How the West’s hundred-year dream of a Christian nation in South Asia moved from missionary to mercenary
From British baptisms in Nagaland to a US mercenary arrested in Mizoram with drones, the dream of a Christian homeland in South Asia has never been a conspiracy theory. It has been a project, patient, evolving, and far from finished.
On 13 March 2026, at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata, a man named Matthew Aaron VanDyke was arrested by India’s National Investigation Agency. He had entered the country on a tourist visa. He had travelled to Mizoram without the required Protected Area Permit. He had crossed into Myanmar. He had, according to the NIA’s charges, been training ethnic armed groups in drone warfare, assembly, and jamming technology. He was also, by his own repeated public declaration, a devout Christian who had spent fifteen years moving through the world’s conflict zones, through Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, offering military training to groups he considered to be on the right side of history. His organisation, Sons of Liberty International, described its mission as helping vulnerable populations fighting authoritarian regimes. He had trained Assyrian Christian fighters against ISIS in Iraq. He had embedded with anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya and been imprisoned by the regime. He had fought in Ukraine. Now he was in custody in Delhi, charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, remanded to NIA custody for eleven days while investigators attempted to map a network they described as an international terror conspiracy operating along India’s most sensitive border.
VanDyke is not the beginning of this story. He is barely even a chapter in it. He is the most recent and most arrestable point in a line that stretches back well over a hundred years, a line connecting Baptist missionaries in colonial Assam, British administrators who looked at the hill tribes of the northeast and decided that Christian conversion would be a more effective pacifier than gunfire, American evangelical organisations that flooded Northeast India with Bibles and schools after independence, and the Naga sovereignty movements whose constitution invoked the sovereignty of God Almighty. That line runs through the Kuki-Chin-Zo dream of a unified ethno-Christian homeland spread across parts of India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, through Sheikh Hasina’s warning in May 2024 that a white man had offered her re-election in exchange for an airbase on Bangladeshi territory, and arrives, now, at a former prisoner-of-war from Baltimore in NIA custody with drone technology and insurgent contacts on a border that three countries share and none of them fully control.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented, continuous ambition, and the only way to understand it honestly is to go back to where it began, and refuse to look away.
The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society first arrived at Sadiya in northeast Assam in 1836. Their original plan was not to convert the hill tribes of India at all. They wanted to get into China. The northeast frontier was a corridor, a geographical convenience. The Naga Hills, where they eventually concentrated their efforts, were simply what the map offered when China stayed closed. The first 23 years of Baptist missionary activity in the region were, by their own annual report of 1858, a great failure. The society had not converted a sizeable population. The report urged the missionaries to cast their gaze elsewhere. They did not leave. They adapted.
What changed the equation was colonialism, not faith. The British had been trying to subjugate the Nagas through military force for decades, fighting battles at Kikruma and Khonoma at significant cost in British officers’ lives. The Nagas were fierce, independent, deeply attached to their ancestral practices, and entirely uninterested in either the Queen’s writ or the missionary’s Bible. What finally opened the Naga Hills to large-scale conversion was the establishment of British military headquarters at Kohima in 1880, after the British defeated the Angami Naga rebellion. Missionary activity followed the army, not the other way round. The Reverend Charles Daniel King started his mission field in Kohima in 1880. Reverend William Ellsworth Witter began his station in Wokha in 1885, with the explicit support of both the missionary Clark and the British deputy commissioner. The pattern was not subtle: wherever British military force broke Naga resistance, Baptist missionaries arrived to consolidate what the rifles had started.
By the time India gained independence in 1947, the transformation was already irreversible. Nagaland, which had a 2 percent Christian population in 1911, reached 13 percent by 1931 and 46 percent by 1951. By 1991, it was above 87 percent. Mizoram went from 3 percent Christian in 1911 to 90 percent by 1951, the entire tribal population converted within four decades. Manipur’s hilly districts, home to the Kuki tribes, are today up to 98 percent Christian. Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram are the three Christian-majority states in India. This was not organic spiritual revelation. It was a demographic revolution engineered by the deliberate alignment of colonial power, educational monopoly, and missionary zeal, with the school, the hospital, and the Bible arriving as a single package in communities that had no access to any of them without accepting the package whole.
