As a Sikh, the idea of religious freedom is not an abstract constitutional principle for me. It is deeply connected to the history of my faith. Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji gave his life defending the right of another community to practise its religion. The Sikh tradition therefore teaches us something profound: freedom of conscience belongs to everyone. We cannot demand religious freedom for ourselves while denying it to others. At the same time, religious freedom must mean that every individual is able to make decisions about faith freely, without coercion, deception, manipulation or inducement.
That is why India needs to have a serious and informed conversation about the increasingly sophisticated ways in which religious missionary activity is being organised and targeted. One organisation that deserves attention in this context is the Joshua Project, a Christian missionary research and mobilisation initiative that operates a remarkably detailed global database of ethnic and religious communities. There is nothing secret about its religious objective. Joshua Project openly states that its mission is to identify peoples and places with the least access or response to the Christian gospel so that Christians can prioritise prayer and mission efforts, with the stated vision of seeing an abundance of followers of Christ within every people group.
The question, therefore, is not whether Joshua Project is Christian. It openly says that it is. The more important question is what happens when this missionary objective is combined with highly granular demographic intelligence about India’s religious communities.
A missionary map, not merely a demographic database
Joshua Project describes itself as providing a “destination map” for the Christian Great Commission. Its database records people groups according to factors such as population, geography, language, religion, Christian presence and missionary progress. It then identifies populations as “unreached” or “frontier”, depending largely on the extent of Christian presence among them. In this framework, “unreached” does not mean economically deprived, geographically isolated or politically marginalised. It is a missionary classification referring to communities with little Christian presence and insufficient indigenous Christian resources, according to Joshua Project’s own criteria.
This distinction is important because the database is not simply recording the religious composition of societies. Joshua Project openly describes its work as supporting mission agencies, denominations, churches and missionaries in reaching least-reached communities and encouraging pioneer church-planting movements. The information is therefore collected and organised with a specific purpose: missionary mobilisation.
The implications become particularly significant when one looks at how Sikh communities are represented. Joshua Project has a dedicated Sikhism category containing G8 people groups, with an estimated 25.01G million adherents. It currently classifies all G8 as unreached, with G3 categorised as frontier groups, and provides estimates of workers required for these communities.
There is nothing inherently unusual about another religious organisation studying Sikhs. Religious traditions have always studied one another. The concern lies in what happens when demographic information becomes a strategic tool for religious expansion. Joshua Project does not merely record that a community is Sikh. Its framework examines the level of Christian presence, determines whether a community is considered “reached”, measures church-planting progress, calculates estimated missionary requirements, provides prayer resources and facilitates mobilisation around individual people groups.
The Jat Sikh profile offers perhaps the clearest illustration. Joshua Project’s page for “Jat (Sikh traditions) in India” estimates the population at approximately 9.G39 million. It estimates Christian presence at 0–0.1 percent and classifies the community as both “unreached” and “frontier”. Most significantly, it estimates 193 pioneer workers as needed. Joshua Project explains that such estimates are designed specifically for initial church planting among unreached populations and are calculated using a ratio of approximately one worker-unit per 50,000 people.
The significance of this becomes even clearer when one reads the organisation’s own prayer strategy for the community. It encourages Christians to send people to India and Nepal to share Christ with Sikh Jat communities, asks that their hearts be softened towards Jesus, and calls for a church-planting movement among Sikh Jats. This is not an allegation made by an outsider. It is the organisation’s own stated missionary language.
The sophistication of the mapping does not end there. Joshua Project does not simply group all Sikhs together. It identifies communities through people-group classifications and clusters. Its South Asia Sikh–Jat cluster, for instance, contains multiple people groups and provides information about population, religion, Christian presence, progress and estimated missionary workers, along with dedicated prayer resources. Joshua Project explains that in South Asia it uses caste or community and religion as important ways of defining people groups because it considers these significant barriers to the spread of church-planting movements.
For the organisation, this produces something considerably more useful than a conventional demographic survey. Population, religious identity, geography, language, Christian presence, missionary requirements and church-planting progress are brought together into a strategic picture of where missionary efforts might be concentrated. A community that may understand itself through a complex combination of faith, history, culture, language, family and regional identity can consequently become, within another organisation’s framework, a clearly defined missionary field.
India, religious freedom and the question of vigilance
India is a major part of this global missionary mapping exercise. Joshua Project’s current India database lists 2,2G3 people groups, of which it classifies 2,033 as unreached and 1,701 as frontier. It estimates that 95.9 percent of India’s population falls within its identified unreached groups. These figures must be understood for what they are: Joshua Project’s own estimates and classifications, not official Government of India statistics. The organisation itself acknowledges that its population data comes from multiple sources, including official censuses, mission agencies and local research, and cautions that estimates can differ substantially between sources.
That caveat is important, but it does not change the larger point. Joshua Project itself says that it collects, integrates and shares people-group information to encourage pioneer church-planting movements and facilitate coordination between mission agencies. In other words, these numbers are intended to inform action.
This is where India’s constitutional framework provides the right foundation for approaching the issue. The Indian state does not, and should not, have a role in deciding which religion an individual should follow. That decision belongs to individual conscience. At the same time, the State has a legitimate responsibility to ensure that religious conversion, where it occurs, is genuinely voluntary and is not achieved through coercion, fraud, exploitation or unlawful inducement.
