Attacking the cross: Rise in anti-Christian violence

By Ram Puniyani,

Julio Ribeiro is one of the best known police officers in India. Recently (March 16, 2015) he wrote that he is feeling like a stranger in this country. ‘I feel threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in my own country’. This pain and anguish of a distinguished citizen, an outstanding police officer has to be seen against the backdrop of the rising attacks on churches and rape of a 71-year-old nun in Kolkata. All over the country, the rage amongst the Christian community is there to be seen in the form of silent marches, candle light vigils and peaceful protests.

As such during the last several months in particular the instances of attacks and intimidation of the minority community have become more frightening. There is also a noticeable change in the pattern of violence against them. Earlier these attacks were more in the remote Adivasi areas, now one can see it taking place in urban areas also. The change in frequency of these attacks after the new government took over is a striking phenomenon.

As such Christians are one of the very old communities in India. Right from the first century when St Thomas visited Malabar Coast in Kerala and set up a church there, the Christian community has been here, part of the society, contributing to various aspects of social life. The missionaries, the nuns and priests, have also spent ages in the rural hinterlands setting up educational and health facilities and have also founded the most reputed educational institutions in most of the major cities of the country. Christians today are a tiny minority (2.3 % as per 2001 census). It has been a community which like any other has its own internal diversity with various Christian denominations.

In this context, the rise of anti-Christian violence during last few decades in Adivasi areas, Dangs (Gujarat) Jhabua (MP) and Kandhamal (Orissa) has been an unnerving experience for the community as a whole and for those believing in pluralism and diversity of the country in particular.

The violence, which picked up from mid-1990s peaked in the burning alive of Pastor Graham Stains (January 1999) and later Kandhamal violence in 2007 and 2008. After this, there was a sort of low intensity scattered violence in remote areas, till the attack on churches in Delhi from last several months. These churches which were attacked were scattered in five corners of Delhi: Dilshad Garden (East), Jasola (South), Rohini (Outer Delhi), Vikaspuri (West) and Vasant Kunj (South West), as if by design the whole terrain of Delhi was to be covered for polarization.

It was claimed by police and state that the main cause of these has been theft etc.; in the face of the fact at most of the places the donation boxes remained intact. BJP spokesperson are vociferously giving the data that during this period, so many temples have also been attacked, which is merely putting the wool in the eye, as the targeted nature of anti-Christian violence is very glaring.

In the meanwhile, the RSS Sarsanghachalak, the boss of the Hindu right, to which BJP owes its allegiance, states that Mother Teresa was doing the charity work with intent to conversion. Post the statement, two major incidents have come to light. One was in Hisar in Harayana, where a church was attacked, it’s cross replaced by the idol of Lord Hanuman and the Chief Minister of Haryana, who again has RSS background, stated that the Pastor of the Church has been alleged to be part of the conversion activities.

At the same time, RSS progeny Vishwa Hindu Parishad stated that more such acts of attack on churches will take place if conversions are not stopped. This incident reminds one of the placing of the idols of Ram Lalla (Baby Ram) in the Babri Mosque in 1949 and then claiming that it was the birth place of Lord Ram. In addition, the statement of the chief minister gives a clear indication as to how the investigation of the incident will take place and whether the real culprits will ever be nabbed. Incidentally there are no police complaints about Pastors’ conversion activities, if any, in the police records. This ‘they are doing conversions’ is a standard ploy, which is propagated for anti-Christian violence witnessed so far.

After Bhagwat’s comments on Mother Teresa, the anti-Christian violence seems to be intensifying by the day and the incidence of Haryana and Kolkata are symbols of that and the VHP is openly talking of more attacks. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his deliberate silence on the issues of violence against minorities, he did say that religious freedom will be respected. But one also knows that what he says and what he means are mostly not the same.