This is worth sitting with. The conversion of Northeast India’s tribal populations was not accomplished through spiritual persuasion alone. It was accomplished because the missionaries, as scholars of the region have documented extensively, provided something the colonial state refused to provide directly: education, healthcare, a written language for previously oral cultures, a social infrastructure that made daily life more navigable. You did not have to be cynical to convert. You only had to be poor, isolated, and offered, for the first time, a school for your children. The missionaries knew what they were doing. The communities they converted knew what they were receiving. That transaction took place under conditions of colonial power asymmetry that made genuine free choice impossible to verify, and that is the irreducible moral weight that every subsequent chapter of this story must carry.
Gandhi understood it before most. In 1924, he wrote with rare directness: “This proselytisation will mean no peace in the world. Conversions are harmful to India.” He was accused of intolerance. He was, more accurately, watching what conversion did to the social fabric of communities, how it separated converts from their ancestral cultures, how it created a new identity that was neither fully Indian nor fully Western, how it made those communities politically legible to foreign interests in ways that served those interests more than the converts themselves. The missionaries who baptised the Nagas did not ask what would happen to Naga sovereignty after baptism. They did not ask how an identity rooted in a foreign religion would interact with the new Indian state being built around them. These were not their questions to ask, because the answers would have required them to weigh Indian interests against their own evangelical mandate, and that was a calculation very few of them were willing to make.
What the Baptist missions created in Nagaland was not merely a Christian community. They created a literate, educated, English-speaking tribal elite whose primary cultural references were American, formed by American Baptist hymns, American educational curricula, and American conceptions of sovereignty and religious freedom. The Naga National Council, formed in 1946, which led the demand for Naga independence from India, drew on this identity directly. Its 1951 plebiscite and 1956 constitution invoked the sovereignty of God Almighty. Its leaders wrote letters to the United Nations in English. They understood geopolitics in a framework that had been constructed, almost entirely, by American missionaries over three generations. The insurgency that followed, which killed tens of thousands and lasted for decades, was, at its root, the political consequence of a cultural project that nobody had thought through to its endpoint.
This is the part of the story that defenders of missionary activity in India are most reluctant to confront. The individual missionaries were, in many cases, people of genuine compassion and sincere faith. The schools they built produced India’s most literate tribal communities. The hospitals they established saved lives that colonial neglect would have lost. None of this is false. All of it is true alongside the other truth, that the conversion project systematically separated communities from their ancestral identity, made them culturally dependent on Western frameworks, and created the conditions for ethnic separatism that India has spent eighty years trying to manage, at considerable cost in lives and democratic credibility. Good intentions and destructive consequences are not mutually exclusive. History does not grade on intent.
The word that no one in this conversation wants to say clearly is leverage.
The conversion of South Asia’s northeastern hill tribes was never only a religious project. It was a leverage project, the creation, in a geopolitically sensitive region adjacent to China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, of communities whose identity, education, cultural references, and institutional affiliations were oriented toward the West. That leverage was useful to the British Empire in the nineteenth century. It has been useful to American strategic interests in the twentieth and twenty-first. The question of whether those interests have ever aligned with the interests of the converted communities themselves is one that the strategic planners have never been required to answer, and the missionaries have never been comfortable examining.
The Zo dream, the imagined homeland of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people spread across parts of India’s Manipur and Mizoram, Myanmar’s Chin State, and Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, is not an invention of Western strategists. It is a genuine ethnic and cultural aspiration of people who have lived across these borders for centuries and who have legitimate grievances against every state that governs them. The Kuki communities of Manipur’s hills are not tools of American imperialism. They are people who were converted to Christianity three generations ago, who built their identity around that faith, who have faced real ethnic violence, including in the devastating Manipur conflict that began in 2023 and killed hundreds, and who want a political arrangement that gives them security and autonomy. Their aspirations are real. Their suffering is real.
What is also real is that those aspirations, in a region of extraordinary strategic significance, where India, China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh converge, where China’s Belt and Road investments run through Myanmar’s Chin territory, where American strategic competition with China requires a foothold in the Indian Ocean and the ability to destabilise Chinese-aligned governments, have made the Kuki-Chin-Zo communities enormously attractive to foreign actors who are entirely unconcerned with their welfare and entirely concerned with the leverage their geography provides. The missionary and the mercenary are not the same person. But they are downstream of the same logic: that a community whose identity has been reoriented toward the West is a community whose territory can be used by the West, when the time comes.
