John Dayal Response to questions by Journalist Vishal Arora on the United States
Question: I m writing a story talking about how the statistics of anti-Christian attacks in India is alarming and worrisome. I have heard many people who are involved in international advocacy for the persecuted church as saying that governments in many countries feel that the incidence of persecution is not a cause for concern because the population of India is more than one billion (So what if 150 or 200 attacks take place?). I am using the US international religious freedom report as the peg for the story.
RESPONSE:
I was saddened to read your note.
I understand the western attitude, and am not surprised at all.
First of all we are dealing with NGOs in a post Christian post modern West. Does it really matter to the people at large if the Christian is wiped out in the East and South.
Perhaps secularism has turned full circle and now seen with Veda chanting in US Senate, Yoga in England and a free visa to any Hindu tantric who wants it, even if India bans all Christians preachers from its soil coming from the west or the east.
I do not mean to scoff at genuine, well meaning and honest advocacy groups to whom I remain indebted for their continuing support to the Freedom of Faith and Civil Liberties activists such as I. It is their support that sustains me -- their moral support, for I do not have an FCRA account and do not receive moneys from any source other than few personal friends and supporters.. I am, as you know, not backed by the Indian church which has to protect its institutions and its presence and cannot take an open and aggressive position of human rights issues, much as individual priests may want to, or even as the Bible may command us to do.
Now about figures.
Sudan, Burma and some other countries have persecution of a magnitude where even thousands killed in a week seem to be about average. Or Saudia where you can be jailed for bringing in a bible. I weep for every Christian killed, but figures seem to inure us to the crisis, and somehow in some evil conspiracy, make them invisible as human tragedy.
This is now how civil society and human rights issues work.
In India, it is not about gigantic data or pogroms, it is about civil rights, of which religious rights are important, above all, it is about the right to life. The most important of all.
India is a secular society by law, with a peculiar population. The bulk remains Hindu, at about 80 per cent even if we construe it to be made up of a series of macro minorities such as the Dalits, tribals and other backward castes. The ethos is Hindu and Hinduism is the `default religion’ as everyone well knows. Often, the State too seems ‘Hindu’.
Islam constitutes from 12 to 15 per cent -- smaller than the Hindus but a very large population group. They get killed by the hundreds, and sometimes by the thousands in pogroms, some of them sponsored by provincial governments. Muslims also live on conglomerations, often discernable sharply from the Hindu groups in the city-scape or the rural landscape. Muslims, even if two or three are killed in a month, remain confined to a defined are and police can record the violence and take action. This is called a riot. The violence against them follows a pattern, as has been proved in at least eight judicial enquiries in fifty years.
The government’s new law proposed against communal violence may curb anti Muslim violence but is impotent against anti Christian hate and violence we do not comer under the scrutiny of its defining and screening measures. The Christians constitute a mere 2.3 to 2.8 per cent population, going by the most generous estimates. They do not live in ghettos but are dispersed. They, unlike Muslims, also go out with a religious message inside Hindi majority areas. This is where they are targeted – the pattern of their interaction with Hindu fundamentalist segment of the society.
Christians are dispersed. The violence against them is also dispersed. It may be just one case a year in one village across the country. But there are four hundred thousand villages, and the total violence may be as much.
I record and prove between 200 to 400 cases of anti Christian violence a year in my unofficial white papers released annually since 1997. The total figure may be from one to two thousand such cases a year, perhaps even more.
How do we define this violence and persecution if governments continue to say these are isolated cases?
If one thousand isolated cases occur in one country, they fit a pattern.
As an example, in state like Lakshadweep where ninety-nine per cent of the population is Muslim, if the few Christians are killed or forced to flee, it means a hundred per cent or total elimination of Christianity in that state.
This is what the RSS groups are threatening in many villages, districts, even states.
I am happy at the routine focus the current US religious freedom report has given on India. This is one of the few authentic international commentaries on freedom of faith in India, and is therefore to be welcomed. We hope there will be more international investigations the freedom of faith situation in India and other countries. This may seem anti national, but India is a signatory to international human rights covenants and it is important that there is total transparency in assessing freedom of faith in India.
At the South Asian level, even Islamic groups, a majority elsewhere, are a minority in India. Hindus are a majority in India, Fiji, Nepal and some other countries in the Carob islands and some Pacific or Indian Ocean islands. Indians are also victims of human rights violations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other places. Christians are a major victim in all the eight south Asian countries.
In India, no political party is really innocent in the matter. The BJP and its frontal organisations of the Sangh Parivar are guilty in the extreme as we have see in Orissa, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and other area. These are states where the police do not register cases when Christians are victim and Sangh Parivar is the aggressor. And yet the same police accompanied Sangh aggression storm troopers when they attack home churches, or conduct the so called Ghar wapsi. The Sangh privet's violence is now at its peak.
The Congress party however is no less guilty.
Dispute the confused secularism of the top leaders including cabinet ministers, Prime Minister Manmohan Singha and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, and despite the effort of the National Commission of Minorities, it needs to be remembered that violence continues in Congress states such as Andhra Pradesh.
Other Congress states such as Himachal have also passed the same laws against Christian activity that have been put in place by BJP state government. The stable state of Andhra Pradesh ahs banned Christian and Muslim activity in seven hills around the Tirupathi temple by an executive order. Now it is bending backwards to please the Sangh Parivar in other issues, including the so called ram setu or Adam's bridge issue.
The Union government has to ensure that the state remains secular and it does not encourage the mixing of religion and politics.
The mixing of Religion and policies missing is the worst thing possible in a country such as India with so many different regions, communities and also on.
This American report also puts a pressure on the US government to ensure that it soil is not abused by NRIs to fund the Sangh Parivar in India.
John Dayal
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wall Street Journal on Dalit Christians
THE 'UNTOUCHABLES'In India, 'Untouchables' ConvertTo Christianity -- and Face Extra Bias
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOVSeptember 19, 2007; Page A1
MEDIPALLY, India -- Every Sunday, women and children gather to pray in a tiny, whitewashed church on the edge of this southern Indian village, sitting cross-legged on blue plastic sheets as they sing Christian hymns.
The men don't dare to come. "If they are seen in the church, the officials will be informed," says Vatipally Aharon, Medipally's Baptist pastor.
Almost all the Christians here -- and the overwhelming majority across India -- hail from the so-called Dalit community, the former "untouchables" relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. That provides the country's most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.
Yaroslav Trofimov
Only women and children risk expressing their religious beliefs in the Dalit community in Medipally, India.
But there is a catch: Any Dalit caught abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villagers' comings and goings.
The plight of India's secret converts, ignored for decades, is now at the forefront of national politics. Partly driving the change is Indian Christians' new partnership with Islam, a religion frequently at odds with Christianity elsewhere in the world.
Representatives of the two religions have turned to the courts to restore benefits to converted Dalits. India's Supreme Court is currently reviewing several challenges filed by Christian and Muslim Dalits that could result in an overturning of the affirmative-action exclusion. A separate bill to remove the restriction is pending in Parliament. Government members, influenced by India's 150-million-strong Muslim community, have indicated their cautious support.
For decades, backers of the existing legislation have argued that since Christianity and Islam have no caste, Dalits who abandon Hinduism find equality amid their new co-religionists and therefore no longer need special protection.
Scrapping the Ban
But the movement to end official discrimination against these converts is gaining momentum in the world's largest democracy. This year, a special government-appointed commission, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Ranganath Mishra, concluded that Dalits retain their stigma in India's society even after converting and recommended scrapping the ban.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination earlier this year also formally rebuked India for denying affirmative-action benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam, and recommended that the prohibition be removed.
"The government of India seems quite sympathetic" to such demands, says Sardar Buta Singh, a minister-level official who heads India's agency overseeing Dalit affairs, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. "All the parties have started thinking about this problem, and it can be solved."
India's Dalits have tried over the centuries to escape their low status, which Hindu scriptures teach is a punishment for sins in a previous life, by embracing caste-less religions. In centuries past most converts turned to Islam, a religion professed by many Indian rulers before the British seized the subcontinent in the 19th century.
But with India's expanding economy offering unprecedented opportunities for social and economic advancement, a great many Dalits are now turning to Christianity, attracted by benefits like education and health care that are sometimes offered by Western-funded congregations. This allows them to seek opportunities beyond the government sector, in the booming information-technology and services industries that put a premium on the Westernized outlook and English-language skills.
Much to the dismay of Hindu nationalist groups, the number of India's secret Christians has climbed in recent years to an estimated 25 million people, about the size of the officially registered Christian population.
The gains among secret Christians come despite the obvious risks: Affirmative-action benefits often mean the difference between grinding poverty and a glimmer of hope for better life.
A lanky 30-year-old with a trimmed mustache, Venkatesh Gunti was born into a Dalit household here in Medipally, a cluster of pastel-colored homes set in the rolling green hills of Andhra Pradesh state. Since his teenage years, Mr. Gunti frequently prayed in the village's Zion church, established by South African missionaries. Three years ago, he found a prized job that would have allowed him to escape the misery of rural life -- as a handyman in a government college in the town of Bhongir.
Zoologist Mukesh Kumar says he was denied a job because he converted to Islam.
The job was reserved for a Dalit, and Mr. Gunti had to produce a "scheduled caste" certificate -- something he believed would be a mere formality.
But when Mr. Gunti applied for it at the local government revenue collection office, the clerk, Mr. Gunti recalls, refused to issue the document. According to reports filed by the village secretary, Mr. Gunti was a regular churchgoer and therefore no longer qualified for "scheduled caste" status. He didn't get the job and had to stay in the village, eking out a living as a manual laborer.
To gain back the affirmative-action benefits, Mr. Gunti says he had to pretend that he had reverted to Hinduism, participating in a Hindu religious festival when he knew that the village secretary was watching. Last year, the subterfuge finally worked, and Mr. Gunti was reclassified as a member of the "scheduled caste." He says he won't partake in any more Hindu rituals, but will also steer clear of the church. Mr. Gunti has yet to find a new job.
Questioned about the case, Raghu Rama Rao, Medipally's village secretary, explains that he has no choice. "This is the law -- if we'll come to know they go to church, we'll have to make an inquiry and submit a report," Mr. Rao says in his home, its outer wall sporting a poster for a Hindu nationalist organization. Mr. Rao adds that he's already showing kindness by reporting only the active churchgoers, and leaving alone those believed Christian Dalits who do not openly flaunt their faith.
Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India's society. "If they ever find out I'm a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it," says a Dalit schoolteacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyderabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
"The government is forcing us to lie," echoes Prasadarao Yadavalli, a 48-year-old official in Andhra Pradesh's state bureaucracy who rose to his post thanks to Dalit quotas while hiding his Christian faith. Mr. Yadavalli says he has decided to finally come out this year, as he could no longer maintain this double life: "Whatever the consequences, God will take care of us."
Even one of the Dalit converts who petitioned India's Supreme Court is keeping his true beliefs secret from neighbors.
Mukesh Kumar, a zoologist, complained in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in 2005 that he was denied a university job reserved for Dalits because he converted to Islam. His wife, Reena, added in the same affidavit that she also wants to embrace Islam but is afraid to do so because she would lose her current job of village administrator, an elected position gained under the Dalit quota.
Posters of Holy Men
Interviewed in his village of Neyazoopura, in the northern Uttar Pradesh state, an agitated Dr. Kumar -- who helps his wife run the village administration -- initially denied any link with the Muslim religion. His office is decorated with posters of Hindu holy men. Only after hastily chasing away curious villagers and shutting the doors would Dr. Kumar, 37, confirm his signature on the affidavit. "It's a constitutional right to change a religion at any time if you want it," he says.
India's 1950 constitution indeed guarantees the freedom of faith, in addition to outlawing discrimination against the Dalits. But, in defining who is entitled to affirmative-action protection afforded to the Dalits, a 1950 presidential order excluded any "person who professes a religion different from Hinduism."
The rule was amended in 1956 to include Dalit Sikhs and in 1990 to embrace Dalit Buddhists, on the grounds that these two religions can be considered offshoots of Hinduism.
Indian Christian groups have tried for decades to win a similar exception for Christianity, which is believed to have arrived in India when St. Thomas disembarked in Kerala in the first century. A bill to do so was approved by the national government in 1996, but never made it to a Parliament vote because of a coalition crisis that prompted new elections; these were won by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
The party is a staunch opponent of conversions from Hinduism, now practiced by 80.5% of the general population. "People convert to Christianity here mostly because of aggressive proselytizing by missionaries, who induce very gullible people. This must be stopped," says Ram Madhav, a spokesman and national executive member of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, or RSS, a powerful organization that promotes Hindu nationalist ideology and is affiliated with the BJP.
The years of BJP rule were marked by violence against Muslim and Christian minorities. Facing a common enemy, India's Christian and Muslim organizations joined forces in protecting the country's secular tradition. Christian groups organized relief for Muslim refugees from religious pogroms in the state of Gujarat in 2002, and Christian churches were sheltered in some Muslim areas. Though the BJP has denied that some of its leaders helped orchestrate religious violence, the U.S. has since canceled the visa of Gujarat's chief minister, a BJP member, because of his role in the 2002 bloodshed.
"The Christians and the Muslims are a minority in India, they are both oppressed, and so there is a natural alliance between us," says Mahmood Madani, a Parliament member and secretary-general of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the country's leading Islamic body.
Viewing the Dalits as the main source of potential converts, some Christian and Muslim organizations started working together in recent years among these communities. While discrimination against Dalits is illegal, it is in practice widespread, particularly in rural parts of India, where people from higher castes often won't touch a Dalit or share with them food or water.
Here in Andhra Pradesh, Muslim and Christian leaders now regularly break this barrier of untouchability as they organize festive meals in Dalit villages, eating from the same giant plate of rice and vegetable curry.
"This is a real physical demonstration against caste discrimination," says Joseph D'souza, the president of the All-India Christian Council, who has organized many of these gatherings.
