Sunday, December 2, 2012

Ode to Sr Valsa John


Uphold the living as we remember martyr Valsa, a victim of Coalgate

JOHN DAYAL

The “Coalgate” scam is not just about financial corruption in the auctions of mining blocks by central and state governments. If dug deep enough, the scandal will also expose human victims – the many Tribals and marginalised farmers who lost their land to the mining companies, the women who were exploited, the children who lost an opportunity in life as their parents were forced to relocate, and human rights activists who suffered jail or, worse, death at the hands of hired goons because they had asked a question too many, challenged a management too often.

Catholic nun Valsa John, of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, was one such. And as church functionaries and Rights groups observed the anniversary of her brutal murder in the Dumka region of Jharkhand a year ago, the focus was not just on the continuing mystery of who killed her. She had died a lonely death, hacked by sharp sword and axe like weapons by a group of men, as she slept in a small hut deep inside the village. The killers fled into the night, leaving behind a terrified village, which has been numbed, into silence.

An important aspect of the tributes paid to her was to bring to the public realm the circumstances in which rights defenders and a broad section of Christian activists, specially religious catholic Nuns, priests sand others work in areas of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Andhra, and to a lesser extent in the forest and mining areas of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

The murder, of course, remains the main issue. Although half a dozen local people, many of them from the same village, have been arrested, it is not clear why the investigating agencies have not explored the possibility of a larger conspiracy involving not just the actual killers but the people who run the mining company.  It is now becoming increasingly clear that the mining contract was possibly not above board even though the main “owner” of the block was a publics sector agency, the Punjab State electricity Board which needs a very large volume of coal to keep its thermal power plants operational to feed the increasing demands of Chandigarh and the growing industrial cities of the state.  Instead of doing the actual mining itself, the Punjab Company went into a partnership with a little known company from West Bengal to do the actual mining. A study of the actual operations makes it clear that he second company in turn wet leases the heavy earth moving machinery complete with operators. This could have been done by PSEB itself instead of giving a fat fee to the intermediate company.  An adjunct of this outsourcing has been the proliferation of several other middle men and contractors who milk the PSEB for profits without any sense of responsibility to the welfare of the local people.

It was to end the exploitation of the local people, and to ensure that they got their due in rehabilitation and reparation including education for the children that Sr. Valsa, a Kerala born activist who has pent all her working mission life with the Santhals, forced the company to sign a memorandum of understanding with the villagers. She was on a return visit to the village to assess how faithfully the MoU had been implemented when she was done to death.

Valsa is not s rare phenomenon in the church, especially in the Catholic faith.  With almost 150,000 men and women religious, including diocesan priests, the Catholic community has several thousand of its activists working in almost every state and certainly in all areas where there is large-scale human displacement or exploitation, be it in the forest areas of central or south India or in the coastal belt where fishermen and boatmen an their families have been targeted, displaced or threatened by industry or massive public projects. Among such major projects are such hazardous ones as the nuclear power plant art Koodmakulam in Tamil Nadu.

This article is not in praise of the individual priest brother, Nun or lay activist, and therefore I will name no names though there are dozens of them now acknowledged by their peers as pioneering defender who have collectively birthed the civil society that we see active in India. But there is need to record and celebrate the impact of the collective effort, as also there is need to question church and society if they have been given the recognition and support they need to be able to fulfill their calling in an appropriate and optimum manner.

Civil society and the Catholic community have, for the most, remained either ignorant or aloof about such activists. The Catholic middle class, like their counterparts in the protestant church and in the lager national community, seem not to be aware of the trials and tribulation of the Tribals, the Dalits and the marginalised farmers. They read the newspapers, but do not digest the enormity of the crime of human displacement, of mass hunger and child deaths.

Even religious communities, barring perhaps some of the more radicalized ones such as the Jesuits, also do not understand the importance of the work their own members are doing.

The result is that often enough, the Priest or Nun is isolated and forced to work all alone with the rest of his or her companions in the community looking at him with amusement or with bewilderment. Worse, some communities see their activist members as threads to the equilibrium whose actions, seeming anti government, anti authority, will bring the wrath of the political and administrative forces on their institutions, making their normal working charism under threat.

It is time for the communities, religious and secular, to come out of this almost paranoiac fear complex that they will be targeted if they speak for the common man.