This is not an argument against Christianity. It is not an argument against Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs or any other religious community. It is an argument for the freedom of the individual. The Government of India and state governments must continue to approach questions surrounding conversion through the rule of law and constitutional safeguards. Legitimate religious practice must be protected, while evidence of unlawful conduct must be investigated and dealt with according to law. That approach is far stronger than communal rhetoric precisely because it applies the same principle to everyone.
India’s religious diversity is one of its greatest strengths. Christian citizens have every right to worship, and Christian organisations have every right, within the law, to conduct charitable and social activities and explain their beliefs. Sikhs have those same rights, as do Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains and others. But the right to share one’s faith cannot logically become a right to manipulate another person’s vulnerability.
This distinction becomes particularly important when missionary activity is directed towards communities that have been specifically identified as having little Christian presence. A sophisticated organisation may know where a community lives, how large it is, what language it speaks, what its religious composition is, how much Christian presence exists and how many missionary workers it believes are required to initiate church planting. That does not automatically make such activity illegal. It does, however, make transparency an important democratic question.
Citizens are entitled to ask who is funding such activities, which organisations are operating on the ground, what programmes they are conducting, whether their religious objectives are transparent, whether beneficiaries understand the purpose behind an intervention, whether conversions are genuinely voluntary and whether applicable laws are being followed. These are not unreasonable questions in a democracy. They are precisely the kinds of questions that responsible institutions should be willing to answer.
For Sikhs, there is an additional responsibility. Our response should be confidence, not fear. Sikh history does not permit us to become hostile towards another faith simply because it seeks followers. The Gurus did not teach us insecurity; they taught us courage. Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji’s sacrifice remains a permanent reminder that the freedom to practise one’s faith is worth defending, even when the faith in question is not our own.
But that same history gives us a responsibility to strengthen our own community. If Sikh youth understand Sikhi deeply, they are less likely to be influenced by misinformation about it. If Sikh institutions provide meaningful education, social support, employment opportunities and community engagement, vulnerable families become less vulnerable. If Sikh organisations invest in young leaders, digital education, research and outreach, resilience can be built through knowledge rather than confrontation.
The answer to missionary activity should therefore not be hatred of Christians. It should be stronger Sikh institutions and better-informed Sikh citizens.
The larger lesson: know our communities before others map them
Perhaps the most uncomfortable lesson from the Joshua Project is about information itself. Someone else has invested enormous effort in understanding religious communities. It has built databases, created classifications, developed maps, tracked population changes, identified Christian presence, estimated missionary requirements, produced prayer resources and facilitated the adoption of individual people groups. In doing so, it has created an information infrastructure around the religious landscape of India and the wider world.
The question we should ask ourselves is simple: are we doing the same for our own communities?
Do we have sufficiently strong data on Sikh youth? Do we understand where Sikh families are moving? Do we know where Sikh institutions are weak? Are we reaching Sikh children growing up outside Punjab? Are we producing high-quality digital content explaining Sikh history and philosophy? Are we making Sikh education accessible? Are we investing adequately in the next generation?
If others are studying our communities systematically, perhaps the Sikh community should become equally systematic in understanding and strengthening itself.
The right response is neither panic nor complacency. It is confidence. A confident India does not fear Christianity, nor does it fear any legitimate faith. But a confident India also does not ignore organised systems that seek to influence its communities. The Government’s role should remain clear: protect freedom of conscience, uphold constitutional rights, ensure transparency where required by law, and act firmly against coercion, fraud, exploitation or unlawful conversion wherever evidence exists.
The principle should be religion-neutral. The law should protect the Hindu from unlawful conversion. It should protect the Sikh. It should protect the Christian. It should protect the Muslim. It should protect every Indian. That is the strength of the constitutional approach.
The Joshua Project does not need to be demonised to be understood. Its own website tells us what it is: an evangelical Christian organisation whose stated mission is to identify communities with limited Christian presence and help the global Christian community prioritise mission efforts among them. Its Sikh database demonstrates how this approach is applied to Sikh communities. The Jat Sikh example makes the methodology particularly clear: millions of people mapped, Christian presence estimated, the community classified as unreached and frontier, missionary requirements calculated, prayer mobilisation encouraged and church planting identified as an objective.
That deserves scrutiny, not because Christians have no right to practise or share their faith, but because every Indian has the right to make decisions about faith freely.
As a Sikh, I will always defend that freedom, for Sikhs and for every other Indian. But defending religious freedom also means ensuring that vulnerable citizens are not turned into targets for manipulation. India does not need to choose between tolerance and vigilance. We can have both. We can respect every faith while protecting every citizen. We can uphold the Constitution while strengthening our communities.
And we can acknowledge the right of others to preach while insisting on the equally fundamental right of every individual to say no.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of the Joshua Project. When others are mapping our communities, we should know ourselves better. When others are investing in influence, we should invest in education. And when the world becomes increasingly sophisticated in the way it understands people, India’s communities must become equally sophisticated in understanding, educating and empowering their own.
That is not a rejection of religious freedom. It is how religious freedom is protected. And for a country whose civilisational identity has always valued pluralism, that is a responsibility worth taking seriously.