Though no open proselytizing is conducted at these events, shared meals frequently end up producing new converts. "The condition of Dalits is like that of dogs in India," says P.K. Ahmad Sabir, Andhra Pradesh state leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and Mr. D'souza's partner in the Dalit outreach effort. "Our religions -- Christianity and Islam -- teach that everyone is an equal. Hindus don't believe in this, which gives a good chance to Christianity and Islam."
Joining Forces
In 2004, the votes of India's religious minorities helped oust the BJP government, bringing into office a center-left coalition led by the traditionally secularist Indian National Congress. This time around, the Muslims joined the earlier Christian campaign to end the discrimination against Dalit converts, and the issue returned to the government agenda.
"The Christian community has realized it is small compared to the Muslims, and that if they stand alone, they have a much smaller chance for success," says Tahir Mahmood, one of India's most prominent constitutional experts. "Together, they're a force to be reckoned with, and so they've become friends in adversity."
Instead of merely adding a waiver for Christianity to the 1950 presidential order, advocates today demand that any reference to religion be deleted from it altogether.
Campaigners are pressing the government to act without delay. "This is not just a Christian problem," says Jose Daniel, president of the National Coordination Committee for Scheduled Caste Christians and one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court challenge against the anticonvert rules. "It's a denial of rights to all the Dalits in India."
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOVSeptember 19, 2007; Page A1
MEDIPALLY, India -- Every Sunday, women and children gather to pray in a tiny, whitewashed church on the edge of this southern Indian village, sitting cross-legged on blue plastic sheets as they sing Christian hymns.
The men don't dare to come. "If they are seen in the church, the officials will be informed," says Vatipally Aharon, Medipally's Baptist pastor.
Almost all the Christians here -- and the overwhelming majority across India -- hail from the so-called Dalit community, the former "untouchables" relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. That provides the country's most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.
Yaroslav Trofimov
Only women and children risk expressing their religious beliefs in the Dalit community in Medipally, India.
But there is a catch: Any Dalit caught abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villagers' comings and goings.
The plight of India's secret converts, ignored for decades, is now at the forefront of national politics. Partly driving the change is Indian Christians' new partnership with Islam, a religion frequently at odds with Christianity elsewhere in the world.
Representatives of the two religions have turned to the courts to restore benefits to converted Dalits. India's Supreme Court is currently reviewing several challenges filed by Christian and Muslim Dalits that could result in an overturning of the affirmative-action exclusion. A separate bill to remove the restriction is pending in Parliament. Government members, influenced by India's 150-million-strong Muslim community, have indicated their cautious support.
For decades, backers of the existing legislation have argued that since Christianity and Islam have no caste, Dalits who abandon Hinduism find equality amid their new co-religionists and therefore no longer need special protection.
Scrapping the Ban
But the movement to end official discrimination against these converts is gaining momentum in the world's largest democracy. This year, a special government-appointed commission, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Ranganath Mishra, concluded that Dalits retain their stigma in India's society even after converting and recommended scrapping the ban.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination earlier this year also formally rebuked India for denying affirmative-action benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam, and recommended that the prohibition be removed.
"The government of India seems quite sympathetic" to such demands, says Sardar Buta Singh, a minister-level official who heads India's agency overseeing Dalit affairs, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. "All the parties have started thinking about this problem, and it can be solved."
India's Dalits have tried over the centuries to escape their low status, which Hindu scriptures teach is a punishment for sins in a previous life, by embracing caste-less religions. In centuries past most converts turned to Islam, a religion professed by many Indian rulers before the British seized the subcontinent in the 19th century.
But with India's expanding economy offering unprecedented opportunities for social and economic advancement, a great many Dalits are now turning to Christianity, attracted by benefits like education and health care that are sometimes offered by Western-funded congregations. This allows them to seek opportunities beyond the government sector, in the booming information-technology and services industries that put a premium on the Westernized outlook and English-language skills.
Much to the dismay of Hindu nationalist groups, the number of India's secret Christians has climbed in recent years to an estimated 25 million people, about the size of the officially registered Christian population.
The gains among secret Christians come despite the obvious risks: Affirmative-action benefits often mean the difference between grinding poverty and a glimmer of hope for better life.
A lanky 30-year-old with a trimmed mustache, Venkatesh Gunti was born into a Dalit household here in Medipally, a cluster of pastel-colored homes set in the rolling green hills of Andhra Pradesh state. Since his teenage years, Mr. Gunti frequently prayed in the village's Zion church, established by South African missionaries. Three years ago, he found a prized job that would have allowed him to escape the misery of rural life -- as a handyman in a government college in the town of Bhongir.
Zoologist Mukesh Kumar says he was denied a job because he converted to Islam.
The job was reserved for a Dalit, and Mr. Gunti had to produce a "scheduled caste" certificate -- something he believed would be a mere formality.
But when Mr. Gunti applied for it at the local government revenue collection office, the clerk, Mr. Gunti recalls, refused to issue the document. According to reports filed by the village secretary, Mr. Gunti was a regular churchgoer and therefore no longer qualified for "scheduled caste" status. He didn't get the job and had to stay in the village, eking out a living as a manual laborer.
To gain back the affirmative-action benefits, Mr. Gunti says he had to pretend that he had reverted to Hinduism, participating in a Hindu religious festival when he knew that the village secretary was watching. Last year, the subterfuge finally worked, and Mr. Gunti was reclassified as a member of the "scheduled caste." He says he won't partake in any more Hindu rituals, but will also steer clear of the church. Mr. Gunti has yet to find a new job.
Questioned about the case, Raghu Rama Rao, Medipally's village secretary, explains that he has no choice. "This is the law -- if we'll come to know they go to church, we'll have to make an inquiry and submit a report," Mr. Rao says in his home, its outer wall sporting a poster for a Hindu nationalist organization. Mr. Rao adds that he's already showing kindness by reporting only the active churchgoers, and leaving alone those believed Christian Dalits who do not openly flaunt their faith.
Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India's society. "If they ever find out I'm a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it," says a Dalit schoolteacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyderabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
"The government is forcing us to lie," echoes Prasadarao Yadavalli, a 48-year-old official in Andhra Pradesh's state bureaucracy who rose to his post thanks to Dalit quotas while hiding his Christian faith. Mr. Yadavalli says he has decided to finally come out this year, as he could no longer maintain this double life: "Whatever the consequences, God will take care of us."
Even one of the Dalit converts who petitioned India's Supreme Court is keeping his true beliefs secret from neighbors.
Mukesh Kumar, a zoologist, complained in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in 2005 that he was denied a university job reserved for Dalits because he converted to Islam. His wife, Reena, added in the same affidavit that she also wants to embrace Islam but is afraid to do so because she would lose her current job of village administrator, an elected position gained under the Dalit quota.
Posters of Holy Men
Interviewed in his village of Neyazoopura, in the northern Uttar Pradesh state, an agitated Dr. Kumar -- who helps his wife run the village administration -- initially denied any link with the Muslim religion. His office is decorated with posters of Hindu holy men. Only after hastily chasing away curious villagers and shutting the doors would Dr. Kumar, 37, confirm his signature on the affidavit. "It's a constitutional right to change a religion at any time if you want it," he says.
India's 1950 constitution indeed guarantees the freedom of faith, in addition to outlawing discrimination against the Dalits. But, in defining who is entitled to affirmative-action protection afforded to the Dalits, a 1950 presidential order excluded any "person who professes a religion different from Hinduism."
The rule was amended in 1956 to include Dalit Sikhs and in 1990 to embrace Dalit Buddhists, on the grounds that these two religions can be considered offshoots of Hinduism.
Indian Christian groups have tried for decades to win a similar exception for Christianity, which is believed to have arrived in India when St. Thomas disembarked in Kerala in the first century. A bill to do so was approved by the national government in 1996, but never made it to a Parliament vote because of a coalition crisis that prompted new elections; these were won by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
The party is a staunch opponent of conversions from Hinduism, now practiced by 80.5% of the general population. "People convert to Christianity here mostly because of aggressive proselytizing by missionaries, who induce very gullible people. This must be stopped," says Ram Madhav, a spokesman and national executive member of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, or RSS, a powerful organization that promotes Hindu nationalist ideology and is affiliated with the BJP.
The years of BJP rule were marked by violence against Muslim and Christian minorities. Facing a common enemy, India's Christian and Muslim organizations joined forces in protecting the country's secular tradition. Christian groups organized relief for Muslim refugees from religious pogroms in the state of Gujarat in 2002, and Christian churches were sheltered in some Muslim areas. Though the BJP has denied that some of its leaders helped orchestrate religious violence, the U.S. has since canceled the visa of Gujarat's chief minister, a BJP member, because of his role in the 2002 bloodshed.
"The Christians and the Muslims are a minority in India, they are both oppressed, and so there is a natural alliance between us," says Mahmood Madani, a Parliament member and secretary-general of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the country's leading Islamic body.
Viewing the Dalits as the main source of potential converts, some Christian and Muslim organizations started working together in recent years among these communities. While discrimination against Dalits is illegal, it is in practice widespread, particularly in rural parts of India, where people from higher castes often won't touch a Dalit or share with them food or water.
Here in Andhra Pradesh, Muslim and Christian leaders now regularly break this barrier of untouchability as they organize festive meals in Dalit villages, eating from the same giant plate of rice and vegetable curry.
"This is a real physical demonstration against caste discrimination," says Joseph D'souza, the president of the All-India Christian Council, who has organized many of these gatherings.
Though no open proselytizing is conducted at these events, shared meals frequently end up producing new converts. "The condition of Dalits is like that of dogs in India," says P.K. Ahmad Sabir, Andhra Pradesh state leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and Mr. D'souza's partner in the Dalit outreach effort. "Our religions -- Christianity and Islam -- teach that everyone is an equal. Hindus don't believe in this, which gives a good chance to Christianity and Islam."
Joining Forces
In 2004, the votes of India's religious minorities helped oust the BJP government, bringing into office a center-left coalition led by the traditionally secularist Indian National Congress. This time around, the Muslims joined the earlier Christian campaign to end the discrimination against Dalit converts, and the issue returned to the government agenda.
"The Christian community has realized it is small compared to the Muslims, and that if they stand alone, they have a much smaller chance for success," says Tahir Mahmood, one of India's most prominent constitutional experts. "Together, they're a force to be reckoned with, and so they've become friends in adversity."
Instead of merely adding a waiver for Christianity to the 1950 presidential order, advocates today demand that any reference to religion be deleted from it altogether.
Campaigners are pressing the government to act without delay. "This is not just a Christian problem," says Jose Daniel, president of the National Coordination Committee for Scheduled Caste Christians and one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court challenge against the anticonvert rules. "It's a denial of rights to all the Dalits in India."
Monday, September 17, 2007
IN THE AGE OF RAM SETU, A LOOK AT WHAT THE RSS SAYS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S GODS
FRONTLINE
India's National MagazineFrom the publishers of THE HINDU
Vol. 15 :: No. 26 :: Dec. 19, 1998 - Jan. 01, 1999
COLUMN
RSS and Christians
The Sangh Parivar's violent hatred against Christianity is deep-rooted and decades old, as is the case with its animosity against several other communities.
A. G. NOORANI
ON December 4, 1998, nearly 23 million Christians across the country observed a protest day demanding that the governments at the Centre and in the States check the growing violence against members of the community. A letter of protest, drawn up by the United Christians' Forum for Human Rights (UCFHR), said: "Since January 1998 there has been more violence against the Christian community than in all the 50 years of the country's Independence. Nuns have been raped, priests executed, Bibles burnt, churches demolished, educational institutions destroyed and religious people harassed." This is persecution in the strict dictionary meaning of the word "pursue with enmity and ill-treatment". Mabel Rebello of the Congress(I) told the Rajya Sabha that day that "50 per cent of these (incidents) have occurred in Gujarat where the BJP is in power".
On October 8, Gujarat's Director-General of Police, C.P. Singh, confirmed in an interview to Teesta Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism Combat (October 1998): "One thing was clear in the pattern of incidents. It was the activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal who were taking the law into their own hands, which posed a serious danger to peace in Gujarat. Many of the attacks on the minorities were after these organisations had whipped up local passions of conversions (by Christian missionaries) and allegedly forced inter-religious marriages... our investigations revealed that in most cases these were entirely baseless allegations."
Two disturbing features of the campaign stand out in bold relief. One is that the attacks mounted steeply after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government assumed office in March 1998. The Archbishop of Delhi, Alan de Lastic, said: "What I have noticed is that ever since this Government came to power at the Centre, the attacks on Christians and Christian missionaries have increased" (Sunday, November 22). The other is the Government's wilful refusal to condemn them. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's remarks on December 5 were virtually forced out of him. Union Home Minister L.K. Advani has been false to his oath of office ("do right to all manner of people in accordance with the Constitution and the law without fear or favour, affection or ill-will"). He said in Baroda on August 2 (The Hindu, August 3): "There is no law and order problem in Gujarat." Three days later the DGP said, according to The Hindustan Times (August 6), that "the VHP and the Bajrang Dal were taking the law into their own hands." He also said that incidents of communal violence had increased manifold over the last few months; recently the crime rate in the State had increased by as much as 9.6 per cent. On an average, 39 crimes of serious nature like murder, rape and dacoity were reported in the State every day." A member of the investigation team sent by the Minorities Commission revealed: "After initial reluctance, the officials named VHP and Bajrang Dal allegedly involved in the mob attacks on Christians and Muslims" (The Indian Express, August 12). Advani's certificate of good conduct speaks for itself.
Christians did not rush to register their protest, as they did on December 4, but for long kept pleading for succour. On October 1, the national secretary of the All India Catholic Union (AICU), John Dayal, pointedly remarked: "The AICU is surprised that Union Government and members of the ruling coalition, including the BJP, have not come out categorically in denouncing the violence against Christians."