Also that the silence of last several months has given a clear message to his associates in the RSS combines that they can carry on their disruptive and polarizing activities at will. A large section within the Christian community feel that Modi was voted on the agenda of development and this type of violence was not anticipated! That is sheer naivety, Modi is an RSS trained pracharak for whom the divisive agenda remains at the core, to be implemented by a clever ‘division of labor’ implemented through different organizations, which are part of RSS combine popularly known as Sangh Parivar.

As such India has been the cradle of many religions, which people celebrated and lived together, a far cry from the present atmosphere which is intimidating the minorities. Christians’ plight in recent times is something to which the concerned democratic rights individuals need to wake up to. This seems to be unfolding of the script ‘Pehle Kasai Phir Isai’ (First Muslims, then Christians). It is not just a violation of their rights; it’s also a violation of very basic norm of democracy. As they say, a democracy has to be judged by the litmus test of level of security and equity its minorities enjoy!

(Ram Puniyani is a Mumbai-based author and peace activist. He can be contacted at ram.puniyani@gmail.com. This appeared in twocircles.net on March 31, 2015.) )

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Flight of imagination, Professor Saab?

An open letter to Jagdish Bhagwati

Uttam Sengupta

Christians in India are suffering from a persecution complex, their fears are ‘totally groundless’ and ‘product of a fevered imagination’, believes economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who wrote a piece in Mint to this effect. He reiterated the point on Monday evening while talking to Barkha Dutt on NDTV, defending ‘Ghar Wapsi’ programme of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. If Christians can convert, he argued, so can Hindus. So, what’s the fuss?

In a delicious irony Prof Bhagwati believes he has impeccable credentials to laugh at the ‘paranoia’ felt by Christians in this country because his own wife, economist Padma Desai, converted to Christianity. There are others in his family who have married Christians, he wrote, and since they never apparently felt any fear of persecution, he is convinced that the fears are exaggerated, politically motivated and driven by the Congress. How does one even begin to react to this reasoning?

Should one begin by informing him that the Constitution allows religious groups to preach, propagate and run institutions? That ‘conversion’ is both legal and can take place without coercion as in the case of his wife or in the case of music director A.R. Rahman or the son of composer Ilaiyaraja. That well-to-do Christians, like well-to-do Muslims, are unlikely to face persecution or discrimination. That he has very little or no knowledge of the persecution of Christians in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and other states. That Christians have been killed, their entry banned into some villages, rations denied to them in other places and some of them intimidated and ‘coerced’ into returning to the fold of Sanatan Dharma. That destruction of churches in remote areas and attacks on Christian priests are reported in the media with monotonous regularity.

Prof Bhagwati is of course not alone in his cocoon. There are others with not the slightest exposure or experience of the ground, who hold similar beliefs.

Why, even a Chief Justice of India, who is now the Governor of a southern state, let off Bajrang Dal ‘leader’ Dara Singh, who had self-confessedly led the mob that burnt Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor sons while they were asleep. While Dara Singh is hailed as a hero and role model by the Bajrang Dal, the judge initially said in his judgment while waiving his death sentence that the killing was designed as a lesson to Staines ‘about his religious activities’. It is another matter that the Supreme Court itself expunged the horrifying sentences a few days later.

Even as Prof Bhagwati was ridiculing Julio Ribeiro for his anguished newspaper article in which he wrote that at the age of 86 he suddenly feels like an alien in his own country and vulnerable, the Chief Justice of India was defending his action in calling for a conference of high court Chief Justices on April 3 which happens to be Good Friday, the day Christians mourn the crucifixion of Jesus. Many of us would love to hail the new work ethic under which the Government under Narendra Modi calls for observing December 25 as the ‘Good Governance Day’, necessitating some ministries to remain open. And the CJI’s intention to ensure that the conference of the chief justices on April 3, 2015 – Good Friday — does not disturb routine work in the high courts.

Prof Bhagwati and CJI Dattu can argue quite convincingly that Christmas and Good Friday were chosen because very few public servants or high court chief justices are Christians. And the solitary High Court Chief Justice who does happen to be Christian has not protested. But such arguments are specious precisely because they lack a degree of sensitivity. Shouldn’t the majority community sacrifice as much or a lot more in fact to uphold the new work culture? Would it not be far more dramatic and effective to work and hold such conferences on Diwali, Holi or Karwa Chauth?

