Narendra Modi Government builds tempo for law against religious conversions

Mr. Modi’s government builds tempo for national law banning conversions to Christianity

JOHN DAYAL

The Indian Government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking Nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi’s senior ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent. Civil Rights groups have recorded 168 incidents of targeted violence against the Christian community in the 300 days Mr. Modi has been in power.

The discourse is already heating up to a fever pitch as Mr. Modi prepares his party for the State legislative assembly elections in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where his Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, hopes to wrest power. These are among the biggest states in the Union of India, and the only ones in the so-called Cow belt of the Gangetic plains where the party does not control the provincial governments.

The BJP had repeatedly promised such a law made to their core constituency, of upper caste and well off Hindus, in their successful campaign in the General elections of 2014. This was reviving an unfulfilled dream that dates back to 1978 when Mr. OP Tyagi of the then unified Janata party moved a Private members draft legislation, ironically called the Freedom of Religion Bill, in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Although the Bill did not mention any religion by name, it was directed at Christianity.

Despite the support it had from Mr. Morarji Desai, the prime minister, the Bill fell through as the government collapsed when the socialist members objected to the “dual membership” that several ministers and party-men had in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, RSS. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mr Desai’s minister for External affairs, and Mr. L. K. Advani, the Information Minister, were members of the RSS, and then broke away to form the BJP.

In 1999, Mr. Vajpayee, then Prime Minister, revived the debate on the Bill when  more than two dozen small churches were destroyed, allegedly by Sangh cadres, in Gujarat’s Dangs region on the eve of Christmas 1998. Mr. Vajpayee had visited the Dangs to see the damage, and apparently felt the Christian community had brought it upon itself by its work in the area. Mr. Vajpayee was challenged by the Late Catholic Bishops Conference President,  Alan De Lastic, the Archbishop of Delhi, who reminded the Prime Minister that the debate on propagation of religion was effectively settled in the Constituent Assembly.

The RSS, and even local Gandhians, were keen to have a law against conversions. Mr. Vajpayee did not have the strength to bring a national law. But the Gujarat state government under Chief Minister Mr. Narendra Modi later passed a Freedom of Religion Act criminalizing conversions traced to force or fraud. Such laws had been enforced earlier in Arunachal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and later by Himachal Pradesh, prescribing stiff punishment for those found guilty. Tamil Nadu too passed the law, but the chief minister, Ms. J Jayalalitha,  soon withdrew it bowing to a major protest by the Christian community which had a political clout in districts in the state.

These provincial laws have survived Christian challenge in the High courts, most recently in Himachal Pradesh, and in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has upheld such laws to be valid, maintaining that while citizens had the freedom to chose, or change, their faith, the constitutional right to propagate religion did not mean the right to “convert another person to one's own religion.” Clergy, then, does not have the right to convert anyone.

In between its campaigns warning that Muslims will overwhelm the “Hindu nation”, the RSS has maintained its pitch demanding that there be a national law to curb the growth in the Christian population, which it says, has been brought about by uncontrolled proselytization by western evangelical groups and politically powerful Catholics in the Congress party.

A national law will require an amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Freedom of Faith. The government is in no position to do so with its minority presence in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper, where it was recently embarrassed when the Opposition forced an amendment to the Address of the President of India to the Joint Session of Parliament.

The Prime Minister, even as he praises the social work of the Christian community, darkly hints at the culpability of religious minorities in communal discord. His ministers are more forthright. Parliamentary affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu, Finance Minister Arun Jaitely and other junior ministers have repeatedly spoken of the urgent need to have a national law against conversions to check the violence against the Christian community.