That is their God given calling, and if they make the chief minister, chief secretary state party president or the superintendent of police angry, so be it. The loss of an Foreign Contribution Regulation Act may threaten all church originated development work on first sight, but surely there is activism and village level work in mobilization and serving the common poor which does not bank on foreign grants or even Indian government funds.

Above all, religious communities and the Lay must celebrate and honour the Nuns and priests who go out and put their necks on the block. Each one of us who call themselves Christian’s and Catholics should have been ready to take that risk. We have not outsourced sacrifice to the religious, but in as much as they are the cutting edge of the social action of the church, they have to be celebrated. They must be upheld when they are alive and working. No merely eulogized when murdered.










Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Media blood-thirst and the silence of the church


Media Blood-thirst and the silence of the Church

John Dayal

In one of the more traumatic recent weeks in India, the media, electronic and print, exposed their bigotry and their blood thirst in ample measure. The issues were the tragic death in Ireland of an Indian dentist, Savita of Karnataka State, of septicemia following a miscarriage, and the execution by hanging of Ajmal Qasab, a 25 year old Pakistani citizen who was part of a terrorist commando group that killed over 160 persons in Mumbai four years ago. Both issues were also marked by a deafening silence from the official church in the country.

A response in the first case could have pre-empted a very focused attack on the Catholic social teachings, and the second would have brought the Church in consonance with the very vast civil society that opposed the ghoulish ranting in the media.

There is no doubt but that these are very polarizing issues in India where hyper nationalism and identity have become critically important in the face of a economic slowdown at home, and a perceived isolation abroad. It does not help that President Obama in his re-election rhetoric repeatedly called for an end to outsourcing services to India, whose economy has become increasingly dependent on remittances from the labour in the Gulf region, the engineers in northern America and Europe, and the “call centers” in metropolitan cities, and even in some small towns.

But the church, apart from affirming its continuing faith in its own doctrine and social teachings, also has to show that it is a part of that component of rational civil society which keeps the lunatics, the extremists and the fringe elements at bay, and effectively prevents them from usurping public space in the media and the political discourse.  Above all, it would show that the church has the courage to go against the grain, to oppose what it perceives to be wrong.

In the case of Savita’s tragic death in a Galloway hospital, India’s pro-choice lobby made common cause with its western sister groups demanding that India intervene to force Ireland to change its “Catholic” laws on abortion which had led to the medical “murder”. The media, specially television, led a hysteric propaganda tsunami pillorying the church. It did not help that the few Catholics invited to participate in the studio debates assumed positions of wounded faith and emerged as ogres of a monstrous religion.

The hanging of the Pakistani terrorist was “celebrated” in India, even in some official circles, as a victory of our judicial system, as a “closure” for the victims, and in the crude language of the Home Minister of the state of Maharashtra,  “justice” for the victims. Sections of the media even have us believe it was a victory over Pakistan.

The community must be clear on the church’s social teachings on the death penalty and abortion. 

In a position paper in 2007 during the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, the Vatican said that the death penalty "is not only a refusal of the right to life, but it also is an affront to human dignity." Governments have an obligation to protect their citizens, "today it truly is difficult to justify" using capital punishment difficult when other means of protection, such as life in prison, are possible.  It carries numerous risks, including the danger of punishing innocent people, contributes to a "culture of violence" and shows "a contempt for the Gospel teaching on forgiveness."

The statement on the Irish issue touching on sanctioning abortion when the life of the mother is in danger came too late, and diluted under the umbrella of the National United Christian Forum, which includes mainline Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic Bishops Conference. A statement at the beginning of the controversy would have put the church in a warmer light. But it was a good and tempered statement and clearly set out the social teachings of the church in which primacy is for a respect of life as a gift from God, which is not for man to tamper with, just to pander to some exigency of the day. As important, the statement cautioned against bowing to peer pressure, social trends or lobbies with a vested interest.

The silence in recent decades on issues of human dignity, development and gender has rapidly marginalised the mainline Church, specially the Catholic Church. Jesuit scholars have been pioneers in documenting displacement and the ecological havoc from big dams and nuclear plants. The “commissions” of the CBCI dealing with Justice, peace and development have attended workshops and tried to educate bishops and protests. Similarly, the Indian Catholic Church has been among the first in organized religion to come out with an official Gender Policy, and an Education code.  Not only are both these revolutionary documents not contributed to the national discourse, they are not even fully known within the church. It needs hardly worth repeating that the average parish priest and the Layperson do not have a clue of the church’s position on these issues.