Sheikh Hasina was not a disinterested observer when, on 23 May 2024, she stood at a meeting of her fourteen-party alliance at the Gono Bhaban in Dhaka and said: “Like East Timor, they will carve out a Christian country taking parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar with a base in the Bay of Bengal.” She was a politician fighting for her political survival, and she lost that fight three months later when she was ousted in a student-led uprising and fled the country. She was not wrong about everything she said. The claim about a white man offering her re-election in exchange for an airbase is unverified and unverifiable in any independent sense. The claim about the broader strategic design, the interest in the Bay of Bengal, the leveraging of Christian communities, the East Timor comparison, is not a fantasy. East Timor did happen: a majority-Catholic territory was separated from a Muslim-majority Indonesia with the active support of Western powers, and it happened within living memory, and regional observers from Dhaka to New Delhi noted what it demonstrated about the model.
Matthew VanDyke, sitting in NIA custody in Delhi as this essay goes to press, is not a CIA operative, at least not in any way that Indian authorities or credible sources have been able to confirm, and the difference between confirmed and speculated matters enormously in a story that is already overheated with conspiracy. He is something simultaneously more ordinary and more illuminating: an American Christian who spent fifteen years convincing himself that his military skills and his faith made him uniquely qualified to intervene in other people’s conflicts on the side of what he judged to be righteousness. His profile on Sons of Liberty International’s website described him as a soldier, a war correspondent, a businessman, and an activist. His social media was full of Christian devotion and attacks on anyone, including Donald Trump, he found insufficiently committed to the cause. He freely awarded bad Christian certificates to world leaders who displeased him. He was, in the language of a tradition that reaches back to the Crusades, a holy warrior, a man who had collapsed the distance between faith and violence so completely that he could not see where one ended and the other began.
He is also what the American Baptist missionaries of 1836 would have recognised, had they looked honestly at where their project led: the end-point of a century of telling the people of South Asia’s hills that their identity, their land, and their future were best understood through a Western Christian framework. The missionary arrived with a Bible and a school. The mercenary arrived with drones and Ukrainian war veterans. The intervening century of conversions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and strategic calculations connects them, not as a conspiracy, but as a logic. You build a community’s identity around a Western framework. That community generates political aspirations shaped by that framework. Those aspirations create instability on borders that matter to Western strategic interests. Western strategic interests find ways to exploit the instability. The next Matthew VanDyke presents himself.
None of this requires a master plan. It requires only the compounding of choices made across generations by people who were certain of their righteousness and incurious about the consequences for the people they were certain they were helping.
Here is what honest reckoning requires: to hold two truths simultaneously without collapsing them into each other.
The first truth is that the communities of Northeast India, the Nagas, the Mizos, the Kukis, and the Chin, have genuine, legitimate aspirations for autonomy, security, and cultural recognition that the Indian state has addressed poorly, violently, and often with contempt. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which has allowed Indian security forces to operate in the northeast with near-total impunity for decades, is a genuine atrocity. The ethnic violence in Manipur in 2023, in which hundreds died and tens of thousands were displaced along religious and ethnic lines, was a genuine catastrophe that the Indian state managed with spectacular indifference for months before Delhi acknowledged it. The grievances are real. The suffering is real. The demand for recognition and justice is legitimate.
The second truth is that the transformation of those legitimate grievances into the raw material for Western geopolitical leverage, through a century of missionary activity that reoriented cultural identity and through the ongoing work of evangelical organisations, mercenary trainers, and strategic planners who see in this region a useful theatre for competition with China, is a form of exploitation that does not become acceptable because the people being exploited have real grievances. The Kuki-Chin-Zo communities are not tools. They are people. Using their suffering to build leverage in the Indo-Pacific is not liberation theology. It is the same colonial logic dressed in newer clothes.
Franklin Graham, whose organisation Samaritan’s Purse was denied a visa to operate in Nagaland in November 2025, runs an operation that has been reported to use humanitarian aid as a vehicle for conversion across multiple countries. Dave Eubank, a former US Special Forces officer and ordained Christian minister who runs Free Burma Rangers, has admitted by his own account not only to providing humanitarian aid and military training to Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, but to proselytising locals into Christianity in active conflict zones. These are not fringe actors. They represent a tradition, the fusing of humanitarian assistance, military capacity, and evangelical purpose, that has operated in South Asia’s hills for a hundred and fifty years and that the Indian state is only now, under the pressure of specific and alarming arrests, taking seriously enough to push back against.