The most direct so far has been the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh who said a few days ago that while he had no issues with the pace of growth of the Muslim population, he wanted and anti-conversion law. “It does not matter how many Muslims are there. If their population is increasing, let it increase. We have no issues. But the cycle of conversions must stop," Mr. Singh told a conference of state minority commissions in Delhi. Without naming her, he revived the RSS fulminations against Mother Teresa’s work as being motivated by her zeal to convert people to Christianity. “Why do we do conversions? If we want to do service, let us do service. But should service be done for the purpose of religious conversion. Do not do this (conversions). Leave it." He feels, as does his party, that conversions will change the demography of India, and therefore make it lose its cultural Hindu identity.

While President Pranab Mukherjee has decried violence against religious minorities, he has not spoken on  this issue. It has been left to Vice President Hamid Ansari to caution against such State meddling any more in religion.. More than once, the Vice president has stressed the freedom to change one's religion or belief is a fundamental right, and asserted that no religion should be given an “official status.” But his is a lonely voice.

The religious minorities have not really been able to forge a united movement against such laws in the states, and it has been left to the Christians to seek recourse in the courts. The Sikh community, despite the violence unleashed against it during a period of insurrectionist terrorism   in the 1970s and the 1980s, has not been impacted. While it attracts many Hindus to its fold, it does not actively seek converts. Muslims in India have not been accused of any magnitude of conversions, other than being repeatedly accused of increasing their population by large and polygamous families.

Among Christians, prelates of some of the Syrian denominations in Kerala have often said their churches have not been involved in proselytization, blaming it on evangelical groups.

But increasingly in recent years, human rights and freedom of faith activists within the Christian community, and in civil society, have felt that the fundamental Constitutional right of freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion, circumscribed only by issues of law and order and health, has to be defended to prevent a further erosion of  civil liberties which could alter the basic character of Indian democracy.

India is, at present, perhaps the only real multi-religious and multi-cultural country in Asia. Its neighboring countries are either theocracies or democracies where the majority religion, linked with ethnicity, is  overwhelmingly powerful, as in Sri Lanka which has only recently emerged from a three decade long civil war.

Hindu political groups set 2021 target to rid India of Christians and Muslim; the world must take notice

 The government encourages them with call for national laws against religious conversions

JOHN DAYAL

On 18^th 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]

Christians want voice, tickets

Christians want voice, tickets

Mohammed Wajihuddin & Ashley DMello | TNN

Mumbai: Christians have asked for adequate representation among candidates running for the assembly elections . The All India Christian Council (AICC) has asked Congress president Sonia Gandhi to nominate at least nine members from the community in Maharashtra, including three from Mumbai, for the October 13 elections.

John Dayal, activist secretary general, AICC, said that the council had appealed to not just the Congress president , but the heads of all political parties for adequate representation for Christians among candidates.

The AICCs Abraham Mathai said, Christians are politically marginalised. Their voice is seldom heard. To give them a sense of security , its essential they are adequately represented in the assembly. Mathai also complained that Christians were taken for granted by secular parties.

The Mumbai Catholic Sabha has also asked the Congress for seats for Christians. We have supported secularminded parties in elections in the state and we now need our share in representation, said sabha president Dolphy D - Souza, who added that they have demanded that 5% of the 288 seats the Congress-NCP will be contesting should be given to Christian candidates.

Christians account for around 18 lakh people in Maharashtra , eight lakh in Mumbai alone. However, they are scattered, said Mathai. The AICC has recommended three names from Mumbai to the CongressJanet DSouza (Ghatkopar), Agnello Fernandes (Mahim) and Steven Noronha (Bandra). These areas have a significant Christian population and the Congress should consider nominating members from the community for these seats, said Dayal.

The Catholic Sabha is also backing Janet DSouza and wants assembly seat 162 in Malad to be given to a Christian , said Dolphy DSouza .

Christian religious leaders are also concerned about the non-representation in the assembly . The Catholic bishop of Pune, Thomas Dabre, said there were many deserving and secular-minded Christians who should be given a chance.
Nobody raises a voice for us. Our institutions have been attacked, a section of Christians in the state lives in fear, but there is no one to address our grievances. The Congress-NCP should nominate Christians and also see to it they are elected, said Nashik-based bishop Pradeep Kamble.

