Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh cops pull back Christian profiling plan
Naveen and Firoz Mirza , Hindustan Times
Bhopal, April 15, 2011
A police circular in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh seeking detailed profiles of Christians and churches in the state has been withdrawn after protests from members of the minority community.
State chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Thursday sought a report on the circular issued on March 23. This is the first time such a circular was issued in Madhya Pradesh.
The controversy caused by the circular surfaced at Ashtra town in Sehore district when a police official allegedly threatened a Christian priest who declined to give information sought through the circular. “The officer threatened to take me to the police station when I refused to provide details,” said Father Francis Scaria of the Ashtra parish.
The police top brass claimed ignorance about the circular even though the state police headquarters issued it to all police stations, seeking information on the financial status, political leanings and sources of funding of churches and their staff.
Director general of police SK Rout reportedly did not know about the circular till Wednesday when a delegation of Christians brought it to his notice.
Rout told HT, “All district police units have been directed not to collect any such information.” The circular had triggered alarm and anger among Christians, who viewed the order as a prelude to unleashing organised violence on the community.
Bhopal’s Archbishop Leo Cornelio, who heads the Catholic Church in the state, said, “It is a conspiracy against Christians in Madhya Pradesh.” He said similar profiling was done in Gujarat, where Christians were targeted in religious violence in some districts between 1999-2000.
Father Anand Muttungal, spokesperson of Catholic Church, Madhya Pradesh, said the circular violated the community’s fundamental rights. It betrayed the anti-Christian bias of the state government, he said.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
LEST WE FORGET
TOGADIA WANTS VOTING RIGHTS IN INDIA ONLY FOR HINDUS
Bharat has seen how viciously many governments are going after Hindus, creating NIA and giving simple cases to NIA so that they get Muslim votes…
Solution? There should be voting rights only to the Hindus. Those whose forefathers opted out for Pakistan and those who do not follow 2 kids norm have no right to vote in Bharat. The political parties who loot national coffer on Muslims in the name of minority should be banned from elections. There must be a common civil code - if it is not now then there will sure be a common civil code but that will be Sharia in Bharat. [Dr Pravin Togadia, International Secretary General of VHP. Contact: drtogadia@gmail.com] [From the column TogadiaSpeak, the Organiser, published from New Delhi, edition dated 13 March 2011. http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388&page=34 ]
Bharat has seen how viciously many governments are going after Hindus, creating NIA and giving simple cases to NIA so that they get Muslim votes…
Solution? There should be voting rights only to the Hindus. Those whose forefathers opted out for Pakistan and those who do not follow 2 kids norm have no right to vote in Bharat. The political parties who loot national coffer on Muslims in the name of minority should be banned from elections. There must be a common civil code - if it is not now then there will sure be a common civil code but that will be Sharia in Bharat. [Dr Pravin Togadia, International Secretary General of VHP. Contact: drtogadia@gmail.com] [From the column TogadiaSpeak, the Organiser, published from New Delhi, edition dated 13 March 2011. http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388&page=34 ]
Monday, February 28, 2011
OMINOUS PORTENDS IN ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE TO DALIT CHRISTIAN PLAINT
John Dayal
It was the Nineteenth time since 2004 that the Public Interest Litigation on the issue of Dalit Christians did not come up for a real hearing in the Supreme Court of India though it was listed on the judicial agenda. But the Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India was not really to blame. They were busy the entire day, 24th February 2011, and would remain so for many other days, hearing a challenge by minority and private schools to the Government’s new law of Right to Education. The private and minority sector is arguing that its member schools are not obliged to give a quarter of their new admissions to children of the poor.
The poor and marginalised Dalit Christians will have to wait for another time, and so will the Dalit Muslims who have joined them in recent years challenging through several Writ petitions -- now being heard together -- Constitution’s Article 341’s Clause [iii], which was inserted surreptitiously through a Presidential Order in 1950 to restrict just to Hindus all the affirmative action, including reservations in jobs, education and legislatures, that the new Government of a new India wanted to give to an entire population described as “untouchables” and kept in subjugation since the law giver Manu wrote his infamous Code.
The issue may come back in the Supreme Court next month or perhaps after the summer vacations – it is not clear at the moment of writing this article.
But there are ominous developments which portend that Dalits of the so called “non-Indic” or Semitic origin religions may never wrest their rights from the Government and its institutions. The latest has come from the learned Mr. G. E. Vahanvati, Advocate General of India, the Government’s highest Law officer who has told the Union Cabinet, in effect, that they just need to play cool and do not have to respond to the otherwise heart-rending cries of the Dalits as the issue is “too complicated. About Mr. Vahanvati, later.
The issue of course is very complicated, and very embarrassing for India’s secularism, if truth be told.
The British, like the Romans way back before them in Biblical Times, liked to count populations, if only to assess how many people they were ruling over, and just which group was in their fiefdom. In their Nineteenth century Census of India, they counted what Manu had just thrown out of his mind – the lower castes, the untouchables. In due time after the Munity of 1857, they sought to win over the poor who already thought of the Empress Victoria Government as Mai-Baap, or mother and father. The result was not just some plums for their “own” people, the Anglo-Indians with a White paternal ancestry, who got jobs in the Armed Forces, the Railways and the Postal Services, and to the “native Christians”, but also to the Depressed classes, the untouchables. Thus was born the affirmative action reservations for the Scheduled castes, so named because they figure in a list appended to the Constitution. The untouchables after abolishment of untouchability, rejected the term Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi coined for them-- Harijan, Children of God – sarcastically asking if the rest were children of the Devil. It would some decades before they coined for themselves the name they go under now, Dalits, or the Broken People.
Officially, the Dalits are about 15 per cent or so of the entire Indian population. The fact is that many of them converted first to Islam, from the 13th to the 19th centuries, and then to Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The Dalit Muslims may number perhaps as many as 50 to 70 million, or at least a third of the Islamic population in India, the rest coming mainly from the Other Backward Classes and a minority from the upper castes and migrants from West and Central Asia.
The Christian Dalits consist of perhaps up to two thirds – or at least 60 per cent -- of the entire Christian population in India, with most of them concentrated in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Most Christians in Andhra, Punjab and Gujarat are of Dalit origin, whether they accept it today or not. The Christians among the tribals of the North East and the tribal-Adivasis of the Chhota-Nagpur region and contiguous areas of central India constitute between 15 to 20 per cent of the community, and are exclusive in that they enjoy all rights and privileges given to their brothers and sisters professing Hinduism or their own particular faiths such as Sarna, Shamaic, nature or ancestor worship.
The transfer of power and the rise of Independent India saw an India-British covenant which gave Anglo Indians two seats in the Lok Sabha, and also reserved seats in the legislatures of Bengal, Andhra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and many other states despite their ever decreasing numbers because of migration to the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in succeeding decades.
The issue of separate quotas for Dalit Christians did not arise at the time of the birth of the new Republic because the Constitution, imagined by Jawaharlal Nehru and written by a committee headed by the great Dalit leader Babasaheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar, correctly understood that the caste system impacted all of India, irrespective of region, ethnicity and religion. The affirmative action contained in the slew of guarantees for the Scheduled castes, including reservations in legislatures, in Government jobs and educational institutions, were meant for all Dalits irrespective of religion. Religions such as Sikhism, Buddhism and course Islam and Christianity do not have caste in their theological construct, but the people professing these religions live together, even as they do to this date, and suffer the same infirmities as their Hindu counterparts.
This law did continue for some months. There is very little documentation, but knowing the caste structure of the Congress and other parties even in the Opposition at the time the Constitution was promulgated – 26th January 1950 – it was clear that this treatment of all Dalits in a single basket – would grossly displease the upper crust and the upper caste among all parties. We know how the landed gentry flummoxed land reforms and the right wing parties sought to dictate to Nehru. [I need hardly say the upper class former Rajas and Maharajas, the landlords, and the Mahants, have made reappearance in Parliament and on Page-3 of newspapers in recent years]. Their fears were obvious. A large group of people, their de facto slaves and bonded labour, were not only being let free and emancipated, they were being educated and would pose a challenge in time. Dalit Christians and Muslims also had the added advantage of claiming spiritual uplift despite their poverty.
Presidential Order of 1950, later forming part three of the Constitution’s Article 341 was the result. The order said in no uncertain terms that privileges such as reservations would be given to just Hindus. Anyone converting to Christianity and Islam, Sikhism or Buddhism, would lose them. And later orders from administration and courts said Dalits who converted to Hinduism from Islam or Christianity would regain the reservations and other advantages. In effect, Dalits had no freedom of faith enjoyed by other citizens of India unless they converted to Hinduism. In one stroke of the pen, their fundamental human rights were taken away from them.
The All India Catholic Union was among the first to protest and challenge this order. Sikhs Dalits – called Mazbhis – and Neo Buddhists joined the movement later. The most recent entrants to the now massive movement are the Pasmanda Muslims.
The Sikhs were powerful. They had regiments in the army, and Punjab is close to Delhi, the national Capital, in more ways than one. Their agitation led to the restoration of their rights by 1956. The Buddhists were really Ambedkarites and the so called neo-Buddhists of Maharashtra. They too had the Mahar regiment in the Army, but it was sheer numbers and the support in Parliament that prompted the then Union Welfare Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, himself a Dalit, to grant them the Scheduled Caste rights. The Christians despite a massive rally in Delhi were denied the privileges, Mr. Paswan and others telling them they would bring forth a law soon thereafter. It as many years later, in the Government of P V Narsimha Rao, a Brahmin, that his Welfare minister Sitaram Kesari persuaded the crafting of a Cabinet resolution on granting the SC rights to Christians. The Cabinet paper was not without loopholes. It mentioned all the pros and cons, carrying the day for the Christians by a thin margin. The Government drafted a Bill, but inadvertently or by design, the Bill was not admitted by the Speaker, Mr. Shivraj Patil who would later earn further notoriety for his silence while Christians in Orissa were massacred in 2008.
The agitation and advocacy has continued unabatedly since them. Rallies have been held all over India, and religiously when Parliament is in session, Dalit Christians come in numbers large and small to Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street in New Delhi to register their protest, to make their cry. Christian organizers give dinners in honour of Christian MPs and went in delegations to party presidents and Government ministers pleading the cause. All of it has been in vain so far.
Things have started moving since a Public Interest Litigation was filed in 2004 by the PIL Centre headed by former Union Law Minister Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant, the human rights lawyer. The PIL asked the Government whether the fact that Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims are deprived of the benefits of reservation did not amount to hostile discrimination under Article 14.
The Government now has to either justify upholding the 1950 Presidential Order or accept the Rangnath Misra Commission recommendation of reservation for Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. Many other writs have been filed since then, some my Pasmanda Muslims and even a few by the Hindutva groups opposing the Christian and Muslim demands. All the writs have been clubbed together for hearing in Courtroom Number One, presided over by the Chief Justice of India. One positive result has been the support that has finally come from Government’s own statutory and other commissions and organisations.
I recall in the ‘Nineties, the then Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha Suraj Bhan, telling me and CBCI secretary Father John Vallamattam, who later founded Indian Currents, how it was in the Fifties when he was member of a Parliamentary team which was assessing this issue. They travelled to many states and cities, including Mumbai, Goa and Kerala. In each halt, they asked the Church hierarchy to explain to them the existence of Dalit Christians. As I recall Mr. Bhan telling the story, “despite the existence of walls dividing upper and lower castes in life in the Church and in death in the cemetery, all of them said they had no Dalits in the Church.”
Many a Church maintains this position, perhaps out of a wrong understanding of faith, sociology, history and Constitutional rights.
Once the matter came to the Supreme Court, it asked the Government to respond. For the first time in fifty years, it could not hide, nor ignore the issue hoping it would vanish like a bad dream. Typically, the first response of the Government was to buy time. It was to repeat this trick more than once. It told the Supreme Court it had set up a commission to examine the issue – the National Commission for religious and Linguistic Minorities headed by former Supreme Court judge and then Congress Member of Parliament, Mr. Rangnath Misra. Even as the Advocate General of the day, the late Mr. Milon Bannerjee was telling the Supreme Court this, some of us who were in the court drove over to Justice Misra who said he had no knowledge of this. It would be many days before he would be finally asked to examine the issue. Dalit Christians and Muslims gave him kilograms of data, scores of historical records including some dating back to the Nineteenth century law courts of Madras presidency.
Justice Misra’s commission, which had the redoubtable jurist Tahir Mahmood on it together with St. Stephen’s College Principal, the late Dr. Anil Wilson, wrote a monumental report. The commission held that the stigma of being a Dalit, that caste itself, crossed the boundaries of religion. It ruled that Christian and Muslim Dalit deserved all the privileges of being Scheduled castes. However the ruling was not without some baggage. The member secretary, Indian Administrative Service officer Asha Das, wrote a vitriolic dissent note, repeating every argument given by every Brahminical officer and minister since 1950. Also refusing the Dalit Christian request was the Department of Welfare, and then headed by the Dalit leader and former Foreign Service officer Meira Kumar. In several signed notes, her department said the Christians did not qualify.
But the sustained pressure – the issue was taken to the United Nations conference on race and racial discrimination held in Durban, South Africa, by office bearers of the All India Christian Council and the All India Catholic Union – and the many rallies of the Christians in New Delhi, Madurai and Chennai, among other places, did have an impact. Political parties including the DMK allied to their support. In time, several State legislatures, including Tamil Naidu and Andhra Pradesh, passed resolutions in support. Chief ministers such as Nitish Kumar, Mayawati and M K Karunanidhi, all from non-Congress spectrum, wrote to the Union Government saying that Dalit Christians, and Muslims, must be given their nights. The BJP was the dissenter. The Congress has remained mum.
The Government, however, has been active in a negative way. After Justice Misra said “Yes”, the Government sent his report to the national Commission for Scheduled castes, headed by former Union Home Minister and once Governor Buta Singh. Many delegations met Buta, who told them he agreed with their demand. He said so in his written report, but added a mischievous footnote, saying that Christians and Muslims be given their reservations without touching the 15 per cent reservations given to Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh Scheduled castes . He did not explain why the commission had not put this rider when the SC status was bestowed on Dalit Sikhs, the community to which he himself belonged, and then to Buddhists.
This is a critical issue. Other than in Tamil Naidu, the maximum reservations which can be made under a Supreme Court ruling is a total of 50 per cent. Government can, possibly justly, say that even if it were to agree to such reservations, it would violate the Supreme Court orders, or say advocates against the Dalit Christians. They also, of course, maintain that there cannot be a Dalit amongst Christianity and Islam, both Semitic religions as there is no untoucbability amongst them. True. But they of course forget that untoucbability has been banned in Hinduism by law, and that Dalits get the privileges of SC Status because of the infirmity of suppression three thousand year old.
