A right-wing Hindu parliamentarian has called for a bid to drive Christian missionaries out of India ahead of assembly polls in three key Indian states.
Parliamentarian Rakesh Sinha, who campaigns turning India a Hindu nation, accused Christian missioners of damaging Indian culture.
"It is time to launch a drive to get rid of Christian missionaries from the country," Sinha said in a Sept. 27 newspaper interview.
Dainik Jagaran newspaper published the interview of the ideologue from the Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
"Christian missionaries in the past 300 years worked to destroy the culture of the indigenous people," said Sinha.
The three Hindu majority states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh are facing elections at the end of this year.
The elections results of the three Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states will have a strong influence on the general elections in 2019.
"The BJP and its supporters know they have to play the communal card to get Hindu votes," Christy Abraham, national general secretary of the ecumenical forum Rashtriya Isai Mahasangh, told an Oct. 3 media conference.
He added that Sinha's hate speech aimed to project the BJP as a champion of Hindu interests.
