Christianity in Arunachal Pradesh

Christianity is the largest religion in the Northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders China, Bhutan and Myanmar. According to the 2011 Census of India, Christians numbered 418,732 and constituted 30.26 per cent of the state's population, the single largest religious community ahead of Hinduism (about 29 per cent) and the indigenous Donyi-Polo and related faiths recorded under "Other Religions and Persuasions" (about 26 per cent), with Buddhism accounting for most of the remainder. Christianity is therefore the leading faith of the state by a plurality rather than an absolute majority, a distinction that lies at the heart of the long-running controversy over the state's anti-conversion law.

Arunachal Pradesh (red) within India. The eastern Himalayan state recorded one of the fastest proportional rises in Christian population of any Indian state in the late twentieth century.

Although the first Christian contact with the region dates to the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, sustained conversion came only in the second half of the twentieth century, when Arunachal Pradesh recorded one of the steepest proportional increases in Christian population of any Indian state, rising from about 0.79 per cent in 1971 to nearly a third of the population by 2011. The faith spread first among the Tani and other tribes of the central and eastern districts, while the western districts around Tawang remained predominantly Buddhist and the indigenous Donyi-Polo tradition retained a large following.

The Roman Catholic Church is generally described as the largest single denomination, organised into the Diocese of Itanagar in the west and the Diocese of Miao in the east, both erected in 2005. Protestant churches, led by the Arunachal Baptist Church Council with around 150,000 baptised members in roughly 1,200 to 1,250 congregations, together account for the majority of the state's Christians, with smaller revivalist, Pentecostal and Anglican-tradition bodies also present.

Religion in Arunachal Pradesh (2011)

religion			percent
Christianity			30.3%
Hinduism			29.0%
Others (mostly Donyi-Polo)			26.2%
Buddhism			11.8%
Islam			1.9%
Sikhism			0.1%
Jainism			0.1%

Background

Land and peoples

Arunachal Pradesh, in the eastern Himalayas, was historically isolated from the Indian plains by mountains and forest, and developed a rich mosaic of more than 25 major tribes and over 100 sub-tribes speaking some fifty languages, mostly of the Tibeto-Burman family. Because many of these languages are mutually unintelligible, Hindi and Assamese often serve as link languages, and Christian missions later played a significant part in reducing tribal tongues to writing. The largest grouping is the Tani cluster, including the Nyishi, Adi, Apatani, Galo and Tagin, settled across the central districts; the eastern districts of Tirap, Longding and Changlang are home to the Nocte, Wancho and Tangsa, while the west is occupied by the Monpa and other communities of Tibetan affinity. The territory was administered as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) under Assam until it became a Union Territory in 1972 and a full state in 1987.

Indigenous and other religions

Most communities traditionally followed animist belief systems centred on nature spirits and ancestor worship, with ritual specialists mediating between people and the spirit world. Among the Tani groups this tradition is known as Donyi-Polo, meaning "Sun-Moon", which venerates the sun and moon as visible manifestations of a single creative principle; in this cosmology the source of all things is called Sedi, from whose body the world is held to be formed, the sun and moon being his eyes. The animist traditions of the tribes, rather than Hinduism or Christianity, were the original religions of most of the population; organised Hinduism and Christianity are both comparatively recent arrivals among the tribes, while Tibetan Buddhism, centred on the seventeenth-century Tawang Monastery, has long been established in the west among the Monpa and others, and the Khamti and Singpho of the east follow Theravada Buddhism.

A closed frontier

For most of the colonial and early post-colonial period the territory was administered as an "Excluded Area" and later under the Inner Line Permit system, which required outsiders, including missionaries, to obtain special permission to enter. This policy, reinforced by the influence of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who became NEFA's adviser on tribal affairs and favoured protecting indigenous cultures from rapid change, kept resident missionaries out of the hills and shaped the late and uneven spread of Christianity compared with neighbouring Nagaland and Mizoram. As a result, the census recorded almost no Christians in the territory before 1950, and the faith spread mainly through tribal students who encountered Christianity in mission schools in Assam, Shillong and elsewhere in Meghalaya and carried it home.