True, these are arguments for argument’s sake. But what is imaginary about VHP leaders saying that there is no space for Muslims and Christians in this country? When RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat defends ‘Ghar Wapsi’ by saying that he is entitled to take back his ‘maal’ from the thieves, whose imagination is working overtime?

Prof Bhagwati reminded me of Dileep Singh Judeo. The former union minister and BJP Member of Parliament from Bilaspur, who was in 2003 caught accepting wads of currency notes and extolling the power of money in a sting operation. He had studied in St Xavier’s College, Ranchi. Not unlike Prof Bhagwati who went to St Xavier’s, Bombay. And yet it was Judeo who in the 1970s spearheaded the ‘Ghar Wapsi’ programme of the VHP and the campaign against Christian missionaries. Even then they were sporadic and symbolic, designed more for publicity than anything else.

In 1977 one recalls Nanaji Deshmukh exhorting ‘Hindu missionaries’ to emulate Christian missionaries. Reach out to the poor, help them get education, health and livelihood, he said. The RSS as a consequence has today a network of Ekal Vidyalayas (single-teacher schools) and Saraswati Shishu Mandirs for the poor and the tribals; as well as a more thinly disguised ‘Hindu’ network of DAV schools to counter the supposed influence of Christian missionaries. Are Vanvasi Kalyan Kendras and ashrams, funded generously by BJP governments, any different from Christian missionary schools? Are they as good or as ‘secular’?

The good Professor has been indoctrinated into believing that Christians are somehow close to the Congress because of Sonia Gandhi being a Catholic. He needs to be reminded that attacks on Christians started at least as early as the sixties when the Congress was all over the place. It was the Congress Government which not just deported several Christian missionaries from the country but effectively put a ban on foreign missionaries arriving here to ‘educate’ Indians! And if Prime Ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi called on Archbishops and if the Bishops exhorted the flock to choose the Congress as a lesser evil, religion was possibly the least of the motivating factors.

Christians truly have not faced the kind of persecution that Muslims have been subjected to. But that is small consolation in a country where the police, like politicians, are unable to trace people who have burnt and attacked churches, and who describe these attacks as ‘routine crime’ simply because ‘thefts’ have been reported from many more Hindu temples!

Hindus and Sikhs are increasingly facing the brunt of racial attacks and discrimination in the land of opportunities where Professor Bhagwati spent much of his working life. He would or at least should have been aware of the fear and outrage among the people of Indian origin in the United States, where they are busy convincing the White radicals that they have nothing to do with radical Islam. That is why it is doubly disappointing that an academic of Professor Bhagwati’s eminence fails to empathise with the fears of a microscopic minority and instead ridicules and insults them.

(Uttam Sengupta is the Deputy Editor of Outlook India. This article appeard in outlookindia.com on March 31, 2015)
***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
False alarm over Christians in India

By Jagdish Bhagwati

A recent opinion piece by Julio Ribeiro, the much-admired scourge of Khalistainis, complains plaintively that he is on “a hit list” today from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because he is a Christian.

Similar alarmist views on Christianity are common in India today, simply because of the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the decimation of the Congress by the BJP. They are being spread by church leaders; for example Catholic Archbishop Anil Couto is reported to have even celebrated the defeat of BJP in the recent Delhi elections as if a calamity for Christians had been averted. But they are so ridiculous and libelous to the prime minister, and even the BJP generally, that they must be exposed forcefully as such.

Before I do that, let me establish my credentials concerning the issue at hand. I come from a family that is impressively pro-Indian-minorities. My wife, Padma Desai, has converted to Christianity (in a moving ceremony described by her in her memoirs, Breaking Out, published by Penguin/Viking in India and MIT Press in the US).

Two of my nephews have married Christians: one is from Mumbai and is a multiple-award-winning psychiatrist practicing in London and periodically in Mumbai, whereas the other is a Syrian Christian from Kerala.