The Bajrang Dal has threatened Christian-run educational institutions in Karnataka with dire consequences if they did not "Hinduise" them. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Rajendra Singh declared at an RSS camp in Meerut on November 22: "Muslims and Christians will have to accept Hindu culture as their own if Hindus are to treat them as Indians" (an Agence France Presse: report in The Asian Age; November 23). The UCFHR bitterly complained in an open letter published on November 19: "The state has failed to do its duty in protecting the life, dignity and property of the victims. At many places, it seems as if the Centre and the State governments have tacitly supported the communal groups. How is it otherwise that the State governments have not taken any action against the virulent and anti-national statements of the VHP, RSS, Jagran Manch and Bajrang Dal?" (emphasis added, throughout).
While the Sangh Parivar's animosity towards Muslims is well-known, its attitude towards Christians has taken many people by surprise. But, Vishwa Hindu Parishad general secretary Giriraj Kishore said in Chandigarh on November 25: "Today the Christians constitute a greater threat than the collective threat from separatist Muslim elements." Describing G. S. Tohra, president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, as a "separatist", he said, "all minorities including Muslims and Christians must accept that their ancestors were Hindus." Ergo, they must all return to the Hindu fold.
Violence in speech inevitably inspires violent acts. As the Jaganmohan Reddy Commission that went into the Ahmedabad riots (1969) noted, once communal tension is created in a city, all that is needed is "only a match to set on fire and a fan to fan the city ablaze." Riots erupt over trifling incidents only because the atmosphere has been fouled up. Hence, the need for "a proper appreciation of the communal atmosphere in a State, in a town or in any particular area," the Commission stressed. Those who spread hate are the real perpetrators of violence. The ones who wield the weapon are their mindless agents.
We have tended to ignore a fact that brooks no neglect - the real cause of the communal riots is the rise of the Sangh Parivar. There was communal peace even in the early years after Partition. A Home Ministry review presented to the National Integration Council in 1968 noted: "From 1954 to 1960, there was a clear and consistent downward trend, 1960 being a remarkably good year with only 26 communal incidents in the whole country. This trend was sharply reversed in 1961. "That was when riots erupted in Jabalpur - thanks to the Jan Sangh, the BJP's ancestor. Communal violence has not "looked back" since.
Justice P. Venugopal, a former Judge of the Madras High Court, who inquired into Hindu-Christian clashes in Kanyakumari district in March 1982, noted: "The RSS adopts a militant and aggressive attitude and sets itself as the champion of what it considers to be the rights of Hindus against minorities. It has taken upon itself the task to teach the minority their place and if they are not willing to learn their place, teach them a lesson. The RSS has given respectability to communalism and communal riots and demoralise administration (sic). The RSS methodology for provoking communal violence is: (a) rousing communal feelings in the majority community by the propaganda that Christians are not loyal citizens of this country..." Report after report has indicted the RSS specifically or its affiliates (Ahmedabad 1969; Bhiwandi 1970; Tellicherry 1971; Jamshedpur 1981; and Mumbai 1993).
VIOLENCE is an integral part of the RSS credo. "It should be used as a surgeon's knife... to cure the society... Sometimes to protect non-violence itself violence becomes necessary," RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar said in 1952. (Spotlights: Guruji Answers, pages 110 and 188). In his fine work India as a Secular State, Donald Eugene Smith recalled the desecration of a church in Bihar in 1955 and the almost total destruction in 1957 of the Gass Memorial Centre at Raipur.
V.D. Savarkar wrote repeatedly in his book Hindutva (1923): "Hindutva is different from Hinduism." For once, he was right. Hinduism is a great religion, it is ancient. Hindutva is an ideology of hate. It is recent. He grouped Muslims and Christians together as ones who do not share "the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilisation - our Hindu culture." He added: "Christian and Mohammedan communities who were but very recently Hindus... cannot be recognised as Hindus as since their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu civilisation (Sanskriti) as a whole... For though Hindusthan to them is Fatherland, as to any other Hindu, yet it is not to them a Holyland too. Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine."
They are not the only offenders: "Look at the Jews; neither centuries of prosperity nor sense of gratitude for the shelter they found can make them more attached or even equally attached to the several countries they inhabit."
Golwalkar revealed on May 15, 1963 that his first book We or Our Nationhood Defined was based on Savarkar's brother Babarao's book in Marathi on the same theme, Rashtra Mimamsa. Golwalkar's second book, Bunch of Thoughts, praised the book Hindutva and amplified its ideology. The BJP has used it as a political weapon with dangerous consequences. Chapter XII of Bunch of Thoughts is devoted to three "Internal Threats" - Muslims, Christians and the Communists. Of the first two he wrote: "Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation. Nor does it end there. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They look to some foreign lands as their holy places." They are asked to return to the Hindu fold.
Not that that will be of much help. "For a Hindu, he gets the first sanskar when he is still in his mother's womb... We are, therefore, born as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, either circumcised or baptised, they become Muslims or Christians." The hatred is unconcealed. They have no right to proselytise. Hindus alone have it, for, "returning to one's ancestral faith is not conversion at all, it is merely home-coming."
Bunch of Thoughts first appeared in 1966 but the good work has been stepped up since. To the three "internal threats", a fourth is added - "Nehruism" - and among the perils we face is "Macaulayism". In Delhi functions an outfit, Voice of India, which proclaims: "We are not general booksellers and handle only books listed in this catalogue. Please do not ask for other books." It is an outfit with a mission. For the catalogue has an "appeal" which reads thus: "Hindu society and culture are faced with a crisis. There is a united front of entrenched alien forces - Islam, Christianity, Communism, Nehruism - to disrupt and discredit the perennial values of the Indian ethos. All who care for India need to know what is happening, and what is to be done if a major tragedy is to be averted. Voice of India aims at providing an ideological defence of Hindu society and culture, through a series of publications."
SOME people were surprised by Advani's assertion at a seminar on November 6 at Sarnath that "the Buddha did not announce any new religion. He was only restating with a new emphasis the ancient ideals of the Indo-Aryan civilisation." The Buddha, he added, derived his teaching from the Bhagvad Gita and was an avatar of Vishnu. Rebuttals from Buddhists were swift and sharp (see "Hindutva's fallacies and fantasies", Frontline, December 4, 1998).
However, no one familiar with the stuff churned out by this factory, for over four decades, would have been surprised. Its literature is intolerant of any cultural and religious diversity. It fosters a siege mentality among Hindus and speaks disparagingly of all others - not excluding Sikhs and Jews. That is not all. A Hindu who does not share its bigotry is attacked as being "anti-Hindu". Its literature represents the spirit, outlook and ethos of the Sangh Parivar. The writings cited below reveal a revolting virulence. Its moving spirit is one Sita Ram Goel.
The Parivar's organ Organiser only recently (October 18, 1998) published a paper he had written in 1983. He wrote: "The English-educated Hindu elite which controls the commanding heights in government, educational institutions and mass media has failed the test either because it has become indifferent to Hindu society, as a result of having imbibed the current cosmopolitan culture, or because it has been trained to look at Hindu society through eyes which are not of its own ancestral culture and, as a result, has become sceptical about, if not actually hostile to, the merits of Hindu society. This desperate situation has been made more difficult by a degenerate politics through which vote-hungry, sloganised, short-sighted and nominally Hindu politicians weaken Hindu society by dividing it on the basis of caste, sect, language and region, disarm Hindu society by sanctimonious and one-sided appeals in the name of traditional Hindu tolerance, strengthen alienated and aggressive communities by supporting their separatist demands in the name of secularism." His intolerance brings all within the sway of his indictment, bar the Parivar itself.
TO return to Advani's notions on Buddhism, a pamphlet entitled "Buddhism vis-a-vis Hinduism" published 40 years ago by Ram Swarup for the outfit asserts: "Buddha, his spiritual experiences and teachings, formed part of a Hindu tradition... A good Buddhist has perforce to be a good Hindu too." He went on to attack "foreign" religions. "The indigenous religions of the countries of the two Americas have been completely overwhelmed. In the African sub-continent (sic) the local religions are under a systematic attack from Islamic and Christian ideologies." The Parivar takes a dim view of the United States.
Golwalkar was asked in July 1967: "What is your opinion about present-day America?" There was lot to comment about - racial conflict, Vietnam policy, and so on. All he could say was: "Do you not yourself see that the American youth is fast dissipating himself in all kinds of sensual indulgence?" Simplistic, sweeping, defamatory judgment comes easily to the tribe.
Ram Swarup's tract Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam continued his refrain about "native" faiths. "What is happening in India is also happening elsewhere. In America even the vestiges of once (sic), a rich spiritual culture of the Indians, is no more." He developed the theme in its sequel Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992). "The two ideologies have been active and systematic persecutors of pagan nations, cultures and religions... We have spoken here with sympathy and respect not only of pagan Americas and Africa but also of the pagan past of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Iran, Syria and Arabia." V.S. Naipaul is in good company with the Sangh Parivar. Unlike him, it indicts Christianity as well as Islam on this score.
"Hinduism can help all peoples seeking religious self-renewal, for it preserves in some way their old Gods and religions, it preserves in its various layers religious traditions and intuitions they have lost. Many countries now under Christianity and Islam had once great religions; they also had great Gods who adequately fulfilled their spiritual and ethical needs... during the long period of neglect, they lost the knowledge which could revive those Gods, Hinduism can help them with this knowledge. In its simplest aspect, Europeans can best study their old pre-Christian religion by studying Hinduism."
Ram Swarup goes on to quote approvingly: "Gore Vidal says that from a 'barbaric Bronze Age text known as Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity and Islam'; he also calls them 'sky-god religions'."
Ram Swarup damns all three religions as "great persecutors". The Hindu response of old was wrong. He writes:
"First, they tried to 'reform' themselves and be like their rulers... One God, a revealed Book and prophets.... The Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Akalis also claimed monotheism and iconoclasm ... in the case of the Akalis, the new look has also become the basis of a new separatist-militant politics....
"The second way the Hindus adopted was that of 'synthesis'. The synthesizers claimed that all religions preach the same thing. They found in the Bible and the Quran all the truths of the Upanishads and vice versa. They culled passages from various scriptures to prove their point... It is by such methods that they proved that the Bible and the Quran were no different from the Upanishads...."
The wrath wells up as he proceeds and delivers a message which explains why the country has had to undergo what it has all these years, especially since 1990: "India became politically free in 1947, but it is ruled by anti-Hindu Hindus. The old mental slavery continues and it has yet to win its cultural and intellectual independence. India is entering into the second phase of its freedom struggle; the struggle for regaining its Hindu identity. The new struggle is as difficult as the old one. Hindus are disorganised, self-alienated, morally and ideologically disarmed. They lack leadership; the Hindu elites have become illiterate about their spiritual heritage and history and indifferent and even hostile towards their religion... India's higher education, its academia and media are in the hands of a Hindu-hating elite."
Note what Ram Swarup has to say of the caste system:
"Once when Hinduism was strong, castes represented a natural and healthy diversity, but now in its present state of weakness these are used for its dismemberment. Old vested interests joined by new ones have come together to make use of the caste factor in a big way in order to keep Hindus down.
"Hindus have been kept down too long. Everyone including the victims think that it is the natural order of things. Therefore, now when the Hindu society is showing some signs of stir, there is a great consternation. Already a cry has gone out of Hindu fundamentalism, we must expect more of it in future." The readers have been warned. But India will not be the only country to be saved. "America is awaiting to be rediscovered in a characteristically Hindu way, not the Christian way".
THIS represents a worse-than-narrow world-view. It is redolent of the bigotry of medieval times. This book was published in 1992. His earlier pamphlet, "Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces", also characterised "castes and denominations" as expressing a "natural and healthy diversity". The ignorance is astounding. "To Marx, the British conquest of India was a blessing." Hinduism faces attacks "both from inside and outside. While the forces of self-alienation are increasing within society, external enemies have intensified their attack.... Communism, Islam, Christianity have powerful international links... their World-Centres. Commu-nists have their Comintern working overtly or covertly." By 1987, Ram Swarup ought to have known that the Comintern was dissolved on May 22, 1943 and that the "Islamic International, a kind of Muslim Vatican, Rabitah al'-alam al-Iscaniya" (Muslim World League) is a Saudi-sponsored non-governmental organisation (1962) which counts for little in India. Hindus, by comparison, are at a disadvantage, he moans. "They do not even have a government of their own." Socially, they are falling prey to "vulgarity"; that is, "gambling, drinking, vulgar film music... Cinemas (sic) are becoming great moral and social pollutants."
ANU PUSHKARNAThe Christian missionary centre at Nawapara in Jhabua district, Madhya Pradesh, where four nuns were gangraped on September 23.
So, combat these and go over to the offensive and "look at Islam, Christianity and Communism... from the Hindu angle." Sikhs are not spared. Ram Swarup adopts a dual approach in Hindu-Sikh Relationship (1985). He woos them as "the members of Hindu society" and denounces them for thinking that "they were different". Base motives are freely attributed: "Thanks to the Green Revolution and various other factors, the Sikhs have become relatively more rich and prosperous. No wonder, they have begun to find that the Hindu bond is not good enough for them and they seek a new identity readily available to them in their names and outer symbols. This is an understandable human frailty."
He defends the storming of the Golden Temple. It "became an arsenal, a fort, a sanctuary for criminals. This grave situation called for necessary action which caused some unavoidable damage to the building." There followed "protest meetings, resolutions", which he deprecates. "The whole thing created wide-spread resentment all over India which burst into a most unwholesome violence when Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The befoggers have again got busy and they explain the whole tragedy in terms of collusion between the politicians and the police. But this conspiracy theory cannot explain the range and the virulence of the tragedy. A growing resentment at the arrogant Akali politics is the main cause of this fearful happening."
This is of a piece with the Organiser's defence of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in its editorial (January 11, 1970) - "turned the people's wrath on himself." Its editor then, K.R. Malkani, is now vice-president of the BJP.
SITA RAM GOEL does not lag behind. His pamphlet "Hindu Society under Siege" (1981) paints a frightening future: "The death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which cannot be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies. Suffering from a loss of its elan, it has become a house divided within itself... Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before."