History

Early encounters (1620s to 1840s)

The first Europeans associated with the wider region were members of the Jesuit order, Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, who reached Northeast India around 1626 to 1627 while searching for an overland route to China and Tibet, though they did not establish any lasting mission. Organised Protestant work in the Northeast came with American Baptist missionaries in the early nineteenth century, encouraged by British administrators who believed missions could help educate and pacify the frontier tribes. In 1836 the American Baptist Mission opened a station at Sadiya in Assam, chosen as a base from which to reach the Nyishi, Hill Miri, Singpho, Mishmi, Khamti and Abor (Adi) peoples; Nathan Brown reached Sadiya on 23 March 1836, and the missionaries opened the first institutional schools for the people of the surrounding hills. The mission made little headway among the Khamtis and Singphos, and after the Khamti raid on Sadiya in 1839 and subsequent unrest, the station was abandoned and the missionaries withdrew to Jaipur (Naharkatia) and then Sibsagar, the Sadiya mission being formally given up around 1841.

The French martyrs: Krick and Bourry (1854)

The earliest recorded Catholic presence in the area came through two French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP), Nicolas Michel Krick and Augustin Étienne Bourry. Krick, who had become one of the first Westerners to reach Tibet by the southern route in 1852, set out again from the British post of Saikhowa on the Lohit on 19 February 1854 with Bourry, intending to cross Mishmi territory into Tibet. Both were killed on 2 August 1854 at Somme village, in the Lohit area near the present Tibetan border, by a Mishmi chief named Kaisha (Kaisha Manyu); accounts attribute the killing variously to a dispute over payment and to the chief's hostility towards the missionaries. Before this final journey Krick had spent time among the Mishmi and the Bokar, a Tani sub-group, and had begun to learn local speech, so that his brief mission is also remembered in accounts of early engagement with the Tani languages. No sustained Catholic work followed at the time, and the two priests are venerated locally as the first Christian martyrs of Arunachal Pradesh; the Diocese of Miao has promoted their cause for beatification, for which a Nihil obstat was obtained from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

Renewed mission from the plains (1890s to 1920s)

British frontier policy long restricted missionary entry into the hills, so renewed Protestant work was based in the Assam plains and reached the tribes indirectly. An independent missionary, the Reverend John Firth, established a mission centre at North Lakhimpur in 1893, which became an important base for education and evangelism among neighbouring communities, and a worker named Tosin was deputed for the Nyishi in 1898. The American Baptist station at Sadiya was revived around 1905 after a long gap, and progress was recorded among the Singphos, where 17 people were baptised in 1911 to 1912 and the number rose to 55 in 1913. Missionary work in Abor (Adi) country, halted after the killing of the political officer Noel Williamson in 1911, reopened following the Anglo-Abor War of 1911 to 1912, after which missionaries conducted medical work and, in 1914, the Reverend L. W. B. Jackman opened schools at Ebung (Dambuk) and Lupang (Meka), with Garo evangelists living among the Abors. The first baptisms of people from within present-day Arunachal Pradesh are recorded around 1919 to 1920: in the west, Sensu Nar, a Nyishi, professed belief in 1919 and was baptised in 1920, while in the east Dugyon Lego and Tamik Dabi are recorded as converts at Jackman's school in 1920, and the first churches of the territory are traditionally associated with these early believers.

A frontier closed to missionaries

Through the colonial period and into the early decades after independence the territory remained largely closed to resident missionaries, and missionary activity was effectively prohibited under the framework that became the Freedom of Religion Act of 1978. Christianity therefore spread less by the work of foreign missionaries living in the hills than by Arunachali students who met the faith in mission-run schools and colleges in Assam and Shillong and returned home as believers, often bringing with them English-language education and new personal names. This pattern, by which conversion was carried by educated members of the tribes themselves, helps to explain both the speed of the later growth and the close link in Arunachal Pradesh between Christianity, schooling and social mobility.

