joined the new faith. Within two months, Tasar later recalled, village leaders burnt the little church they had built, and the police arrested both men.
Healing mattered enormously. Traditional rites demanded the sacrifice of mithun, pigs and fowl to placate the spirits blamed for illness, and the cost could ruin a family. Conversion took a household out of that sacrificial economy, which was also how villages shared their wealth and bound themselves together. To a village council, a Christian family had not merely changed its prayers. It had stopped paying into the common life of the village. That is the hidden logic of much of what followed.
The burning years
The first wave came in 1968 and 1969. Documents gathered by the North East India Christian Council record three churches burnt in 1969, six in 1970 and seven in 1971. In 1970 one mission school was forced out of the territory, and in 1971 another was closed.
The worst came in Subansiri District between March and June 1974. The Council’s lists, shown to foreign journalists that year, are chilling in their precision. They record thirty-seven churches burnt, twenty-five homes burnt and seventy-four damaged, affecting 343 families. Fifty-three people were assaulted. Sixteen granaries were burnt and 162 destroyed or looted, and 463 head of livestock and 1,275 fowl were taken.
Read those numbers slowly. A granary in the hills holds a year’s food, and a single mithun is wealth, bride-price and standing all at once. Whoever burnt the granaries was not only punishing belief. They were trying to make Christian households impossible to sustain inside the village, so that families would either recant or leave. By October 1974 about fifty Christian leaders and their families had fled across the Inner Line to shelter at the John Firth School. Others hid in the forest and lived on roots and leaves.
The violence reached bodies too. Tasar remembers villagers stripping a Christian woman naked before the whole village to make her give up her faith. She refused. A senior leader of the People’s Party of Arunachal later told the press that a Christian woman had been stripped and hung upside down at the instigation of officials. A 1978 memorandum handed to Prime Minister Morarji Desai at Itanagar described Christians at Chulyu village tortured and tied to a post. It counted forty-six churches burnt and named one man, Tana Ekha, as killed by his persecutors.
The constant denials and admission
What makes this history unusual is not that officials lied. It is that they rarely needed to. They had a vocabulary that let them admit the facts while erasing their meaning.
In 1969 churches became huts. In 1972, when the Christian Council petitioned for protection, the territory’s chief commissioner wrote back that the attacks were not persecution but ‘reprisal in the tribal way’ against people who had divided tribal society. In 1974 the chief administrative secretary blamed mission schoolboys for beating a defender of tribal faith, and said that youths had merely burnt a few thatched houses in reply. Each time the buildings shrank, the attackers became ordinary villagers, and the victims became the cause of their own suffering.
The pattern reached its fullest form in Parliament on 27 March 1979. Opposition members read out orders from Tirap District. One, from the deputy commissioner at Khonsa, was dated 25 October 1978, the very day the president signed Arunachal’s new Freedom of Religion Act. A follow-up from the officer at Miao told villages that no temple or church other than those of indigenous faith could be built, and that any already standing must be demolished at once. P. A. Sangma, a young Christian member from Meghalaya, read out the memorandum describing burnt churches and tortured believers.
The then home minister, H. M. Patel, replied that no authority had demolished a single church. He admitted one exception, a temporary church in Tirap that he said converts had pulled down themselves on returning to their old faith. Then, almost in passing, he conceded that the territory’s policy for several years had been not to allow new churches anywhere. The opposition walked out. It is hard to find a clearer example of a state denying persecution while describing it.
Here lies the key to the whole history. The state rarely lit the fires itself. It wrote the rules that made churches illegal, shared power with village councils that treated conversion as desertion, sent officials to preside over the meetings where punishments were decided, and then reported the result as spontaneous village anger. Coercion was delegated, and responsibility was disowned.
The schools that were welcomed
The frontier was never closed to every religious school. It was closed to Christian ones.
In 1966, after correspondence between Indira Gandhi, then minister of information and broadcasting, and Swami Ranganathananda of the Ramakrishna Mission, a Mission school opened at Along. By 1969 it was the only school in the entire territory not run by the government. Along was the same town where, in December 1968, village authorities detained tribal Christian preachers and the deputy commissioner expelled them from the district. A local historian records that a Sangh organiser, S. R. Shende, helped to shape the Along school.
Then came the Vivekananda Kendra. Its founder, Eknath Ranade, had been the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s all-India head of propaganda, and the Kendra’s own biography says he first studied the Upanishads as a young man to answer Christian missionary propaganda. Invited by the territorial government, the Kendra opened seven residential schools in Arunachal in 1977, at Sher, Balijan, Jairampur, Kharsang, Oyan and in East Kameng. That was six or seven years after Christian mission schools had been forced out.