One is reminded of the loonies of California, the minutemen who lived in dread of a Soviet conquest of the U.S. The familiar ghosts of old are revived - "Islamism", "Christianism" and a new one to keep them company, "Macaulay-ism" (the educated Hindu who rejects the Parivar's voodoo credo and the mumbo-jumbo of its shrill rhetoric).
"Ideologically, Communism in India is, in several respects, a sort of extension of Macaulayism, a residue of British rule. That is why Communism is strongest today in those areas where Macaulayism had spread its widest spell." In no other parts of the country, though, are Indian languages and culture more highly respected than in West Bengal and Kerala. "Macaulayism is wedded to Secularism and Democracy. It has to find out for itself as to who are the enemies of Secularism and Democracy and who their best friends. This can be done only by looking beyond the United Front of Islamism, Communism and Christianism."
In the U.S., the minutemen belonged to the lunatic fringe. In India, the Parivar's ideology is espoused by the party in power, even if it be through dubious alliances. Scruples are not the Parivar's strongpoint. On April 4, 1980, L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee endorsed a formulation in the National Executive of the Janata Party which pledged its members to accept "unconditionally and strive to preserve the composite culture and secular state established in our country." After splitting the Janata Party both rejected the concept of India's "composite culture." On April 8, 1998, at the BJP's Agra session, its then president, Advani, denounced the concept of composite culture - just as the Jan Sangh had done in December 1969.
HARSH NARAIN was a Visiting Professor at Aligarh Muslim University and Reader at the North-Eastern Hill University. His Myths of Composite Cultural and Equality of Religions (1990) reveals the unspoken thoughts of the Parivar; the sub-text beneath the avowed text.
"Mere permanent settlement in a country does not entitle a plunderer to be looked upon as indigenous. It must first be seen whose interests he is out to serve. What is his attitude towards Indians? Take an example. European settlers entered America and ruined the original inhabitants, whom they named 'Red Indians'. To expect the remaining Red Indians to regard their European-born rulers as equally indigenous would be a cruel joke beyond their understanding.
"Islam was out to deal a death blow to the equilibrium, exuberance, and cosmopolitan character of Indian humanity, later designated as Hindu culture in juxtaposition to Indian culture."
To him, the Taj and the Qutub Minar are specimens exclusively of Muslim, not Indian, sculpture. For, he holds: "The Muslims have been religiously indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, Indian sculpture. Thanks to the taste of the Sufis, the Muslims took some fancy to Indian music. The main gamut of Indian literature has also been untinged with Muslim literature and historic-cultural allusions... Urdu language and literature, the much-vaunted symbols or vehicles of composite culture, are not the result of intermingling of Hinduism and Islam but reflected the Muslim image in Indian garb... nor have the Hindu heroes and servants been fortunate enough to be honoured by the Muslim community."
This can only be deliberate falsehood, since he flaunts familiarity with Urdu. The much-maligned Iqbal wrote whole poems in praise of the Buddha, Ram, Guru Nanak, and Swami Ram Tirtha. He was an admirer of the Sanskrit poet, Bhartruhari, and had drunk deep at the fount of the Gita and the Upanishads. Another great poet, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, a confirmed leftist, wrote nostalgically of the soil of Mathura and in praise of Krishna. He was also an ardent admirer of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. But this is understandable of one who stoops to libel one of the greatest mystics and martyrs of all time, Mansur al-Hallaj. He was beheaded and his life forms the subject of the feat of scholarship, Louis Massignon's four-volume The Passion of al-Hallaj. He is accused of converting to Islam "the Dudwalas and Pinjaris of Gujarat." No authority is cited in support of the charge.
Harsh Narain holds that while "a sizable section of the Sufis had been comparatively free from the proverbial emphasis on coercion ... the role of Sufi tradition in bridging the gulf between Islam and Hinduism or laying the foundations of a composite culture has been greatly exaggerated."
All this and more only in order to expose "the mad propaganda of composite culture" and to prove that "Muslim culture cannot be said to be an integral part of Indian culture and must be regarded as an anticulture or counter culture in our body politic." This is no different from the RSS chief's demand (November 22, 1998) that the minorities Hinduise themselves.
The author turns his attention to Jainism ("failed to develop any cultural identity of its own") and Buddhism ("basically a life-negating religion, having little interest in social order, strictly speaking"). Conclusion? "Our national culture, Indian culture, is a unity describable as Aryan culture, Hindu culture... Indian culture is Hindu culture... Muslim and Christian cultures are counter-cultures." And Parsi culture is "something like" a sub-culture.
So "Hindu culture alone deserves the credit of recognition as the national culture (abhimanin) of this country, as the culture owning and possessing this great nation, along with other Indian-born cultures like Buddhist and Jain cultures as its sub-cultures; Muslim and Christian cultures being in the nature of tenant-cultures. The distinction of master-possessor-owner culture and tenant-parasitic culture has its own significance." One can guess what he is hinting at.
Sita Ram Goel writes in the same vein. His ardour is reflected in his three books Catholic Ashrams, Papacy and History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (304-1996). His preface to the second edition (1996) of the book on Hindu-Christian encounters explains a lot: "The Sangh Parivar, which had turned cold towards Hindu causes over the years, was startled by the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1984 elections, and decided to renew its Hindu character. The Ramajanmabhumi Movement was the result. The Movement was aimed at arresting Islamic aggression. Christianity or its missions were hardly mentioned. Nevertheless, it was Christianity which showed the greatest concern at this new Hindu stir, and started crying 'wolf'. Its media power in the West raised a storm, saying that Hindus were out to destroy the minorities in India and impose a Nazi regime. The storm is still raging and no one knows when it will subside, if at all." Thus "the storm" was unleashed for reasons of power through election victories.
Goel's writings alone prove that the Parivar's ire against Christians is decades old. In an article published in March 1983 he had asserted that the ancient Hindu precept sarva dharma samabhava (all religions are equal) should not be applied to Christians or Muslims.
IT is with some hesitation that one turns to Goel's book Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (1994); so wantonly offensive it is. The focus now is not on the missionaries, or politics, or history. The target is the faith itself; Christianity as a religion. Why? Because hitherto "we Hindus have remained occupied with the behaviour patterns of Muslims and Christians and not with the belief systems which create those behaviour patterns. We object to Christian missions, but refuse to discuss Christianity and its God, Jesus. We object to Islamic terrorisms, but refuse to have a look at Islamic and its prophet, Muhammad. I see no sense or logic in this Hindu habit."
Is there any other country in the world where such theses are written for such a purpose? One wonders. "Now, I could see why the history of Christianity had been what it had been. The source of the poison was in the Jesus of the gospels."
The Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary is attacked wantonly. There are chapters on Jesus of history, of fiction and of faith. The thesis? He did not exist in history. "The quantum of crimes committed by Muhammad's Islam was only slightly smaller than that of the crimes committed by the Christianity of the Jesus Christ... The parallel between Jesus and Hitler was seen as still more striking. The Nazi creed, as laid down by Hitler, did not sound much different from the Christian creed as preached by Jesus in the gospels."
Goel is dismayed to find that Jesus Christ "should continue to retain his hallow" (sic) in India. "Christianity is accepted as a religion not only by the westernised Hindu elite but also by Hindu saints, scholars, and political platforms."
Jesus Christ has been "praised to the skies, particularly by Mahatma Gandhi." But, "it is high time for Hindus to learn that Jesus Christ symbolises no spiritual power, or moral uprightness. He is no more than an artifice for legitimising wanton imperialist aggression. The aggressors have found him to be highly profitable so far. By the same token, Hindus should know that Jesus means nothing but mischief for their country and culture. The West where he flourished for long, has discarded him as junk. There is no reason why Hindus should buy him. He is the type of junk that cannot be re-cycled. He can only poison the environment."
THE virulence of the language reveals the depths of the hatred. This is what Indians are up against - a powerful hate group, enjoying the patronage of many politicians in power and in the administration, which is out to wipe out all traces not only of secularism and democracy but of religious tolerance, religious and cultural diversity and, indeed, of decency itself from India.
It shall not come to pass. The answer lies not in forging a united front of the minorities; it lies in a renewal of the secular ideal in our politics and in the nation at large.
India's National MagazineFrom the publishers of THE HINDU
Vol. 15 :: No. 26 :: Dec. 19, 1998 - Jan. 01, 1999
COLUMN
RSS and Christians
The Sangh Parivar's violent hatred against Christianity is deep-rooted and decades old, as is the case with its animosity against several other communities.
A. G. NOORANI
ON December 4, 1998, nearly 23 million Christians across the country observed a protest day demanding that the governments at the Centre and in the States check the growing violence against members of the community. A letter of protest, drawn up by the United Christians' Forum for Human Rights (UCFHR), said: "Since January 1998 there has been more violence against the Christian community than in all the 50 years of the country's Independence. Nuns have been raped, priests executed, Bibles burnt, churches demolished, educational institutions destroyed and religious people harassed." This is persecution in the strict dictionary meaning of the word "pursue with enmity and ill-treatment". Mabel Rebello of the Congress(I) told the Rajya Sabha that day that "50 per cent of these (incidents) have occurred in Gujarat where the BJP is in power".
On October 8, Gujarat's Director-General of Police, C.P. Singh, confirmed in an interview to Teesta Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism Combat (October 1998): "One thing was clear in the pattern of incidents. It was the activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal who were taking the law into their own hands, which posed a serious danger to peace in Gujarat. Many of the attacks on the minorities were after these organisations had whipped up local passions of conversions (by Christian missionaries) and allegedly forced inter-religious marriages... our investigations revealed that in most cases these were entirely baseless allegations."
Two disturbing features of the campaign stand out in bold relief. One is that the attacks mounted steeply after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government assumed office in March 1998. The Archbishop of Delhi, Alan de Lastic, said: "What I have noticed is that ever since this Government came to power at the Centre, the attacks on Christians and Christian missionaries have increased" (Sunday, November 22). The other is the Government's wilful refusal to condemn them. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's remarks on December 5 were virtually forced out of him. Union Home Minister L.K. Advani has been false to his oath of office ("do right to all manner of people in accordance with the Constitution and the law without fear or favour, affection or ill-will"). He said in Baroda on August 2 (The Hindu, August 3): "There is no law and order problem in Gujarat." Three days later the DGP said, according to The Hindustan Times (August 6), that "the VHP and the Bajrang Dal were taking the law into their own hands." He also said that incidents of communal violence had increased manifold over the last few months; recently the crime rate in the State had increased by as much as 9.6 per cent. On an average, 39 crimes of serious nature like murder, rape and dacoity were reported in the State every day." A member of the investigation team sent by the Minorities Commission revealed: "After initial reluctance, the officials named VHP and Bajrang Dal allegedly involved in the mob attacks on Christians and Muslims" (The Indian Express, August 12). Advani's certificate of good conduct speaks for itself.
Christians did not rush to register their protest, as they did on December 4, but for long kept pleading for succour. On October 1, the national secretary of the All India Catholic Union (AICU), John Dayal, pointedly remarked: "The AICU is surprised that Union Government and members of the ruling coalition, including the BJP, have not come out categorically in denouncing the violence against Christians."
The Bajrang Dal has threatened Christian-run educational institutions in Karnataka with dire consequences if they did not "Hinduise" them. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Rajendra Singh declared at an RSS camp in Meerut on November 22: "Muslims and Christians will have to accept Hindu culture as their own if Hindus are to treat them as Indians" (an Agence France Presse: report in The Asian Age; November 23). The UCFHR bitterly complained in an open letter published on November 19: "The state has failed to do its duty in protecting the life, dignity and property of the victims. At many places, it seems as if the Centre and the State governments have tacitly supported the communal groups. How is it otherwise that the State governments have not taken any action against the virulent and anti-national statements of the VHP, RSS, Jagran Manch and Bajrang Dal?" (emphasis added, throughout).
While the Sangh Parivar's animosity towards Muslims is well-known, its attitude towards Christians has taken many people by surprise. But, Vishwa Hindu Parishad general secretary Giriraj Kishore said in Chandigarh on November 25: "Today the Christians constitute a greater threat than the collective threat from separatist Muslim elements." Describing G. S. Tohra, president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, as a "separatist", he said, "all minorities including Muslims and Christians must accept that their ancestors were Hindus." Ergo, they must all return to the Hindu fold.
Violence in speech inevitably inspires violent acts. As the Jaganmohan Reddy Commission that went into the Ahmedabad riots (1969) noted, once communal tension is created in a city, all that is needed is "only a match to set on fire and a fan to fan the city ablaze." Riots erupt over trifling incidents only because the atmosphere has been fouled up. Hence, the need for "a proper appreciation of the communal atmosphere in a State, in a town or in any particular area," the Commission stressed. Those who spread hate are the real perpetrators of violence. The ones who wield the weapon are their mindless agents.
We have tended to ignore a fact that brooks no neglect - the real cause of the communal riots is the rise of the Sangh Parivar. There was communal peace even in the early years after Partition. A Home Ministry review presented to the National Integration Council in 1968 noted: "From 1954 to 1960, there was a clear and consistent downward trend, 1960 being a remarkably good year with only 26 communal incidents in the whole country. This trend was sharply reversed in 1961. "That was when riots erupted in Jabalpur - thanks to the Jan Sangh, the BJP's ancestor. Communal violence has not "looked back" since.
Justice P. Venugopal, a former Judge of the Madras High Court, who inquired into Hindu-Christian clashes in Kanyakumari district in March 1982, noted: "The RSS adopts a militant and aggressive attitude and sets itself as the champion of what it considers to be the rights of Hindus against minorities. It has taken upon itself the task to teach the minority their place and if they are not willing to learn their place, teach them a lesson. The RSS has given respectability to communalism and communal riots and demoralise administration (sic). The RSS methodology for provoking communal violence is: (a) rousing communal feelings in the majority community by the propaganda that Christians are not loyal citizens of this country..." Report after report has indicted the RSS specifically or its affiliates (Ahmedabad 1969; Bhiwandi 1970; Tellicherry 1971; Jamshedpur 1981; and Mumbai 1993).