Growth after 1950

Restrictions on missionaries continued under the NEFA administration after independence, and the remoteness of the region, poor roads, the prevalence of malaria and the political sensitivity of the China border, especially after the 1962 Sino-Indian War, further limited open evangelism. Conversions nonetheless grew from the 1960s. The census recorded 1,438 Christians in 1961 and 3,684, about 0.79 per cent, in 1971, after which numbers climbed steeply. Among Baptists, Taro Boje and Barjo Taye were appointed the first licensed evangelists by the Council of Baptist Churches in North East India in 1966, and between 1966 and 1975 numerous associations were formed among the Adi, Galo, Nyishi and other peoples, later federating into the Arunachal Baptist Church Council.

Roman Catholic work developed largely from contact with Arunachali students in Catholic schools in Assam and Meghalaya, the first baptisms of Apatani students taking place at Lakhimpur in 1963. Two contrasting figures shaped the early Catholic mission. Father Vedamuthu Kulandaisamy, parish priest of Harmuty, a border parish in Assam close to Arunachal, from the late 1970s, built up the first seed communities among the Nyishi by welcoming tribal visitors, linking baptism to systematic instruction, placing young people in Catholic schools and training local catechists; the parish of Harmuty had been established for this purpose by Bishop Joseph Mittathany in 1977. Brother Prem Bhai, by contrast, was an itinerant missionary who travelled long distances on foot into the closed interior, founding the Holy Trinity Ashram at Banderdewa and ministering in villages where there was no church, work that on occasion brought him arrest and physical danger. In eastern Arunachal, Salesian priests including Jose Chemparathy, Job Kallarackal and George Pallipparambil pioneered work among the Nocte and Wancho from parishes in Assam, and in August 1979 more than 900 Noctes are recorded as having requested baptism.

Catholic consolidation and dioceses (1990s to 2005)

The Missionaries of Charity opened houses at Pappunalla near Naharlagun and at Borduria village in 1992, and Mother Teresa visited Borduria in 1993, blessing one of the first Catholic churches in eastern Arunachal. Catholic structures matured rapidly thereafter. On 7 December 2005 the Holy See erected two dioceses: the Diocese of Itanagar, split from the Diocese of Tezpur to cover the western districts, and the Diocese of Miao, split from the Diocese of Dibrugarh to cover the east, both suffragans of the Archdiocese of Guwahati. John Thomas Kattrukudiyil became the first bishop of Itanagar and George Pallipparambil the first bishop of Miao.

Christianity, language and Tani identity

The Tani peoples, a Tibeto-Burman group whose own traditions trace their distant origins to lands to the north, form both the largest section of the state's population and the bulk of its Christians, who are today predominantly Catholic with a substantial Baptist presence; smaller numbers continue to follow Donyi-Polo or Buddhism. Christian writers have argued that the missions played an important part in preserving Tani language and culture, a claim that is contested by indigenous-faith advocates who hold the opposite, that conversion has eroded traditional religion and custom.

The link between mission and language was close from the start, because the churches generally sought to teach and worship in the vernacular. As early as 1841 the Baptist educationist William Robinson worked to reduce the Miri (Adi) language to writing, and the Baptist missionaries James Herbert Lorrain and Frederick William Savidge, who learned Miri, published in 1902 the devotional readers known as Isorke Doyinge (stories from God) and Jisuke Doyinge (stories from the gospel). Further works in the language followed, including Keyum Kero in 1914 and translations of the epistles to the Romans and Corinthians in 1916 and of the gospel of Matthew in 1917. The convert Dugyon Lego, baptised in 1920, is credited with devising an early script for the Tani language adapted from the Latin alphabet to suit its tonal sounds, and he became a celebrated Tani writer; the complete New Testament was rendered into the language by Kosham Lego and Okep Lego by 1944. In the present day the churches commonly encourage worshippers to wear traditional dress at Sunday services and celebrate the liturgy in both the vernacular and English, and the Catholic diocese has made a point of incorporating local language and cultural expression into its worship, presenting itself as a Church rooted in tribal identity.

