Posted by on April 14, 19102 at 12:18:37:
The current offensive against the country's minuscule Christian community is part of a well-charted-out plan to ensure the ascendancy of the forces of Hindutva.
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi
THERE have been few precedents for the nationwide day of protest that the Christian community observed on December 4 to convey its sense of alarm at the attacks on its members, which have been taking place with increasing frequency and vehemence in recent times. Christian institutions, including schools, remained closed for a day on a call given by the United Christian Forum for Human Rights. Members of the Forum expressed their dismay at the increasing currency of the propaganda that the community is intent on pursuing an aggressive campaign of proselytisation. The menacing overtones of the Bharatiya Janata Party's slogan of "One Nation, One Culture and One People" were now becoming a practical hazard of life for India's Christians.
A Forum delegation met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on the day of protest. While deprecating the incidents of violence against the community, the Prime Minister strongly refuted any suggestion that his party may have been involved in them. This is a plea that is unlikely to stand scrutiny in the light of known facts from States such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka. Where direct involvement is unproven, there is little question that the atmosphere of intolerance that the BJP has fostered in league with its allies in the Hindutva constellation has been the principal cause of the recent events.
In one of the declared objectives of Hindu nationalism - to establish a native religious tradition as the foundation of a "national church" - the influence of medieval Western models of religious organisation is apparent. Critics have argued quite accurately that Hindutva introduces an alien proselytising element into Indian traditions as a defensive reflex to the supposed inroads other faiths make. That however, is at the level of principle. In its practical details, the current Hindutva offensive against the minuscule Christian community reflects all the visceral animosities of the paranoid fringe.
Activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal in Gujarat have in recent times conveyed their intents and purposes through a chilling slogan: "Pahle Kasai, Phir Isai" (First Muslims; then Christians). The slogan serves a dual purpose - it seeks to smear an entire faith by equating its adherents to a traditionally stigmatised occupational grouping in India, and then to threaten it with extinction. (Kasai in Hindi means 'butcher' and the same word denotes Muslims.) In the sense of cultural hostility it embodies towards all faiths, the slogan is of a piece with all that was seen during the peak of the Ayodhya movement.
The slogan also encapsulates the strategy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates towards what it terms "social cleansing". The strategy formulated in concrete terms in the 1960s clearly states that Muslims are the principal enemy and Christians a close second. The third identified enemy is the so-called Indian elite, which is influenced by "foreign isms, fashions and ideologies".
According to RSS records, the strategy was formulated in concrete terms in the Mumbai conference of Hindu religious leaders in August 1964, which led to the formation of the VHP as the militant vehicle of religious propagation. The tasks assigned to the VHP included the "consolidation and strengthening of Hindu society", the "protection and dissemination of Hindu spiritual and ethical values", and the "establishment of links among Hindus living in different countries". The proposed method was to build an ecclesiastical order, complete with its own liturgy, scripture and institutional hierarchy. Diversities were to be ironed out in cultural homogeneity, individuals manning shrines across the country were to be coopted into the network of VHP sponsorship. In another conscious reversion to the medieval model of religious organisations, VHP activists, themselves drawn to a great extent from the RSS, were designated as a lay order which would impart the necessary momentum for social consolidation on religious lines.
Social scientists characterise this process as one of stigmatisation and emulation. A perception of threat from an alien cultural influence is created in the minds of the members of the target population, who are then reclaimed by the native and indigenous culture through methods that were in others' hands decried as a mortal danger to the national culture.
Records of the 1964 conference show that the VHP, to achieve its objectives, was asked to take on systematically the Muslim clergy and Christian missionaries, who had launched "intensive activity to convert Hindus, especially the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, in various parts of the country". The conference identified Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Gujarat as areas of heightened Muslim activity. Christian missionaries, the conference observed, were dangerously active in the northeastern region, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.