Emotions ran high at the DY Patil Sports Academy in Navi Mumbai, India, on October 30, when the India women’s cricket team faced Australia in a nerve-racking World Cup semifinal.
As the crowd roared, cameras zoomed in on Jemimah Rodrigues as she delivered a match-winning knock, leading her team into the finals for the first time since 2017. Tears streamed down Rodrigues’s face as she dropped to her knees in relief.
“Towards the end, I was just quoting a Scripture from the Bible—to just stand still and that God will fight for me,” she said in a postmatch interview, referring to Exodus 14:14. “I have almost cried every day through this tour. Not doing well mentally, going through anxiety. I knew I had to show up, and God took care of everything.”
Despite Rodrigues’s match-winning hit—and India winning the Women’s Cricket World Cup three days later—online commenters hounded her for speaking publicly about Christianity. “Once a rice bag always a rice bag,” wrote one person on X in response to a cricket post. (Rice bag is a derogatory term in India used to describe someone who converted to Christianity for material benefits.) Others used slurs such as “missionary dog.”
Many dragged her family, accusing them of participating in forced conversions. “She continued her conversion racket even in post-match,” posted another X account. “If her father and she continue to do that, Hate is only what you expect.”
The harshest comments targeted her father, Ivan Rodrigues, a junior cricket coach and PE teacher. “Her father was a soul ripper so deserved flak,” a commenter wrote. “Every converter is a soul terrorist. Their kids’ good deeds don’t cancel it.”
This wasn’t the first time the Rodrigueses came under attack for being Christians. In October 2024, Khar Gymkhana—one of Mumbai’s oldest clubs—revoked Jemimah Rodrigues’s honorary membership, following allegations that her father used the club premises for conversion activities.
Dismissing the accusations, he said prayer meetings there were conducted in accordance with club rules and with the club’s full knowledge. Khar Gymkhana’s president called the allegations “politically motivated,” noting that the club committee members’ comments came before elections and they lacked evidence.
Since then, videos of Jemimah Rodrigues leading worship or participating in healing services have circulated online, with netizens mocking her faith and shaming her family.
Although reports about persecution against Indian Christians focus on churches vandalized, pastors beaten, or prayer meetings disrupted, Christian public figures and content creators often face vicious online attacks when they speak out about their faith. That spills into their offline lives when they lose jobs and struggle with depression over the constant barrage of hate.
Beyond terms like rice bag, trolls also call Indian Christians “foreign agents,” claiming their loyalties lie with the West, where Christianity is the predominant religion. Lately, terms such as gorre (“lamb”) and gorre biddalu (“children of the lamb”) in the Telugu language have been used as dog whistles, recasting the Christian imagery of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb into ridicule.
To many Indians, the word converted carries a presumption of force and fraud. Christians are seen as converted, never as believers who chose freely.
In the Hindu nationalist worldview, this is particularly true in the case of Dalits and Adivasis (Indigenous groups), whom they believe are especially vulnerable to Christianity because of their socioeconomic status. Hindu nationalists believe they must protect those groups from Christianity to maintain a Hindu demographic majority.
Those who wear their Christian faith on their sleeve often bear the brunt of this language. Content creator Angelcy Benjamin, who posts humorous reels about her faith journey on Instagram, says slurs are all too common.
“People ask how many bags of rice my family received to convert,” she said. “I no longer get offended. I am a proud rice bag. My faith only deepens in the face of hate, and my resolve to share the gospel only rises.”
Others’ experience online is not so easy. When content creator Joy Mattu posted a call for prayer and peace after India and Pakistan exchanged missile fire last May, the comments turned vicious.
“I was called Pakistani, foreigner, British agent,” he recalled. Anonymous accounts sent him threats: “Tell me where you live. Even if you don’t, we will track you.”
He stopped posting on Instagram for a month. “My mother and sister were abused in comments,” he recounted. “It was psychologically draining,”
Some face consequences in their workplace. Smriti—a Christian influencer who speaks about her conversion from a devout Hindu background—lost two jobs within three months. One employer pressured her to resign, while another terminated her.
Meanwhile, podcaster and author John Giftah said he lost two jobs because of his online content. His podcast, Fuel for the Soul with John Giftah, is India’s No. 1 Christian podcast.
“My boss openly said, ‘Give him more work so he cannot make his YouTube videos to brainwash and convert people,’” he said. “In meetings, they mocked my faith.”
The job losses and constant humiliation depressed him to the point of feeling suicidal. He started going to therapy while also finding solace in the Scriptures, especially 1 Corinthians 7:17—“Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them.”
Human rights activist and author John Dayal stresses that the language of contempt and digital hate connects to the physical persecution inflicted on Christians.
“It is part of the same continuum,” Dayal said. “Social media is a force multiplier for hate-mongers. They borrow the same vocabulary that has targeted Christians for decades. It is time Christians stand up to the weaponization of hate.”
He believes believers can fight the online narrative by sharing their own narratives.
Research attests to Dayal’s view. As part of a larger Hindu nationalist strategy, the constant anti-Christian rhetoric produces a “wider cultural common sense” and language, rendering violence against Christians a “moral obligation” to save Hindu India. Once it becomes part of everyday digital spaces, it is constantly circulated and recirculated until the stigmatization of Christians is normalized.
Out of the 1,165 instances of hate speech documented by the India Hate Lab 2024 report, 115 of them targeted Christians directly or alongside Muslims. The peaks came during Christian seasons such as Advent and Christmas.
Every time Jemimah Rodrigues and her family became the target of online abuse, she said that they chose to forgive.
“God is our witness,” she told the Hindustan Times. “So, we decided to stay silent, not to prove anything or fight back. We chose to forgive those who hurt us, because that’s what Jesus taught us: to forgive even those who wrong us.”
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