VIOLENCE is an integral part of the RSS credo. "It should be used as a surgeon's knife... to cure the society... Sometimes to protect non-violence itself violence becomes necessary," RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar said in 1952. (Spotlights: Guruji Answers, pages 110 and 188). In his fine work India as a Secular State, Donald Eugene Smith recalled the desecration of a church in Bihar in 1955 and the almost total destruction in 1957 of the Gass Memorial Centre at Raipur.
V.D. Savarkar wrote repeatedly in his book Hindutva (1923): "Hindutva is different from Hinduism." For once, he was right. Hinduism is a great religion, it is ancient. Hindutva is an ideology of hate. It is recent. He grouped Muslims and Christians together as ones who do not share "the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilisation - our Hindu culture." He added: "Christian and Mohammedan communities who were but very recently Hindus... cannot be recognised as Hindus as since their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu civilisation (Sanskriti) as a whole... For though Hindusthan to them is Fatherland, as to any other Hindu, yet it is not to them a Holyland too. Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine."
They are not the only offenders: "Look at the Jews; neither centuries of prosperity nor sense of gratitude for the shelter they found can make them more attached or even equally attached to the several countries they inhabit."
Golwalkar revealed on May 15, 1963 that his first book We or Our Nationhood Defined was based on Savarkar's brother Babarao's book in Marathi on the same theme, Rashtra Mimamsa. Golwalkar's second book, Bunch of Thoughts, praised the book Hindutva and amplified its ideology. The BJP has used it as a political weapon with dangerous consequences. Chapter XII of Bunch of Thoughts is devoted to three "Internal Threats" - Muslims, Christians and the Communists. Of the first two he wrote: "Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation. Nor does it end there. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They look to some foreign lands as their holy places." They are asked to return to the Hindu fold.
Not that that will be of much help. "For a Hindu, he gets the first sanskar when he is still in his mother's womb... We are, therefore, born as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, either circumcised or baptised, they become Muslims or Christians." The hatred is unconcealed. They have no right to proselytise. Hindus alone have it, for, "returning to one's ancestral faith is not conversion at all, it is merely home-coming."
Bunch of Thoughts first appeared in 1966 but the good work has been stepped up since. To the three "internal threats", a fourth is added - "Nehruism" - and among the perils we face is "Macaulayism". In Delhi functions an outfit, Voice of India, which proclaims: "We are not general booksellers and handle only books listed in this catalogue. Please do not ask for other books." It is an outfit with a mission. For the catalogue has an "appeal" which reads thus: "Hindu society and culture are faced with a crisis. There is a united front of entrenched alien forces - Islam, Christianity, Communism, Nehruism - to disrupt and discredit the perennial values of the Indian ethos. All who care for India need to know what is happening, and what is to be done if a major tragedy is to be averted. Voice of India aims at providing an ideological defence of Hindu society and culture, through a series of publications."
SOME people were surprised by Advani's assertion at a seminar on November 6 at Sarnath that "the Buddha did not announce any new religion. He was only restating with a new emphasis the ancient ideals of the Indo-Aryan civilisation." The Buddha, he added, derived his teaching from the Bhagvad Gita and was an avatar of Vishnu. Rebuttals from Buddhists were swift and sharp (see "Hindutva's fallacies and fantasies", Frontline, December 4, 1998).
However, no one familiar with the stuff churned out by this factory, for over four decades, would have been surprised. Its literature is intolerant of any cultural and religious diversity. It fosters a siege mentality among Hindus and speaks disparagingly of all others - not excluding Sikhs and Jews. That is not all. A Hindu who does not share its bigotry is attacked as being "anti-Hindu". Its literature represents the spirit, outlook and ethos of the Sangh Parivar. The writings cited below reveal a revolting virulence. Its moving spirit is one Sita Ram Goel.
The Parivar's organ Organiser only recently (October 18, 1998) published a paper he had written in 1983. He wrote: "The English-educated Hindu elite which controls the commanding heights in government, educational institutions and mass media has failed the test either because it has become indifferent to Hindu society, as a result of having imbibed the current cosmopolitan culture, or because it has been trained to look at Hindu society through eyes which are not of its own ancestral culture and, as a result, has become sceptical about, if not actually hostile to, the merits of Hindu society. This desperate situation has been made more difficult by a degenerate politics through which vote-hungry, sloganised, short-sighted and nominally Hindu politicians weaken Hindu society by dividing it on the basis of caste, sect, language and region, disarm Hindu society by sanctimonious and one-sided appeals in the name of traditional Hindu tolerance, strengthen alienated and aggressive communities by supporting their separatist demands in the name of secularism." His intolerance brings all within the sway of his indictment, bar the Parivar itself.
TO return to Advani's notions on Buddhism, a pamphlet entitled "Buddhism vis-a-vis Hinduism" published 40 years ago by Ram Swarup for the outfit asserts: "Buddha, his spiritual experiences and teachings, formed part of a Hindu tradition... A good Buddhist has perforce to be a good Hindu too." He went on to attack "foreign" religions. "The indigenous religions of the countries of the two Americas have been completely overwhelmed. In the African sub-continent (sic) the local religions are under a systematic attack from Islamic and Christian ideologies." The Parivar takes a dim view of the United States.
Golwalkar was asked in July 1967: "What is your opinion about present-day America?" There was lot to comment about - racial conflict, Vietnam policy, and so on. All he could say was: "Do you not yourself see that the American youth is fast dissipating himself in all kinds of sensual indulgence?" Simplistic, sweeping, defamatory judgment comes easily to the tribe.
Ram Swarup's tract Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam continued his refrain about "native" faiths. "What is happening in India is also happening elsewhere. In America even the vestiges of once (sic), a rich spiritual culture of the Indians, is no more." He developed the theme in its sequel Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992). "The two ideologies have been active and systematic persecutors of pagan nations, cultures and religions... We have spoken here with sympathy and respect not only of pagan Americas and Africa but also of the pagan past of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Iran, Syria and Arabia." V.S. Naipaul is in good company with the Sangh Parivar. Unlike him, it indicts Christianity as well as Islam on this score.
"Hinduism can help all peoples seeking religious self-renewal, for it preserves in some way their old Gods and religions, it preserves in its various layers religious traditions and intuitions they have lost. Many countries now under Christianity and Islam had once great religions; they also had great Gods who adequately fulfilled their spiritual and ethical needs... during the long period of neglect, they lost the knowledge which could revive those Gods, Hinduism can help them with this knowledge. In its simplest aspect, Europeans can best study their old pre-Christian religion by studying Hinduism."
Ram Swarup goes on to quote approvingly: "Gore Vidal says that from a 'barbaric Bronze Age text known as Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity and Islam'; he also calls them 'sky-god religions'."
Ram Swarup damns all three religions as "great persecutors". The Hindu response of old was wrong. He writes:
"First, they tried to 'reform' themselves and be like their rulers... One God, a revealed Book and prophets.... The Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Akalis also claimed monotheism and iconoclasm ... in the case of the Akalis, the new look has also become the basis of a new separatist-militant politics....
"The second way the Hindus adopted was that of 'synthesis'. The synthesizers claimed that all religions preach the same thing. They found in the Bible and the Quran all the truths of the Upanishads and vice versa. They culled passages from various scriptures to prove their point... It is by such methods that they proved that the Bible and the Quran were no different from the Upanishads...."
The wrath wells up as he proceeds and delivers a message which explains why the country has had to undergo what it has all these years, especially since 1990: "India became politically free in 1947, but it is ruled by anti-Hindu Hindus. The old mental slavery continues and it has yet to win its cultural and intellectual independence. India is entering into the second phase of its freedom struggle; the struggle for regaining its Hindu identity. The new struggle is as difficult as the old one. Hindus are disorganised, self-alienated, morally and ideologically disarmed. They lack leadership; the Hindu elites have become illiterate about their spiritual heritage and history and indifferent and even hostile towards their religion... India's higher education, its academia and media are in the hands of a Hindu-hating elite."
Note what Ram Swarup has to say of the caste system:
"Once when Hinduism was strong, castes represented a natural and healthy diversity, but now in its present state of weakness these are used for its dismemberment. Old vested interests joined by new ones have come together to make use of the caste factor in a big way in order to keep Hindus down.
"Hindus have been kept down too long. Everyone including the victims think that it is the natural order of things. Therefore, now when the Hindu society is showing some signs of stir, there is a great consternation. Already a cry has gone out of Hindu fundamentalism, we must expect more of it in future." The readers have been warned. But India will not be the only country to be saved. "America is awaiting to be rediscovered in a characteristically Hindu way, not the Christian way".
THIS represents a worse-than-narrow world-view. It is redolent of the bigotry of medieval times. This book was published in 1992. His earlier pamphlet, "Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces", also characterised "castes and denominations" as expressing a "natural and healthy diversity". The ignorance is astounding. "To Marx, the British conquest of India was a blessing." Hinduism faces attacks "both from inside and outside. While the forces of self-alienation are increasing within society, external enemies have intensified their attack.... Communism, Islam, Christianity have powerful international links... their World-Centres. Commu-nists have their Comintern working overtly or covertly." By 1987, Ram Swarup ought to have known that the Comintern was dissolved on May 22, 1943 and that the "Islamic International, a kind of Muslim Vatican, Rabitah al'-alam al-Iscaniya" (Muslim World League) is a Saudi-sponsored non-governmental organisation (1962) which counts for little in India. Hindus, by comparison, are at a disadvantage, he moans. "They do not even have a government of their own." Socially, they are falling prey to "vulgarity"; that is, "gambling, drinking, vulgar film music... Cinemas (sic) are becoming great moral and social pollutants."
ANU PUSHKARNAThe Christian missionary centre at Nawapara in Jhabua district, Madhya Pradesh, where four nuns were gangraped on September 23.
So, combat these and go over to the offensive and "look at Islam, Christianity and Communism... from the Hindu angle." Sikhs are not spared. Ram Swarup adopts a dual approach in Hindu-Sikh Relationship (1985). He woos them as "the members of Hindu society" and denounces them for thinking that "they were different". Base motives are freely attributed: "Thanks to the Green Revolution and various other factors, the Sikhs have become relatively more rich and prosperous. No wonder, they have begun to find that the Hindu bond is not good enough for them and they seek a new identity readily available to them in their names and outer symbols. This is an understandable human frailty."
He defends the storming of the Golden Temple. It "became an arsenal, a fort, a sanctuary for criminals. This grave situation called for necessary action which caused some unavoidable damage to the building." There followed "protest meetings, resolutions", which he deprecates. "The whole thing created wide-spread resentment all over India which burst into a most unwholesome violence when Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The befoggers have again got busy and they explain the whole tragedy in terms of collusion between the politicians and the police. But this conspiracy theory cannot explain the range and the virulence of the tragedy. A growing resentment at the arrogant Akali politics is the main cause of this fearful happening."
This is of a piece with the Organiser's defence of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in its editorial (January 11, 1970) - "turned the people's wrath on himself." Its editor then, K.R. Malkani, is now vice-president of the BJP.
SITA RAM GOEL does not lag behind. His pamphlet "Hindu Society under Siege" (1981) paints a frightening future: "The death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which cannot be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies. Suffering from a loss of its elan, it has become a house divided within itself... Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before."
One is reminded of the loonies of California, the minutemen who lived in dread of a Soviet conquest of the U.S. The familiar ghosts of old are revived - "Islamism", "Christianism" and a new one to keep them company, "Macaulay-ism" (the educated Hindu who rejects the Parivar's voodoo credo and the mumbo-jumbo of its shrill rhetoric).
"Ideologically, Communism in India is, in several respects, a sort of extension of Macaulayism, a residue of British rule. That is why Communism is strongest today in those areas where Macaulayism had spread its widest spell." In no other parts of the country, though, are Indian languages and culture more highly respected than in West Bengal and Kerala. "Macaulayism is wedded to Secularism and Democracy. It has to find out for itself as to who are the enemies of Secularism and Democracy and who their best friends. This can be done only by looking beyond the United Front of Islamism, Communism and Christianism."
In the U.S., the minutemen belonged to the lunatic fringe. In India, the Parivar's ideology is espoused by the party in power, even if it be through dubious alliances. Scruples are not the Parivar's strongpoint. On April 4, 1980, L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee endorsed a formulation in the National Executive of the Janata Party which pledged its members to accept "unconditionally and strive to preserve the composite culture and secular state established in our country." After splitting the Janata Party both rejected the concept of India's "composite culture." On April 8, 1998, at the BJP's Agra session, its then president, Advani, denounced the concept of composite culture - just as the Jan Sangh had done in December 1969.
HARSH NARAIN was a Visiting Professor at Aligarh Muslim University and Reader at the North-Eastern Hill University. His Myths of Composite Cultural and Equality of Religions (1990) reveals the unspoken thoughts of the Parivar; the sub-text beneath the avowed text.
"Mere permanent settlement in a country does not entitle a plunderer to be looked upon as indigenous. It must first be seen whose interests he is out to serve. What is his attitude towards Indians? Take an example. European settlers entered America and ruined the original inhabitants, whom they named 'Red Indians'. To expect the remaining Red Indians to regard their European-born rulers as equally indigenous would be a cruel joke beyond their understanding.
"Islam was out to deal a death blow to the equilibrium, exuberance, and cosmopolitan character of Indian humanity, later designated as Hindu culture in juxtaposition to Indian culture."
To him, the Taj and the Qutub Minar are specimens exclusively of Muslim, not Indian, sculpture. For, he holds: "The Muslims have been religiously indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, Indian sculpture. Thanks to the taste of the Sufis, the Muslims took some fancy to Indian music. The main gamut of Indian literature has also been untinged with Muslim literature and historic-cultural allusions... Urdu language and literature, the much-vaunted symbols or vehicles of composite culture, are not the result of intermingling of Hinduism and Islam but reflected the Muslim image in Indian garb... nor have the Hindu heroes and servants been fortunate enough to be honoured by the Muslim community."