Was the church frightened it would be pilloried as being anti national if it spoke its mind on the issue of capital punishment in general and the hanging of Qasab in particular, that it would be misunderstood, or that there would some kind of violent reaction against it, specially in hinterland areas where it is already a victim of violent persecution? If this were so, it is high time the church came out of its fear complex, and showed the maturity of standing in the face of obscene and extremist nationalism. This will earn it the respect of the better elements in the country. The church needs realize that while it ought not be as arrogant as to presume it is the repository of all that is moral, its interventions are important in shaping the national social, political and development discourse as it stands up for all that is true and honorable and nurturing for the common people of the country whose voice is carried but feebly in forums that matter.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Human trafficking gangs evolve some new and sickening tricks


Human Trafficking – three short stories and a brief interview
JOHN DAYAL
The horror of contemporary Human Trafficking in India
JOHN DAYAL
On issues of human tricking, specially where the victims are women and the girl child, it does not take very many words to bring out the stark horror of the situation as it exists in India at present.
First, three horror stories told me recently by national and international activists working in India on this subject. Each one is true, I am assured.
STORY 1 – Nagpur, Maharashtra:
A baby girl was found abandoned near a garbage heap. She was picked up by some people and brought to a woman, apparently a widow, and in need of money.  She was promised a handsome monthly allowance and asked to take care of the baby as if it were her own daughter, with enough to pay for her food, education and clothing.  In fifteen years, the little girl grew with the woman, believing her to be the mother. The widow too developed a strong bond with the girl. The girl was a student of class X when a man came to the woman, told her that her “duties” with regard to the child were over, handed her some money and took the girl away. The story came to light when anti-trafficking activists subsequently rescued the girl.
STORY 2 – Mumbai, Maharashtra:
After a rescue mission, a minor girl was being counseled by the group, which had done the rescue. The woman objected when the counselors addressed her as a female, insisting that “she” was a man. Non-plussed at first, the counselor persisted, asking why the woman did not want to be addressed as one. The person narrated his/her story. “I was a youth living in a Mumbai suburb, commuting daily to work in the city. One day, in the local train, a fellow passenger gave me something to eat. I took it and lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a luxurious hospital suite, but in great pain. I discovered I had been castrated, and now had a vagina.” Apparently a cosmetic surgeon had done the complicated surgery to create an artificial vagina. The victim was kept in the hospital for several weeks while the wounds healed. He was given hormone injections and began to develop breasts and other female characteristics. After a couple of months of stay in the hospital, he was discharged – now looking like a woman. He was subsequently passed onto a Mumbai brothel owner where he was forced to entertain clients like other inmates, and did so till he was rescued. The Child Welfare Committee before whom this youth, legally still a minor, was produced got extensive tests done which confirmed that “she” was a male. This remains the most bizarre case of human trafficking the rescue group has ever come across.

STORY 3 – also from Maharashtra
Minor girls rescued from brothels are usually put in the custody of government homes. The custody of the girls in the government homes meant for minors ends the day, the girl turn 18. On that day, the girl is set free from the “protection” of the shelter homes. Often the girls don’t have a home to go to and are clueless about how to proceed once they are released. Often traffickers are in touch with the clerical staff of the government homes and know exactly when a particular girl is going to be turn 18 and will be released from the shelter home. On the appointed day, the trafficker’s agent is waiting outside the gates of the shelter home in a car ready to pick up the homeless and clueless girl. The girl is picked up in a car, brought to a brothel readied to receive her and soon she is reintroduced into trafficking, now as an adult.
Ruchira Gupta, an internationally acclaimed and Delhi-based activist working on issues of human trafficking and the sex “business” says of the 20 million enslaved people in the world, about a million are trafficked into prostitution, cheap labour, organ trade, domestic servitude, child marriage, child soldiers and bonded labour every year. Seventy per cent of these are women and children. In India, the last official figure is from the Central Bureau of Investigation is from 2009, says more than 3 million women and girls were trapped in prostitution, of which 1.4 million were girls. About two hundred thousand were being trafficked additionally every year.
The following are excerpts from an interview Indian Currents had with her recently.
Question:  is trafficking just a quotient of poverty. Are parents involved?

Trafficking is a demand driven Industry. It is formed of the buyer (end user), the business (pimp, recruiter, transporter etc.) and the Bought (prostituted child, bonded slave). Because there is a demand for using and abusing little girls and women, traffickers simply go into poor and isolated villages, in “low caste” Dalit and Tribal communities, and prey upon the destitution and vulnerability of such poor people by offering a job in the big city or the false promise of marriage. In the big cities brothel managers force mothers who enter their late twenties to replace themselves with their daughters as they are unable to attract customers.