The Government was sleeping well till the Supreme Court disturbed its siesta last year, asking it to make up its mind soon, and respond in the hearings scheduled for 24th February 2011.
The Political Affairs Committee of the Union Cabinet, charged with formulating the Government position, asked Advocate General Vahanvati to brief it. It was in this briefing that Vahanvati dropped his bombshell. Vahanvati said “many complicated legal issues are involved” but currently “no decision was called for.” The complication from the Buta Singh suggestion -- if reservation is given to these two groups, it should not be from the 15 per cent meant for Dalits. It should be a separate quota. The existing position on reservation at the national level is: 27 per cent for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), 15 per cent for the SC (or Dalits) and 7.5 per cent for the Scheduled Tribes. The three categories together account for 49.5 per cent, and till now, the Supreme Court has ruled that reservation should not exceed 50 per cent.” Clearly, therefore, a decision one way or the other will open a can of worms, “a newspaper said. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs is headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and includes Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Defence Minister A.K. Antony. A special invitee at the meeting was Minorities Affairs Minister Salman Khursheed.
Newspapers are pointing that elections in Tamil Naidu, Bengal and Kerala put pressure on the Government on act, as these three states have Christians and Muslims in sizable numbers. The CPM recently organised a major convention at Kottayam, a major Christian centre in Kerala, to woo the Dalit Christians. Christians form 19% of the state's 31.8 million people while Dalit Christians are around 4%. DMK boss and chief minister M Karunanidhi has maintained that the demand for granting Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Christians "is not only just but also indisputable" and if necessary the party would even lead an agitation, the Hindustan Times said. The Congress however fears what Hindustan Times described as a “political backlash which would cost dearly for the party.”
The Vahanvati briefing and the adjournment of the case has not gone down well with Christian organisations. The All India Christian Council termed the statement of Attorney-General Vahanvati as “ominous”.
“In the many years the case has been in the Apex court, proceedings have been delayed because of the Government’s inability to make up its mind on the matter despite repeated prodding by the court. This speaks of a debilitating indecisiveness which is born of political perfidy and bureaucratic obduracy. Sections of the officialdom, belonging to the upper castes, and sections of the same power groups in the ruling and the major opposition party are opposing the assertion of the religious minority groups to regain their constitutional rights, the aicc feels. We do not see why these groups feel so threatened. Our brothers and sisters in the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Dalits know that most Government jobs go unfilled, and there is enough for everyone to share without restricting each others’ privileges and rights, “the council said
“It is a mystery why the Government yet demurs.” When the Constitution was signed, the affirmative action of reservations in jobs, legislatures, schools, and on such issues as rural development was given to all Dalits who were struggling to regain human dignity after 3,000 years of oppression at the hands of the ruling upper caste-led social system, the Christian council added. “This era of prevarication and political indecisiveness must now end, Dalit Christians and Muslims must be given their rights now,” it said
It was the Nineteenth time since 2004 that the Public Interest Litigation on the issue of Dalit Christians did not come up for a real hearing in the Supreme Court of India though it was listed on the judicial agenda. But the Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India was not really to blame. They were busy the entire day, 24th February 2011, and would remain so for many other days, hearing a challenge by minority and private schools to the Government’s new law of Right to Education. The private and minority sector is arguing that its member schools are not obliged to give a quarter of their new admissions to children of the poor.
The poor and marginalised Dalit Christians will have to wait for another time, and so will the Dalit Muslims who have joined them in recent years challenging through several Writ petitions -- now being heard together -- Constitution’s Article 341’s Clause [iii], which was inserted surreptitiously through a Presidential Order in 1950 to restrict just to Hindus all the affirmative action, including reservations in jobs, education and legislatures, that the new Government of a new India wanted to give to an entire population described as “untouchables” and kept in subjugation since the law giver Manu wrote his infamous Code.
The issue may come back in the Supreme Court next month or perhaps after the summer vacations – it is not clear at the moment of writing this article.
But there are ominous developments which portend that Dalits of the so called “non-Indic” or Semitic origin religions may never wrest their rights from the Government and its institutions. The latest has come from the learned Mr. G. E. Vahanvati, Advocate General of India, the Government’s highest Law officer who has told the Union Cabinet, in effect, that they just need to play cool and do not have to respond to the otherwise heart-rending cries of the Dalits as the issue is “too complicated. About Mr. Vahanvati, later.
The issue of course is very complicated, and very embarrassing for India’s secularism, if truth be told.
The British, like the Romans way back before them in Biblical Times, liked to count populations, if only to assess how many people they were ruling over, and just which group was in their fiefdom. In their Nineteenth century Census of India, they counted what Manu had just thrown out of his mind – the lower castes, the untouchables. In due time after the Munity of 1857, they sought to win over the poor who already thought of the Empress Victoria Government as Mai-Baap, or mother and father. The result was not just some plums for their “own” people, the Anglo-Indians with a White paternal ancestry, who got jobs in the Armed Forces, the Railways and the Postal Services, and to the “native Christians”, but also to the Depressed classes, the untouchables. Thus was born the affirmative action reservations for the Scheduled castes, so named because they figure in a list appended to the Constitution. The untouchables after abolishment of untouchability, rejected the term Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi coined for them-- Harijan, Children of God – sarcastically asking if the rest were children of the Devil. It would some decades before they coined for themselves the name they go under now, Dalits, or the Broken People.
Officially, the Dalits are about 15 per cent or so of the entire Indian population. The fact is that many of them converted first to Islam, from the 13th to the 19th centuries, and then to Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The Dalit Muslims may number perhaps as many as 50 to 70 million, or at least a third of the Islamic population in India, the rest coming mainly from the Other Backward Classes and a minority from the upper castes and migrants from West and Central Asia.
The Christian Dalits consist of perhaps up to two thirds – or at least 60 per cent -- of the entire Christian population in India, with most of them concentrated in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Most Christians in Andhra, Punjab and Gujarat are of Dalit origin, whether they accept it today or not. The Christians among the tribals of the North East and the tribal-Adivasis of the Chhota-Nagpur region and contiguous areas of central India constitute between 15 to 20 per cent of the community, and are exclusive in that they enjoy all rights and privileges given to their brothers and sisters professing Hinduism or their own particular faiths such as Sarna, Shamaic, nature or ancestor worship.
The transfer of power and the rise of Independent India saw an India-British covenant which gave Anglo Indians two seats in the Lok Sabha, and also reserved seats in the legislatures of Bengal, Andhra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and many other states despite their ever decreasing numbers because of migration to the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in succeeding decades.
The issue of separate quotas for Dalit Christians did not arise at the time of the birth of the new Republic because the Constitution, imagined by Jawaharlal Nehru and written by a committee headed by the great Dalit leader Babasaheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar, correctly understood that the caste system impacted all of India, irrespective of region, ethnicity and religion. The affirmative action contained in the slew of guarantees for the Scheduled castes, including reservations in legislatures, in Government jobs and educational institutions, were meant for all Dalits irrespective of religion. Religions such as Sikhism, Buddhism and course Islam and Christianity do not have caste in their theological construct, but the people professing these religions live together, even as they do to this date, and suffer the same infirmities as their Hindu counterparts.
This law did continue for some months. There is very little documentation, but knowing the caste structure of the Congress and other parties even in the Opposition at the time the Constitution was promulgated – 26th January 1950 – it was clear that this treatment of all Dalits in a single basket – would grossly displease the upper crust and the upper caste among all parties. We know how the landed gentry flummoxed land reforms and the right wing parties sought to dictate to Nehru. [I need hardly say the upper class former Rajas and Maharajas, the landlords, and the Mahants, have made reappearance in Parliament and on Page-3 of newspapers in recent years]. Their fears were obvious. A large group of people, their de facto slaves and bonded labour, were not only being let free and emancipated, they were being educated and would pose a challenge in time. Dalit Christians and Muslims also had the added advantage of claiming spiritual uplift despite their poverty.
Presidential Order of 1950, later forming part three of the Constitution’s Article 341 was the result. The order said in no uncertain terms that privileges such as reservations would be given to just Hindus. Anyone converting to Christianity and Islam, Sikhism or Buddhism, would lose them. And later orders from administration and courts said Dalits who converted to Hinduism from Islam or Christianity would regain the reservations and other advantages. In effect, Dalits had no freedom of faith enjoyed by other citizens of India unless they converted to Hinduism. In one stroke of the pen, their fundamental human rights were taken away from them.
The All India Catholic Union was among the first to protest and challenge this order. Sikhs Dalits – called Mazbhis – and Neo Buddhists joined the movement later. The most recent entrants to the now massive movement are the Pasmanda Muslims.
The Sikhs were powerful. They had regiments in the army, and Punjab is close to Delhi, the national Capital, in more ways than one. Their agitation led to the restoration of their rights by 1956. The Buddhists were really Ambedkarites and the so called neo-Buddhists of Maharashtra. They too had the Mahar regiment in the Army, but it was sheer numbers and the support in Parliament that prompted the then Union Welfare Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, himself a Dalit, to grant them the Scheduled Caste rights. The Christians despite a massive rally in Delhi were denied the privileges, Mr. Paswan and others telling them they would bring forth a law soon thereafter. It as many years later, in the Government of P V Narsimha Rao, a Brahmin, that his Welfare minister Sitaram Kesari persuaded the crafting of a Cabinet resolution on granting the SC rights to Christians. The Cabinet paper was not without loopholes. It mentioned all the pros and cons, carrying the day for the Christians by a thin margin. The Government drafted a Bill, but inadvertently or by design, the Bill was not admitted by the Speaker, Mr. Shivraj Patil who would later earn further notoriety for his silence while Christians in Orissa were massacred in 2008.
The agitation and advocacy has continued unabatedly since them. Rallies have been held all over India, and religiously when Parliament is in session, Dalit Christians come in numbers large and small to Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street in New Delhi to register their protest, to make their cry. Christian organizers give dinners in honour of Christian MPs and went in delegations to party presidents and Government ministers pleading the cause. All of it has been in vain so far.
Things have started moving since a Public Interest Litigation was filed in 2004 by the PIL Centre headed by former Union Law Minister Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant, the human rights lawyer. The PIL asked the Government whether the fact that Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims are deprived of the benefits of reservation did not amount to hostile discrimination under Article 14.
The Government now has to either justify upholding the 1950 Presidential Order or accept the Rangnath Misra Commission recommendation of reservation for Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. Many other writs have been filed since then, some my Pasmanda Muslims and even a few by the Hindutva groups opposing the Christian and Muslim demands. All the writs have been clubbed together for hearing in Courtroom Number One, presided over by the Chief Justice of India. One positive result has been the support that has finally come from Government’s own statutory and other commissions and organisations.
I recall in the ‘Nineties, the then Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha Suraj Bhan, telling me and CBCI secretary Father John Vallamattam, who later founded Indian Currents, how it was in the Fifties when he was member of a Parliamentary team which was assessing this issue. They travelled to many states and cities, including Mumbai, Goa and Kerala. In each halt, they asked the Church hierarchy to explain to them the existence of Dalit Christians. As I recall Mr. Bhan telling the story, “despite the existence of walls dividing upper and lower castes in life in the Church and in death in the cemetery, all of them said they had no Dalits in the Church.”
Many a Church maintains this position, perhaps out of a wrong understanding of faith, sociology, history and Constitutional rights.
Once the matter came to the Supreme Court, it asked the Government to respond. For the first time in fifty years, it could not hide, nor ignore the issue hoping it would vanish like a bad dream. Typically, the first response of the Government was to buy time. It was to repeat this trick more than once. It told the Supreme Court it had set up a commission to examine the issue – the National Commission for religious and Linguistic Minorities headed by former Supreme Court judge and then Congress Member of Parliament, Mr. Rangnath Misra. Even as the Advocate General of the day, the late Mr. Milon Bannerjee was telling the Supreme Court this, some of us who were in the court drove over to Justice Misra who said he had no knowledge of this. It would be many days before he would be finally asked to examine the issue. Dalit Christians and Muslims gave him kilograms of data, scores of historical records including some dating back to the Nineteenth century law courts of Madras presidency.
Justice Misra’s commission, which had the redoubtable jurist Tahir Mahmood on it together with St. Stephen’s College Principal, the late Dr. Anil Wilson, wrote a monumental report. The commission held that the stigma of being a Dalit, that caste itself, crossed the boundaries of religion. It ruled that Christian and Muslim Dalit deserved all the privileges of being Scheduled castes. However the ruling was not without some baggage. The member secretary, Indian Administrative Service officer Asha Das, wrote a vitriolic dissent note, repeating every argument given by every Brahminical officer and minister since 1950. Also refusing the Dalit Christian request was the Department of Welfare, and then headed by the Dalit leader and former Foreign Service officer Meira Kumar. In several signed notes, her department said the Christians did not qualify.
But the sustained pressure – the issue was taken to the United Nations conference on race and racial discrimination held in Durban, South Africa, by office bearers of the All India Christian Council and the All India Catholic Union – and the many rallies of the Christians in New Delhi, Madurai and Chennai, among other places, did have an impact. Political parties including the DMK allied to their support. In time, several State legislatures, including Tamil Naidu and Andhra Pradesh, passed resolutions in support. Chief ministers such as Nitish Kumar, Mayawati and M K Karunanidhi, all from non-Congress spectrum, wrote to the Union Government saying that Dalit Christians, and Muslims, must be given their nights. The BJP was the dissenter. The Congress has remained mum.
The Government, however, has been active in a negative way. After Justice Misra said “Yes”, the Government sent his report to the national Commission for Scheduled castes, headed by former Union Home Minister and once Governor Buta Singh. Many delegations met Buta, who told them he agreed with their demand. He said so in his written report, but added a mischievous footnote, saying that Christians and Muslims be given their reservations without touching the 15 per cent reservations given to Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh Scheduled castes . He did not explain why the commission had not put this rider when the SC status was bestowed on Dalit Sikhs, the community to which he himself belonged, and then to Buddhists.
This is a critical issue. Other than in Tamil Naidu, the maximum reservations which can be made under a Supreme Court ruling is a total of 50 per cent. Government can, possibly justly, say that even if it were to agree to such reservations, it would violate the Supreme Court orders, or say advocates against the Dalit Christians. They also, of course, maintain that there cannot be a Dalit amongst Christianity and Islam, both Semitic religions as there is no untoucbability amongst them. True. But they of course forget that untoucbability has been banned in Hinduism by law, and that Dalits get the privileges of SC Status because of the infirmity of suppression three thousand year old.