Denominations

Roman Catholic

The two Latin Church dioceses together account for the largest body of Christians under a single structure. As of around 2020 the Diocese of Itanagar reported on the order of 60,000 to 85,000 Catholics across some 42 to 55 parishes and mission stations in the western districts, with the Cathedral of St Joseph in Itanagar as its seat. The Diocese of Miao, with its seat at the Christ the Light Shrine, covers the eastern districts and reported a comparable Catholic population. The Salesians of Don Bosco have been central to the church's work, running schools and hostels such as the Don Bosco institutions at Jollang, opened as a school in 1992 and a college in 2002, which allowed children from remote villages to obtain schooling together with religious formation; the Missionaries of Charity carry on social and charitable work. The diocese also sustains an active lay apostolate through bodies such as the Arunachal Pradesh Catholic Association, the youth movement Yuvodaya and the Arunachal Pradesh Women Association, which organise catechesis, leadership training and social outreach.

Baptist and other Protestant

Protestant Christianity is dominated by Baptist churches grouped under the Arunachal Baptist Church Council (ABCC), with its office at Naharlagun. A denominational census published by the body reported about 132,000 to 152,000 baptised members in roughly 1,140 to 1,255 churches under around 19 to 20 member associations, including bodies such as the Nyishi Baptist Church Council, the Galo Baptist Church Council and the Adi Baptist associations; the ABCC is affiliated to the Council of Baptist Churches in North East India. Other denominations that began work in the state include the Arunachal Pradesh Christian Revival Church Council, started at Naharlagun in 1987, the Presbyterian Church linked to the Mizoram Synod from 1984, and the United Pentecostal Church of North East India from 1989. Part of the state also falls within the Diocese of North East India of the Church of North India.

Education and social work

Because the territory was closed to resident missionaries, education was both the principal channel through which Christianity first reached Arunachali communities and one of its most lasting contributions. The earliest converts were very often tribal students educated in Catholic and Baptist schools in Assam and Shillong, who returned home as the first evangelists of their own peoples, and the churches later built up their own networks of schools, hostels and dispensaries within the state. Catholic education expanded through the Salesian schools and hostels and through institutions run by other congregations, while the Catholic Church is credited with opening some of the first hospitals in the territory after independence. Both Catholic and Baptist bodies run schools that admit pupils irrespective of religion, and Christians in the state record a literacy rate higher than the state average, a pattern that is widely linked to the missions' emphasis on schooling.

Indigenous revival and Hindu nationalist involvement

The Nyokum festival of the Nyishi, the state's largest tribe. The revival of indigenous Tani religion as Donyi-Polo drew heavily on the patronage of Hindu nationalist organisations.

The rapid growth of Christianity was accompanied by a movement to organise the indigenous animist traditions into a structured faith. The pioneer was the Adi activist Talom Rukbo (1937 to 2001), under whom a meeting of Adi intellectuals at Along in 1968 resolved to codify the scattered traditions of the Tani tribes; this led in 1986 to the founding of the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang, which created written prayers and hymns, an iconography of the deities and community prayer halls known as ganggings, forms in some respects modelled on Christian congregational worship.

Scholars and journalists have emphasised that this revival did not occur in isolation but received sustained patronage from Hindu nationalist organisations seeking to counter Christianity and to draw the tribes towards Hinduism. The anthropologist Sarit Kumar Chaudhuri records that the Donyi-Polo movement and the parallel Rangfraism of the Tangsa and Intayaism of the Idu Mishmi all received overt or covert patronage from Hindu nationalist bodies seeking a foothold in the frontier state. Reporting has noted that Talom Rukbo became president of the Arunachal Vikas Parishad, a body affiliated to the Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, which is in turn linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); the Kalyan Ashram and its affiliates, active among tribal populations across India, are widely described as working to bring tribal communities within a Hindu fold and to check the influence of Christian missions. The Sangh's wider strategy in the state has included the establishment of Vivekananda Kendra schools and other educational institutions, and the Government of Arunachal Pradesh under the Bharatiya Janata Party created a Department of Indigenous Faiths and Cultural Affairs that has worked to codify and formalise the tribal religions.

A number of observers argue that, as a result of this involvement, the boundary between the institutionalised indigenous faiths and Hinduism has become increasingly blurred. Chaudhuri notes that many of the idols introduced in the revival are largely Hinduised in form, even where some local features are added. Journalistic accounts describe the appearance of Shiva lingams across the state, the placing of images of Hindu and nationalist figures alongside tribal deities in some prayer halls, and the reinterpretation of local myths in Hindu terms, for example by linking the Idu Mishmi to a wife of the deity Krishna, so as to integrate the region into a Hindu sacred geography. Christianity Today has reported that the RSS helped to institutionalise Donyi-Polo as a structured faith to compete with Christianity and to reinforce tribal identity within a Hindu framework.