Question: With development, is it increasing or is there a palpable decrease:

It is increasing because the demand to buy human beings for cheap labour or exploitative sex is increasing, and the trafficking rings as well as the sex industry are getting more increased. On top of that foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have entrenched the sex industry further by hiring pimps and brothel managers as peer educators to distribute condoms, creating a false notion of "ethical" demand that it is all right to but sex if one uses a condom. They even funded a programme where the social marketing campaign said, " It does not matter which sex worker you chose, chose the right condom."
The rise in the use of pornography is also fuelling the demand as twelve year old boys surfing the net are suddenly invited by a cartoon character to play a game with her and lo and behold a few clicks later he watches a woman being penetrated from every part of her body, crying and saying give me more. He begins to believe that sex is connected with violence ad domination and wants that kind of sex!


Question: Have rescue agencies and NGOs, or for that matter police, made a dent?

In terms of actual human beings, NGOs have made a dent in preventing the trafficking of people in some of the pockets they work, but very little has been done to make a dent in the trafficking industry. Hardly any traffickers and certainly know end users, who are basically slave owners are ever arrested, prosecuted or convicted. “Crime in India” statistics show that more women are arrested under the Indian law than men!

Question:  Can this be prevented at all?

Yes, it is very preventable. If we see trafficking as a demand and supply problem, Demand being formed of people who have choices with impunity - the buyers and the business and supply being formed of people with lack and choices - marginalized girls and women, isolated and poor low caste people, etc. If the government tackles demand and supply simultaneously- tackle demand by holding legally accountable people who enslave others, buy them and sell to deter their choice and at the same time invest more in marginalized girls and women and caste communities vulnerable to trafficking to increase their choices, trafficking can be dismantled.

Sweden, Norway, Iceland have all changed their laws to make the purchase of sex illegal, not the selling of sex. They have shifted the blame from the victim to the perpetrator and they have managed to reduce trafficking in their country.

The problem can be tackled very easily if we value our girls ad women more and hold those who abuse them accountable. Right now neither the police nor the government wants to do anything about it.

Recently, an anti-trafficking activist from the low-cast Nat community, Md Kalam, who had been providing information against traffickers to my NGO, Apne Aap was falsely arrested by a corrupt police official Shivdeep Lande. The police officer has not been punished and anti-trafficking activists working for my NGO in Bihar are absolutely terrorised. Kalam is out on bail but now traffickers know that the police are on their side, so keep attacking our staff with impunity!

Ruchira Gupta NGO website is www.apneaap.org .

Monday, November 5, 2012

Governments mum on gang rape of Dalit girls in Kandhamal, Orissa


To The Chairperson
National Commission for Children
Government of India, New Delhi

Dear Dr Shantha Sinha

This is to request you to kindly look into the plight of a young Christian girl who was gang raped in Kandhamal, Orissa and then subjected to abuse by the state child right and police authorities [women themselves]

Thank you

John Dayal
Member, national Integration Council
Government of India

KANDHAMAL REPORT NOVEMBER 2012

Gang-rapes in Kandhamal, and the apathy of government agencies towards the young victims

JOHN DAYAL

The gang rape of two Christian girls in Kandhamal, both 13 years old, and the murder of one of them subsequently during the Dussehara festival has created not just panic in their villages, but a sense of disgust among activists for the obnoxious attitude of police and the State Child Right Commission.

It was possible to meet the surviving victim because she is now with her parents who now work as casual labour in Bhubaneswar.