The Government was sleeping well till the Supreme Court disturbed its siesta last year, asking it to make up its mind soon, and respond in the hearings scheduled for 24th February 2011.
The Political Affairs Committee of the Union Cabinet, charged with formulating the Government position, asked Advocate General Vahanvati to brief it. It was in this briefing that Vahanvati dropped his bombshell. Vahanvati said “many complicated legal issues are involved” but currently “no decision was called for.” The complication from the Buta Singh suggestion -- if reservation is given to these two groups, it should not be from the 15 per cent meant for Dalits. It should be a separate quota. The existing position on reservation at the national level is: 27 per cent for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), 15 per cent for the SC (or Dalits) and 7.5 per cent for the Scheduled Tribes. The three categories together account for 49.5 per cent, and till now, the Supreme Court has ruled that reservation should not exceed 50 per cent.” Clearly, therefore, a decision one way or the other will open a can of worms, “a newspaper said. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs is headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and includes Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Defence Minister A.K. Antony. A special invitee at the meeting was Minorities Affairs Minister Salman Khursheed.
Newspapers are pointing that elections in Tamil Naidu, Bengal and Kerala put pressure on the Government on act, as these three states have Christians and Muslims in sizable numbers. The CPM recently organised a major convention at Kottayam, a major Christian centre in Kerala, to woo the Dalit Christians. Christians form 19% of the state's 31.8 million people while Dalit Christians are around 4%. DMK boss and chief minister M Karunanidhi has maintained that the demand for granting Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Christians "is not only just but also indisputable" and if necessary the party would even lead an agitation, the Hindustan Times said. The Congress however fears what Hindustan Times described as a “political backlash which would cost dearly for the party.”
The Vahanvati briefing and the adjournment of the case has not gone down well with Christian organisations. The All India Christian Council termed the statement of Attorney-General Vahanvati as “ominous”.
“In the many years the case has been in the Apex court, proceedings have been delayed because of the Government’s inability to make up its mind on the matter despite repeated prodding by the court. This speaks of a debilitating indecisiveness which is born of political perfidy and bureaucratic obduracy. Sections of the officialdom, belonging to the upper castes, and sections of the same power groups in the ruling and the major opposition party are opposing the assertion of the religious minority groups to regain their constitutional rights, the aicc feels. We do not see why these groups feel so threatened. Our brothers and sisters in the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Dalits know that most Government jobs go unfilled, and there is enough for everyone to share without restricting each others’ privileges and rights, “the council said
“It is a mystery why the Government yet demurs.” When the Constitution was signed, the affirmative action of reservations in jobs, legislatures, schools, and on such issues as rural development was given to all Dalits who were struggling to regain human dignity after 3,000 years of oppression at the hands of the ruling upper caste-led social system, the Christian council added. “This era of prevarication and political indecisiveness must now end, Dalit Christians and Muslims must be given their rights now,” it said
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Hate poisons the Narmada
FACT FINDING REPORT ON THE EVENTS ON THE EVE OF THE PROPOSED NARMADA SAMAJIK KUMBH AT MANDLA, MADHYA PRADESH
JABALPUR, 1 FEBRUARY 2011
A fact finding team which toured the Narmada Valley areas in Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh on the eve of the so-called Narmada Samajik Kumbh scheduled to be held from 10th to 12th February 2011 has found that the Christian community not just of the district but of the entire region encompassing Madhya Pradesh and neighbouring state of Chhatisgarh, have solid reasons to fear an outbreak of violence against them during or after the event from cadres of the Sangh Parivar.
The Sangh Parivar has left no one in any doubt that the main reason for organising the Kumbh, or holy river bank gathering, at which they expect two million people and the entire leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, its daughter organisations and the governments of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to attend, is to purge the region of “Christian missionaries” they accuse of carrying on large scale conversions of tribals, mostly Gonds in this part of the country.
The church leadership in turn has sent urgent representations to the Governor and chief minister of Madhya Pradesh apprising them of the sinister developments and calling on the State to ensure that they are not persecuted and that there is no outbreak of violence. “Our sources tell us there will be a major ghar wapsi or conversion to Hinduism of local Christians. We urge the administration to take timely action and appropriate steps to protect the citizens and particularly the minorities, their places of worship and institutions and religious personnel. The administration would be entirely and wholly responsible in case of any undesirable eventuality,” a memorandum signed by priests and representatives of the Christian community to the State Governor, with copies to the Chief Minister and the divisional and district authorities said. The memorandum also listed samples of newspaper clippings and the offensive posters targetting minorities.
The Fact Finding Team: the fact finding team consisted of Dr John Dayal, Member, National Integration Council of the Government of India, and secretary general of the All India Christian Council, and Mr Vijayesh Lal, Human rights activist and Secretary of Religious Liberty Commission - EFI. The team spent three days in the Mandla-Jabalpur region, and met with the Catholic bishop of Jabalpur, Right Reverend Gerald Almeida as well as over 200 Catholic, Protestant and evangelic priests, pastors and church workers of the region in two groups in Jabalpur, where one group had come as they were afraid to meet the team in their village areas, and in the Mandla Catholic parish church hall.
The team visited the banks of the Narmada River, particularly the left bank, where some houses and fields had been levelled to make housing, toilet and other arrangements of the crowds expected to attend. The team spoke with the contractors building the “shamianas” and tents, roads and a new barrage, to local policemen, and others. The team could not, for want of time, go to Bhopal to meet with the Chief Minister, the Home Minister, the State Minorities Commission and the Governor, all of whom have been apprised of the situation by the local church authorities.
The fact finding team also collected, or photographed, pamphlets, posers, hoardings, and were given copies of other printed material.
Background: The district lies in the Mahakoshal region of Madhya Pradesh state. Most of the district lies in the basin of the Narmada River whose origins are in streams perhaps a hundred kilometres upstream from the town. Mandla district is part of the Administrative commissioner’s division of Jabalpur, with an area of 8,771 square kilometres, an official Census population of 779,414, a literacy rate of 59.85. Politically, it sends a member to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament and as many as 12 members to the State Assembly, making it politically a very important region. Government statistics say much of the population are Adivasis (tribals, who the RSS wants to describe as Vanvasis, or forest-dwellers, a term abhorred by the people). The State government admits that despite 60 years of Independence, 11 Five year Plans and millions of rupees spent in Union and State projects, the Mandla district “consistently” ranks among the 20 most backward districts in India. It is rugged terrain, and barring the state highway, inner roads continue to be in a terrible condition. Even within sight of from the highway, housing ranges from brick and cement houses to mud and thatch huts.
The Church is active in the region in education, health and development projects, many begun in recent years. The Catholic Church runs a hospital, a girl’s school and a boy’s school, apart from work done by the fathers and Sisters. The Church also has a home for its retired clergy in the region. The catholic population is thinly spread over the region, barring two villages which have a sizable number of Gond Catholics. The Church of North India has a century old church in the town, near the offices and residences of the Collector and Police chief. The CNI church has some historical and architectural importance. About 400 protestant and evangelical Pastors
Backgrounder to Kumbh Melas: The Kumbh, as the encyclopaedia says, is a mass Hindu pilgrimage, usually on the banks of a holy river and with a fixed periodicity. The minor Kumbhs are held every 3 years, the Ardh or half Kumbhs every six years at on the Ganges at Haridwar in Uttarakhand and Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh on the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and the main or 12 yearly Kumbh at river banks at four places --Allahabad, Haridwar, and Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh and Nasik in Maharashtra. The government spends billions of rupees in the periodic preparations, largely on crowd management, sanitation and habitation, but the religious rituals are carried out by well known Akharas, or congregations which have traditional rights of bathing and prayers in a sharply contested hierarchy and priority. The government has little role in it, and political parties even less. Political parties however to register their presence, and it not just Bharatiya Janata party leaders but such Congress top brass as Mrs Sonia Gandhi who make their presence felt at these religious fetes together with the other millions of the faithful. [By the way, the Supreme Court has recently upheld the official expenditure at Kumbhs, the Muslim Haj and the Hindu pilgrimage to Mansarover in Chinese-held Tibet as legitimate.]
What distinguished the “”Narmada Samajik Kumbh” from the others is that is part of a very recent series of religious festivals invented by the Sangh Parivar as part of an ideological campaign to animate tribal populations in western and central India, specially the Chhotanagpur region inhabited by some of the oldest tribes in the world, anthropologically older than the Dravidian and the Aryan groups that now constitute much of the Indian population. While the people call themselves Adivasis, or original people, the Sangh Parivar calls them Vanvasis or forest dwellers as it is loath to admit that they pre-date the Aryans in the subcontinent. This region is also heavily forested, and has vast reserves of rare earths, minerals, coal and much of the country’s bio diversity. While the late Lakshmananda Saraswati was evangelising the Kondh tribals of Kandhamal in Orissa – later scene of much violence against Christians – with similar heavily Sanskritised ritual, his colleague in the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Swami Aseemanand, invented the “Shabari Kumbh” in the Dangs district of Gujarat to create a political and ritual campaign against local Christians and church workers. Aseemanand, born in Bengal and with a master’s degree in science, had become a terror in south Gujarat, which first saw serial violence against Christians on Christmas Eve in 1998 in which over three dozen village churches were torched. Aseemanand is currently in police custody and is being investigated for his part in “Hindutva terror” targetting religious minorities and involving the3 bombing of Muslim shrines and mosques as well as the India-Pakistan peace train, called the Samjhauta express, in 2007. In fact the Shabari event launched by Aseemanand was planned in Madhya Pradesh, according to media reports.
The India Abroad News Service in a despatch from Ahmedabad in January 17 reported that Aseemanand, the chief organiser of the 'shabari mahakumbh', first held in February 2006 to reconvert Christian tribals as Hindus in the tribal Dangs district of Gujarat, had earlier announced that the second edition would be held this year at the same venue, but the venue was shifted later. IANS quoted Hindu Jagran Manch and other co-sponsors based in Surat saying the decision to shift the congregation away from Dangs has been taken in view of the heightened surveillance by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). It was first christened 'Maa Narmada Kumbh'. The name was changed to Narmada Samajik Kumbh when some tribal groups objected and threatened to hold their own festivities to challenge the Kumbh. The Fact Finding team was told that the Tribals possibly would go ahead with their alternative celebrations.
The Kumbh venue is spread over 14 square km area to accommodate about 20 lakh people that are expected to attend. The government has allotted Rs 140 crore [Rupees 1,400 million] for the civil works, tentage, roads and other arrangements.
Already, a barrage has been built across the nascent Narmada River to hold back water for the people to bathe in, as normally at this time of the year, there is not much water in the river. The fact finding team could not ascertain if environmental clearances had been got from the Central authorities for this barrage which itself may have repercussions on wildlife and irrigation downstream. Several kilometres of roads have been built on the riverbed and fields, while tens of kilometres of roads leading up to the river from Jabalpur are being hurriedly given a fresh black-top after removing the old asphalt coating. In normal times, a small temple and a natural island host the several ritual bathing ceremonies held every year, and attended only by local people. The fact finding tram witnessed one such bathing festival, which was supervised by a handful of policemen.
We understand that for the coming Kumbh, not only police from the division but other parts of the State is being deployed, as prominent Hindu religious leaders as well as activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and other Hindu organisations, besides prominent Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, are expected to attend. We were given to understand that Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states, including Mr. Narendra Modi of Gujarat, Mr. Shivraj Singh Chauhan of Madhya Pradesh and Mr. Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh, were also expected to attend.
We were told that even before the New year, groups of Sadhus and Sangh activists had been roaming about the villages in Mandla, as well as villages and town in the rest of state, going home to home to tell about the Kumbh and to collect money for food and arrangements for the devotees. We were told that such teams of fund collectors were even active in Jabalpur, the second major town in Madhya Pradesh and seat of its High court.
It was in this context that the Pastors and social leaders in Mandla told us of the threatening nature of the Sangh propaganda. They said much of the treat was oral, and conveyed as the groups moved across the villages briefing the people about the activities of the “missionaries” or Christian pastors. The group leaders were openly saying they would wipe out Christianity from the region and covert the region’s Christians to Hinduism in Ghar wapsi through ritual cleansing.
We came across software used to print various sizes of banners and flex-boards. One such set of slogans on the posters charged the Christian missionaries of fooling the local people through their educational and medical services. The main slogan was that the “Church will do anything for conversions” Some of this software bears the signatures of the “Dharma Jagran Samiti, Maharashtra”.
Interestingly, the State administration is going out of its way to patronise the Kumbh The police superintendent on 6 December 2010 issued orders telling Churches , and others, that they needed to close down their schools and other institutions which would used to house the visiting dignitaries, women police and other officials. The school officials told the police it would be impossible to close down the schools for such a long period. After this, the police superintendent claimed he had not signed such an order. The fact Finding team could procure a copy of the order.
The Mandla police have always kept close tabs on the local Christian leadership. The police issued a notice to Sister Olga Lucas of the Deenbandhudham Convent that they were investigating complaints and wanted the Convent to give a list of the nuns serving in the convent with details, further details of their bank accounts, the details of other inmates, numbers of landline and mobile telephones in the convent and the names of those who owned these instruments. Going to ridiculous lengths, the police also asked for full details of patients undergoing treatment in the hospital and clinics, and the details of the administrative structure of the congregation of the nuns, together growth names, addresses and phone numbers of the office bearers and superiors.
Similar notices were also issued to other catholic priests and protestant pastors. The Fact Finding committee could get hold of copies of many of these handwritten notices and orders
The collective fears of the community and church leaders are evident in the text of the Memorandum submitted to the Governor, which inter alia says [English translation, as the original is in Hindi] “It is a matter of great happiness for the Mahishmati Nagar Mandla that the Narmada Kumbh is organized at Mandla on 10,11 and 12th February 2011. As per the information received about 20 lacs [two million] people are expected to arrive for this program. The Kumbh is supposed to be a time of blessings for all. But many fears too are expressed about the purpose of organizing this Mela.
1. As per one of the Paper reports, one of the aims of the Mela is to save the tribals from the persecution of the Christian missionaries. To persecute somebody is against the principles and teachings of Christianity. Moreover the Christian Community in Mandla District have been giving generous support for the development of this District through its educational, medical and social works. Therefore we request the Govt. take care and stop the black propaganda going on against the Christians so that the religious good will prevailing here may not be lost.