This reading is not universally accepted. The original purpose articulated by Rukbo and other founders was to resist absorption into both Christianity and Hinduism and to assert an independent indigenous identity, and indigenous-faith organisations present the revival as the authentic preservation of tribal culture rather than a Hindu project. The contested status of these faiths is also reflected in the census, which has no separate category for Donyi-Polo, so that its adherents are recorded under "other religions" or, in some cases, as Hindus, a classification that complicates any precise count. The indigenous cause has been represented politically by the Indigenous Faith and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh (IFCSAP), and official promotion of the tradition was illustrated by the renaming of Itanagar's airport as Donyi Polo Airport in 2022.

Anti-conversion law and persecution

Although Christianity is the largest religion in Arunachal Pradesh, the community has experienced episodes of hostility and operates under an anti-conversion law that, in the view of church leaders, singles it out. The community's position as a plurality rather than a majority, in a state where indigenous-faith and Buddhist groups together outnumber Christians and enjoy specific legal protection, has made the relationship between conversion, law and tribal identity unusually contested.

Early opposition (1969 to 1990)

The rapid social change accompanying conversion prompted resistance from indigenous-faith organisations and episodes of violence against converts. According to studies of the period, persecution of Christians began around 1969, when churches in the Subansiri area were reported burnt, and incidents continued into the 1970s, including the confinement of converts in 1972 and allegations that numerous churches were destroyed in 1974. Baptist accounts describe the period from about 1970 to 1990 as the most intense phase of opposition, marked by social ostracism of converts as well as the destruction of places of worship, with various organisations and government agencies said to have been involved, a phase that nonetheless coincided with continued and accelerating numerical growth.

The Freedom of Religion Act, 1978

These tensions contributed to demands by indigenous leaders for legal protection of traditional beliefs, leading the legislature to pass the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (APFRA), 1978, which received presidential assent the following year. Modelled on earlier laws such as the Odisha Freedom of Religion Act of 1967, the Act prohibits conversion from one religious faith to another by the use of force, inducement or fraudulent means, provides for penalties of imprisonment and fine, and requires that conversions be reported to the district authorities; it was framed expressly to protect the indigenous faiths of the state's tribal communities. Arunachal Pradesh thus became one of a group of Indian states, numbering about a dozen by the 2020s, to enact anti-conversion legislation.

Dormancy and revival of the law (2018 to 2024)

The Act remained unimplemented for more than four decades because the enforcement rules needed to bring it into operation were never framed, so that no prosecutions could be brought under it. Chief Minister Pema Khandu indicated in 2018 that his government was considering repealing the law, in deference to Christian concerns, but did not do so. The question returned to prominence when, on 30 September 2024, the Gauhati High Court directed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government to finalise the rules of the legislation within six months, acting on a public interest litigation filed by Tambo Tamin, a former general secretary of the Indigenous Faith and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh.

Protests of 2025

The court's direction prompted large protests by Christian groups in early 2025. Under the banner of the Arunachal Pradesh Christian Forum (ACF), the community held an eight-hour hunger strike on 17 February 2025, and on 6 March a wider demonstration that organisers said drew around 200,000 people gathered at Borum near Itanagar and at district headquarters across the state, demanding the law's repeal; a meeting with the state home minister on 21 February was reported as inconclusive, the government stating that it was bound to comply with the court order. ACF leaders, among them its Catholic president Mir Stephen Tarh, argued that the law infringed the freedom of religion guaranteed by Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution and that the requirement to give prior notice of a conversion would invite official harassment. The protests drew national attention, and a remark by a protest leader reported in some footage as declaring the state to belong to Christianity was criticised by indigenous-faith organisations as confirming their fears about demographic and cultural change, an episode that sharpened the wider debate.