This can only be deliberate falsehood, since he flaunts familiarity with Urdu. The much-maligned Iqbal wrote whole poems in praise of the Buddha, Ram, Guru Nanak, and Swami Ram Tirtha. He was an admirer of the Sanskrit poet, Bhartruhari, and had drunk deep at the fount of the Gita and the Upanishads. Another great poet, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, a confirmed leftist, wrote nostalgically of the soil of Mathura and in praise of Krishna. He was also an ardent admirer of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. But this is understandable of one who stoops to libel one of the greatest mystics and martyrs of all time, Mansur al-Hallaj. He was beheaded and his life forms the subject of the feat of scholarship, Louis Massignon's four-volume The Passion of al-Hallaj. He is accused of converting to Islam "the Dudwalas and Pinjaris of Gujarat." No authority is cited in support of the charge.
Harsh Narain holds that while "a sizable section of the Sufis had been comparatively free from the proverbial emphasis on coercion ... the role of Sufi tradition in bridging the gulf between Islam and Hinduism or laying the foundations of a composite culture has been greatly exaggerated."
All this and more only in order to expose "the mad propaganda of composite culture" and to prove that "Muslim culture cannot be said to be an integral part of Indian culture and must be regarded as an anticulture or counter culture in our body politic." This is no different from the RSS chief's demand (November 22, 1998) that the minorities Hinduise themselves.
The author turns his attention to Jainism ("failed to develop any cultural identity of its own") and Buddhism ("basically a life-negating religion, having little interest in social order, strictly speaking"). Conclusion? "Our national culture, Indian culture, is a unity describable as Aryan culture, Hindu culture... Indian culture is Hindu culture... Muslim and Christian cultures are counter-cultures." And Parsi culture is "something like" a sub-culture.
So "Hindu culture alone deserves the credit of recognition as the national culture (abhimanin) of this country, as the culture owning and possessing this great nation, along with other Indian-born cultures like Buddhist and Jain cultures as its sub-cultures; Muslim and Christian cultures being in the nature of tenant-cultures. The distinction of master-possessor-owner culture and tenant-parasitic culture has its own significance." One can guess what he is hinting at.
Sita Ram Goel writes in the same vein. His ardour is reflected in his three books Catholic Ashrams, Papacy and History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (304-1996). His preface to the second edition (1996) of the book on Hindu-Christian encounters explains a lot: "The Sangh Parivar, which had turned cold towards Hindu causes over the years, was startled by the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1984 elections, and decided to renew its Hindu character. The Ramajanmabhumi Movement was the result. The Movement was aimed at arresting Islamic aggression. Christianity or its missions were hardly mentioned. Nevertheless, it was Christianity which showed the greatest concern at this new Hindu stir, and started crying 'wolf'. Its media power in the West raised a storm, saying that Hindus were out to destroy the minorities in India and impose a Nazi regime. The storm is still raging and no one knows when it will subside, if at all." Thus "the storm" was unleashed for reasons of power through election victories.
Goel's writings alone prove that the Parivar's ire against Christians is decades old. In an article published in March 1983 he had asserted that the ancient Hindu precept sarva dharma samabhava (all religions are equal) should not be applied to Christians or Muslims.
IT is with some hesitation that one turns to Goel's book Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (1994); so wantonly offensive it is. The focus now is not on the missionaries, or politics, or history. The target is the faith itself; Christianity as a religion. Why? Because hitherto "we Hindus have remained occupied with the behaviour patterns of Muslims and Christians and not with the belief systems which create those behaviour patterns. We object to Christian missions, but refuse to discuss Christianity and its God, Jesus. We object to Islamic terrorisms, but refuse to have a look at Islamic and its prophet, Muhammad. I see no sense or logic in this Hindu habit."
Is there any other country in the world where such theses are written for such a purpose? One wonders. "Now, I could see why the history of Christianity had been what it had been. The source of the poison was in the Jesus of the gospels."
The Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary is attacked wantonly. There are chapters on Jesus of history, of fiction and of faith. The thesis? He did not exist in history. "The quantum of crimes committed by Muhammad's Islam was only slightly smaller than that of the crimes committed by the Christianity of the Jesus Christ... The parallel between Jesus and Hitler was seen as still more striking. The Nazi creed, as laid down by Hitler, did not sound much different from the Christian creed as preached by Jesus in the gospels."
Goel is dismayed to find that Jesus Christ "should continue to retain his hallow" (sic) in India. "Christianity is accepted as a religion not only by the westernised Hindu elite but also by Hindu saints, scholars, and political platforms."
Jesus Christ has been "praised to the skies, particularly by Mahatma Gandhi." But, "it is high time for Hindus to learn that Jesus Christ symbolises no spiritual power, or moral uprightness. He is no more than an artifice for legitimising wanton imperialist aggression. The aggressors have found him to be highly profitable so far. By the same token, Hindus should know that Jesus means nothing but mischief for their country and culture. The West where he flourished for long, has discarded him as junk. There is no reason why Hindus should buy him. He is the type of junk that cannot be re-cycled. He can only poison the environment."
THE virulence of the language reveals the depths of the hatred. This is what Indians are up against - a powerful hate group, enjoying the patronage of many politicians in power and in the administration, which is out to wipe out all traces not only of secularism and democracy but of religious tolerance, religious and cultural diversity and, indeed, of decency itself from India.
It shall not come to pass. The answer lies not in forging a united front of the minorities; it lies in a renewal of the secular ideal in our politics and in the nation at large.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
A critical Factoid for some transparency in Freedom of Faith In secular India
According to the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India, there were approximately one hundred registered foreign Christian missionaries (both Catholic and Protestant) in the country, most over the age of seventy.
Are these old men a threat to a nation of over 1.20 billion people [120 crore]
That works out to one Missionary for every 12.5 million people [One crore Tonty-five lakh Indians]
[Source 2006 US Report on Religious Freedom
We have no count of Indian religious workers [Hindu. Islamic, Sikh and Christian] working in the US and West Europe.
Are these old men a threat to a nation of over 1.20 billion people [120 crore]
That works out to one Missionary for every 12.5 million people [One crore Tonty-five lakh Indians]
[Source 2006 US Report on Religious Freedom
We have no count of Indian religious workers [Hindu. Islamic, Sikh and Christian] working in the US and West Europe.
Friday, September 14, 2007
RELIGIOUS QUOTA DOES NOT REPLACE DEMAND FOR SCHEDULED CASTE STATUS
ALL INDIA CHRISTIAN COUNCIL
President: Dr. Joseph D’souza Secretary General: Dr. John Dayal
Address for Correspondence:
johndayal@vsnl.com
Mobile: 09811021072
Website: http://www.aiccindia.org
PRESS STATEMENT
NEW DELHI, September 14, 2007
Community welcomes Tamil Nadu reservations, but Dalit Christians still need same protection of law and affirmative action
[The following is the text of the Press Statement issued by Dr John Dayal, Member of the National Integration Council, Secretary General of the All India Christian Council and President of the All India Catholic Union, in response to the announcement of the Tamil Nadu Government yesterday giving a seven per cent quota for Muslims and Christians in the state.]
The Christian community in Tamil Nadu, and Tamil Christians across the world, will surely welcome with thanksgiving in their heart the decision of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government in the state of Tamil Nadu the provision of a 3.5 per cent reservation carved out of the existing Backward Communities reservations. We also welcome the decision of Chief Minister Dr M Karunanidhi's Cabinet to urge the Central government to grant similar quotas to Christians and to Muslims.
On the face of it, reservations for jobs and other opportunities on the basis of religion may seem an anathema in secular India where the Constitution guarantees equality in all sectors of life. The ground reality however presents a dismally negative picture. In most states, there is a wide chasm between the privileged castes and communities, and religious and other minorities who have minimal representation in state employment and the devolution of developmental resources.
Tamil Nadu had long ago recognised that communities suffered from developmental inequities irrespective of their religious affiliations. It also recognised that governments had to make determined thrust to ensure that affirmative action promised in independent India reached these communities and was not diluted because of judicial or administrative, but artificial, ceilings.
However, it is clearly understood that these reservations do not quench, much less take the place of the demand of the Christians of Dalit origin that they be given the same privileges, including reservations, as are given nationally to Dalits who profess Buddhism, Sikhism or Hinduism.
The writ petitions of several Dalit Christian groups are now before the Supreme Court and is expected to come up for hearing later this month. The Justice Rangnath Mishra National Commission for Linguistic and Religious Minorities has in its report already accepted this position and has commended full rights under the Scheduled Caste categories for Dalit Christians and Muslims. Dr Buta Singh, Chairman of the National Scheduled Caste Commission, is now considering the Misra Report and has in his public statements extended full to Dalit Christians and Muslims.
Classification under the Scheduled Caste provisions of the Constitution is much more than mere reservations in jobs or educational institutions. Political vested interests have long misled the Dalits professing Hinduism that they will somehow suffer if Muslims and Christians get similar benefits and that it would `eat into their cake.’. It has long been proved that this is not so, as the religious minorities, once they get Scheduled Caste status, not be part of the OBC or other quota.
Scheduled status goes much beyond mere jobs, which may be limited in some categories. The scope in education is unlimited, and reservations must indeed be open to the full extent possible. Dalits of Hindu faith will not suffer also if Scheduled status brings the protection of law to Muslims and Christians, to their widows, and those injured in caste violence. At present, Christian Dalits suffer as much as anyone else in caste violence, but are bereft of relief. In Panchayati Raj too, the benefits to one religious group will not be at the cost of any other groups.
The Tamil Nadu Government must tell the Centre that the UPA’s credibility suffers as of its partners if Scheduled Caste status is not given to Dalit Muslims and Christians because of their religious affiliation.
Released for publication
President: Dr. Joseph D’souza Secretary General: Dr. John Dayal
Address for Correspondence:
johndayal@vsnl.com
Mobile: 09811021072
Website: http://www.aiccindia.org
PRESS STATEMENT
NEW DELHI, September 14, 2007
Community welcomes Tamil Nadu reservations, but Dalit Christians still need same protection of law and affirmative action
[The following is the text of the Press Statement issued by Dr John Dayal, Member of the National Integration Council, Secretary General of the All India Christian Council and President of the All India Catholic Union, in response to the announcement of the Tamil Nadu Government yesterday giving a seven per cent quota for Muslims and Christians in the state.]
The Christian community in Tamil Nadu, and Tamil Christians across the world, will surely welcome with thanksgiving in their heart the decision of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government in the state of Tamil Nadu the provision of a 3.5 per cent reservation carved out of the existing Backward Communities reservations. We also welcome the decision of Chief Minister Dr M Karunanidhi's Cabinet to urge the Central government to grant similar quotas to Christians and to Muslims.
On the face of it, reservations for jobs and other opportunities on the basis of religion may seem an anathema in secular India where the Constitution guarantees equality in all sectors of life. The ground reality however presents a dismally negative picture. In most states, there is a wide chasm between the privileged castes and communities, and religious and other minorities who have minimal representation in state employment and the devolution of developmental resources.
Tamil Nadu had long ago recognised that communities suffered from developmental inequities irrespective of their religious affiliations. It also recognised that governments had to make determined thrust to ensure that affirmative action promised in independent India reached these communities and was not diluted because of judicial or administrative, but artificial, ceilings.
However, it is clearly understood that these reservations do not quench, much less take the place of the demand of the Christians of Dalit origin that they be given the same privileges, including reservations, as are given nationally to Dalits who profess Buddhism, Sikhism or Hinduism.
The writ petitions of several Dalit Christian groups are now before the Supreme Court and is expected to come up for hearing later this month. The Justice Rangnath Mishra National Commission for Linguistic and Religious Minorities has in its report already accepted this position and has commended full rights under the Scheduled Caste categories for Dalit Christians and Muslims. Dr Buta Singh, Chairman of the National Scheduled Caste Commission, is now considering the Misra Report and has in his public statements extended full to Dalit Christians and Muslims.
Classification under the Scheduled Caste provisions of the Constitution is much more than mere reservations in jobs or educational institutions. Political vested interests have long misled the Dalits professing Hinduism that they will somehow suffer if Muslims and Christians get similar benefits and that it would `eat into their cake.’. It has long been proved that this is not so, as the religious minorities, once they get Scheduled Caste status, not be part of the OBC or other quota.
Scheduled status goes much beyond mere jobs, which may be limited in some categories. The scope in education is unlimited, and reservations must indeed be open to the full extent possible. Dalits of Hindu faith will not suffer also if Scheduled status brings the protection of law to Muslims and Christians, to their widows, and those injured in caste violence. At present, Christian Dalits suffer as much as anyone else in caste violence, but are bereft of relief. In Panchayati Raj too, the benefits to one religious group will not be at the cost of any other groups.
The Tamil Nadu Government must tell the Centre that the UPA’s credibility suffers as of its partners if Scheduled Caste status is not given to Dalit Muslims and Christians because of their religious affiliation.
Released for publication
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Naxal hunt in Bangalore colleges
PRESS AND GENERAL STATEMENT
From John Dayal
Government agencies harass academics, looking for Naxalites in Karnataka educational institutions
I am deeply disturbed at recent developments in the state of Karnataka, once known for its secular character, peace and cosmopolitan ambience. The state has seen a spurt in activities against the minorities, both Muslims and Christians. A local group recently met the National human Rights Commission and Union Home Minister Shiv Raj Patil in this context.
Now it transpires that even as they fail to curb anti Christian terrorism, Karnataka State agencies are entering Christian educational institutions to probe links of Human rights groups with alleged naxalite activity.
In a very controversial incident, intelligence agents came to the famous St Joseph’s College in Bangalore, among others, last Sunday. They hung around the college premises for more than four long hours. They were keen to know how the "Karnataka communal harmony" group made an entry into St. Joseph's College premises. The group consisting of several activists, academicians and others meet in various parts of the state. The major colleges in the state capital – as is the practice in most metropolitan cities -- routinely provide space for all progressive groups.
