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]

Prof Guptara Human Rights Award for John Dayal

GENEVA, SECEMBER 12, 2008
Dr John Dayal has won the Maanav Adhikaar Paaritaushik (Human Dignity Award) of Rupees One Lakh in memory of Professor M. M. Guptara.

Dr Dayal has spent his life in investigating, and then helping individual cases of human rights abuse, as well as struggling against structural human rights abuse aimed at whole groups (such as Dalits, Muslims and Christians), and fighting organised human rights abuse - for example in Vadodara and in Orissa.

At a time in our nation's history when we have been struck down from the heights by the current global crisis as well as by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it is important not only to celebrate the strengths and beauties of the various cultures in our country, but also to recognise individual efforts to cleanse our country of its evils.

"Over several decades, and at the cost of his own health and finances, Dr Dayal has helped people regardless of ethnicity, gender, economic status, religion or any other criterion. That is something surely worth celebrating," said Professor Prabhu Guptara.Recognising that the award is only a token, the Guptara family deeply appreciates Dr. Dayal's lifetime of exceptional efforts and service to our country.

For further information contact: Professor Guptara on prabhusguptara@gmail.com OR UK Mobile: 07799.638.785

Dr John Dayal is available for interview on (Indian) mobile: +91 11 9811021072

This interview of John Dayal with the New Leader, one of the oldest news magazines in Asia, was recorded in November 2007, weeks before the Christmas Week violence against Christians erupted in the Kandhamala district of Orissa, India. New Leader published in its February 2008 issue.


QUESTION 1. Church in India should thank and congratulate you for your relentless fight on behalf of the Christian community in India. What motivates you?

JOHN DAYAL: Nothing that a human rights and civil society activist does can really compare with the courage, faith and forbearance of the victims, and those who survive persecution, terror, coercion, the physical violence and the humiliation that comes when there is an assault on his God given human dignity, the erosion of the freedoms guaranteed to a citizen by the Constitution of India.

Nothing can, of course, replace a human life lost, or recompense a widow or an orphan. We can pray with them, and in that prayer, find the strength in ourselves, as individuals and as society, to try and see that such tragedy is not repeated, such impunity is not allowed to go unchallenged.
It is perhaps that moment of prayer that sustains me as an activist, now nearing forty years in standing together with many others to say `Stop that tyranny, curb that vicious torch, be shamed of defying laws made by men, and afraid before you defy the law of God’. Activism, at the end of the day, is not a display of courage, or duty, or even love. It is surrender to God’s Will. After that there is no fear. It is the means, and it is an end in itself. I, therefore, seek no one’s gratitude. I do seek understanding, for sometimes one has to go against the grain. And I seek forgiveness, for sometimes what I say or do or write may seem to offend Hierarchy, leaders and others, or embarrass them in their own attempts at peace, reconciliation or negotiations with their tormentors.

QUESTION 2. Recently in a press statement, you had mentioned that roughly four incidents of Christian persecution take place in a week in India. This is shocking, since we had assumed that the plight of Christians in India will improve, once the BJP-led coalition lost power at the centre. Is anti-Christian persecution restricted to the BJP-ruled States in India?

JOHN DAYAL: I studied Physics as a student, and then worked in areas of Operational Research, surveys before becoming what is now called an Investigative Journalist back in the first years of the 1970s. That has taught me the power of data, of number crunching, in proving a point, and of field studies in discovering what others may want to remain hidden. These issues have included drugs and human trafficking, corruption and instances of bigotry and injustice, the forcible sterilizations of the Emergency of 1975-77, and of course the massive and penetrating sabotage of the Indian psyche and of its secular ethos by the Sangh Parivar from when it was just the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. That is how, leaning on the strong staff of the late Archbishop Alan de Lastic of Delhi, I could publish the first Unofficial White Paper of Violence against Christians in 1998, exposing the massive persecution of Christians across the country. We have sought to be able to publish that document every year since then, and I am happy its data, carefully collected and correlated, is by and large accepted by national and international Human Rights and Freedom of Faith institutions and organisations. It is in analysing such data that we find that even in 2007, there are almost 200 cases in 11 months – the year is yet to end, and these are but recorded and reported cases. Maybe there are hundreds of other cases which have not come to my notice.