Tipnis asks RSS to stand as bulwark against fundamentalism
Lt Gen Rawat of Uttarakhand Joins BJP

Indian Express Thursday June 7, 01:36 AM

Air Chief Marshal A Y Tipnis (retd) has called upon the Rashtriya Swayasevak Sangh(RSS) to be a bulwark against forces of fundamentalism and communalism and change itself keeping fresh Indian realities in mind.


"The Preamble to the Constitution and the declaration of citizens' Fundamental Rights assure to each and everyone of us liberty of faith and worship. How is it then that places of worship have been attacked and desecrated? How is it that the family of a foreign missionary engaged in laudable humanitarian work was attacked with murderous violence? The RSS can render great service by standing up as a bulwark against forces of fundamentalism, communalism and religious prejudice and intolerance," Tipnis said at an RSS function here on Tuesday.
He said that despite an inspiring Constitution, the country was full of overt and hidden violence. It was reflected in the organised attacks on minorities, Dalits and tribals, and also on the majority. There was the need for a social organisation to carry the torch of non-violence and communal harmony and to find non-violent solutions to problems.
"I urge the RSS to take note of Indian realities and find ways to respond constructively to them without causing alarm or apprehension in any section of the society," Tipnis said while calling on the Sangh to play a role in fighting corruption and pioneer a civic movement to ensure public cleanliness. "The RSS, I believe, is a dynamic organisation and I hope it is reviewing its agenda regularly to ensure that it addresses the existing challenges and not those of yesteryear," he said.
Speaking at the function, RSS chief K S Sudershan called for altering the statute to base it on "Indian realities". "Ambedkar himself had said in 1953 that he would have burnt the Constitution if he had his wish. The statute is based on the Government of India Act of 1935 which was a tool of British exploitation of India. There is no harm in changing the Constitution. France is having its fifth constitution," Sudershan said.
"We first divided the nation into various states and then reunited as a nation under the Constitution. We adopted an election system that has led to division of the society along caste lines. The Western model of economy based on struggle for existence and survival of the fittest was adopted. We need to adopt the Hindu model that takes care of weaker sections, protection of nature and individual duties. Also, it is due to basic Constitutional problems that we can't take action against Naxalites whom every state tackles in its own way rather than putting up a united fight," the RSS chief said.
He said the RSS had always been protective of Dalits, tribals and the oppressed classes, but Christian missionaries and Communists had been instigating them against their own brethren. "Missionaries were alluring tribals to convert. Today, symbols of Hindu pride like Ram temple, Ram Setu are being attacked. Hence Hindus need to become strong," he said.

Lt Gen T P S Rawat quits Congress

Dehradun, June 07: In a setback to Congress in Uttarakhand, senior party leader Lt Gen (Retd) T P S Rawat today resigned from his Dhumakot Assembly seat, raising speculation that he would join BJP. Rawat has tendered his resignation and Speaker Harbans Kapoor has accepted it, Vidhan Sabha Secretary Mahesh Chandra said. notification in this regard is also being issued, he said.
The resignation of Rawat, a former state Tourism Minister, also raised speculation that he is vacating his seat for Chief Minister B C Khanduri to enable him to be elected to the assembly. BJP sources said that if Khanduri contests from Dhumakot, then the party would field Rawat from Pauri Lok Sabha seat which is presently being represented by the Chief Minister. Rawat was not immediately available for comments. With the resignation of Rawat, the strength of Congress has come down to 18 in the 70-member Uttarakhand Assembly.
At present, BJP has a strength of 35 in the house which is one less than the figure for a simple majority. The sources said that Khanduri has left for New Delhi to meet the party's central leadership. "The Chief Minister has gone to New Delhi. All his engagements for today and tomorrow have been cancelled," an aide to Khanduri said.