Continuing standoff (2025 to 2026)

The dispute continued into 2026. The state government constituted a High-Power Committee, including government representatives together with members of the ACF and indigenous-faith groups, to consider the framing of rules, but meetings held on 19 March and 21 April 2026 failed to reach agreement, and ACF representatives walked out of the April meeting, stating that the committee did not fairly represent the Christian community. After the government signalled that it intended to notify the rules by the end of April 2026, the ACF organised a further statewide protest on 30 April, and demonstrations spread across several districts, including Itanagar, Pasighat, Lower Dibang Valley, West Siang, East Kameng, Kamle and Changlang, with the forum demanding the repeal or substantial modification of the Act.

Competing arguments

The controversy turns on a genuine clash of principles, and it is increasingly read against the background of national religious politics. Supporters of the law, including indigenous-faith organisations such as the IFCSAP, argue that it prohibits only coerced, induced or fraudulent conversion, not voluntary changes of belief, and that some legal protection is necessary because large-scale conversion has weakened traditional religion, language and community structures and threatens the survival of small tribal cultures. Opponents, led by the Christian forums and supported by international religious-freedom organisations, contend that the Act is vague, that it has in practice been aimed at Christians, who as converts from the same tribes regard themselves as no less indigenous than their non-Christian kin, and that anti-conversion laws undermine the freedom of religion protected by the Constitution. Some Christian leaders and commentators further argue that the revival of the dormant law, taken together with the state-backed promotion of indigenous faiths and the involvement of the Sangh Parivar, forms part of a broader Hindu-nationalist effort in the Northeast, and they fear a renewed wave of repression of the kind seen in the 1970s and 1980s; the state government and indigenous-faith groups reject this characterisation, presenting the measures as the protection of tribal culture rather than an attack on any religion. The matter forms part of a wider national debate, with the validity of anti-conversion laws in about a dozen states pending before the Supreme Court of India.

Demographics

Census figures record a continuous rise in both the number and proportion of Christians in the state, one of the most rapid recorded anywhere in India over the period.

Christians in Arunachal Pradesh by census year

Year	Number	Percentage	Source
1961	1,438	0.43
1971	3,684	0.79
1981	27,306	4.32
1991	89,013	10.29
2001	205,548	18.72
2011	418,732	30.26

Christianity within Scheduled Tribes

The 2011 census showed wide variation in the share of Christians across the state's Scheduled Tribes, from near-universal adherence in some communities to small minorities in others. Christianity is strongest among the eastern tribes such as the Wancho, Nocte and Tangsa and among the large Nyishi community of the centre, while the Buddhist Monpa and the Hindu and Donyi-Polo sections of other tribes show low Christian shares.

Christian share within selected Scheduled Tribes (2011)

Tribe	Christians	Percent
Yobin	2,965	99.03%
Wancho	54,165	95.22%
Nocte	23,093	66.62%
Nyishi	180,609	63.30%
Tangsa	21,291	58.95%
Sulung	2,085	46.14%
Miji	3,419	42.07%
Aka	2,788	34.38%
Adi	65,691	27.60%
Apatani	9,513	21.73%
Tagin	7,634	12.13%
Mishmi	1,864	4.24%

See also

• Religion in Arunachal Pradesh
• Hinduism in Arunachal Pradesh
• Donyi-Polo
• Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978
• Arunachal Baptist Church Council
• Roman Catholic Diocese of Itanagar
• Roman Catholic Diocese of Miao
• Christianity in Northeast India
• Christianity in India

Further reading

• Downs, Frederick S. (1983). Christianity in North East India: Historical Perspectives. Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
• Chaudhuri, Sarit Kumar (2013). "The Institutionalization of Tribal Religion: Recasting the Donyi-Polo Movement in Arunachal Pradesh". Asian Ethnology. 72 (2): 259–277.
• Mibang, Tamo; Chaudhuri, Sarit K., eds. (2004). Understanding Tribal Religion. New Delhi: Mittal Publications.
• Scheid, Claire S. (2015). "Talom Rukbo and the Donyipolo Yelam Kebang". Internationales Asienforum. 46 (1): 127–148.

External links

• Arunachal Baptist Church Council: history
• Diocese of Miao: history
• Diocese of Itanagar at GCatholic