Posted by on April 08, 19102 at 12:35:16:
Hindu Fundos Kill Catholic Priest, Bomb Churches
NEW DELHI, India, June 9, 2000 (VOA): Roman Catholic leaders in India say they have asked for an urgent meeting with the country's Prime Minister following the murder of a Catholic priest on Wednesday -- and a series of explosions at four churches on Thursday. VOA's Jim Teeple reports from New Delhi that church leaders in India say the government should do more to protect the rights of the minority Christian community.
Archbishop Alan de Lastic, who heads the Roman Catholic Church in India, says the recent attacks are just the latest in a series of escalating violence against Christians in India over the past six months. Bishop de Lastic says there is a campaign underway in India to intimidate his church and other Christian denominations.
DE LASTIC: "Well my conclusion is that there is a definite strategy and a plan on a national basis. That is proved by these incidents all over. How is it that they happened all at the same time? Why, for example, did they not happen after one or two months in a sporadic fashion? They are all planned. And I think these forces at work want to intimidate the Christians and stop their work of trying to uplift the masses."
On Wednesday, Franciscan Brother George Kuzhikandan was beaten to death by unidentified assailants in the northern Indian City of Mathura, about 150 kilometers southeast of New Delhi. On Thursday, a series of explosions took place at four churches in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa, causing minor damage and slightly injuring several people.
Wednesday's killing of Brother Kuzhikandan was the first of a Christian missionary in India since early 1999, when Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were burned alive by a mob led by a Hindu extremist known as Dara Singh in India's eastern Orissa state.
Christians make up just over two percent of India's population, which is overwhelmingly Hindu. In recent years, tensions have escalated between the two communities as some Hindu nationalists have charged that some Christian missionaries are trying to convert illiterate tribal or Hindu villagers by offering them promises of free medical care and free education -- a charge denied by the missionaries.
Christian groups charge that many of the attacks are carried out by members of Hindu extremist groups with ties to the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. Party officials deny they have any links to the attacks and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has condemned the violence.
At his news conference on Friday, Archbishop De Lastic says a recent government commission that looked into the matter in the state of Gujarat found no evidence that Catholic priests were carrying out what he describes as "forced conversions."
DE LASTIC: "On that very delicate issue of conversion - if some people think conversion is wrong and it is forced -- that is false. The last minority which went to Gujarat found and put into writing that there was no evidence at all of any instance of "forced conversion."
Archbishop De Lastic says attacks against India's Christians have increased since Pope John Paul's historic trip to India last year. He says this year alone there have 35 such attacks and he describes the violence as the most serious threat to freedom in India since the country's independence more than 50-years ago.