Ranade was explicit about why. Writing to Prime Minister Morarji Desai, he warned that one wrong step in Arunachal could ‘tilt the balance in favour of the separatist forces’. In the language of the time, that meant the largely Christian insurgencies of Nagaland and Mizoram. The Christians of Lete and Subansiri were farmers and schoolchildren, not rebels. Yet in Ranade’s framing a peaceful religious minority became the advance guard of secession.
One detail from 1978 captures the whole asymmetry. While officers in Tirap were ordering unauthorised churches demolished, the lieutenant governor’s office was pressing for six hundred bags of cement to complete a Buddhist temple at Kharsang, calling it a very important project. Kharsang was also where one of the new Kendra schools had opened the year before.
Protecting whose faith?
The Sangh’s work in Arunachal has always been presented as the protection of indigenous culture. The evidence suggests something more complicated, and in places more troubling.
The ideology came first. M. S. Golwalkar, the Sangh’s head from 1940 to 1973, had written in 1939 that non-Hindus could remain in India only ‘wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing’. In 1966 he listed Christians among the nation’s internal threats and urged the peoples of the north-east to call themselves Hindu, whatever their language or customs. An organisation shaped by these ideas could hardly see a tribal Christian as anything but a cultural loss.
Then came the reshaping of Donyi-Polo, the sun and moon faith of the Adi and related peoples. The movement to organise it began in 1968 among Adi intellectuals led by Talom Rukbo, himself a government cultural officer. It was a genuine response to cultural loss. As it grew, prayer halls, printed hymnals and painted images of deities appeared, and the Sangh network supported each step. The Kendra’s institute in Guwahati published Rukbo’s writings, the Sangh’s tribal welfare wing became the Arunachal Vikas Parishad in 1993 with Rukbo as its first president, and many new rituals borrowed incense, candles and bells.
Arunachali voices have objected. The anthropologist Sarit Kumar Chaudhuri concluded that Hindu norms were imposed on the revival, consciously or in disguise. Rukbo’s close friend Kaling Borang recalled warning him that people were saying the movement was making Adi society Hindu. A Nyishi revivalist leader called the Hindu label a design of external forces and a threat to tribal identity. Meanwhile a Sangh functionary in the state denied any intention to Hinduise the faith. Where the state once disowned coercion, the Sangh now disowns appropriation.
Fairness demands its limits too. No source ties Sangh or Kendra workers to the burnings of the 1970s. The Kendra schools educated thousands of children in places the state neglected, and their teachers worked in real hardship. Donyi-Polo belongs to its own believers, many of whom resent being treated as anyone’s instrument. The charge is narrower and more serious. The Sangh network supplied the ideas that made Christians foreign, accepted from the state a freedom it denied to churches, and remade the very faith it claimed to defend.
The law wakes up
The Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 bans conversion by force, fraud or inducement, with penalties of up to two years in prison and a fine of ten thousand rupees. Its most striking feature is a list. It names the faiths it protects as ‘indigenous’, including Donyi-Polo, and leaves Christianity off. For forty-six years it slept, because no government framed the rules needed to enforce it. Christians formed the Arunachal Christian Forum in 1979 largely to keep it that way.
Then, in 2024, a public interest petition filed by the advocate Tambo Tamin led the Gauhati High Court to order the state to finalise the rules within six months. The state told the court on 30 September 2024 that draft rules had been framed. Christians answered with a hunger strike in early 2025 and with rallies and sit-ins across the state. A high-powered committee, whose members included Christian, indigenous-faith and Hindu organisations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Vikas Parishad, submitted its recommendations on 8 June 2026. Days earlier the Christian Forum had issued a fifteen-day ultimatum demanding that the process stop.
Chief Minister Pema Khandu insists the Act protects indigenous culture and targets no religion. Christians, more than thirty per cent of the population at the 2011 census, hear an older echo. The demand first made by the territory’s Pradesh Council in 1972, that a convert be treated as having deserted the tribe and lose its benefits, has resurfaced on placards at indigenous-faith rallies. Reconversion ceremonies have been reported among Nyishi families since 2015. As far as public reports show, the rules had still not been notified by the late summer of 2026.
What the archive still hides?