2. It is informed by various sources that during the Kumbh in large number, Christians will be reconverted to Hinduism through “Ghar wapasi” (Home Coming) program. Joining any religion or returning to any religion is a fundamental right of every citizen of this country. But we request the Govt. to see that no one is allured or forced to go back to any religion and thus violate their fundamental rights.
3. Another fear about Kumbh is that large number of people from outside M.P. are involved in the preparations and conducting the Kumbh. Since the work is allotted to people who do not know well the language and culture of this place, it can create unwanted situations and problems. In that situation if anything unwanted like stampede etc happens we wish that any antisocial elements should not put the blame on the minorities and take advantage of the situation. To face such situation we request the Government to insure all the buildings, shops, institutions and other movable and immovable properties of the minorities at the expense of the Govt. itself and save the minorities from any risk.
4. Some of the political groups have expressed their doubt that the Kumbh is organized to lease out terrorism here. If the Govt. has some doubt of such thing, to save the innocent people from such situation, in time Govt. may deploy necessary police and Para military forces.
5. From the information received it is learnt that in order to spoil the religious harmony and social peace, a lot of leaflets and flexes are printed and they are being distributed. In time if the Govt. does not take precautionary measures on it and stops it, there is a possibility of losing religious harmony and cause social unrest.
6. Mandla is a peaceful and healthy area. But the coming of such a large number of people may pollute this area and this may lead to some kind of epidemic.
7. We request the Govt to introspect on the above points and take necessary steps in time. Give total protection for the people, institutions and worshipping places of the minorities. If needed kindly arrange sufficient paramilitary force for the same. If through the negligence of the Govt. if anything unwanted happens the Govt. will be held responsible for the same. We wish a peaceful Kumbh and all the success for it and promise our full support and cooperation.”
The Church leadership has reserved its right to consult legal opinion and, if necessary, move the courts for protection.
After its visit, the Fact Finding team fears that even if there is no violence and no forcible conversions of Christians to Hinduism during the duration of the Kumbh, the Hindutva campaign had vitiated the atmosphere and seriously impacted on human relationships between Christian and other tribals in the hamlets, villages and townships of the region. The penetration of hard core Sangh activists and their cells in this area may have long term repercussions for the freedom of religion in this region and may seriously impact on the continuing social work of the Church, including the running of schools and medical centres.
The Fact finding tram hopes the Madhya Pradesh government will take whatever administrative steps are required to prevent any coercive moves against the Christian minority community, that the government will take cognisance of the massive hate campaign that has been unleashed, that it will monitor the security of the minorities during the Kumbh and that it will take long term measures to see that constitutional guarantees of freedom of faith continue to be implemented in the Mandla region.
A copy of this report is being sent to the Governor of Madhya Pradesh, to the Chief Minister, to the National Commission for Minorities, to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and to the office of the Prime Minister of India for their information.
Enclosures:
Soft copies of posters
Photocopies of police notices to Convents and churches
Text of the Church memorandum to the Governor
JABALPUR, 1 FEBRUARY 2011
A fact finding team which toured the Narmada Valley areas in Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh on the eve of the so-called Narmada Samajik Kumbh scheduled to be held from 10th to 12th February 2011 has found that the Christian community not just of the district but of the entire region encompassing Madhya Pradesh and neighbouring state of Chhatisgarh, have solid reasons to fear an outbreak of violence against them during or after the event from cadres of the Sangh Parivar.
The Sangh Parivar has left no one in any doubt that the main reason for organising the Kumbh, or holy river bank gathering, at which they expect two million people and the entire leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, its daughter organisations and the governments of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to attend, is to purge the region of “Christian missionaries” they accuse of carrying on large scale conversions of tribals, mostly Gonds in this part of the country.
The church leadership in turn has sent urgent representations to the Governor and chief minister of Madhya Pradesh apprising them of the sinister developments and calling on the State to ensure that they are not persecuted and that there is no outbreak of violence. “Our sources tell us there will be a major ghar wapsi or conversion to Hinduism of local Christians. We urge the administration to take timely action and appropriate steps to protect the citizens and particularly the minorities, their places of worship and institutions and religious personnel. The administration would be entirely and wholly responsible in case of any undesirable eventuality,” a memorandum signed by priests and representatives of the Christian community to the State Governor, with copies to the Chief Minister and the divisional and district authorities said. The memorandum also listed samples of newspaper clippings and the offensive posters targetting minorities.
The Fact Finding Team: the fact finding team consisted of Dr John Dayal, Member, National Integration Council of the Government of India, and secretary general of the All India Christian Council, and Mr Vijayesh Lal, Human rights activist and Secretary of Religious Liberty Commission - EFI. The team spent three days in the Mandla-Jabalpur region, and met with the Catholic bishop of Jabalpur, Right Reverend Gerald Almeida as well as over 200 Catholic, Protestant and evangelic priests, pastors and church workers of the region in two groups in Jabalpur, where one group had come as they were afraid to meet the team in their village areas, and in the Mandla Catholic parish church hall.
The team visited the banks of the Narmada River, particularly the left bank, where some houses and fields had been levelled to make housing, toilet and other arrangements of the crowds expected to attend. The team spoke with the contractors building the “shamianas” and tents, roads and a new barrage, to local policemen, and others. The team could not, for want of time, go to Bhopal to meet with the Chief Minister, the Home Minister, the State Minorities Commission and the Governor, all of whom have been apprised of the situation by the local church authorities.
The fact finding team also collected, or photographed, pamphlets, posers, hoardings, and were given copies of other printed material.
Background: The district lies in the Mahakoshal region of Madhya Pradesh state. Most of the district lies in the basin of the Narmada River whose origins are in streams perhaps a hundred kilometres upstream from the town. Mandla district is part of the Administrative commissioner’s division of Jabalpur, with an area of 8,771 square kilometres, an official Census population of 779,414, a literacy rate of 59.85. Politically, it sends a member to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament and as many as 12 members to the State Assembly, making it politically a very important region. Government statistics say much of the population are Adivasis (tribals, who the RSS wants to describe as Vanvasis, or forest-dwellers, a term abhorred by the people). The State government admits that despite 60 years of Independence, 11 Five year Plans and millions of rupees spent in Union and State projects, the Mandla district “consistently” ranks among the 20 most backward districts in India. It is rugged terrain, and barring the state highway, inner roads continue to be in a terrible condition. Even within sight of from the highway, housing ranges from brick and cement houses to mud and thatch huts.
The Church is active in the region in education, health and development projects, many begun in recent years. The Catholic Church runs a hospital, a girl’s school and a boy’s school, apart from work done by the fathers and Sisters. The Church also has a home for its retired clergy in the region. The catholic population is thinly spread over the region, barring two villages which have a sizable number of Gond Catholics. The Church of North India has a century old church in the town, near the offices and residences of the Collector and Police chief. The CNI church has some historical and architectural importance. About 400 protestant and evangelical Pastors
Backgrounder to Kumbh Melas: The Kumbh, as the encyclopaedia says, is a mass Hindu pilgrimage, usually on the banks of a holy river and with a fixed periodicity. The minor Kumbhs are held every 3 years, the Ardh or half Kumbhs every six years at on the Ganges at Haridwar in Uttarakhand and Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh on the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and the main or 12 yearly Kumbh at river banks at four places --Allahabad, Haridwar, and Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh and Nasik in Maharashtra. The government spends billions of rupees in the periodic preparations, largely on crowd management, sanitation and habitation, but the religious rituals are carried out by well known Akharas, or congregations which have traditional rights of bathing and prayers in a sharply contested hierarchy and priority. The government has little role in it, and political parties even less. Political parties however to register their presence, and it not just Bharatiya Janata party leaders but such Congress top brass as Mrs Sonia Gandhi who make their presence felt at these religious fetes together with the other millions of the faithful. [By the way, the Supreme Court has recently upheld the official expenditure at Kumbhs, the Muslim Haj and the Hindu pilgrimage to Mansarover in Chinese-held Tibet as legitimate.]
What distinguished the “”Narmada Samajik Kumbh” from the others is that is part of a very recent series of religious festivals invented by the Sangh Parivar as part of an ideological campaign to animate tribal populations in western and central India, specially the Chhotanagpur region inhabited by some of the oldest tribes in the world, anthropologically older than the Dravidian and the Aryan groups that now constitute much of the Indian population. While the people call themselves Adivasis, or original people, the Sangh Parivar calls them Vanvasis or forest dwellers as it is loath to admit that they pre-date the Aryans in the subcontinent. This region is also heavily forested, and has vast reserves of rare earths, minerals, coal and much of the country’s bio diversity. While the late Lakshmananda Saraswati was evangelising the Kondh tribals of Kandhamal in Orissa – later scene of much violence against Christians – with similar heavily Sanskritised ritual, his colleague in the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Swami Aseemanand, invented the “Shabari Kumbh” in the Dangs district of Gujarat to create a political and ritual campaign against local Christians and church workers. Aseemanand, born in Bengal and with a master’s degree in science, had become a terror in south Gujarat, which first saw serial violence against Christians on Christmas Eve in 1998 in which over three dozen village churches were torched. Aseemanand is currently in police custody and is being investigated for his part in “Hindutva terror” targetting religious minorities and involving the3 bombing of Muslim shrines and mosques as well as the India-Pakistan peace train, called the Samjhauta express, in 2007. In fact the Shabari event launched by Aseemanand was planned in Madhya Pradesh, according to media reports.
The India Abroad News Service in a despatch from Ahmedabad in January 17 reported that Aseemanand, the chief organiser of the 'shabari mahakumbh', first held in February 2006 to reconvert Christian tribals as Hindus in the tribal Dangs district of Gujarat, had earlier announced that the second edition would be held this year at the same venue, but the venue was shifted later. IANS quoted Hindu Jagran Manch and other co-sponsors based in Surat saying the decision to shift the congregation away from Dangs has been taken in view of the heightened surveillance by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). It was first christened 'Maa Narmada Kumbh'. The name was changed to Narmada Samajik Kumbh when some tribal groups objected and threatened to hold their own festivities to challenge the Kumbh. The Fact Finding team was told that the Tribals possibly would go ahead with their alternative celebrations.
The Kumbh venue is spread over 14 square km area to accommodate about 20 lakh people that are expected to attend. The government has allotted Rs 140 crore [Rupees 1,400 million] for the civil works, tentage, roads and other arrangements.
Already, a barrage has been built across the nascent Narmada River to hold back water for the people to bathe in, as normally at this time of the year, there is not much water in the river. The fact finding team could not ascertain if environmental clearances had been got from the Central authorities for this barrage which itself may have repercussions on wildlife and irrigation downstream. Several kilometres of roads have been built on the riverbed and fields, while tens of kilometres of roads leading up to the river from Jabalpur are being hurriedly given a fresh black-top after removing the old asphalt coating. In normal times, a small temple and a natural island host the several ritual bathing ceremonies held every year, and attended only by local people. The fact finding tram witnessed one such bathing festival, which was supervised by a handful of policemen.
We understand that for the coming Kumbh, not only police from the division but other parts of the State is being deployed, as prominent Hindu religious leaders as well as activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and other Hindu organisations, besides prominent Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, are expected to attend. We were given to understand that Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states, including Mr. Narendra Modi of Gujarat, Mr. Shivraj Singh Chauhan of Madhya Pradesh and Mr. Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh, were also expected to attend.
We were told that even before the New year, groups of Sadhus and Sangh activists had been roaming about the villages in Mandla, as well as villages and town in the rest of state, going home to home to tell about the Kumbh and to collect money for food and arrangements for the devotees. We were told that such teams of fund collectors were even active in Jabalpur, the second major town in Madhya Pradesh and seat of its High court.
It was in this context that the Pastors and social leaders in Mandla told us of the threatening nature of the Sangh propaganda. They said much of the treat was oral, and conveyed as the groups moved across the villages briefing the people about the activities of the “missionaries” or Christian pastors. The group leaders were openly saying they would wipe out Christianity from the region and covert the region’s Christians to Hinduism in Ghar wapsi through ritual cleansing.
We came across software used to print various sizes of banners and flex-boards. One such set of slogans on the posters charged the Christian missionaries of fooling the local people through their educational and medical services. The main slogan was that the “Church will do anything for conversions” Some of this software bears the signatures of the “Dharma Jagran Samiti, Maharashtra”.
Interestingly, the State administration is going out of its way to patronise the Kumbh The police superintendent on 6 December 2010 issued orders telling Churches , and others, that they needed to close down their schools and other institutions which would used to house the visiting dignitaries, women police and other officials. The school officials told the police it would be impossible to close down the schools for such a long period. After this, the police superintendent claimed he had not signed such an order. The fact Finding team could procure a copy of the order.
The Mandla police have always kept close tabs on the local Christian leadership. The police issued a notice to Sister Olga Lucas of the Deenbandhudham Convent that they were investigating complaints and wanted the Convent to give a list of the nuns serving in the convent with details, further details of their bank accounts, the details of other inmates, numbers of landline and mobile telephones in the convent and the names of those who owned these instruments. Going to ridiculous lengths, the police also asked for full details of patients undergoing treatment in the hospital and clinics, and the details of the administrative structure of the congregation of the nuns, together growth names, addresses and phone numbers of the office bearers and superiors.
Similar notices were also issued to other catholic priests and protestant pastors. The Fact Finding committee could get hold of copies of many of these handwritten notices and orders
The collective fears of the community and church leaders are evident in the text of the Memorandum submitted to the Governor, which inter alia says [English translation, as the original is in Hindi] “It is a matter of great happiness for the Mahishmati Nagar Mandla that the Narmada Kumbh is organized at Mandla on 10,11 and 12th February 2011. As per the information received about 20 lacs [two million] people are expected to arrive for this program. The Kumbh is supposed to be a time of blessings for all. But many fears too are expressed about the purpose of organizing this Mela.
1. As per one of the Paper reports, one of the aims of the Mela is to save the tribals from the persecution of the Christian missionaries. To persecute somebody is against the principles and teachings of Christianity. Moreover the Christian Community in Mandla District have been giving generous support for the development of this District through its educational, medical and social works. Therefore we request the Govt. take care and stop the black propaganda going on against the Christians so that the religious good will prevailing here may not be lost.
2. It is informed by various sources that during the Kumbh in large number, Christians will be reconverted to Hinduism through “Ghar wapasi” (Home Coming) program. Joining any religion or returning to any religion is a fundamental right of every citizen of this country. But we request the Govt. to see that no one is allured or forced to go back to any religion and thus violate their fundamental rights.
