Deadly Sacrifice

ANTHONY SPAETH New DelhiThe pride of independent India is its democracy: freewheeling, pluralistic and broad-based. (In the 1988 general elections, more than 375 million Indians voted.) Free and regular elections, it's argued, provide the glue that has held the heterogeneous land together for half a century.But the ways in which electoral politics is conducted, in India as elsewhere, can become emblems of national shame. Consider recent events in Ahwa (pop. 10,000), a township in the western state of Gujarat. With the permission of local authorities, several thousand protesters took to the streets on Christmas day to denounce the activities of the town's Christians. Raised voices turned to mob violence and a crowd descended on Deep Darshan, a high school run by nuns, pelting it with stones and damaging several buildings. Later in the day, a Jesuit-run school in a nearby village was besieged by a similar mob--two priests were injured--and 20 more Christian establishments were attacked over the following week.An obscure locale, a tiny minority--Christians account for 5% of the population in Ahwa's region, and less than 3% of India's masses as a whole--sticks, stones and ugly chants: the resulting headlines initially seemed evidence of the local skirmishes that chronically roil India's diverse society. They were anything but, as follow-up proclamations from India's bigwig politicians demonstrated. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, after a tour of the affected areas, called for a national debate on all religious conversions in largely Hindu India. Ashok Singhal, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a powerful Hindu group, was quoted in newspapers decrying a Christian conspiracy to propagate their religion and wipe out Hinduism from this country.(The VHP also announced a three-year plan to counter Christian missionaries and reconvert Christians to Hinduism.) Says Denzil Keelor, a highly decorated former Indian Air Force marshal and himself a Christian: I'm extremely concerned and disgusted that the government in power is allowing the violence to escalate.Unforeseen threats to the nation and growing violence can mean only one thing: politics rearing its ugly head. In this case, the fragile and fumble-prone government of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological sympathizers seem determined to fabricate an issue to rally support among the country's Hindus, the majority religion accounting for 82% of the population. The purpose is not so much to stay in power but to recover lost ground before the next general election, which analysts predict could take place this year. The Christian community has come into the militants' cross-hairs. There were only 15 instances of violence against Indian Christians in 1997, according to the New Delhi-based United Christian Forum for Human rights; but in 1998, the year the BJP came into power and Sonia Gandhi entered politics, there were 108 such attacks. And while it seems paradoxical for Hindu groups and their allies to target Christians, who are small in number, unaggressive and have never before been considered a threat, that might be precisely the point. If you're in power, what's a safe way to mobilize militant Hindu cadres? asks Balveer Arora, professor of government and politics at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. Pick on a smaller minority. The violence is manageable and will not put the government in peril. It does, however, put peril in the way of a fairly defenseless religious community. Hindu groups are openly declaring that they will drive out all the Christians, says Sister Carmen Borges, 42, a Vedrunite nun from Goa, who runs Deep Darshan, the high school attacked on Christmas. We now live in constant fear.India's 23 million Christians are a small minority, but for the BJP government they represent a very big political bull's eye: a strike against Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who is trying to rejuvenate her husband's Congress Party and boot the BJP out. The ruling party's strategy is to tar Sonia as a Christian, a foreigner, a figure who will institute a Rome Raj if she ever gains the prime ministership, which is increasingly likely. All these years, nobody accused Sonia Gandhi of Christian bias, points out political scientist Rajni Kothari. It's nothing but a tacit admission by the BJP that the Congress is coming back to power. PAGE 1|
Pakistan's followers of Christ face a bloody fate

