The
government encourages them with call for national laws against religious conversions
JOHN
DAYAL
On
18th December 2014, which is the official National Minorities Day, Mr. Rajeshwar Singh, the head of the Dharm Jagran
Manch [Faith awakening forum] declared on national television news channels
that the Manch had set a 2021 deadline to cleanse India of the “alien Islam and Christianity”. Another group
said Christians would not be allowed in the Himalayan regions, sacred to the
Hindus. The hate speeches went viral on social media, and then in the major
newspapers across the country.
The
Indian government of Mr. Narendra Modi, has so far not indicated if Mr.
Rajeshwar Singh is being prosecuted under India’s strict laws against religious
discord, used so far largely to target Christian pastors, and in recent months, Muslim youth active on Face Book who vent their anger
against the State.
But
members of Mr. Modi’s Council of Ministers, and official spokesmen of the
Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, which controls much of the Indian provincial
governments, have been voluble in support of the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar is
a very large and almost omni-present family of Hindu militant organisations
created by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the past two decades, of which
the Dharma Jagran Manch, the Bajrang Dal and the powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad are among the
more prominent groups with aggressive
cadres.
Political analysts have said it would be erroneous to assume that under the government
of Mr. Modi, the RSS has reoriented its goals. Each time the BJP assumes power,
its ideologues get emboldened. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power in New
Delhi when major attacks took place on Christians. Over 30 village churches
were destroyed in Dangs in Gujarat on Christmas Eve in 1998. Australian leprosy
worker Graham Staines and his sons were burnt alive in January 1999, and of a Catholic priest Fr
George Kuzhikandam in Mathura, not too far from New Delhi, as he lay asleep in
his church in June 2000. Christmas eve violence in 2007 in Kandhamal, Orissa,
was a precursor of the 2008 pogrom, was when the BJP was in power in coalition
government. Mr. Modi has made no bones of the fact that he was a leader of the
RSS, and continues to profess its ideology.
RSS
affiliated groups have launched a campaign to convert the poorer Christians and
Muslims to Hinduism, a process they call Ghar Wapsi, or home coming under their
argument that every Indian is actually a Hindu, and Christians and Muslims are
those who have strayed, or have been bought over by missionaries. In turn, the
Sangh groups have called for a war chest for the Ghar Wapsi, earmarking Rupees
500,000 for every Muslim they convert, and Rupees 200,000 for every Christian.
The different rates are presumably because Muslims are felt to be more
difficult to “persuade’ for a change of faith.
In
the central Indian State of Chhattisgarh, where some months ago radical groups
enacted villages banning the entry of essentially Christian pastors and
religious services other than those of the Hindus, the focus is now on Catholic
Schools. In its Bastar Tribal region, Christian schools, which are otherwise in
great demand, need to install statues of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati.
And priests running these institutions can no longer be called “father’, but
need to be called “Pracharya”, a teacher. Protestant pastors are now beaten up,
home churches raided almost as a matter of routine, with the police looking on,
or an active participant. Santa Claus, of course, has been proscribed. Needless
to say, the State has been governed by the BJP for the past 12 years.
The
fact that the Sangh Parivar runs over 57,000 ideology based schools for
children in villages across several states, and specially in areas populated by
Tribals and the Dalits, groups once called Untoucbable, makes available a cadre
of youth and their parents ready to do their bidding.
The
BJP’s response has been to suggest that the religious cleansing deadline needs
to be seen in the context of fiery speeches by Muslim TV evangelists and
western campaigns to spread Christianity. The government’s senior minister, Mr.
Venkiah Naidu, a former president of the BJP, has called for a national law
against religious conversions. These laws exist in six states, and have been
passed by two more states but yet made cleared by the Governors. It is a matter
of a few months before they too are brought into force. These laws have also
led to some considerable violence against religious groups in the years they
have been in force.
United
Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs for Religious Freedom have slammed these
laws as infringing the basic rights of freedom of faith and belief, enunciated
in the UN bill of Rights, and in fact, an important part of the Indian
Constitution.
Other
ministers have suggested an immediate enactment of a Common Civil Code,
seemingly a good thing, but rooted in the unsubstantiated premise that Muslims can
marry four wives at a time, are breeding too fast, and will outnumber the
Hindus soon. The law will also impact on Christian personal laws and customs, particularly
in rural populations where tradition and custom are the glue that holds their
society together.
Mr.
Modi’s minister for education, the former TV actor Mrs. Smriti Boman Irani, who
has ordered a revision of text books, particularly of history, to incorporate
more of ancient Indian traditions including references of Hindu sacred texts.
Various important councils in the ministry are now chaired by luminaries wedded
to the thesis that India is the fountainhead of all knowledge in the world. The
BJP and the Minister hold Hindu sacred texts are the 5,000-year-old source of
knowledge on such diverse subjects as plastic surgery, aviation, nuclear
weaponry and genetic engineering.
Her
officials passed orders earlier this month that Christmas Day will now be
called “Good Governance Day” in honour of the birthday, not of Jesus, but of
Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first BJP Prime Minister who ruled from 1998 to
2004, and is now critically ill and has not been seen in public for several
years. Academic institutions from junior schools to Universities were keep
their doors open and organise social programmes for the students, supervised by
the teachers. Christmas was not to be a holiday any more.
An
outcry by Church and Civil Society, an acrimonious clash in Parliament where Mr.
Modi still does not have a majority in the Upper House, Rajya Sabha, forced the
government to dilute its order. Christmas remains a Holiday, but the “educational”
programmes of declamations and other activities will also be held, with
Principals and officials told to report to the government that they did indeed
comply with the order.
Muslims
and Christians feel they are being encircled in a vicious and tightening
noose, in the villages and small towns
by Sangh cadres who have the police on their side, and nationally by the
Federal and State governments who seem to endorse the hate campaigns and the
violence.
But for
Civil society, the threat is to the Constitution
of India which ahs evolved as a great international democratic document that
protects the subcontinent-sized country’s hundreds of cultures, languages,
races and faith. All too many people in office and heading Sangh groups
have said the Constitution is a British inheritance that has no place in Hindu Rashtra, the Land
of the Hindus.
This is
something that must worry not just Indian religious minorities, but the world.
[UCAN]