3. Another fear about Kumbh is that large number of people from outside M.P. are involved in the preparations and conducting the Kumbh. Since the work is allotted to people who do not know well the language and culture of this place, it can create unwanted situations and problems. In that situation if anything unwanted like stampede etc happens we wish that any antisocial elements should not put the blame on the minorities and take advantage of the situation. To face such situation we request the Government to insure all the buildings, shops, institutions and other movable and immovable properties of the minorities at the expense of the Govt. itself and save the minorities from any risk.
4. Some of the political groups have expressed their doubt that the Kumbh is organized to lease out terrorism here. If the Govt. has some doubt of such thing, to save the innocent people from such situation, in time Govt. may deploy necessary police and Para military forces.
5. From the information received it is learnt that in order to spoil the religious harmony and social peace, a lot of leaflets and flexes are printed and they are being distributed. In time if the Govt. does not take precautionary measures on it and stops it, there is a possibility of losing religious harmony and cause social unrest.
6. Mandla is a peaceful and healthy area. But the coming of such a large number of people may pollute this area and this may lead to some kind of epidemic.
7. We request the Govt to introspect on the above points and take necessary steps in time. Give total protection for the people, institutions and worshipping places of the minorities. If needed kindly arrange sufficient paramilitary force for the same. If through the negligence of the Govt. if anything unwanted happens the Govt. will be held responsible for the same. We wish a peaceful Kumbh and all the success for it and promise our full support and cooperation.”
The Church leadership has reserved its right to consult legal opinion and, if necessary, move the courts for protection.
After its visit, the Fact Finding team fears that even if there is no violence and no forcible conversions of Christians to Hinduism during the duration of the Kumbh, the Hindutva campaign had vitiated the atmosphere and seriously impacted on human relationships between Christian and other tribals in the hamlets, villages and townships of the region. The penetration of hard core Sangh activists and their cells in this area may have long term repercussions for the freedom of religion in this region and may seriously impact on the continuing social work of the Church, including the running of schools and medical centres.
The Fact finding tram hopes the Madhya Pradesh government will take whatever administrative steps are required to prevent any coercive moves against the Christian minority community, that the government will take cognisance of the massive hate campaign that has been unleashed, that it will monitor the security of the minorities during the Kumbh and that it will take long term measures to see that constitutional guarantees of freedom of faith continue to be implemented in the Mandla region.
A copy of this report is being sent to the Governor of Madhya Pradesh, to the Chief Minister, to the National Commission for Minorities, to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and to the office of the Prime Minister of India for their information.
Enclosures:
Soft copies of posters
Photocopies of police notices to Convents and churches
Text of the Church memorandum to the Governor
Saturday, January 29, 2011
A bit of the Cancer remains in Supreme court’s Judgment on Dara Singh
John Dayal
Oncologists, cancer surgeons, take extra care when excising a malignant tumor from the human body. They make sure not an iota, not one cell remains of the tumor, lest it blow up in full bloom some years later and send the patient to his or her death.
The Supreme Court of India, the last bulwark of justice and secularism from the point of view of micro minorities such as the Christians, seems not to have take such due diligence when in a rare suo moto action this week it modified its remarks in a judgement denying the investigating agency’s demand for the death penalty for Bajrang Dal activist Dara Singh who led a mob that burnt alive Australian mission and health worker Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons Timothy and Philips in Orissa on the night of 22 January 1999. The court upheld the High court judgement which had given Dara Singh a life term holding that the crime was not the rarest of the rare, and the trial court in Khurda had erred in giving Dara Singh and some of his associates the death penalty in the first place.
The Christian community is still divided on its support or opposition to the death penalty, but most in the Catholic and Protestant churches say capital punishment is an anathema in this age and time. I am myself a staunch opponent of the death penalty.
When the Supreme Court delivered its judgement, the community was slow to respond. I was on satellite television to welcome the life term, but to express my strong apprehensions to the implication of the Supreme Court judgment which made it seem that Dara Singh was justified in “punishing” Stainless for his Christiana activities including alleged conversions of the tribals I Orissa.
The Supreme Court through most of its judgement text dwelt on the circumstances of the case and held that Dara had been indirectly identified through slogans and identification through photographs. It did bold that the triple murder was horrendous. But in its concluding paragraphs, the court said the following: In the case on hand, though Graham Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while they were sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity. All these aspects have been correctly appreciated by the High Court and modified the sentence of death into life imprisonment with which we concur." The Court had also said, "It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone's belief by way of 'use of force', provocation, conversion, and incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other."
The All India Christian Council issued an immediate press statement, which expressed concern about affect of Judges’ comments about conversion on cases of communal violence. Dr. Joseph D’souza, President of the Council said, “We are satisfied with the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the 2005 Orissa High Court’s verdict which commuted a death sentence for Dara Singh to life imprisonment for killing Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa in 1999. In dismissing Dara Singh’s petition for dropping of the case against him, the Apex Court clearly denounced the heinous hate crime perpetrated by communal forces.”
Dr. John Dayal, aicc Secretary General, said, “Most Indian Christians oppose the death penalty both on moral and theological grounds, as much as we oppose abortion and taking away life at any stage. Of course, as Citizens, we want the State and Central government to uphold the rule of law.” In the conclusion of the ruling on Criminal Appeal No 1366 of 2005, “Rabindra Kumar Pal @ Dara Singh Vs. Republic of India”, the judges wrote, “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other.” Some media reports insinuated this meant ‘conversions’ are illegal or the root cause of the violent attack. Dayal said, “Although we are yet to analyse the full judgment of the Supreme Court, we are disturbed by the parts carried by the media, mentioning terms like fraud and forcible and conversion. The Court must comment on Hindu conversions, termed Ghar Wapsi. But more than anything, we fear such remarks may negatively impact trials in Kandhamal, Orissa and future challenges to so-called ‘freedom of religion laws’ in various states.”
The aicc said inquiries by the National Commission for Minorities, Right To Information (RTI) requests, and other investigations have proven repeatedly there have been no fraudulent or forceful conversions by Christians in India anywhere, anytime. After analyzing the Supreme Court reference to conversions, the aicc might move Supreme Court to revise the reference at an appropriate time. “We do not want any court to pre-judge the matter of conversions and violence. The real root cause of strife in which Staines lost his life with his two kids was a misunderstanding of conversion. We have seen communal violence not only against Christians, but also on Muslims and Sikhs since India’s Independence. It is unfortunate that Hindutva forces look for an excuse to attack Christians and others because they believe that India is for Hindus only. This goes against India’s spirit of secularism.”
A day later, civil society activists, among them Navaid Hamid, Shabnam Hashmi, Seema Mustafa, Harsh Mander, H S Hardenia, and former MP Shahid Sidiqi, and Christian activists John Dayal, Dominic Emmanuel, and Mary Scaria also issued an angry press note, widely covered on the internet and controversially covered by the Hindu on Page One -- leading to a hilarious editorial development, of which some other time – calling the comments gratuitous. The statement noted A bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and B. S. Chauhan went on to add: “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other. It strikes at the very root of the orderly society, which the founding fathers of our Constitution dreamt of. ”
“This statement patently is unconstitutional as it goes against guarantees of freedom of faith on the one hand and seems to acknowledge vigilante action of criminals like Dara Singh who take upon themselves ‘to teach lessons’ to persons serving lepers and the poor. Did the SC ever take into consideration the report of the Wadhwa Commission which was set up to probe the murder of Graham Staines and which had observed, “There has been no extraordinary increase in the Christian population in Koenjhar district between 1991 and 1998. The population had increased by 595 during this period and could have been caused by natural growth”. The SC ruling may in fact send the wrong signals to courts trying cases of religious violence in Kandhamal, for instance, and in other places. It also tends to preempt possible challenges to the black laws enacted by many states in the guise of Freedom of Religion Bills.
“The secular India looks at SC and other judicial forums as its last hope to preserve Constitutional guarantees given to religious minorities and other marginalized groups. It is therefore understand disturbed when judgments such as this one and the Allahabad-Lucknow Bench, ruling on Ayodhya are made and interpreted as supporting the bigoted point of view of right wing fundamentalists such as the Sangh Parivar. The state cannot abrogate its responsibilities to ensure the secular fabric of the country. We expect the government to ask the SC to expunge the unnecessary, uncalled for and unconstitutional remarks..”
The uproar had its impact. The Supreme Court did not wait for us to file an application. In a salutary rare revision of its own order, the two judges expunged most of the offending words.
The suo moto changes made by the court are:
"In the case on hand, though Graham Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while they were sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity."
has been replaced with:
“However, more than 12 years have elapsed since the act was committed, we are of the opinion that the life sentence awarded by the High Court need not be enhanced in view of the factual position discussed in the earlier paragraphs," said the bench in its one of such replacement.”
And
We hope Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of religion playing a positive development integrating into a prosperous nation will be realized. "It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone's belief by way of use of force, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other."
has been replaced with:
"There is no justification for interfering in someone's religious belief by any means."
On the face of it, it is satisfactory. But senior Supreme court advocates I have consulted have told me there is enoiugh cause to go back to the Supreme court to seek clarifications on what it means by the term “interference” in someone else’s religion. Is talking about your own religion “interference”, or is evangelization interference. This suddenly gains in importance in view of the Somaekharan Commission report on the Karnataka attacks on churches in which it calls for drastic measures to regulate church activity, including registration of churches.
The bench of justices P Sathasivam and BS Chauhan, while dismissing the agency’s plea for death penalty, said the punishment can be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases depending upon the facts and situation of each case. Dara Singh and Mahendra Hembrom were found guilty of burning to death Staines and his sons, who were sleeping inside a van outside a church, at Manoharpur village in Koenjhar district of Orissa on January 22, 1999. The bench had on December 15 last year reserved its judgement after hearing at length the arguments of CBI’s counsel and Additional Solicitor General Vivek Tankha and counsel for the convicts.
Senior counsel KTS Tulsi and Ratnakar Dash, besides Counsel Sibo Shankara Mishra, appeared for the 12 convicts. Appearing for CBI, Tankha had told the bench that Dara Singh deserves death sentence as the murders were committed in a most “diabolic and dastardly manner” which warranted exemplary punishment. Dara had filed an appeal challenging his conviction and the life sentence awarded to him. The appeals were admitted by the apex court in October 2005. On May 19, 2005, the Orissa High Court had commuted to life imprisonment the death penalty imposed by the sessions court on Dara Singh for the murder of Staines and his two minor sons, 10 y3ear old Philip,6 year old Timothy. Mahendra Hembram, a tribal, was convicted but the High Court acquitted 11 others who were awarded life terms by the trial court in the case. The trial court in Khurda had in September 2003 convicted all the 13 accused. While Dara Singh was awarded death sentence, others were given life terms.
While the Christian Council has reserved its right to move the Supreme Court again, there seems to be a division in the church on what to do next. High level meetings in the Delhi archdiocese have not arched a unanimous decision on the course of action, but it is clear that senior counsel and even the National Commission of Minorities has to be consulted.
CBCI law panel secretary Sr Mary Scaria said; the freedom of religion is a Constitutional Right under Article 25 of the Constitution of India and it is accepted and respected both in the national and International laws. The right to freedom of religion allows Indian citizens to choose any religion that he / she wants to choose. This fundamental right was chosen after lot of thought regarding the process of person choosing his / her own religion. The right to freedom of religion is a fundamental right guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution of India. Article 25 reads as follows:-The judgment will give impetus and be used as a precedent to justify the "Freedom or Anti-Conversion" Acts and Bills in many states, besides emboldening religious fundamentalists and moral policing. As the Supreme Court itself have realized that they have made a mistake and expunged those portions which according to them were unconstitutional, the community after having gone through the judgment before and after expunging feel the urgency to go before the APEX COURT with another petition perhaps as it is a larger Constitutional issue pray for a proper dealing of the issue. Or referring to a larger bench?
One of the messages tome said “”The modified version of the Supreme Court judgement in the Graham Staines case may be less offensive, but it is in no way less dangerous. In some ways it is even more dangerous to liberty than the earlier offensive wording. While deleting references to "teaching the victim a lesson" etc, and direct use of the word "conversion", the Court still maintains that "There is no justification to interfere in someone's belief by any means", implying thereby, that propagating one’s beliefs is tantamount to interference in another’s beliefs. This judgement needs to be challenged – not under criminal law, but under Constitutional law.
Advocate P I Jose said: Rules of statutory interpretation are not applicable to reading of a Judgment. But there are well accepted judicial norms for this too. Keeping that in mind the basic question that scares every one, particularly Christians in India, is- what is the larger social evil that disturbed and prompted the two judges while dealing with the subject case to pen paragraph 47 as a post script to the Judgment? References to Shri K.R. Narayanan and Mahatma Gandhi in the same Para 47, which was retained even after suo-moto ‘clarification’ make it clear, the evil that disturbed them is “intolerance and disrespect for another’s religion The issue is whose intolerance or disrespect- the convict’s or the victims’? The replaced sentence answers it without any doubt as the words used are “religious belief” because Dara Singh did not interfere with helpless Stains and two innocent children’s “religious belief” but with their “right to life”. This takes us to the conclusion that the judges were disturbed by the victims’ way of life.
On the first place making a comment on the victims’ is out of place and against the basic principles of judicial thinking because a victim is not given an opportunity to explain their conduct in a criminal trial. Secondly, but more important, applying the yardstick of victims’ conduct while judging a criminal act not committed on a sudden provocation, rather in a case of cold blooded murder. Sadly the feeling of scare and deep hurt the comments made to the Christian community in India is because it fell from the highest court of the land. A comment deviating from the ordinary norms of judicial thinking from the Supreme Court has the potential not only to propel the conduct of a billion people but also determines the performance of a policeman’s lati in this country. “
This is still a story which is developing.
John Dayal
Oncologists, cancer surgeons, take extra care when excising a malignant tumor from the human body. They make sure not an iota, not one cell remains of the tumor, lest it blow up in full bloom some years later and send the patient to his or her death.
The Supreme Court of India, the last bulwark of justice and secularism from the point of view of micro minorities such as the Christians, seems not to have take such due diligence when in a rare suo moto action this week it modified its remarks in a judgement denying the investigating agency’s demand for the death penalty for Bajrang Dal activist Dara Singh who led a mob that burnt alive Australian mission and health worker Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons Timothy and Philips in Orissa on the night of 22 January 1999. The court upheld the High court judgement which had given Dara Singh a life term holding that the crime was not the rarest of the rare, and the trial court in Khurda had erred in giving Dara Singh and some of his associates the death penalty in the first place.
The Christian community is still divided on its support or opposition to the death penalty, but most in the Catholic and Protestant churches say capital punishment is an anathema in this age and time. I am myself a staunch opponent of the death penalty.