The first one, a class VII student of Dadamaha, had gone to witness a 'yatra'(play) at nearby Simanbadi village on Thursday night when the youths sexually assaulted her. Sub-divisional police officer (SDPO), Baliguda, Arjun Barik said the girl apparently attempted to raise an alarm, she was tied to a tree and strangulated to death with her scarf. The body was found from the roadside near Masanipada village 26 October.
An autopsy was conducted on the body at Daringbadi public health centre and a case was registered on the basis of an FIR lodged by her father. There have been no arrests so far.
The second girl, a  resident of  Ritangia village in Tiangia block, was also 13-year old, and a student of class VIII in a local school. Her father is now a security guard in Bhubaneswar, and the girl lives with relatives to continue her studies. On 27th October, she went to see the Dussehara festivities, which attract a large crowd. On the way home, she was abducted by six men, taken the nearby forest, stripped naked and raped by all six of them. She collapsed.
She regained consciousness after one of the rapists sprinkled water on her face. One of them put a shirt on her and brought her close to the village. She was found in the marketplace in the morning, and taken to her aunt’s house.
Initially the local police did not help at all. She was brought to Bhubaneswar and taken to the offices of the State Commission for Child Rights. This is where she was subjected to mental torture by those designated to help children in distress. The  chairperson was rude and crude, said this was a police matter and that she could not do anything even if she believed the story of the girl.
In the all-woman Police Station set up for registering crimes against women in an environment friendly to the victims, the office on charge was absent. When Inspector Itti Das came to the office at last, she too was rude, and even more crude. According to the woman social worker who had accompanied the victim to the police station, the woman inspector said “you would not be alive if you had been gang-raped”. The implication was that  the girl was covering up, had gone with the rapists of her own accord.
The police filed a report at last, and referred the report to the Raikia police station in Kandhamal. The victim was finally given a medical examination on 3rd November, a full week after her  traumatic experience. The medical report  has not been given to the police yet.
Activists who ar now counseling the girl, who was still in a state of shock when we met her, are aghast at the manner in which the child right chief, a government appointee, and the woman police officer behaved with the girl, who is no more than a child, small and in distress.
Surprisingly, the local and state media have chosen not to investigate this story. The two gang rapes merited a passing couple of paragraphs.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

RESUMING CHRITIAN MUSLIM DIALOGUE IN INDIA


Muffled Dialogue

Have Islamic groups in Kashmir Valley and Kerala’s “love jihad” fears killed Christian-Muslim dialogue in India?

JOHN DAYAL

When was the last time we read a joint statement on communal harmony, a statement signed by accepted representatives of the Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain faiths recognised in India as national religious minorities? I recall one in 1984, after the massacre of the Sikhs, and then in 2002 in the violence targeted against Muslims in Gujarat. There were no such statements in the wake of the anti-Christian pogrom in Kandhamal, Orissa, in 2007 and 2008. The one time Muslim and Christian leaders came together was in an advocacy rally for the rights of converts to the two religions from Hinduism’s former “untoucbable” castes  -- now called the Dalits.

In the recent riots in the North-eastern state of Assam, where over 400,000 people were displaced in clashes between the Bodo ethnic community and Bengali and Assamese speaking Muslims, several top Muslims leaders from New Delhi asked me to urge the Catholic church to intervene – presuming that the Bodos were all Christians. The Bodos are an ethnic community, and while some of them indeed are Christians, most of the others profess Hinduism or their own ancient religions. Sociologists are still debating if the Assam violence was economic, ethnic or religious in its root causes.

Christian sociologists and activists did intervene as strong voices for peace, and in helping quell the panic large-scale movement of people of North eastern origin from cities such as Hyderabad and Bengaluru in south India amidst rumours of retributive Muslim attacks on them. The rumours were just malicious mischief by some political groups, among them the infamous Hindutva Parivar seeking to polarize communities.

Considering that both Muslims and Christians, constituting perhaps no more than 10 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively of India’s 1.20 billion population as religious minorities, and both victims of State harshness and violence at the hands of Hindu fundamentalists, it would be presumed that the two communities occasionally made common cause, or at least existed in close camaraderie and cooperation. In reality, both live in their own separate, individual cocoons, mostly ignorant of the problems of the other community, and largely unconcerned with the crises they both find themselves in with unfailing regularity..

I do not recall in the last forty years or so Church hierarchy, Protestant and Catholic, come together with the top leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami, an orthodox group, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, a more “nationalist” organisation with roots in India’s Independence movement and similar groups, on any issue of concern to the people.

It is a different matter that there is little political cohesion in India’s extremely diverse Christian community. In Parliament, I have seen the Muslim community come together, defying party whips, on issues relating to the community, but I have not seen them come out to speak when the issues concern persecution, or during nuanced debated on the controversial Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, the matter of denial of Indian Visas to missionaries and activists, ban on religious conversions by some provincial governments all of which vilify and target Christians. To be fair, I have not seen the Christian MPs come together as a block to speak in defence of the Muslims, preferring the safety of the party whip.