Intelligence groups insist that many of such human rights and civil society groups sympathise with Naxalites and PWG Angry college authorities have questioned this state action, and are asking if giving space to human rights groups is against the government policies.
It is understood that Mr. Deve Gowda has been monitoring all NGOs in his home district of Hassan. Activists have been complaining that the social space is becoming limited in the State.
I strongly protest this and call upon civil society groups to take the matter up with the authorities in the state capital of Bangalore, as also in other states and with the Central Government.
God Bless
John Dayal
Member, National Integration Council, Government of India, New Delhi
National President, All India catholic Union
Secretary General, All India Christian Council
From John Dayal
Government agencies harass academics, looking for Naxalites in Karnataka educational institutions
I am deeply disturbed at recent developments in the state of Karnataka, once known for its secular character, peace and cosmopolitan ambience. The state has seen a spurt in activities against the minorities, both Muslims and Christians. A local group recently met the National human Rights Commission and Union Home Minister Shiv Raj Patil in this context.
Now it transpires that even as they fail to curb anti Christian terrorism, Karnataka State agencies are entering Christian educational institutions to probe links of Human rights groups with alleged naxalite activity.
In a very controversial incident, intelligence agents came to the famous St Joseph’s College in Bangalore, among others, last Sunday. They hung around the college premises for more than four long hours. They were keen to know how the "Karnataka communal harmony" group made an entry into St. Joseph's College premises. The group consisting of several activists, academicians and others meet in various parts of the state. The major colleges in the state capital – as is the practice in most metropolitan cities -- routinely provide space for all progressive groups.
Intelligence groups insist that many of such human rights and civil society groups sympathise with Naxalites and PWG Angry college authorities have questioned this state action, and are asking if giving space to human rights groups is against the government policies.
It is understood that Mr. Deve Gowda has been monitoring all NGOs in his home district of Hassan. Activists have been complaining that the social space is becoming limited in the State.
I strongly protest this and call upon civil society groups to take the matter up with the authorities in the state capital of Bangalore, as also in other states and with the Central Government.
God Bless
John Dayal
Member, National Integration Council, Government of India, New Delhi
National President, All India catholic Union
Secretary General, All India Christian Council
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Mother Teresa, a tribute on her tenth death anniversary
Ma Tujhe Salaam
Teresa for the Munna-bhai generation
By John Dayal
It turns out that Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu is not an Albanian after all.
After the current redrawing of maps in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet universe, her birthplace Skopje is firmly in the bosom of Macedonia. The Maid of the Gutters of Kolkata is a Macedonia, a birth region she shares with Phillip, whose son Alexander sought to conquer the world. Alexander the Great failed, of course, dying of chikanguniya or something similar he caught during his brief stay in north India, possibly during the Monsoons. Teresa, in the event, continued out of Kolkata to capture the hearts of the world – the hearts of dictators and despots, for which she was criticised, as much as the hearts of presidents and other democrats and the common people, for which she was given the Nobel Price. It is perhaps the first time, and the last time too, that Dollars from the fortunes of the dynamite maker and possible drug lords have come to be used to bring a sense of human dignity to the dying and the destitute of modern metropolises.
In a world where just about everyone who matters claims to have known Mother, or worked with her in her many Ashrams, I must be among the few who started with a Fight with Mother, and at a press conference too. Well, not as fight exactly, but a verbal duel for a couple of minutes during which a [then] middle aged English language newspaper Editor found out just how Teresa captured the imagination of the world.
It was in the Delhi Catholic Archdiocesan hall in a setting similar to what all of you must be so familiar from Raghu Rai’s famous portraits illustrating Navin Chawla’s Autobiography of Mother. She was seated on a stool, or just on the ground, her serenity in sharp contradistinction to her blue striped signature dhoti’s ribbed and ruffled porcelain framing ivory-ceramic gnarled hands and a face fractured in deep gullies like Mother Earth after a draught. You could well imagine a shaft of sunlight – made visible to the eye by the dust-dandruff of urban Delhi -- framing her huddled figure. And if you had ears, perhaps you could hear words in the silent hall – words which said `This is Our Favorite Daughter, whom we are well pleased. `
There was no Akashvani, of course. Just Mother insisting that it was a sin to support abortion, that no one could be branded an unwanted child, an abandoned orphan, and that there was enough love in the world to take are of every such life.
Surely that was red rag to the feminine movement of that time, and to their friends, of whom I was one. Ought not women to have control over their bodies, and what of victims of rape of those fearing genetic disorder, basic groups classified in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act? Was the Old Nun not living in a fool’s paradise, out of tune with a nation whose exploding population could smother its development and its future? Was the pro-life movement not anti-woman, anti-development?
I have forgotten her exact words, but by the time Mother was finished, ardent feminists in the group of editors and correspondents were speechless, even sheepish. Many still believed in the MRTP, but most agreed that she had a point. There indeed was enough love in the world to take care of the unborn once he or she was allowed an appearance in the lap of the unwed mother, or the willing. This was decades before the gender data from Haryana and Punjab slapped us in the face with its record of millions of unborn girl children murdered in the womb.
An incident in an orphanage or Home run by Mother’s Sisters of Charity answered several other questions. The Orphanage is next to the biggest Catholic school in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where the children of the high and the mighty study. The two storied building is neat, with wards and rooms for the very ill and the very young.
I was there one Sunday. The children looked happy, as any well kept six month old or toddler will, once she is bathed, clothed and given a bottle of warm milk by someone who smiles at her, makes delightful faces and chuckles her under the chin. Surely that is what all Mothers do, even if they have not given birth to the child in their lap.
This was soon to be finessed, as a gambler would say. There was a flurry of activity in the lane in front of the home. A couple of large sedan cars stopped on the gravel. The gravel. They were Mercedes Benz’s, or maybe one of them was a Rolls Royce Maybach. Out stepped as clutch of women, dripping diamonds, wafting fine parfums, and in the best chiffons and silks money could buy. They had come to celebrate the birthday of an only son with some altruistic charity. They handed over the sweats to the sisters, and the bundles of clothes. The elder women personally distributed food to a few. But before they left, some of the younger women were on their knees with dusters in their hand, cleaning the floor in a gesture of humility that transcended their generosity in cash.
That, I knew, was the reason why an ashram of the Mother has never been vandalised, not even by the worst bigots. There was an aroma of love. And the Orphans were from Jaipur’s own lanes, its dark and dirty secret.
Since that first encounter, I have sought to retrace Mother’s footsteps many times, in fits and starts. Kalighat of her first activity, Bandel where she spent many years, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose Street where
Mother’s House is a lodestone to many seekers of a purpose in life. I have seen her Sisters, their trademark blue striped sari-dhoti making them stand out whether their features are Indian, African or European, in the crowds at international airports. More often than not, there would be a child in their arms, being carried to a new home. Once these children were mostly of Indian origin. Now their faces, like those of their surrogate Mothers, reflect all nationalities and all nations where Mother’s thousands of sisters work.
When passing through Kolkata, I always make it a point to go to Mother’s House, and celebrate Mass with the Sisters and any visiting Priest. It is refreshing to see the compound still busy with little children and young nuns, and attendance at Mass is usually House-full, men women and children reflecting the faces of a hundred nations, and every province of India’s. Here too Mother sits, in a porcelain statue, small, discreet, almost beautiful.
There are people with a story or two about Mother. Some of them, believe me, are funny stories. Like the one narrated by a Baptist woman activist who had lived in the Baptist Mission near Mother’s Home. Mother had her eye on a building the Baptists owned, but were not using. Mother thought she could use the building for her expanding family. Once when she met this lady from London, she told her “Jesus came to me in my dreams last night and told me to ask you for the building. He said you had agreed to part with it. “That’s strange,” said the Lady from London. “Jesus came in my dreams too last night, but he never said a word about the building.” I am sure the two ladies had a hearty laugh.
Mother conquered death when she first tended the dying at Kalighat. After her won death, she has grown in stature. It does not really matter when the Pope in Rome announces that Teresa is a Saint.
To me and to countless others, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu a.k.a Teresa of Kolkata is already a Saint.
[This first appeared in an anniversary Special Issue of a noted airlines magazine published by Media Transasia]
Teresa for the Munna-bhai generation
By John Dayal
It turns out that Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu is not an Albanian after all.
After the current redrawing of maps in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet universe, her birthplace Skopje is firmly in the bosom of Macedonia. The Maid of the Gutters of Kolkata is a Macedonia, a birth region she shares with Phillip, whose son Alexander sought to conquer the world. Alexander the Great failed, of course, dying of chikanguniya or something similar he caught during his brief stay in north India, possibly during the Monsoons. Teresa, in the event, continued out of Kolkata to capture the hearts of the world – the hearts of dictators and despots, for which she was criticised, as much as the hearts of presidents and other democrats and the common people, for which she was given the Nobel Price. It is perhaps the first time, and the last time too, that Dollars from the fortunes of the dynamite maker and possible drug lords have come to be used to bring a sense of human dignity to the dying and the destitute of modern metropolises.
In a world where just about everyone who matters claims to have known Mother, or worked with her in her many Ashrams, I must be among the few who started with a Fight with Mother, and at a press conference too. Well, not as fight exactly, but a verbal duel for a couple of minutes during which a [then] middle aged English language newspaper Editor found out just how Teresa captured the imagination of the world.
It was in the Delhi Catholic Archdiocesan hall in a setting similar to what all of you must be so familiar from Raghu Rai’s famous portraits illustrating Navin Chawla’s Autobiography of Mother. She was seated on a stool, or just on the ground, her serenity in sharp contradistinction to her blue striped signature dhoti’s ribbed and ruffled porcelain framing ivory-ceramic gnarled hands and a face fractured in deep gullies like Mother Earth after a draught. You could well imagine a shaft of sunlight – made visible to the eye by the dust-dandruff of urban Delhi -- framing her huddled figure. And if you had ears, perhaps you could hear words in the silent hall – words which said `This is Our Favorite Daughter, whom we are well pleased. `
There was no Akashvani, of course. Just Mother insisting that it was a sin to support abortion, that no one could be branded an unwanted child, an abandoned orphan, and that there was enough love in the world to take are of every such life.
Surely that was red rag to the feminine movement of that time, and to their friends, of whom I was one. Ought not women to have control over their bodies, and what of victims of rape of those fearing genetic disorder, basic groups classified in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act? Was the Old Nun not living in a fool’s paradise, out of tune with a nation whose exploding population could smother its development and its future? Was the pro-life movement not anti-woman, anti-development?
I have forgotten her exact words, but by the time Mother was finished, ardent feminists in the group of editors and correspondents were speechless, even sheepish. Many still believed in the MRTP, but most agreed that she had a point. There indeed was enough love in the world to take care of the unborn once he or she was allowed an appearance in the lap of the unwed mother, or the willing. This was decades before the gender data from Haryana and Punjab slapped us in the face with its record of millions of unborn girl children murdered in the womb.
An incident in an orphanage or Home run by Mother’s Sisters of Charity answered several other questions. The Orphanage is next to the biggest Catholic school in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where the children of the high and the mighty study. The two storied building is neat, with wards and rooms for the very ill and the very young.
I was there one Sunday. The children looked happy, as any well kept six month old or toddler will, once she is bathed, clothed and given a bottle of warm milk by someone who smiles at her, makes delightful faces and chuckles her under the chin. Surely that is what all Mothers do, even if they have not given birth to the child in their lap.
This was soon to be finessed, as a gambler would say. There was a flurry of activity in the lane in front of the home. A couple of large sedan cars stopped on the gravel. The gravel. They were Mercedes Benz’s, or maybe one of them was a Rolls Royce Maybach. Out stepped as clutch of women, dripping diamonds, wafting fine parfums, and in the best chiffons and silks money could buy. They had come to celebrate the birthday of an only son with some altruistic charity. They handed over the sweats to the sisters, and the bundles of clothes. The elder women personally distributed food to a few. But before they left, some of the younger women were on their knees with dusters in their hand, cleaning the floor in a gesture of humility that transcended their generosity in cash.
That, I knew, was the reason why an ashram of the Mother has never been vandalised, not even by the worst bigots. There was an aroma of love. And the Orphans were from Jaipur’s own lanes, its dark and dirty secret.
Since that first encounter, I have sought to retrace Mother’s footsteps many times, in fits and starts. Kalighat of her first activity, Bandel where she spent many years, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose Street where
Mother’s House is a lodestone to many seekers of a purpose in life. I have seen her Sisters, their trademark blue striped sari-dhoti making them stand out whether their features are Indian, African or European, in the crowds at international airports. More often than not, there would be a child in their arms, being carried to a new home. Once these children were mostly of Indian origin. Now their faces, like those of their surrogate Mothers, reflect all nationalities and all nations where Mother’s thousands of sisters work.
When passing through Kolkata, I always make it a point to go to Mother’s House, and celebrate Mass with the Sisters and any visiting Priest. It is refreshing to see the compound still busy with little children and young nuns, and attendance at Mass is usually House-full, men women and children reflecting the faces of a hundred nations, and every province of India’s. Here too Mother sits, in a porcelain statue, small, discreet, almost beautiful.
There are people with a story or two about Mother. Some of them, believe me, are funny stories. Like the one narrated by a Baptist woman activist who had lived in the Baptist Mission near Mother’s Home. Mother had her eye on a building the Baptists owned, but were not using. Mother thought she could use the building for her expanding family. Once when she met this lady from London, she told her “Jesus came to me in my dreams last night and told me to ask you for the building. He said you had agreed to part with it. “That’s strange,” said the Lady from London. “Jesus came in my dreams too last night, but he never said a word about the building.” I am sure the two ladies had a hearty laugh.
Mother conquered death when she first tended the dying at Kalighat. After her won death, she has grown in stature. It does not really matter when the Pope in Rome announces that Teresa is a Saint.
To me and to countless others, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu a.k.a Teresa of Kolkata is already a Saint.