Another niece is married to a Parsi (who, of course, belongs to a still smaller, and equally beloved minority as Christians in India); and yet another almost married a Muslim young man. My only daughter’s significant other for years was a Christian and indeed an American-Indian on his mother’s side.

Abid Husain, my closest friend of over 40 years, whom I met in Turkey when we were both working there, was one of India’s most distinguished reformers and a pioneer in community development programs. He was a Muslim and had married a brilliant Parsi intellectual. Indeed, the other equally close friend for over half a century has been former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a devout Sikh (yet another minority much loved in India except for the awfully heinous massacre, indeed a pogrom, of the Sikhs in Delhi by some Congress party men in 1984 after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards).

Most of all, I went to St. Xavier’s High School in Bombay. I got excellent education there, and I expressed my sentimental bond with the school when I was chosen recently to receive the coveted Xavier Ratna award. On a lighter side, with discipline a high point, we used to joke how strict the school was because they even had a guy nailed to the wall.

So, if there was anything to the Christian fears today, I should be the first to join the protests. But the truth is that these fears are totally groundless and are, at best, a product of a fevered imagination. First, we now know from the admirable investigative report in Firstpost (Crying Wolf: The Narrative of the ‘Delhi church attacks’ flies in the face of facts, 17 February) by Rupa Subramanya that there is simply no evidence for the six alleged attacks on Christian churches and one Christian school. This turns out to be a case of the “monkey say, monkey repeat” phenomenon that converts false allegation into a fact.

Second, Ribeiro resents the remark of Mohan Bhagwat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that Mother Teresa was interested in conversions to Christianity, not just in the welfare (as distinct from the spiritual salvation) of her flock. But surely, Christians do believe in conversion, as do Muslims; does Rebeiro deny that?

Again, what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. If Christians can convert non-Christians to their faith, what is wrong with Hindus doing the same? In fact, being a religion that does not normally convert, only a minuscule number of Hindus will do this whereas a far higher proportion of Christians and Muslims will.

Moreover, Ribeiro is offended that Mother Teresa is not respected as a saint by Bhagwat. But he is clearly ignorant of the fact that Mother Teresa may have won the Nobel Peace Prize but many doubt her bona fides, including the late Christopher Hitchens whose scathing critique of her was not the only dissenting voice on her, as recently recounted by the Washington Post reporter Adam Taylor (Why, to many critics, Mother Teresa is still no saint, 25 February).

Since Hitchens followed this with a scathing attack on Hillary Clinton (an icon mostly to herself), I must confess that when he was coming out of a television debate on Hillary Clinton and I was going in to do a debate of my own, I could not resist telling him: Christopher, you did not say that Hillary Clinton was no Mother Teresa.

Rebeiro, the Archbishop and other Christians also forget that Sonia Gandhi is a Roman Catholic. To my knowledge, many have objected to her leading the country because she was born abroad (much as Americans disbar foreign-born citizens from becoming the president), but hardly anyone, in BJP or elsewhere, has objected to her because she was a Christian.

US President Barack Obama’s speech in India where he talked of Mohandas Gandhi’s legacy of respect for all religions has been self-servingly appropriated by anti-BJP and anti-Modi critics (such as my former Columbia University student Siddharth Varadarajan) as a chastisement of their alleged communalism

But this interpretation is absurd since the president clearly had in mind the difficulties that the US itself is having with such issues. In fact, on returning to the US, he proceeded to tell Americans that Christianity itself had been guilty of serious lapses over many centuries.

Ribeiro and the Archbishop are good men who have allowed themselves to be dragged into politics that plays on fear and partisanship. I only hope that they will join those of us who would like to see religious harmony, not the religious discord that can only subtract from our humanity.

Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor (economics, law and international affairs) at Columbia University. This article appeared in livemint.com on March 29, 2015

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within these articles are the personal opinions of the authors. Matters India is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information on this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Matters India and Matters India does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)