Hamid Masih

Hamid Masih is the Jalandhar-based president of the Punjab Christian Movement. The Tribune describes him as its president and chief. He is a living public campaigner, and what follows is what he has said in public, as reported. Other Christian leaders have disagreed with him on some points, as noted below.

Key moments

• June 2023: he led members of the Punjab Christian Movement in a protest outside the district administrative complex at Jalandhar against the vandalism of churches in Manipur and against the Centre's plan for a Uniform Civil Code, and handed over a memorandum addressed to the President of India.
• April 2025: after the conviction of the self-styled pastor Bajinder Singh, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2018 rape case, The Tribune reported that Masih and a former sarpanch, Suraj Masih, called the conviction an attack on Christianity. The same report quotes Tarsem Peter, a Catholic leader in Jalandhar, who said that governments' failure to take medical care to the poor had given people like Bajinder their opening, and that he had suspected from the beginning that Christian dera culture would go the way of other deras.
• March 2026: after Home Minister Amit Shah said at a rally in Moga that a BJP government would bring a bill against religious conversions in Punjab, Masih told the press at the Punjab Press Club in Jalandhar that such remarks sowed discord and bitterness. He said Punjab's Christians lived in peace with other communities and asked what cases or complaints had been received against them.
• 2026: reacting to the Supreme Court's ruling in Chinthada Anand v State of Andhra Pradesh, that converting to a religion other than Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism means losing Scheduled Caste status, he told The Wire that the judgment was controversial and discriminatory. He argued that the court overlooked the caste system and focused on conversion, and that the presence of churches in Punjab did not mean forced conversions were taking place.

The wider debate. The Wire's report notes that about 1.5 per cent of Punjab's people are Christian by the 2011 Census, that Dalit Christians in the state belong mainly to the Valmiki, Majhbi Sikh and Ad-dharmi communities, and that the BJP is a marginal player in Punjab politics. Masih's statements are one Christian leader's answer to the call for a conversion law; the law's supporters make their own case, and the reports above do not settle it.