Much of this story still sits behind a lock. I was unable to get permission to access most of these files. The confidential file of 1970 on protecting religious faiths, the senior officers’ conference papers of 1972 to 1975, the district records of Subansiri and Tirap, and the Home Ministry’s papers on the Christian petitions have never been opened by historians. Until they are, the fullest record of the persecution remains the one its victims compiled themselves, the careful lists of burnt churches, granaries and animals that they sent to prime ministers who did not reply.
For Catholics and other Christians in India, the lesson is uncomfortable but important. Persecution does not always arrive with mobs and slogans. In Arunachal it arrived through permit rules, building regulations and the quiet authority of village councils, and it was written up afterwards as custom. That is why the present debate over rules for a 1978 law is not a technical matter. A law that protects one community’s faith by naming it, and leaves another’s unnamed, can become an instrument of exclusion long after the people who wrote it are gone.
There is a hopeful thread too. The Christians of Arunachal did not answer violence with violence. They wrote memoranda, petitioned the Supreme Court, rebuilt their churches and kept faith in the Constitution. Their documents, kept and handed on, are the reason this history can be told at all. Against a grammar of denial, the most powerful reply is still the patient and truthful record.
Sources
1. Lok Sabha Debates, written answers, 16 May 1969, ‘Reported burning of churches in NEFA’. eparlib.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/2920702/1/04_VII_16-05-1969_p91_p92_u9966.pdf
2. Lok Sabha Debates, 27 March 1979, calling attention on the demolition of churches in Arunachal Pradesh. eparlib.sansad.in/bitstream/123456789/837890/1/06_VII_27-03-1979_p124_p137_PII.pdf
3. ‘North East India. Combating the converts’, Christianity Today, January 1975. www.christianitytoday.com/1975/01/north-east-india-combating-converts/
4. ‘Indian Christians stopped an anticonversion law. Until now’, Christianity Today, 17 February 2025. www.christianitytoday.com/2025/02/arunachal-pradesh-anticonversion-law-christianity-hinduism/
5. Nani Bath, ‘Understanding religious policy of Arunachal Pradesh’, Dialogue, 7/3 (2006). www.asthabharati.org/Dia_Jan06/Nani.htm
6. State Archives of Arunachal Pradesh, file RES-47/70, ‘National Integration-Protection of culture and religious faiths of the people of NEFA’, 1970. www.statearchivesarunachalpradesh.com/xmlui/handle/123456789/6687
7. Angana Chakrabarti, ‘Preach’, FiftyTwo, 18 March 2023. fiftytwo.in/story/preach/
8. Ngayir Taji, ‘RSS in Arunachal. The changing contours’, Arunachal Times, 27 September 2025. https://archive.arunachaltimes.in/index.php/2025/09/27/rss-in-arunachal-the-changing-contours/
9. Sarit Kumar Chaudhuri, ‘The institutionalization of tribal religion’, Asian Ethnology, 72/2 (2013), 259–77. https://asianethnology.org/article/149718-the-institutionalization-of-tribal-religion-recasting-the-donyi-polo-movement-in-arunachal-pradesh/attachment/313629.pdf
10. M. R. Lalu, ‘Vivekananda Kendra. Nurturing the roots’, Organiser, 9 January 2018. organiser.org/2018/01/09/119904/bharat/vivekananda-kendra-nurturing-the-roots/
11. ‘Eknathji’s short biography’, eknathji.org. www.eknathji.org/2026/01/eknathjis-short-biography.html
12. Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalayas Arunachal Pradesh Trust, institutional profile. targetstudy.com/institutions/groups/vivekananda-kendra-vidyalaya-arunachal-pradesh-trust/
13. Bengia Ajum, report on the high-powered committee on the APFRA rules, Arunachal Times, November 2024.
14. ‘Christians concerned as Arunachal Pradesh moves to implement anti-conversion law’, Catholic Connect, 8 January 2025. catholicconnect.in/news/christians-concerned-as-arunachal-pradesh-moves-to-implement-anti-conversion-law
15. ‘Arunachal. High-powered committee submits APFRA rules recommendations’, United News of India, 8 June 2026. uniindia.com/arunachal-high-powered-committee-submits-apfra-rules-recommendations-after-stakeholder-consultations/east/news/3870007.html
16. ‘Arunachal Christian Forum gives 15-day ultimatum’, New Indian Express, 3 June 2026, as reproduced by New Age Islam. www.newageislam.com/islamic-world-news/arunachal-christian-forum-gives-ultimatum-freedom-religion-act/d/140273
17. M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, 1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore, 1966)
—————————————————-
Thokmay Dorjee is a research scholar in history focussing on the Tibetan Cultural Sphere. This article draws on his research into religion and the state on India’s north-eastern frontier.