Careful analysis shows persecution to be a complex criminal phenomenon. It involves massive hate campaigns. It involves vicious political forces and week Governments. Above all it implies slice, complicity or impunity of Government agencies such as police, civil administration and subordinate judiciary. Government is deaf and blind to hate campaigns, whether it is congress which is ruling or the BJP which is in power alone or in collation. The police will not register complaints. The civil administration will gleefully coerce schools, pressurise priests, abet religious fundamentalists, and often accompany mobs as they assault Christians. They ill not arrest culprits, nor will they convict guilty or award them just punishment. No wonder fundamentalists and mobs are encouraged. Media perceptions and unconcern aggravate matters.

Surely the religious fundamentalism and the criminal concept of nationalism that the Sangh Parivar espouses make persecution quite the norm in states ruled by them. The Sangh also penetrates the police, administration and local judiciary, and that means the entire system is loaded against the weaker elements of the minority communities, especially against Christians.
Sometimes, as in Himachal and other areas, the local Congress leadership seems to be in completion with the Sangh Parivar in appeasing the majority. Himachal hardly has any Christians, and neither does Rajasthan, but both states have laws designed to curb conversions! Mrs. Sonia Gandhi once responded to me to assure her Party, the Congress, opposed such laws, but apparently the Himachal chief minister does not care for what his political leader feels and says. His eye is always on the next election. We can challenge the Sangh, but when secular groups such as the Congress and the Left for political reasons actively or by default join forces against Christians, it really saddens me. Then I almost feel helpless.

3. Apart from the vicious campaign by the Sangh Parivar, are there other factors that contribute to anti-Christian violence?
There is what I call the Ravi Shankar-Niyogi Syndrome. You will recall the rule of Pandit Ravi Shankar, a Congressman but an arch Hindutva protagonist who was Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. He defied Jawaharlal Nehru, ignored his caution, and appointed Justice Niyogi to head a farcical commission designed to indict the Church for fraudulently and forcible conversions especially of tribals. That report mothered the anti conversion laws in many states.
That explains it all. The persecution is not a legitimate, if violent, response to Christian spiritual violence -- if you so want to describe evangelistic activity in urban, rural and tribal areas. The laws, which include the Presidential Order of 1950 which deprives Christian Dalits of their development rights, and the social and political perceptions, are designed to keep a vast population of the Dalits and the poor in the thrall and slavery of a few from the traditional social elite. There is virtually no persecution in areas which also do not also have harsh caste distinctions and Dalit or Tribal persecution. It is a one-on-one match! Political groups either encourage or condone persecution of Christians for political reasons.

QUESTION 4. Have national bodies like National Integration Council, of which you are a member, and the National Minorities Commission done anything to stop this?

ANSWER: The National Commission for Human rights does not look at religious persecution, leaving it to the national Minorities commission. Even otherwise I have problems with the NHRC whose focus is essentially on police and jails and torture, and that too not always honestly. It is little more than lip service. I recall at least one former Chief Justice of India who became NHRC chairman was strong supporter of the black law called POTA, used mostly against Muslims.
The National Commission for Scheduled Castes had, till Dr Buta Singh became its chairman, adopted a very hostile attitude towards Dalit Christians - whether the chair was a Congress person or a Bharatiya Janata Party ideologue and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh stalwart.
The National Commission for Minorities, barring the brief interlude when Dr James Massey, a Dalit, was the Christian member, has almost always had time servers or political appointees whose interests were anything but relating to the community. Some have been hostile to the community, some have been corrupt, and some have been retired politicians or bureaucrats whose ignorance has been exceeded only by their unconcern.