When the Supreme Court delivered its judgement, the community was slow to respond. I was on satellite television to welcome the life term, but to express my strong apprehensions to the implication of the Supreme Court judgment which made it seem that Dara Singh was justified in “punishing” Stainless for his Christiana activities including alleged conversions of the tribals I Orissa.
The Supreme Court through most of its judgement text dwelt on the circumstances of the case and held that Dara had been indirectly identified through slogans and identification through photographs. It did bold that the triple murder was horrendous. But in its concluding paragraphs, the court said the following: In the case on hand, though Graham Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while they were sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity. All these aspects have been correctly appreciated by the High Court and modified the sentence of death into life imprisonment with which we concur." The Court had also said, "It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone's belief by way of 'use of force', provocation, conversion, and incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other."
The All India Christian Council issued an immediate press statement, which expressed concern about affect of Judges’ comments about conversion on cases of communal violence. Dr. Joseph D’souza, President of the Council said, “We are satisfied with the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the 2005 Orissa High Court’s verdict which commuted a death sentence for Dara Singh to life imprisonment for killing Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa in 1999. In dismissing Dara Singh’s petition for dropping of the case against him, the Apex Court clearly denounced the heinous hate crime perpetrated by communal forces.”
Dr. John Dayal, aicc Secretary General, said, “Most Indian Christians oppose the death penalty both on moral and theological grounds, as much as we oppose abortion and taking away life at any stage. Of course, as Citizens, we want the State and Central government to uphold the rule of law.” In the conclusion of the ruling on Criminal Appeal No 1366 of 2005, “Rabindra Kumar Pal @ Dara Singh Vs. Republic of India”, the judges wrote, “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other.” Some media reports insinuated this meant ‘conversions’ are illegal or the root cause of the violent attack. Dayal said, “Although we are yet to analyse the full judgment of the Supreme Court, we are disturbed by the parts carried by the media, mentioning terms like fraud and forcible and conversion. The Court must comment on Hindu conversions, termed Ghar Wapsi. But more than anything, we fear such remarks may negatively impact trials in Kandhamal, Orissa and future challenges to so-called ‘freedom of religion laws’ in various states.”
The aicc said inquiries by the National Commission for Minorities, Right To Information (RTI) requests, and other investigations have proven repeatedly there have been no fraudulent or forceful conversions by Christians in India anywhere, anytime. After analyzing the Supreme Court reference to conversions, the aicc might move Supreme Court to revise the reference at an appropriate time. “We do not want any court to pre-judge the matter of conversions and violence. The real root cause of strife in which Staines lost his life with his two kids was a misunderstanding of conversion. We have seen communal violence not only against Christians, but also on Muslims and Sikhs since India’s Independence. It is unfortunate that Hindutva forces look for an excuse to attack Christians and others because they believe that India is for Hindus only. This goes against India’s spirit of secularism.”
A day later, civil society activists, among them Navaid Hamid, Shabnam Hashmi, Seema Mustafa, Harsh Mander, H S Hardenia, and former MP Shahid Sidiqi, and Christian activists John Dayal, Dominic Emmanuel, and Mary Scaria also issued an angry press note, widely covered on the internet and controversially covered by the Hindu on Page One -- leading to a hilarious editorial development, of which some other time – calling the comments gratuitous. The statement noted A bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and B. S. Chauhan went on to add: “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other. It strikes at the very root of the orderly society, which the founding fathers of our Constitution dreamt of. ”
“This statement patently is unconstitutional as it goes against guarantees of freedom of faith on the one hand and seems to acknowledge vigilante action of criminals like Dara Singh who take upon themselves ‘to teach lessons’ to persons serving lepers and the poor. Did the SC ever take into consideration the report of the Wadhwa Commission which was set up to probe the murder of Graham Staines and which had observed, “There has been no extraordinary increase in the Christian population in Koenjhar district between 1991 and 1998. The population had increased by 595 during this period and could have been caused by natural growth”. The SC ruling may in fact send the wrong signals to courts trying cases of religious violence in Kandhamal, for instance, and in other places. It also tends to preempt possible challenges to the black laws enacted by many states in the guise of Freedom of Religion Bills.
“The secular India looks at SC and other judicial forums as its last hope to preserve Constitutional guarantees given to religious minorities and other marginalized groups. It is therefore understand disturbed when judgments such as this one and the Allahabad-Lucknow Bench, ruling on Ayodhya are made and interpreted as supporting the bigoted point of view of right wing fundamentalists such as the Sangh Parivar. The state cannot abrogate its responsibilities to ensure the secular fabric of the country. We expect the government to ask the SC to expunge the unnecessary, uncalled for and unconstitutional remarks..”
The uproar had its impact. The Supreme Court did not wait for us to file an application. In a salutary rare revision of its own order, the two judges expunged most of the offending words.
The suo moto changes made by the court are:
"In the case on hand, though Graham Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while they were sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity."
has been replaced with:
“However, more than 12 years have elapsed since the act was committed, we are of the opinion that the life sentence awarded by the High Court need not be enhanced in view of the factual position discussed in the earlier paragraphs," said the bench in its one of such replacement.”
And
We hope Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of religion playing a positive development integrating into a prosperous nation will be realized. "It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone's belief by way of use of force, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other."
has been replaced with:
"There is no justification for interfering in someone's religious belief by any means."
On the face of it, it is satisfactory. But senior Supreme court advocates I have consulted have told me there is enoiugh cause to go back to the Supreme court to seek clarifications on what it means by the term “interference” in someone else’s religion. Is talking about your own religion “interference”, or is evangelization interference. This suddenly gains in importance in view of the Somaekharan Commission report on the Karnataka attacks on churches in which it calls for drastic measures to regulate church activity, including registration of churches.
The bench of justices P Sathasivam and BS Chauhan, while dismissing the agency’s plea for death penalty, said the punishment can be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases depending upon the facts and situation of each case. Dara Singh and Mahendra Hembrom were found guilty of burning to death Staines and his sons, who were sleeping inside a van outside a church, at Manoharpur village in Koenjhar district of Orissa on January 22, 1999. The bench had on December 15 last year reserved its judgement after hearing at length the arguments of CBI’s counsel and Additional Solicitor General Vivek Tankha and counsel for the convicts.
Senior counsel KTS Tulsi and Ratnakar Dash, besides Counsel Sibo Shankara Mishra, appeared for the 12 convicts. Appearing for CBI, Tankha had told the bench that Dara Singh deserves death sentence as the murders were committed in a most “diabolic and dastardly manner” which warranted exemplary punishment. Dara had filed an appeal challenging his conviction and the life sentence awarded to him. The appeals were admitted by the apex court in October 2005. On May 19, 2005, the Orissa High Court had commuted to life imprisonment the death penalty imposed by the sessions court on Dara Singh for the murder of Staines and his two minor sons, 10 y3ear old Philip,6 year old Timothy. Mahendra Hembram, a tribal, was convicted but the High Court acquitted 11 others who were awarded life terms by the trial court in the case. The trial court in Khurda had in September 2003 convicted all the 13 accused. While Dara Singh was awarded death sentence, others were given life terms.
While the Christian Council has reserved its right to move the Supreme Court again, there seems to be a division in the church on what to do next. High level meetings in the Delhi archdiocese have not arched a unanimous decision on the course of action, but it is clear that senior counsel and even the National Commission of Minorities has to be consulted.
CBCI law panel secretary Sr Mary Scaria said; the freedom of religion is a Constitutional Right under Article 25 of the Constitution of India and it is accepted and respected both in the national and International laws. The right to freedom of religion allows Indian citizens to choose any religion that he / she wants to choose. This fundamental right was chosen after lot of thought regarding the process of person choosing his / her own religion. The right to freedom of religion is a fundamental right guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution of India. Article 25 reads as follows:-The judgment will give impetus and be used as a precedent to justify the "Freedom or Anti-Conversion" Acts and Bills in many states, besides emboldening religious fundamentalists and moral policing. As the Supreme Court itself have realized that they have made a mistake and expunged those portions which according to them were unconstitutional, the community after having gone through the judgment before and after expunging feel the urgency to go before the APEX COURT with another petition perhaps as it is a larger Constitutional issue pray for a proper dealing of the issue. Or referring to a larger bench?
One of the messages tome said “”The modified version of the Supreme Court judgement in the Graham Staines case may be less offensive, but it is in no way less dangerous. In some ways it is even more dangerous to liberty than the earlier offensive wording. While deleting references to "teaching the victim a lesson" etc, and direct use of the word "conversion", the Court still maintains that "There is no justification to interfere in someone's belief by any means", implying thereby, that propagating one’s beliefs is tantamount to interference in another’s beliefs. This judgement needs to be challenged – not under criminal law, but under Constitutional law.
Advocate P I Jose said: Rules of statutory interpretation are not applicable to reading of a Judgment. But there are well accepted judicial norms for this too. Keeping that in mind the basic question that scares every one, particularly Christians in India, is- what is the larger social evil that disturbed and prompted the two judges while dealing with the subject case to pen paragraph 47 as a post script to the Judgment? References to Shri K.R. Narayanan and Mahatma Gandhi in the same Para 47, which was retained even after suo-moto ‘clarification’ make it clear, the evil that disturbed them is “intolerance and disrespect for another’s religion The issue is whose intolerance or disrespect- the convict’s or the victims’? The replaced sentence answers it without any doubt as the words used are “religious belief” because Dara Singh did not interfere with helpless Stains and two innocent children’s “religious belief” but with their “right to life”. This takes us to the conclusion that the judges were disturbed by the victims’ way of life.
On the first place making a comment on the victims’ is out of place and against the basic principles of judicial thinking because a victim is not given an opportunity to explain their conduct in a criminal trial. Secondly, but more important, applying the yardstick of victims’ conduct while judging a criminal act not committed on a sudden provocation, rather in a case of cold blooded murder. Sadly the feeling of scare and deep hurt the comments made to the Christian community in India is because it fell from the highest court of the land. A comment deviating from the ordinary norms of judicial thinking from the Supreme Court has the potential not only to propel the conduct of a billion people but also determines the performance of a policeman’s lati in this country. “
This is still a story which is developing.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Church, Civil Society and Human Rights
Is it too hard to follow Christ’s examples of justice for the underdog?
John Dayal
6 January 2011
-------
“Let justice roll like a river (Amos 5:24-27). Prior to Vatican II, no Roman Catholic treatise would have begun with scripture. It would start with the definition of justice – Suu, cuique tradere – to render to each one’s due. Specially with the 1971 Synod, justice became a call to the Christians from the God of the two Testaments. [From The New Dictionary of theology, edited by Joseph Komonhak and others]
“As one of the first Christian voices against slavery, St. Patrick, himself a former slave, has a special relationship to the modern quest for human rights. [Philip S. Johnson]
“Christians for Justice – Stop Targetting Binayak Sen and Teesta Setalvad” {A banner at the Christian candle light demonstration on 4th January 2011 in support of the human rights defenders organised in the national capital by activists of Catholic, protestant and Evangelical Churches.]
-----------
I think I met my first Catholic Religious human rights activist sometime in 1976 in the rural areas of the “steel belt” that runs through what was then undivided Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand where all the big steel plants, coal mines, and the steel trade is located.
Those were turbulent times. Indira Gandhi had declared a state of national Emergency [1975-77], almost suspended the Constitution, got the Supreme Court to rule that that there could be no cause for habeas corpus and that normal human rights as we understand them, the right to life and liberty and the rule of law, would not be available to the common man. Indira Gandhi was a Prime Minister fighting to save her regime after the Allahabad High Court overturned her election to the Lok Sabha. But it was his younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, aided and abetted by a coterie of self-serving senior officers and a gang of Youth Congress leaders, who had emerged as the real, albeit extra-constitutional, centre of authority.
Their actions saw forcible sterilisations of men as old as sixty, and as young as sixteen, and demolitions of Muslim qasbas, and about 1,400 clusters, scattered across the city of Delhi, which were bulldozed out of existence. Close to 200,000 families were hastily given barren and tiny plots of land in about 40 so called resettlement colonies, and lived or months without adequate water and toilets, and with tarpaulin sheets to save them from the heat, the cold and the rains that are always so excessive in Delhi. By the way, barring a muted voice or two, I did not find the Church in India, Cardinals, archbishops or their organisations in any denomination; pass a resolution against the Emergency. Safety first, for sure, and always be on the right side of the ruling party. Nothing much has changed.
But I digress. This is not about the Emergency, though one is sore tempted to write more on the because of the recent Congress party autobiography in which it admits the excesses, and even puts a bit of the blame on Sanjay Gandhi, whose wife Maneka Gandhi and son Varun are now leading lights of the opposition Bharatiya Janata parity. Another leading light of the BJP and a former Union minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government, Jagmohan who was once a Sanjay Gandhi acolyte, has risen to the defence of his old chum and master, writing a fiery piece in the editorial page of the Hindustan Times. I know something of the Emergency excesses and had written about them in a book For Reasons of State, Delhi under the Emergency which I authorised with my then colleague in the Patriot newspaper, Ajoy Bose, later of the Guardian, UK.
I was in the central Indian badlands researching the major technology step by Indira Gandhi after the later “implosion” of a successful nuclear bomb. This was the SITE, or Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, which brought TV to remote villages with promises of new agro techniques and doles given by the government. The messages were subtle, meant to bring the rural masses to the government’s fold. Hundreds of psychologists monitored the popular response. Their findings have since been used successfully “to fool most of the people most of the time,” as someone once said. On a positive side, the current saturation of dish and cable TV has its roots in that experiment.
But the difference between promise and actual benefits given by the government also brought about distrust of the government, and sometimes unrest. Trade unions, curbed under the Emergency, had gone underground, for labour unrest was frequent where ever employers, including big government and private sector bosses, sought to short change the working class.
It was in this context that I saw young scholastics moving around with the workers, expressing solidarity, extending moral support. I am not sure if they were Jesuits or Divine Word missionaries, possibly both. But I was happy to see they were involved in the struggles of the common man, at the grassroots, far away from the publicity and the glare of the media which now sometimes motivated some human rights activists.
I regret to say that barring rare exceptions through the decades and the last half of the 20th Century, and some personal experience in the new decade involving Kandhamal and Orissa, I have not seen the Church in a leadership role as a human rights defender, or motivator.
It is time that the Church itself, and others who want it to grow in strength, subject it to a close examination as to why it has not only failed itself but has prevented its common members from seeing themselves as major constituents of the nation’s civil society.
