Gusts of hot winds have scorched India’s hills, plains, valleys and forests. These winds are of hatred manufactured systematically against bitterly demonised communities. The campaigns of hate that target the populous Muslim community are better known than those mounted against the tiny Christian minority who peacefully inhabit most corners of this diverse land.

The attacks on Christians, unlike in Hindu-Muslim riots, very rarely involve mass clashes between people of Christian and non-Christian faiths. Instead, the intimidation takes mainly three other forms.  The first is of violent assaults on Christian priests, rape of nuns of numerous denominations, destruction and desecration of churches and chapels, and burning of Bibles. These have recurred with growing frenzy since 1997-98, when a priest was paraded naked in Dumka, and nuns were raped in Jhabua and Mayurbhan. In the same district, a priest was murdered in 1999. Churches were destroyed in the Dangs in Gujarat in 1998. India’s then Home Minister LK Advani admitted in Parliament that there were 400 attacks on Christian priests, nuns and churches between 1998 and 2000.

These attacks have continued unabated in the new century and recently spread to cities. The intensity of these attacks may be gauged by the fact that in the month of May 2007 alone, physical attacks on priests were reported from locations in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Kerala, Orissa, Maharashtra, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. There was a common pattern, of armed mobs of Hindutva activists thrashing the priests, often in front of their families, sometimes proudly before the cameras of invited television channels, accusing them of propagating a ‘foreign’ religion by fraud, insulting the Hindu faith and demanding that they are permanently expelled. The police, on occasion, accompanied the mobs, but rarely restrained or registered complaints against the attackers. Instead, at times, it arrested the priests.

A second form of intimidation is when converts themselves are attacked. A people’s tribunal convened by Angana Chatterji and Mihir Desai painstakingly tracks the frightening sequence of such recent attacks for the state of Orissa alone. Their long and chilling litany includes: in 1999, 157 Christian homes were set ablaze in Ranalai village, and three people suffered gunshot wounds; in 2003, seven women converts and a pastor were forcibly tonsured in Kilipal village, and a socio-economic boycott imposed on them; 15 homes were burnt in 2005 in Gandhavati village, and so on.

The third strategy for intimidation is of mobilising large masses for ‘re-conversion’ ghar wapsi ceremonies, mainly in tribal regions, in which thousands of alleged Christian converts are welcomed ‘home’ to Hinduism. Dilipsingh Judeo, BJP leader (caught receiving bribes in a television sting) who led the campaign with vicious speeches goading violence against converts, claimed in 1999 that by then 1,65,000 persons were reconverted. But all such claims are highly exaggerated, because independent investigations confirm that the majority of those who are bundled for these rallies are not converts to start with. Also most tribal people were not Hindus in the first place, but animists who worship the wind, forests, hills and animals that inhabit their world.      

The Sangh propaganda is fuelling the attacks on Christians.These attacks are justified by the Sangh and its supporters as righteous expressions of mass popular resistance by an enraged Hindu majority against allegedly anti-national machinations of Christian missionaries. It is claimed that these missionaries coerce and bribe hapless dispossessed tribal people and Dalits  with their foreign funded educational and health services, into the ‘foreign’ Christian faith. At its most extravagant, the missionaries are depicted as instruments of the CIA and the Pope with the mission to evangelise all of India and reduce Hindus to a minority. Sangh propaganda graphically depicts this alleged clash of patriots with traitors in pamphlets, posters and more recently CDs, through emotive images such as of the cross being triumphantly pierced by a trishul or trident and dripping with blood, or comparing the destruction of churches with Ram’s final assault on the demon Ravana.

These claims find a sympathetic echo among many middle-class people. Arun Shourie reacts with anguish to this sinister ‘'harvesting of souls’. And former Prime Minister Vajpayee sheds his masterly ambiguity in the wake of stunned international outrage followed the gruesome burning alive with his two small sons, in the interiors of Orissa in 1999, of Australian missionary Graham Staines who served highly- stigmatised leprosy patients. Vajpayee called for a national debate on conversions. Even Congress governments in states like Himachal Pradesh think it fit to bring in anti-conversion legislation.

(Source: Hindustan Times, June 27, 2007 )