Unlike the Christian religious leaders, who are not part of ideological divides and political polarities in the country, the Muslim religious leadership is deeply political. Muslims are active in almost every political party, and in some States, have their own parties which content elections and are even part of coalitions in government. There is a direct connect between the Moulvies if the mosques and the teachers of the hundreds of thousands of Madrasas, with the political leadership. The only apparent division is in theological loyalties between the Shia and Sunnis, and within the Sunnis, the Barelvis, the more liberal, and Deobandi schools of theology. The recent Wahabi movement, financed by Saudi Arabia, has rapidly radicalized a section of the Muslim leadership in all provinces, and specially in Assam, Kerala and Kashmir.

The Wahabi radicalization is perhaps the single major reason for souring whatever relationship there was between the two communities.  This is the most apparent in the valley of Kashmir and in Kerala – even though the two regions differ so widely with each other in demographic and social parameters
The argument is not that the Christian community in India consciously follows the West’s perceptions post 9/11 United States of America. If anything, perhaps, the more pious in the Christian community and specially the urban middle class look at the Islamic groups in India with glasses not very much different from those worn by the hyper nationalist members of the Hindutva Sangh Parivar. Christians from Kashmir often say, “You may know Islam, we know the Muslims”.

On the other extreme are the purported dialogues that go in the name of “Idd Milan” after Muslim religious festivities twice a year, and the Catholic Bishops Conference and diocesan “inter faith dialogues” in which a prayerful representative from each community is invited to a small meeting, a brass lamp is lit, every one recites from their own holy books, a group photograph is taken, and tea served. Not everyone sips the tea or nibble at the sweats and hors d’ oeuvres. Most are in a hurry to get back home. Some do not eat outside their own place of worship or home. The photographs of course serve their owners well in annual reports and funding drives and to prove their “secular” credentials.

Would it be that there is nothing in common in the diverse situations of India’s many religious minorities? Do the religious minorities share nothing in India’s history, its common heritage? Do they not suffer and bleeds when hit by the barbs, bombs and slings of the hyper nationalist rightwing majoritarian groups?  And are they really insulated from the massive political and social developments sweeping this wonderful nation?

These are questions that beg an answer – social, political, and in relation to the guarantees of the Constitution, contained in the Preamble, and Articles such as 25, 29, 30.
It was unfortunate that two years ago – before the “Arab Spring” -- Muslim academics in Egypt have suspended their dialogue with the Vatican over Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on anti-Christian violence in Egypt calling it as "unacceptable interference in Egypt’s affairs". Pope Benedict XVI as the leader of the Catholic Church in his remarks condemned violence, expressed his closeness to suffering Christians and highlighted the concern for the religious freedom of Christian minorities.
The Christians in India perhaps did not even know that there ever was a dialogue between Rome and the Muslim world. Its eyes were glued to some developments in Srinagar and Kerala.
The Kashmiri militancy, with a heavy overlay of religious fundamentalism and intolerance, has been tragic for both the Hindu and the Christian community. Almost all Hindus have fled the Kashmir valley in the face of a threat of violence. The Christian community was perhaps as small as 500 families in the region, and they have been under pressure. The half a dozen Christian schools in the valley have less than 50 Christian students, but even then are in constant fear. Militants have banned any proselytization among the Muslim community. The police have arrested people accused by the militants of being involved in proselytization.

In Kerala, where the Christian and Muslim communities live in broadly distinct regions, there has been growing stress manifesting itself in occasional violence from Islamic extremists and a demographic and social fear among the Christian community. Last year, a Christian teacher’s hand was cut off for alleged blasphemy. Catholic clergy have cautioned against the fast growing Muslim population, and the stagnant Christian population. On prelate went as far as to call upon the faithful to start large families.
But the most peculiar, or hilarious depending one’s point of view, is the matter of “Love jihad”. It is a fact that a large number of Christian girls in Kerala are marrying outside the community. There are many reasons for this, the presence of a notorious dowry system being a major one. But Hindu girls are also marrying non-Hindus. Many Christian and Hindu girls are marrying Muslim youth. The religious, and now political, leadership of both Hindus and Christians allege there could be a strategy to woos these young women – a sort of human piracy. Criminal cases have been registered with the police. It is a simmering issue, but could well explode at any time.

Security and development issues of the two communities however demand the start of a really serious and constructive pan-regional dialogue between the leaderships of the two communities. In a political environment of collective bargaining, mutual collaboration and cooperation can help getting a decent share of the national development pie. A greater understanding can also reduce tensions, and perhaps help a successful social challenge to extremist groups, including the Hindutva Sangh Parivar, who are every so keen to feed off religious differences and perceptions.