One went to the extent of saying he saw no persecution, because he had never been persecuted. Another was keen to bring the community to its knees before the RSS in the guise of a dialogue. Little wonder, therefore, that when the Union Cabinet devised the so called Communal Violence prevention Bill, it just did not cover the issues of Christians, and hate crimes and persecution of the micro minority. The Muslims, after their Gujarat pogrom experience, and Sikhs with the 2004 massacres, rightly rejected the CV Bill out of hand because it strengthened the hands of the police without helping the victims of communal violence. The CV prevention Bill did not even understand the persecution of Christians in various parts of India, or the massive hate campaign against the community carried out in tribal belts, villages and even in cities. Sad to say, in the many seminars organised by Civil Society and by Muslim groups and intellectuals, there were hardly any Christians present and almost no formal representation by Catholic and Protestant hierarchies.

QUESTION 5. Do you think individuals like the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and Sonia Gandhi are fully aware of this continuing harassment of Christians in India?

ANSWER: I am sure they are aware. It is not just the many memorandums the community has submitted to them in the last four years. Governors of many states have repeatedly written to the President and through him to the Home Minister. The Police Intelligence must have told them too. But I expect little of political figures.

QUESTION. Are human rights organisations outside India aware of this situation?
ANSWER: Every Human Rights group in India and abroad worth its salt is fully aware of the situation. Firstly, it is not just persecution of Christians. There is persecution of Muslims. There are issues of delayed justice for the Gujarat massacre victims, for the widows of the Sikhs killed in 2004, and of course much delay in registering cases of persecution. The issue has figured in Amnesty reports, the US Government’s annual reports on International religious Freedom, and reports of NGOs.

As part of our larger advocacy exercise, we have kept the global village aware of what is happening to our community here, and in other countries too. India is a signatory to international Treaties and Resolutions on Human Rights, Freedom of faith and similar civilisation value documents. We hope international peer pressure will force the Government of India to take action and meet its Treaty obligations. India’s Human Rights record is up for review in April 2008 in the United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaces the old UN Human Rights Commission. This is a body directly answerable to the UN General Assembly. India eagerly looks forward to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and I hope the Government will take this opportunity to assure the UN of its honorable intentions in safeguarding full minority rights in the country.

But I wish to make it clear once again that we will never seek any punitive action against India, or sanctions of any kind, that may eventually impact on the poor of the country. We hope to fight and win this battle on our terms, and in utter peace.

QUESTION 7. Is there anything the Christian community in India can do to protect itself from such attacks?

ANSWER: We do not seek anything other than our full and honest rights ads citizens of this great country. It is for those in authority to seek that justice prevails and citizens’ security is safeguarded. That is what Governments are for, that and the fact that they must also ensure economic and development justice. Christians are the worse off in this matter too. And Government has not even bothered to set up an assessment committee such as the Justice Rajinder Sachchar high powered committee that the Prime Minister set up for Muslims.
There are precautions, of course, including prayer and unity amongst all Christians. There is the need to be aware of out rights, and not to be afraid of going to the police and insisting that they register a case if there is violence doe, or threats made. Evangelists need to evolve a new vocabulary. Human rights must be a part of the curricula of every Bible school, every seminary. There is need to dialogue with all groups, and to participate in civil society duties in speaking out for others when they are victimised and targeted. We must stand together with anyone who is victimised. That is the only way to ensure we will not hang separately.
Bowing to pressure, accepting defeat, toadyism and displays of weakness will never assure security. The hierarchy and NGOs with FCRA accounts permissions to protect must recognise this. There can be no dialogue between dead bodies and their killers, or between rapists and their victims. Dialogues take place between peaceful persons. Truce is not peace. Peace without justice can be eventually fatal. And in the short run, it merely ensures servitude and a loss of civil rights. I hope it never happens.

QUESTION 8. For quite some years now, you have boldly spoken out for the Christian community. Have you faced any personal threats or risks as a result?

QUESTION; I am not afraid. Like anyone else, I fear the thought of pain, but I do not fear death. In a lighter vein I may say the material and economic violence against me has been more than the physical. But of course as many a priest and lay activist, I have often been threatened with personal injury. Cyber police and security agencies are investigating a recent threat, to me and some top Congress leaders, which had roots abroad. For some time in the past, the Government had given me armed bodyguards, but mercifully they were removed after a time. They were an embarrassment, and guards have never saved anyone. That is what history shows us. I am protected by the prayers of many.