Last week, while at my local shops, I met an Indian immigrant working behind the counter. As I was speaking with him, I noticed a Christian cross hanging on the wall behind him, alongside a Bible verse. I asked if he was a Christian. He said yes. I told him that I was, too. That simple exchange opened the door to a conversation that has stayed with me all week.

He told me that he and his wife had come to Australia with their two young children because of severe persecution in the part of India they came from. Christians, he said, make up less than two percent of the population there, and in recent years, violence against them has escalated dramatically. According to him, extremist groups, he mentioned both radical Hindu and radical Muslim factions, have been responsible for intimidation, assaults, and even killings.

He shared a story that visibly pained him. Someone his family knew, a Christian woman, was raped and then paraded naked through the street by a radical Hindu mob after a Sunday service. This was not a distant news report. This was personal. As he recounted it, his voice shook.

He explained that in India, the only real protection Christians have is the size of their congregation. Large churches are generally left alone because attacking them would draw too much attention, but small congregations, especially village churches,are vulnerable every single week. He said that violent incidents, threats, and harassment are a weekly, even daily, reality in parts of India, though rarely acknowledged by mainstream media.

When he arrived in Australia, he was shocked at how difficult it was to find a Christian community made up of Indian migrants. According to him, there are only about half a dozen such congregations across the entire country. Yet he sees many new migrants arriving who identify as Hindu or Muslim. This confused him. He had always believed Australia was a Christian nation, or at least a nation built on Christian foundations. He couldn’t understand why, as a Christian fleeing persecution, he had entered a country whose immigration policies seemed to favour people from the very groups that included the extremists who had persecuted Christians back home.

He then told me something that cut unexpectedly deep: he is worried for his daughter. He escaped violence so she could grow up safe. But he fears that in twenty years’ time, Australia may no longer resemble the refuge he imagined, especially if the religious and cultural landscape shifts in ways that echo the tensions he fled.

As our conversation continued, his concerns grew more pointed. What troubled him most was not simply the presence of different cultures and religions in Australia, but that the country does not seem to appreciate the implications of importing ideas, ideologies, and longstanding conflicts under the banner of multiculturalism.

In his view, Australia celebrates multiculturalism as though it were only about food, festivals, and colourful diversity. What it fails to confront, he said, are the deeper questions: What beliefs are being brought here? What political and religious grievances are arriving alongside them? What historical animosities, carried for centuries overseas, are quietly being introduced into suburbs that have never known them?

He emphasised repeatedly that the people who attack Christians in India are not entire religions or communities, but extremist groups within them. But extremists do not arise in a vacuum. They grow out of cultural, ideological, and religious ecosystems that shape attitudes toward minorities and shape responses to difference. And his fear is simple: those ecosystems can travel.

He looked at me and said, “No country is magically immune. The same beliefs that justified hurting us in India, if they come here in large numbers, why would they suddenly disappear?”

He believes Australians are deeply naïve about this. Policymakers assume every culture is automatically compatible with every other, an assumption he says is dangerously untested. People bring their history with them, he told me. Their worldviews. Their resentments. Their loyalties. Their inherited conflicts. “These tensions don’t vanish on the plane ride. People bring their world with them.”

What alarmed him most was that Australians seem afraid to talk about these risks. Anyone who raises concerns about the ideological or religious implications of immigration is quickly dismissed as intolerant. He said that this silencing only increases his fear: “If you cannot talk about the dangers,” he told me, “you cannot prevent them.”

He said he does not oppose immigration; he himself is a migrant, grateful to be here. But he believes that Australia is accepting people without properly examining the cultural, ideological, and religious frameworks they bring with them, frameworks that, in other parts of the world, have resulted in severe divisions, sectarian conflict, and violent persecution of minorities like him.

He worries that if Australia continues importing people from regions where Christians are violently oppressed, while doing little to support persecuted Christians themselves, we may eventually replicate the very conditions that drive people like him to flee.

He paused, his eyes watering, and said something I won’t forget:

“I ran from that world. I just pray we are not building it again here.”

He escaped to protect his family. But now, watching Australia celebrate multiculturalism without considering its costs, he fears that the refuge he sought might one day begin to resemble the nightmare he left behind.