The few times the Church has been active has been when its own vested interests were involved. Cardinals and bishops, quite correctly, exhorted the parishioners to take to the streets, albeit in peaceful processions, to challenge the government of the State of Kerala which sought to control the managements of private colleges, many of which were owned by the Church, or when it meddled in text books. Back in 1998, 4th December to be precise, the Church called for a nation wide closure of its schools and mass rallies protesting the sudden violence unleashed on the community by elements of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and others closely allied with the Bharatiya Janata party which was then ruling in New Delhi and several other states.
And last year, the Religious for Justice, the Conference of Religious and individual activists, especially lawyers, from men and women Congregations, took up the imitative to see that justice was done to the victims of Kandhamal because the Fast Track Courts were letting off one murderer after another. The initiative will hopefully bring the Supreme Court to bring its weight to bear on the situation so that the miscarriage of justice is brought to a speedy end, and justice is done.
Another community issue, the cause of the Christian of Dalit origin demanding a reversal of the 1950 Presidential order which robbed them of the rights to be called Scheduled castes with concomitant loss of benefits of reservations in employment and education, has also seen the Church go about at tortoise speed. Although the Catholic and Protestant Churches collaborated in the 1991 massive Dalit Christian rally at India Gate – the biggest ever by the community -- they have not been able to repeat it. It cannot be for want of resources. The Church has a-plenty. It must then be attributed to a lack of desire. The movement is now being carried forward by a few men – among them Jesuit Fr Bosco, the CBCI secretary Fr Cosmon, the activist Franklin Caesar and some others from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The rallies have taken on appearances of tokenism with barely 500 – three hundred of them brought from the southern states – ever present, and Bishops making a “photo opportunity” attendance. Barely any laity or clerical group joins from Delhi.
Dalit activists will argue that they are doing their best under the circumstances. They have to be praised for regularly going to the Supreme Court where their writs are pending before the Bench of the Chief Justice of India. Fate, government apathy and political opposition have all contributed to a situation where the writ does not come up any more for hearing, and only the most committed feel there will be any justice done in the near future.
Arguably, if the entire Church had backed the Dalit Christian demand – and they could have taken lessons in agitation advocacy from the Gurjars, the Sikhs and others who bring Union and state governments to their knees within a few days of jamming rail and road traffic on major routes - the issue would have possibly been long resolved. It remains a controversial argument within Church circles and the poor Dalits continue to agitate at Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street four times a year when Parliament meets for its sessions. The efforts by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and the National Council of Churches in India to feed Christian MPs at official dinners during the sessions, as a short cut in advocacy -- had borne no fruit, as the MPs too keep a low profile on the Dalit rights issue. Anyway, the major Church support for the Dalit Christian issue is not more than ten years old.
In the same light, the Church support for the cause of the domestic workers, most of them Catholic girls from Ranchi, Chhatisgarh and Orissa tribal areas employed in homes in metropolitan areas of Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, can be traced to their religious affinity, rather that their ethnic origins. The Church is not very visible in the agitations of tribals against monopolists and foreign interests denuding forests in Orissa, or stealing the mines in the tribal lands in other states.
If this is the situation where Christian communities are concerned, and if this is how the Church behaves towards it own, is there any one surprised if we look in vain for major Church advocacy in favour of other religious minorities, or the marginalised. Agreed there is a CBCI document committing itself to the marginalised. Agreed that in recent years, the CBCI has seminars on the Right to Food, and agreed that Caritas and CASA and Eficor are among the first to go whenever there is an earthquake or a tsunami – physically challenging and dangerous even, but political not just safe but productive – they remain far behind the firing line in mass movements where the people are asserting for their rights, sometimes for their right to life itself.
No wonder that the Church was invisible when the Sikhs were being burnt alive in Delhi and other cities, when Kashmir Hindus were pushed out of the valley by a combination of Islamic fundaments elements and the political strategy of the governor of that time, or when the Muslims were brutalised repeatedly from Nellie, Meerut, Moradabad all the way to Gujarat 2002. A few convents may have opened their doors to refugees and victims, but the Church metaphorically kept its doors closed, its conscience shut. All it did was way of charity. Not open protest, as Jesus perhaps would have wanted it to.
The argument that this will be political activity and will bring the Church or the Christian community in direct conflict with the government and the law and order machinery has to be debated, and the Church fears have to be confronted and defeated.
As a practising Catholic, I do not want the Church to suffer the consequences of some foolhardy action, or some thoughtless agitation. I certainly do not want to see bishops or priests in jail even though it is my dream that Cardinals lead some pro-people movement against corruption, for food, for a living wage, and above all, for human dignity. What a grand sight that would be.
But I do want the Church in India – Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecost, and Independent – to understand that it must support human dignity and human aspirations, specially of the poor, beyond lip service. Human dignity cannot be brought about by acts of charity. No among of building houses by Caritas, or medical relief couriered from the West to an Indian site of a natural disaster, will add an iota to the sum total of human rights in India.
What is required is for the Church to understand what it takes to be to be a part of Civil society, not just a part but the very super structure of a national nervous system that responds to the pain of the people.
What are issues agitating civil society at the moment? One has to merely read the daily newspapers, apathetic as they are and guided as they are to their urban middle class markets, to find out. The rapine in Delhi and unsolved murders in Delhi are the tip of the iceberg. India is shot through and through with a jungle law of might is right which aggravates the more one moves away from the city. Dalits in village sleep the night in terror. Their women are easy targets. The tribals are being robbed of their birthright. Dissent is met with murder by hired goons, caste thugs, or by the police. Custodial death is rampant.
Corruption in high cost construction or information technology contracts like the 2 G scandal many make the headlines, but the common man has to face corruption in the lower courts which make a total mockery of the justice dispensation system. Policemen who have to give a bribe to their superiors to get a job or a new posting need to make that money somewhere. Corruption in the money market, the food market and in the job market leads to farmer’s suicides and mass pauperisation of the hinterland. Landless peasantry sells its soul, and its body, for the privilege of being able to live the day. But surely the Church knows it first hand – for do not many of them pay a bribe to keep their FCRA permit alive.
How many remain uneducated and how many remain sick under the shadow of our 50,000 educational and medical institutions? No one knows, because no one cares. The parish system would have enabled to Church to develop an information system which even the government could not beat. But there has never been the effort. The Church does not know how many Christians are below the poverty line.
Needless to say, it is time the situation changed. It is time remedial measures were taken.
You have to look nowhere but at the life and message of Jesus Christ to understand our role in upholding human rights and becoming the foundation of a genuine civil society. Once this is understood, and finds it way into seminaries and formation schools, the situation will change – for the better. I will not have o listen to the senior Religious, heading a major institute, who told me and a group of my colleagues, that if he investigated human rights violations, he was afraid his institution – with its huge stone-walled buildings – would be pelted by stones by angry right wing groups! Surely the buildings would have survived.
It was Christ, in his parables and in his own deeds, who spelled out the common minimum of civil society – to love the neighbour not just as ourselves, but to go a step forward and love him as Christ has loved us – at the cost of his life.
It is this vision which triggered the movement after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, of a new jurisprudence concerned with the defence of human rights, culminating in the Charter of the United nations on Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.
I am not a theologian, not by a long stretch. But I was struck by a note in my email referring to John Warwick Montgomery, a human rights specialist who served as Director of Studies at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg from 1979-81. The webpage said Montgomery has written extensively in the field tackling such subjects as the Marxist approach to human rights, the philosophical justification for human rights, and right-to-life issues. Montgomery was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has written about the problem of human rights in China.
He pointed out Christians had been subjected to persecution and torture at the hands of the Roman Imperial legal system. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote against the use of torture in obtaining confessions. Pope Gregory the Great echoed his stance in the sixth century and Pope Nicholas I did the same in the ninth century. In 928 AD 'good King Wenceslas' of Bohemia destroyed instruments of torture. In the twelfth century Decretum of Gratian likewise repudiated torture.
The English common law tradition developed out of Biblical principles of law, such as the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' Golden Rule that you do to others as you would be done by them. The Magna Carta, which also reflected Biblical truths, originated from the work of Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Incidentally, common law tradition prohibited secret trials and the extraction of confessions by torture.
“God's perspective on human rights can be grounded in Biblical revelation. Both the theology of the creation and the incarnation of Christ provide the grounds for justifying rights. The rights are entitlements given to us by God. “
If that be so, than it is the duty of the Church to expresses solidarity with human rights, and with those who defend human rights.
The small candle light procession at the historic India gate by the Christian community of Delhi – led by activist of the Federation of Catholic Associations of Delhi, the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the all India Christian Council, brightened not just the darkness surrounding the extraordinary punishment meted out to popular doctor Binayak Sen working with the tribals of Chhatisgarh and lawyer Teesta Setalvad fighting for the victims of the Gujarat government and RSS pogrom against Muslims, but also lit a spark in the hearts of many in the Church that bitter cold evening.
I would like to hope that it ignites a major revolution in the Church which sees it move away from cheque-based charity to become the cornerstone of a vibrant civil society which alone can monitor powerful governments and dangerous extremist groups to ensure that dignity, freedom, liberty and life is assured to the poorest of the poor, the helpless and the hapless. Once it reaches that stage, its own properties, its own institutions, schools and colleges will also be automatically safe from predation and persecution.
-------
John Dayal
6 January 2011
-------
“Let justice roll like a river (Amos 5:24-27). Prior to Vatican II, no Roman Catholic treatise would have begun with scripture. It would start with the definition of justice – Suu, cuique tradere – to render to each one’s due. Specially with the 1971 Synod, justice became a call to the Christians from the God of the two Testaments. [From The New Dictionary of theology, edited by Joseph Komonhak and others]
“As one of the first Christian voices against slavery, St. Patrick, himself a former slave, has a special relationship to the modern quest for human rights. [Philip S. Johnson]
“Christians for Justice – Stop Targetting Binayak Sen and Teesta Setalvad” {A banner at the Christian candle light demonstration on 4th January 2011 in support of the human rights defenders organised in the national capital by activists of Catholic, protestant and Evangelical Churches.]
-----------
I think I met my first Catholic Religious human rights activist sometime in 1976 in the rural areas of the “steel belt” that runs through what was then undivided Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand where all the big steel plants, coal mines, and the steel trade is located.
Those were turbulent times. Indira Gandhi had declared a state of national Emergency [1975-77], almost suspended the Constitution, got the Supreme Court to rule that that there could be no cause for habeas corpus and that normal human rights as we understand them, the right to life and liberty and the rule of law, would not be available to the common man. Indira Gandhi was a Prime Minister fighting to save her regime after the Allahabad High Court overturned her election to the Lok Sabha. But it was his younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, aided and abetted by a coterie of self-serving senior officers and a gang of Youth Congress leaders, who had emerged as the real, albeit extra-constitutional, centre of authority.
Their actions saw forcible sterilisations of men as old as sixty, and as young as sixteen, and demolitions of Muslim qasbas, and about 1,400 clusters, scattered across the city of Delhi, which were bulldozed out of existence. Close to 200,000 families were hastily given barren and tiny plots of land in about 40 so called resettlement colonies, and lived or months without adequate water and toilets, and with tarpaulin sheets to save them from the heat, the cold and the rains that are always so excessive in Delhi. By the way, barring a muted voice or two, I did not find the Church in India, Cardinals, archbishops or their organisations in any denomination; pass a resolution against the Emergency. Safety first, for sure, and always be on the right side of the ruling party. Nothing much has changed.
But I digress. This is not about the Emergency, though one is sore tempted to write more on the because of the recent Congress party autobiography in which it admits the excesses, and even puts a bit of the blame on Sanjay Gandhi, whose wife Maneka Gandhi and son Varun are now leading lights of the opposition Bharatiya Janata parity. Another leading light of the BJP and a former Union minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government, Jagmohan who was once a Sanjay Gandhi acolyte, has risen to the defence of his old chum and master, writing a fiery piece in the editorial page of the Hindustan Times. I know something of the Emergency excesses and had written about them in a book For Reasons of State, Delhi under the Emergency which I authorised with my then colleague in the Patriot newspaper, Ajoy Bose, later of the Guardian, UK.
I was in the central Indian badlands researching the major technology step by Indira Gandhi after the later “implosion” of a successful nuclear bomb. This was the SITE, or Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, which brought TV to remote villages with promises of new agro techniques and doles given by the government. The messages were subtle, meant to bring the rural masses to the government’s fold. Hundreds of psychologists monitored the popular response. Their findings have since been used successfully “to fool most of the people most of the time,” as someone once said. On a positive side, the current saturation of dish and cable TV has its roots in that experiment.
But the difference between promise and actual benefits given by the government also brought about distrust of the government, and sometimes unrest. Trade unions, curbed under the Emergency, had gone underground, for labour unrest was frequent where ever employers, including big government and private sector bosses, sought to short change the working class.
It was in this context that I saw young scholastics moving around with the workers, expressing solidarity, extending moral support. I am not sure if they were Jesuits or Divine Word missionaries, possibly both. But I was happy to see they were involved in the struggles of the common man, at the grassroots, far away from the publicity and the glare of the media which now sometimes motivated some human rights activists.
I regret to say that barring rare exceptions through the decades and the last half of the 20th Century, and some personal experience in the new decade involving Kandhamal and Orissa, I have not seen the Church in a leadership role as a human rights defender, or motivator.
It is time that the Church itself, and others who want it to grow in strength, subject it to a close examination as to why it has not only failed itself but has prevented its common members from seeing themselves as major constituents of the nation’s civil society.
The few times the Church has been active has been when its own vested interests were involved. Cardinals and bishops, quite correctly, exhorted the parishioners to take to the streets, albeit in peaceful processions, to challenge the government of the State of Kerala which sought to control the managements of private colleges, many of which were owned by the Church, or when it meddled in text books. Back in 1998, 4th December to be precise, the Church called for a nation wide closure of its schools and mass rallies protesting the sudden violence unleashed on the community by elements of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and others closely allied with the Bharatiya Janata party which was then ruling in New Delhi and several other states.
And last year, the Religious for Justice, the Conference of Religious and individual activists, especially lawyers, from men and women Congregations, took up the imitative to see that justice was done to the victims of Kandhamal because the Fast Track Courts were letting off one murderer after another. The initiative will hopefully bring the Supreme Court to bring its weight to bear on the situation so that the miscarriage of justice is brought to a speedy end, and justice is done.
