Bangalore, India. There may not be many parts of the world where Christians heave a sigh of relief when a politician promises to adhere to "secular values," but India is certainly one of them. When the leading candidate of India's Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, opened her campaign in India's general election in Bangalore last January, she used this phrase to mean one thing: If her party came back to power it would protect India's minority religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, from persecution by Hindu nationalists.

That promise assumed more significance in March as the leading Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), emerged from the elections with 251 seats in the parliament, with the help of other parties, enough to rule the 534-seat chamber. There are widespread fears that, once in power in India, the BJP will gradually enact legislation severely encroaching on the religious and social freedoms first of the Muslims (at 11.4 percent of the total population of some 940 million) and then of the Christians (an estimated 2.5 percent).

At its worst, such moves could eventually lead to a severe restriction of Christian evangelism in India, even persecution of the faith itself. But even if no actual persecution took place, Indian cultural and social life might resume social practices that horrified British Christians who arrived in India in the early 19th century. These included the burning alive of widows of deceased Hindu men (known as sati), the denial of educational and career opportunities to members of the lowest social castes, self-immolation in idolatrous religious rites, and the murder of female babies.

The earliest representatives of Britain's East India Company, which began to rule India from the 1750's, paid little attention to all this mayhem. They were too busy making money to worry about local customs.

But after the British people themselves began to become much more godly under the impact of the preaching of John Wesley (I703-I791) and the revival named after him, attitudes in Britain changed. The British parliament demanded that widow-burning be abolished in 1829. Extraordinary missionaries like William Carey (1761-1834) translated the Bible into Indian languages, introduced the printing press and fought to liberate Indian women from ignorance and social slavery.

The brilliant Christian of our own day, Vishal Mangalwadi, a former student of the late Francis Schaeffer, has argued powerfully that it was Christian-led social reforms throughout the 19th century in India that prepared India for independence and democracy: In India: The Grand Experiment, Mangalwadi shows that India's "secular values" of tolerance and freedom sprang not frog secularism but from the Christian bees that all men are created in the image of God and should be treated with respect and dignity. By contrast, the mgt virulent of India's Hindu nationalists their inspiration in Nazi Germany.

Who ends up running India, them fore, is not some obscure discussion topic for political scientists or journalists; it will vitally affect the lives of Indian Christians. I thought about missionaries like William Carey, or fearless present-*, Indian Christians like Vishal Mangalwadi, as I spent an afternoon in the home of a friend who is an Indian Christian journalist, Stephen David. Stephen's parents paid the price for being the first Christians in traditional Hindu families.

Stephen's father, first-named David, lost his job as a telex operator for a year, when his bosses discovered his faith. His mother, Chandralekhar, was scorned by her parents and forbidden to go to medical school because she was a Christian.

Today there is a spiritual beauty to Chandralekhar's face that reflects hours spent in prayer, reaching out to slum dwellers, to neighbors and to anyone whom the Holy Spirit leads across her pathway. "I often weep in prayer for my country," she says. "I pray constantly that India may be reached with the gospel."

Indian Christians deserve the prayers of every American with a missionary, heart so that, one day, Chandralekhar will have to weep no more.