India’s response to all of this has been, characteristically, both real and compromised. The crackdown on foreign funding for NGOs under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act has been used as a legitimate tool against organisations channelling Western evangelical money into conversion programmes, and has simultaneously been used as a cudgel against human rights organisations, minority advocacy groups, and any civil society voice that the BJP government finds inconvenient. The Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, had its FCRA registration declined in 2022 before being reinstated two weeks later following a public outcry, an episode that illustrated precisely how bluntly and indiscriminately the state wields its regulatory power when it decides that foreign-linked organisations are a threat. The Modi government’s concerns about missionary activity and foreign funding are not without foundation. The manner in which those concerns are pursued, sweeping, selective, often directed at the politically inconvenient rather than the genuinely dangerous, does serious damage to the democratic fabric that the concerns themselves claim to protect.
This is the trap at the centre of this entire story: a legitimate security concern, rooted in a hundred and fifty years of genuine historical pattern, deployed by a government with its own majoritarian agenda in ways that punish the innocent alongside the problematic and silence criticism under the banner of national security. The VanDyke arrest, if the NIA’s charges are ultimately proven, is a serious and legitimate security action. The FCRA revocation of a leprosy charity’s registration is not.
The distinction matters. It matters because when a state stops making it, the legitimate concern becomes cover for the political project, and the people it was supposed to protect, the tribal communities of the northeast, the Christians of India who have nothing to do with American evangelical geopolitics, the Kuki families displaced by ethnic violence and abandoned by Delhi, are swallowed by a narrative that reduces them from human beings with complex lives to symbols in a war between two kinds of nationalism, one Western and Christian and one Indian and Hindu, each convinced of its righteousness, neither particularly interested in the people caught between.
Begin with a man in an airport. Matthew VanDyke, arrested at Kolkata with drone technology and insurgent connections, is the clearest recent evidence that the project is not historical. It is present tense. It runs through Mizoram’s borders, through Myanmar’s Chin hills, through the Bay of Bengal and into the Indian Ocean. It is built on a foundation that Baptist missionaries laid in 1836 when they arrived in Assam looking for a corridor to China and found, instead, the hill tribes of the northeast, poor, isolated, and entirely unaware that their conversion would become, a century and a half later, a strategic asset in a geopolitical competition they had never asked to enter.
The dream of a Christian nation in South Asia is not one dream. It is a palimpsest, layer upon layer, each drawn over the last, the original missionary impulse buried under decades of ethnic nationalism, strategic calculation, evangelical dollar flows, and mercenary training contracts. Each layer believes itself to be the real thing. Each layer has, in its own way, used the people of these hills as material for purposes that were finally someone else’s.
Gandhi’s warning from 1924 was not the warning of a bigot. It was the warning of a man who understood that conversion in conditions of power asymmetry is not a spiritual transaction. It is a geopolitical one, and the communities who undergo it pay the price of that transaction for generations, in insurgencies they did not choose, in conflicts they cannot end, and in the persistent attentions of foreign actors who claim to come in the name of God but arrive, always, with their own interests in their other hand.
The arrests will be processed. The charges will be tested in court. VanDyke’s lawyers have filed habeas corpus petitions. Ukraine’s ambassador has submitted formal notes. The US embassy has said it is aware of the situation and declined to comment further. The machinery of states will turn, slowly and imperfectly, as it always does.
What will not be processed, what no court will adjudicate, is the hundred-year question: what do you owe the people whose identity you remade for your own purposes, and whose land you now want to use for the next chapter of the same project?
That question has no defendant. It has only inheritors, the communities living in the Chin hills and the Manipur valleys and the Mizo plateaux, who are Christian because a Baptist missionary followed a British regiment into their ancestral homeland in 1880, and who are now caught, once again, between a foreign ambition and a domestic one, each as indifferent to them as the other, each as certain of its righteousness, each as unwilling to ask what the people themselves actually want.
That is not a conspiracy. It is something worse: a pattern so old that the people who perpetuate it have forgotten they are doing it.
All charges are allegations. The accused have not been convicted. The investigation is ongoing.