The wave of Christian-bashing is further proof that India's politics are descending even further on the low road of divisiveness and violence. On the national scene, that lugubrious turning came in the 1980s, when the mighty Congress, which had dominated both national and state politics for decades, lost its preeminence. Until then, national elections had been votes of confidence in the Congress and, following Indira Gandhi's 19-month emergency rule in the mid-'70s, a punishment vote against it. The pendulum swung a few more times, pushed by sympathy votes after the assassinations of Mrs. Gandhi and her son Rajiv. But the party was clearly running out of popular support.The BJP's leaders saw a political vacuum forming--and recognized that Indian voters were ready for an ethos beyond embracing or rejecting the Congress every five years. Their strategy was to appeal to Hindu voters as Hindus. And the simplest way to be pro-Hindu was to be against a minority. The country's 120 million Muslims became the target, not only because they are the largest minority but also due to the residual animus against them from the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, in which the Muslim state of Pakistan was created. In 1981, some 300 lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam in the southern Indian village of Meenakshipuram and the voluble protests of the VHP brought the group to national prominence. By the end of the 1980s, the BJP focused on a squat mosque in the north Indian temple town of Ayodhya, demanding that it be torn down to uncover the foundations of an ancient Hindu temple allegedly on the site. Thumping the drum of restoring Hindu pride, while simultaneously promising a whack to the Muslims, the BJP picked up 86 parliamentary seats in 1989, compared with just two in 1984. In 1992, with the BJP's then-president in attendance, organized Hindu mobs destroyed the mosque--the first example of a national political party associating with a campaign of violence against a minority. The BJP said it was championing Hindutva, a purposely vague concept of Indian culture. Many saw the tyranny of a religious majority poised to replace India's secular governing system.The Ayodhya campaign, along with the continuing disintegration of the Congress, helped the BJP make it to national power for a brief 13 days in 1997 and, more durably, in an unwieldy coalition that took the reins last February. But Ayodhya also produced a backlash. The Muslim minority struck back after the mosque's demolition with anti-government riots and, in March 1993, a series of bomb blasts in Bombay that terrorized the country's business capital. The Muslims proved they were ready for sustained war--and organized attacks against them haven't been attempted since.Today, Vajpayee's government has one populist triumph to its credit, the testing of five nuclear devices in May, and myriad failures, most notably skyrocketing inflation. In response, it has gone into campaign mode for the next elections. From out of the blue, the main national issue has become the threat of Christians to the Hindu masses. Christianity is the new type of imperialism, thunders Mohan Joshi, central secretary of the VHP. His boss, Ashok Singhal, told a gathering of VHP faithful in December that Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen was helping Christianize India by advocating universal literacy--Christian schools presumably would do the job--and that the Nobel committee was in on the plot, having already given a peace prize to that famous Christian troublemaker Mother Teresa (Singhal subsequently denied the statement). The BJP has formally called for an investigation into foreign funds ending up in missionaries' hands. The underlying accusation is that Christian schools are fronts for forced conversions, especially of lower caste-Hindus or, in the case of the incidents in rural Gujarat, proto-Hindu tribal peoples. Leaders of Christian missions, which run 16,500 schools as well as 6,500 hospitals, orphanages and old-age homes, wearily shake their heads at the charges. If we had been converting through our schools, says Alan de Lastic, Archbishop of Delhi, there would be 500 million Christians in India today.The linking of the Christian threat and Sonia Gandhi, who assiduously downplays her origins by not celebrating Christmas and constantly stressing her attachment to India, has hardly been subtle. The rate of conversions to Christianity has increased ever since Sonia Gandhi became president of the Congress Party early last year, claims VHP international secretary Praveen Togadia. Christians have also become more assertive. That produces head-shaking among Congressmen. Says party spokesperson Girija Vyas: It's nonsensical. Sometimes we feel ashamed even to react to what they say.Sonia's initial response to the attacks on Christians in December was muted; within the party, there was fear that she would walk into the BJP's trap. But she did finally visit the site of the attacks, and last week gave a speech criticizing certain sections of our society who spread the politics of hate and antagonism. She quoted an ancient Sanskrit saying: Truth is one, the wise pursue it variously. Gujarat's vulnerable Christians have learned how dangerous that pursuit can be, and anti-Christian tension is spreading to other areas, such as the violence-prone state of Bihar. It's probably our lot to suffer, says Archbishop de Lastic--at least through the next election.Reported by Maseeh Rahman/New Delhi|2
Pakistan's followers of Christ face a bloody fate