[This first appeared in an anniversary Special Issue of a noted airlines magazine published by Media Transasia]
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Not Much Right to Information, if it is about massacres of Muslims
Not much right to Info, if you want to get info on policemen who killed young, and innocent, Muslim youth
[JOHN DAYAL’S NOTE: Civil Society, grass roots workers, well meaning citizens, and of course the Church in India, has set much store by the hard won Right to Inform ration. We are hoping to use it to get their due rights to Dalits of all Faiths, including Dalit Christians. We hope to use it tom expose governments who have clamped the so called Freedom of Religion Acts in their states claming large scale forcible and fraudulent conversions to Christianity. And of course, we intend to use it to bring to task corrupt and malignant officials, policemen, institutions and organisations. It has been a few years since the RTI became a law across India. But is it easy to use to elicit or confirm the truth -- especially when the victims are poor, and the guilt is shared by the police and the state, both protected by an increasingly more communal political apparatus. The following is a case in point. This is the experience of Vrinda Grover, a Supreme Court of India lawyer.
]
Hashimpura killings: RTI response
On 24th May 2007, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the communally motivated Hashimpura PAC custodial killings, victim families and survivors had filed 615 RTI applications in Lucknow.
613 RTI applications were filed at the office of the DGP at 1 Tilak Marg, Lucknow. Shri D.C. Pandey, DIG, who is the Public Information Officer (PIO). The survivors and families of the victims asked the State why the accused PAC men charged by a Delhi Sessions Court for the murder of 42 Muslim men, continue to be in active service of the PAC? Was any departmental inquiry initiated against them? Was any disciplinary action taken against them? Or were they rewarded with promotions in rank and emoluments? Were the 19 accused PAC men ever suspended from service? What were the grounds on which they were reinstated? They asked for copies of the Annual Confidential Report (ACR) of each of the accused persons to be made available.
In reply to these RTI applications some information has been made available. The ACR. of the accused PAC men reveals that mass custodial killing of Muslims does not even invite a negative comment in the Report. To the contrary the ACR noting for the year 1987 gives the PAC accused a glowing and congratulatory report. The ACR of 14 of the PAC accused that has been supplied states for the year 1987, " Kaam aur Aacharan Achha Hai. Satyanishtha Pramnit hai. Shreni Achha.". The career prospects of the accused were in no way hurt by the fact that the CBCID was enquiring into their role in the brutal killings of over 42 innocent Muslims.
The reply received from the State states that no Departmental Enquiry was ever conducted against any of the 19 PAC accused men, nor any disciplinary action taken. Was the mass killing of Muslims in custody not a cause serious enough to warrant a departmental enquiry?
Further documents obtained through RTI disclose that they were suspended very briefly in 1995 after the charge sheet was submitted by the CBCID. Within a year or more the accused PAC personnel were reinstated on flimsy and untenable grounds. Shockingly the reinstatement orders disclose that they were being reinstated, as the PAC required their services. So are we to conclude that the PAC requires the services of those men who have been charged with and are currently being prosecuted for the murder of over 42 innocent Muslim men. Other PAC men were reinstated as they were facing financial hardships. Of course no thought was spared for the families of Hashimpura who were rendered destitute due to the PAC custodial killings. The attitude and approach both of the State and the Police Department sends a clear signal condoning the communally motivated custodial killings and encouraging State impunity.
It is shocking to see that some of the documents supplied in reply are completely blank and the concerned officer has even attested the same. Such a brazen disregard for the rights of the people belies all claims of good and transparent governance.
RTI was also deployed to expose the complicity of the State and unmask the truth. The counsel for the victim families, Advocate Vrinda Grover, had filed 2 RTI applications with the Home Department. These RTI applications asked for a copy of the Inquiry Report submitted by the CBCID into the Hashimpura killings of Muslims by the PAC, to be made available. The State was asked to reveal how many persons were indicted by the CBCID Report as complicit in the PAC killings and why did the State sanction criminal prosecution only against 19 PAC men and not all the others indicted in the CB CID Report? The RTI application also pointedly asks the reasons for the delay in the prosecution of the PAC accused and the names of those responsible for the same.
The response of the State to these 2 RTI applications is very disappointing. The CBCID report has not been made available nor have answers been given to any of the above questions. The State has simply chosen to stonewall and blatantly violate the citizens right to information.
Against this 4 Appeals and 4 Complaints were been filed under the RTI Act with the Appellate Authority.
On 3rd September 2007 the Appeals were argued before Mr. Harmol Singh Director General CBCID, in Lucknow, by Adv. Vrinda Grover who was accompanied by Magsaysay award winner Sandeep Pandey, journalist Nasiruddin Haider Khan and Vanagna activist Puneet Goel. The DG. admitted that as per the RTI Act they ought to have answered the RTI's filed more than 3 months ago. The DG sought time and assured that information would be supplied shortly. The DG. CBCID also assured the delegation that CBCID as the prosecuting agency would ensure that the criminal trial pending in Delhi court is prosecuted effectively and efficiently.
Appeals are also pending before the State Information Commission. No date for hearing has yet been given.
[JOHN DAYAL’S NOTE: Civil Society, grass roots workers, well meaning citizens, and of course the Church in India, has set much store by the hard won Right to Inform ration. We are hoping to use it to get their due rights to Dalits of all Faiths, including Dalit Christians. We hope to use it tom expose governments who have clamped the so called Freedom of Religion Acts in their states claming large scale forcible and fraudulent conversions to Christianity. And of course, we intend to use it to bring to task corrupt and malignant officials, policemen, institutions and organisations. It has been a few years since the RTI became a law across India. But is it easy to use to elicit or confirm the truth -- especially when the victims are poor, and the guilt is shared by the police and the state, both protected by an increasingly more communal political apparatus. The following is a case in point. This is the experience of Vrinda Grover, a Supreme Court of India lawyer.
]
Hashimpura killings: RTI response
On 24th May 2007, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the communally motivated Hashimpura PAC custodial killings, victim families and survivors had filed 615 RTI applications in Lucknow.
613 RTI applications were filed at the office of the DGP at 1 Tilak Marg, Lucknow. Shri D.C. Pandey, DIG, who is the Public Information Officer (PIO). The survivors and families of the victims asked the State why the accused PAC men charged by a Delhi Sessions Court for the murder of 42 Muslim men, continue to be in active service of the PAC? Was any departmental inquiry initiated against them? Was any disciplinary action taken against them? Or were they rewarded with promotions in rank and emoluments? Were the 19 accused PAC men ever suspended from service? What were the grounds on which they were reinstated? They asked for copies of the Annual Confidential Report (ACR) of each of the accused persons to be made available.
In reply to these RTI applications some information has been made available. The ACR. of the accused PAC men reveals that mass custodial killing of Muslims does not even invite a negative comment in the Report. To the contrary the ACR noting for the year 1987 gives the PAC accused a glowing and congratulatory report. The ACR of 14 of the PAC accused that has been supplied states for the year 1987, " Kaam aur Aacharan Achha Hai. Satyanishtha Pramnit hai. Shreni Achha.". The career prospects of the accused were in no way hurt by the fact that the CBCID was enquiring into their role in the brutal killings of over 42 innocent Muslims.
The reply received from the State states that no Departmental Enquiry was ever conducted against any of the 19 PAC accused men, nor any disciplinary action taken. Was the mass killing of Muslims in custody not a cause serious enough to warrant a departmental enquiry?
Further documents obtained through RTI disclose that they were suspended very briefly in 1995 after the charge sheet was submitted by the CBCID. Within a year or more the accused PAC personnel were reinstated on flimsy and untenable grounds. Shockingly the reinstatement orders disclose that they were being reinstated, as the PAC required their services. So are we to conclude that the PAC requires the services of those men who have been charged with and are currently being prosecuted for the murder of over 42 innocent Muslim men. Other PAC men were reinstated as they were facing financial hardships. Of course no thought was spared for the families of Hashimpura who were rendered destitute due to the PAC custodial killings. The attitude and approach both of the State and the Police Department sends a clear signal condoning the communally motivated custodial killings and encouraging State impunity.
It is shocking to see that some of the documents supplied in reply are completely blank and the concerned officer has even attested the same. Such a brazen disregard for the rights of the people belies all claims of good and transparent governance.
RTI was also deployed to expose the complicity of the State and unmask the truth. The counsel for the victim families, Advocate Vrinda Grover, had filed 2 RTI applications with the Home Department. These RTI applications asked for a copy of the Inquiry Report submitted by the CBCID into the Hashimpura killings of Muslims by the PAC, to be made available. The State was asked to reveal how many persons were indicted by the CBCID Report as complicit in the PAC killings and why did the State sanction criminal prosecution only against 19 PAC men and not all the others indicted in the CB CID Report? The RTI application also pointedly asks the reasons for the delay in the prosecution of the PAC accused and the names of those responsible for the same.
The response of the State to these 2 RTI applications is very disappointing. The CBCID report has not been made available nor have answers been given to any of the above questions. The State has simply chosen to stonewall and blatantly violate the citizens right to information.
Against this 4 Appeals and 4 Complaints were been filed under the RTI Act with the Appellate Authority.
On 3rd September 2007 the Appeals were argued before Mr. Harmol Singh Director General CBCID, in Lucknow, by Adv. Vrinda Grover who was accompanied by Magsaysay award winner Sandeep Pandey, journalist Nasiruddin Haider Khan and Vanagna activist Puneet Goel. The DG. admitted that as per the RTI Act they ought to have answered the RTI's filed more than 3 months ago. The DG sought time and assured that information would be supplied shortly. The DG. CBCID also assured the delegation that CBCID as the prosecuting agency would ensure that the criminal trial pending in Delhi court is prosecuted effectively and efficiently.
Appeals are also pending before the State Information Commission. No date for hearing has yet been given.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Ignorance, Hate, or just another manifestation of the new NRI Sangh syndrome?
Christian converts cease to be Indians, or so says a Swami
[PTI, September 3, 2007) Durban, South Africa -
A Hindu religious leader in South Africa has caused a storm within the Indian community by saying that those who convert to Christianity will "lose their right to be Indian". Thillayvel Naidoo, an executive member of the South African Hindu Maha Sabha and a Tamil linguist, made the remarks after a Christian convert, Deena Muthen, urged people to maintain their language and culture even if they convert. Muthen, who is now a pastor practising in the large Indian-dominated residential township of Chatsworth in Durban, told his congregation that they should be proud of their rich language and culture.But Naidoo said Muthen's comments were "tricks" to entice gullible people to convert to Christianity. "Those who reject their religion lose the right to be completely Indian. He (Muthen) is distracting people with his Tamil preaching and hymns. Just because he preaches in Tamil does not mean anything, and I condemn it," he said. However, Muthen, a former Hindu priest, rejected the assertion saying he made the comments because there was hunger for Indian culture and language among Indian Christians. "I have been urging churches to become more culturally involved. People desire to know their heritage, and we can teach them Tamil. There is a lack of knowledge among Christian Indians, but this does not mean that we are not Indian or less than Indian," he said.Courtesy WWRN.Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
[PTI, September 3, 2007) Durban, South Africa -
A Hindu religious leader in South Africa has caused a storm within the Indian community by saying that those who convert to Christianity will "lose their right to be Indian". Thillayvel Naidoo, an executive member of the South African Hindu Maha Sabha and a Tamil linguist, made the remarks after a Christian convert, Deena Muthen, urged people to maintain their language and culture even if they convert. Muthen, who is now a pastor practising in the large Indian-dominated residential township of Chatsworth in Durban, told his congregation that they should be proud of their rich language and culture.But Naidoo said Muthen's comments were "tricks" to entice gullible people to convert to Christianity. "Those who reject their religion lose the right to be completely Indian. He (Muthen) is distracting people with his Tamil preaching and hymns. Just because he preaches in Tamil does not mean anything, and I condemn it," he said. However, Muthen, a former Hindu priest, rejected the assertion saying he made the comments because there was hunger for Indian culture and language among Indian Christians. "I have been urging churches to become more culturally involved. People desire to know their heritage, and we can teach them Tamil. There is a lack of knowledge among Christian Indians, but this does not mean that we are not Indian or less than Indian," he said.Courtesy WWRN.Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
Tribal girls used to breed infants for adoption, and in India's national Capital New Delhi
Maid to suffer in absence of law3 Sep 2007 NEW DELHI: The TV expose of a baby-selling racket run by a placement agency in northwest Delhi has once again revealed the vulnerability of young women who come to Delhi in search of their livelihood as domestic maids and end up being exploited. The agency was getting women from Jharkhand and West Bengal — many of them minors — and forcing them to conceive, thereafter selling the babies to childless couples. There are efforts in various quarters to give these women some semblance of rights to prevent such incidents from happening but social activists and women's organisations feel that in the absence of set guidelines for dealing with such crimes, the efforts often go waste. The National Commission for Women has finally woken up to the problem and claims to be drafting a set of recommendations for the purpose. ''Next week we will be presenting our recommendations for a special law for domestic workers in Delhi,'' said NCW law officer Yogesh Mehta. The law would take its own time in coming and till then the sheer bizarreness of such crimes may leave the enforcement agencies at a disadvantage. The placement agency owners have been charged with kidnapping, unlawful restraining and rape. Calling the incident an instance of the worst kind of exploitation, Christian Human Rights activist Dr. John Dayal, said: ''This is as bizarre as 'puppy farming'. Young girls being made to breed human beings for sale is a horrific thought. Where does one draw the line?'' Most of these girls are young and uneducated. They are at complete mercy of the placement agents who get them to the city from their villages or ''take charge'' right from the time these women get down from trains only to find agents waiting at the station to pounce on them. In search of a living to get away from the poverty, the girls get caught in the net and with constant fear of being further victimised if they talk about their travails, theirs become cursed existences. Dayal stresses, ''Domestic workers should be included under the unorganised labour Act. Apart from just 'verification', police should also take responsibility for the safety of people who come to work as domestic helps and the government should form a body that pays regular visits to the placement agencies and compiles a database on women who are being placed as domestic helps.''
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