Last December, I gave a speech in the European Parliament voicing my concerns for growing religious intolerance in India, particularly recent incidents of mob violence and forced conversions.
A representative from the Indian embassy was present, and rightly responded by acknowledging and deploring these crimes. He then, however, diagnosed them as, "solely a question of law and order".
I think it is more than that; a deeper force is at work - the Hindu-nationalist leadership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Undoubtedly, India's struggle with pluralism is not new.
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Even before BJP government, a Pew Research Forum report (2013) classed India as the country in which religious minorities face the highest societal hostilities in the world. Nonetheless, numerous sources are claiming that since May 2014 (when the BJP government came into power) India has experienced a further increase.
The Catholic Secular Forum claimed that in 2015, incidents rose by at least 20 per cent compared to the previous year.
Additionally, Open Door's authoritative World Watch List raised India's Christian persecution score of severity by six points (it is a score out of 100) compared to its 2014 score - one of the largest leaps in the world.
This was based on its recording of reported incidents, amounting to 400 between November 2014 and November 2015, up from 154 in the same period in the previous year. This is an increase of 150 per cent.
Anti-conversion laws are a typical example where the BJP's ideology of Hindutva (guarding India's "Hinduness") is expressed.
In September 2015, BJP MP Tarjun Vijay announced that he was leading a private members bill for a nationwide anti-conversion law, saying: "For the first time, the population of Hindus has been reported to be less than 80 per cent. We have to take measures to arrest the decline. It is very important to keep the Hindus in majority in the country and I think a bill of this nature [anti-conversion law] will… allow Hindus to remain a majority in India."
As this quote shows, these laws are intended to discriminate against conversions from Hinduism, because they are intended to maintain India's Hindu majority.
This also has the unpleasant side effect of legitimising wider societal discrimination of minorities, since aggressors feel they act with the government's patronage.
With sincere concern for India, I implore Prime Minister Narendra Modi to exercise leadership over his party: to speak up against religious intolerance and violence; support, visit and comfort non-Hindu victims of religious attacks; command the police to pay special attention to attacks on religious minorities and repeal the anti-conversion laws that are already in place in five Indian states.