Another community issue, the cause of the Christian of Dalit origin demanding a reversal of the 1950 Presidential order which robbed them of the rights to be called Scheduled castes with concomitant loss of benefits of reservations in employment and education, has also seen the Church go about at tortoise speed. Although the Catholic and Protestant Churches collaborated in the 1991 massive Dalit Christian rally at India Gate – the biggest ever by the community -- they have not been able to repeat it. It cannot be for want of resources. The Church has a-plenty. It must then be attributed to a lack of desire. The movement is now being carried forward by a few men – among them Jesuit Fr Bosco, the CBCI secretary Fr Cosmon, the activist Franklin Caesar and some others from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The rallies have taken on appearances of tokenism with barely 500 – three hundred of them brought from the southern states – ever present, and Bishops making a “photo opportunity” attendance. Barely any laity or clerical group joins from Delhi.
Dalit activists will argue that they are doing their best under the circumstances. They have to be praised for regularly going to the Supreme Court where their writs are pending before the Bench of the Chief Justice of India. Fate, government apathy and political opposition have all contributed to a situation where the writ does not come up any more for hearing, and only the most committed feel there will be any justice done in the near future.
Arguably, if the entire Church had backed the Dalit Christian demand – and they could have taken lessons in agitation advocacy from the Gurjars, the Sikhs and others who bring Union and state governments to their knees within a few days of jamming rail and road traffic on major routes - the issue would have possibly been long resolved. It remains a controversial argument within Church circles and the poor Dalits continue to agitate at Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street four times a year when Parliament meets for its sessions. The efforts by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and the National Council of Churches in India to feed Christian MPs at official dinners during the sessions, as a short cut in advocacy -- had borne no fruit, as the MPs too keep a low profile on the Dalit rights issue. Anyway, the major Church support for the Dalit Christian issue is not more than ten years old.
In the same light, the Church support for the cause of the domestic workers, most of them Catholic girls from Ranchi, Chhatisgarh and Orissa tribal areas employed in homes in metropolitan areas of Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, can be traced to their religious affinity, rather that their ethnic origins. The Church is not very visible in the agitations of tribals against monopolists and foreign interests denuding forests in Orissa, or stealing the mines in the tribal lands in other states.
If this is the situation where Christian communities are concerned, and if this is how the Church behaves towards it own, is there any one surprised if we look in vain for major Church advocacy in favour of other religious minorities, or the marginalised. Agreed there is a CBCI document committing itself to the marginalised. Agreed that in recent years, the CBCI has seminars on the Right to Food, and agreed that Caritas and CASA and Eficor are among the first to go whenever there is an earthquake or a tsunami – physically challenging and dangerous even, but political not just safe but productive – they remain far behind the firing line in mass movements where the people are asserting for their rights, sometimes for their right to life itself.
No wonder that the Church was invisible when the Sikhs were being burnt alive in Delhi and other cities, when Kashmir Hindus were pushed out of the valley by a combination of Islamic fundaments elements and the political strategy of the governor of that time, or when the Muslims were brutalised repeatedly from Nellie, Meerut, Moradabad all the way to Gujarat 2002. A few convents may have opened their doors to refugees and victims, but the Church metaphorically kept its doors closed, its conscience shut. All it did was way of charity. Not open protest, as Jesus perhaps would have wanted it to.
The argument that this will be political activity and will bring the Church or the Christian community in direct conflict with the government and the law and order machinery has to be debated, and the Church fears have to be confronted and defeated.
As a practising Catholic, I do not want the Church to suffer the consequences of some foolhardy action, or some thoughtless agitation. I certainly do not want to see bishops or priests in jail even though it is my dream that Cardinals lead some pro-people movement against corruption, for food, for a living wage, and above all, for human dignity. What a grand sight that would be.
But I do want the Church in India – Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecost, and Independent – to understand that it must support human dignity and human aspirations, specially of the poor, beyond lip service. Human dignity cannot be brought about by acts of charity. No among of building houses by Caritas, or medical relief couriered from the West to an Indian site of a natural disaster, will add an iota to the sum total of human rights in India.
What is required is for the Church to understand what it takes to be to be a part of Civil society, not just a part but the very super structure of a national nervous system that responds to the pain of the people.
What are issues agitating civil society at the moment? One has to merely read the daily newspapers, apathetic as they are and guided as they are to their urban middle class markets, to find out. The rapine in Delhi and unsolved murders in Delhi are the tip of the iceberg. India is shot through and through with a jungle law of might is right which aggravates the more one moves away from the city. Dalits in village sleep the night in terror. Their women are easy targets. The tribals are being robbed of their birthright. Dissent is met with murder by hired goons, caste thugs, or by the police. Custodial death is rampant.
Corruption in high cost construction or information technology contracts like the 2 G scandal many make the headlines, but the common man has to face corruption in the lower courts which make a total mockery of the justice dispensation system. Policemen who have to give a bribe to their superiors to get a job or a new posting need to make that money somewhere. Corruption in the money market, the food market and in the job market leads to farmer’s suicides and mass pauperisation of the hinterland. Landless peasantry sells its soul, and its body, for the privilege of being able to live the day. But surely the Church knows it first hand – for do not many of them pay a bribe to keep their FCRA permit alive.
How many remain uneducated and how many remain sick under the shadow of our 50,000 educational and medical institutions? No one knows, because no one cares. The parish system would have enabled to Church to develop an information system which even the government could not beat. But there has never been the effort. The Church does not know how many Christians are below the poverty line.
Needless to say, it is time the situation changed. It is time remedial measures were taken.
You have to look nowhere but at the life and message of Jesus Christ to understand our role in upholding human rights and becoming the foundation of a genuine civil society. Once this is understood, and finds it way into seminaries and formation schools, the situation will change – for the better. I will not have o listen to the senior Religious, heading a major institute, who told me and a group of my colleagues, that if he investigated human rights violations, he was afraid his institution – with its huge stone-walled buildings – would be pelted by stones by angry right wing groups! Surely the buildings would have survived.
It was Christ, in his parables and in his own deeds, who spelled out the common minimum of civil society – to love the neighbour not just as ourselves, but to go a step forward and love him as Christ has loved us – at the cost of his life.
It is this vision which triggered the movement after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, of a new jurisprudence concerned with the defence of human rights, culminating in the Charter of the United nations on Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.
I am not a theologian, not by a long stretch. But I was struck by a note in my email referring to John Warwick Montgomery, a human rights specialist who served as Director of Studies at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg from 1979-81. The webpage said Montgomery has written extensively in the field tackling such subjects as the Marxist approach to human rights, the philosophical justification for human rights, and right-to-life issues. Montgomery was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has written about the problem of human rights in China.
He pointed out Christians had been subjected to persecution and torture at the hands of the Roman Imperial legal system. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote against the use of torture in obtaining confessions. Pope Gregory the Great echoed his stance in the sixth century and Pope Nicholas I did the same in the ninth century. In 928 AD 'good King Wenceslas' of Bohemia destroyed instruments of torture. In the twelfth century Decretum of Gratian likewise repudiated torture.
The English common law tradition developed out of Biblical principles of law, such as the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' Golden Rule that you do to others as you would be done by them. The Magna Carta, which also reflected Biblical truths, originated from the work of Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Incidentally, common law tradition prohibited secret trials and the extraction of confessions by torture.
“God's perspective on human rights can be grounded in Biblical revelation. Both the theology of the creation and the incarnation of Christ provide the grounds for justifying rights. The rights are entitlements given to us by God. “
If that be so, than it is the duty of the Church to expresses solidarity with human rights, and with those who defend human rights.
The small candle light procession at the historic India gate by the Christian community of Delhi – led by activist of the Federation of Catholic Associations of Delhi, the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the all India Christian Council, brightened not just the darkness surrounding the extraordinary punishment meted out to popular doctor Binayak Sen working with the tribals of Chhatisgarh and lawyer Teesta Setalvad fighting for the victims of the Gujarat government and RSS pogrom against Muslims, but also lit a spark in the hearts of many in the Church that bitter cold evening.
I would like to hope that it ignites a major revolution in the Church which sees it move away from cheque-based charity to become the cornerstone of a vibrant civil society which alone can monitor powerful governments and dangerous extremist groups to ensure that dignity, freedom, liberty and life is assured to the poorest of the poor, the helpless and the hapless. Once it reaches that stage, its own properties, its own institutions, schools and colleges will also be automatically safe from predation and persecution.
-------
Saturday, January 1, 2011
PRESS STATEMENT
For Immediate Release
For more information, contact Dr. John Dayal
CHRISTIAN COUNCIL CONCERN AT TARGETING OF HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS BINAYAK SEN, TEESTA SETALVAD, AND OTHERS
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY SAYS FREEDOM OF FAITH AND HUMAN DIGNITY CORNERSTONES OF INDIAN SECULAR DEMOCRACY
NEW DELHI: 1 January 2011 -- The All India Christian Council (aicc) today expressed deep distress at the systematic targeting and persecution of human rights defenders by government agencies as well as by organised groups. Christian Council leaders said India’s future as a vibrant secular democracy requires an abiding commitment to the civil liberties and human dignity of its citizens.
In a New Year Statement to the Nation, the aicc President and leadership also listed erosion of freedom of faith and disregard of special rights for vulnerable sections such as Tribals and Dalits as major issues facing India -- not just in the New Year 2011 -- but the second decade of the 21st Century. The Christian Council wished all fellow citizens peace, security, and a share in the national prosperity.
“Freedom of faith and human rights were special victims in the last year and the last decade. We recall the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 and the pre-planned mass violence against Christians in Kandhamal and other districts of Orissa as well as Karnataka,” said Dr. Joseph D’souza, aicc President. D’souza urged the Union Government to proactively resolve the unprecedented prison term for humanist doctor Mr. Binayak Sen and bring to an end the harassment of brave activist Ms. Teesta Setalvad who is currently targeted by both state and rightwing fundamentalist organisations.
Dr. John Dayal, aicc Secretary General, said, “It is tragic that a great republic such as India doesn’t have a sufficiently strong civil society and civil liberty mass movements which are required to monitor fault lines and lacunae in the administration of justice. A few daring individuals -- at great risk to their own lives -- and a handful of human rights groups have kept alive the spirit of the Constitution and taken up the cause of the common man victimized by extremist groups or a power-crazed governance system. People such as Binayak Sen and Teesta kept alive the pursuit of justice for the victims.” The Christian Council paid tributes to several activists who passed away last year – including Dr. Bhagwan Das of the Dalit movement, socialist leader Surendra Mohan, and Peoples Union for Civil Liberties Advocate Kannabiran.
Dr. Dayal said, “We call upon the government to ensure that a bill against communal violence is brought before Parliament which fully addresses the fears of micro-minorities such as the Christians in India. The Christian Council fully supports the demands of Dalit Christians and Muslims, and we hope the government and Supreme Court grant them justice in 2011.”
“It is high time that the government makes three structural changes to strengthen justice mechanisms in India. It should bring forth legislation establishing an Equal Opportunities Commission, set up a study group along the lines of the Sachar Commission to study the economic and social conditions of all strata of the Christian community in every part of the country, and strengthen the Nation Commission for Minorities. The 12th Five Year Plan must also reflect our needs, aspirations and hopes,” said Dr. Dayal.
The All India Christian Council plans to organise a series of seminars and consultations on these issues to educate the community and to keep the Union Government, Planning Commission, and state authorities abreast of issues crucial to the 26 million Christians in India.
The All India Christian Council (www.christiancouncil.in), birthed in 1998, exists to protect and serve the Christian community, minorities, and the oppressed castes. The aicc is a coalition of thousands of Indian denominations, organizations, and lay leaders.
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For Immediate Release
For more information, contact Dr. John Dayal
CHRISTIAN COUNCIL CONCERN AT TARGETING OF HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS BINAYAK SEN, TEESTA SETALVAD, AND OTHERS
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY SAYS FREEDOM OF FAITH AND HUMAN DIGNITY CORNERSTONES OF INDIAN SECULAR DEMOCRACY
NEW DELHI: 1 January 2011 -- The All India Christian Council (aicc) today expressed deep distress at the systematic targeting and persecution of human rights defenders by government agencies as well as by organised groups. Christian Council leaders said India’s future as a vibrant secular democracy requires an abiding commitment to the civil liberties and human dignity of its citizens.
In a New Year Statement to the Nation, the aicc President and leadership also listed erosion of freedom of faith and disregard of special rights for vulnerable sections such as Tribals and Dalits as major issues facing India -- not just in the New Year 2011 -- but the second decade of the 21st Century. The Christian Council wished all fellow citizens peace, security, and a share in the national prosperity.
“Freedom of faith and human rights were special victims in the last year and the last decade. We recall the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 and the pre-planned mass violence against Christians in Kandhamal and other districts of Orissa as well as Karnataka,” said Dr. Joseph D’souza, aicc President. D’souza urged the Union Government to proactively resolve the unprecedented prison term for humanist doctor Mr. Binayak Sen and bring to an end the harassment of brave activist Ms. Teesta Setalvad who is currently targeted by both state and rightwing fundamentalist organisations.
Dr. John Dayal, aicc Secretary General, said, “It is tragic that a great republic such as India doesn’t have a sufficiently strong civil society and civil liberty mass movements which are required to monitor fault lines and lacunae in the administration of justice. A few daring individuals -- at great risk to their own lives -- and a handful of human rights groups have kept alive the spirit of the Constitution and taken up the cause of the common man victimized by extremist groups or a power-crazed governance system. People such as Binayak Sen and Teesta kept alive the pursuit of justice for the victims.” The Christian Council paid tributes to several activists who passed away last year – including Dr. Bhagwan Das of the Dalit movement, socialist leader Surendra Mohan, and Peoples Union for Civil Liberties Advocate Kannabiran.
Dr. Dayal said, “We call upon the government to ensure that a bill against communal violence is brought before Parliament which fully addresses the fears of micro-minorities such as the Christians in India. The Christian Council fully supports the demands of Dalit Christians and Muslims, and we hope the government and Supreme Court grant them justice in 2011.”
“It is high time that the government makes three structural changes to strengthen justice mechanisms in India. It should bring forth legislation establishing an Equal Opportunities Commission, set up a study group along the lines of the Sachar Commission to study the economic and social conditions of all strata of the Christian community in every part of the country, and strengthen the Nation Commission for Minorities. The 12th Five Year Plan must also reflect our needs, aspirations and hopes,” said Dr. Dayal.
The All India Christian Council plans to organise a series of seminars and consultations on these issues to educate the community and to keep the Union Government, Planning Commission, and state authorities abreast of issues crucial to the 26 million Christians in India.
The All India Christian Council (www.christiancouncil.in), birthed in 1998, exists to protect and serve the Christian community, minorities, and the oppressed castes. The aicc is a coalition of thousands of Indian denominations, organizations, and lay leaders.
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