Christians Under Fire in India

Legend has it that the apostle St. Thomas brought Christianity to India almost 2,000 years ago. But among this country’s hard-core Hindu revivalists, the faith has never lost its foreign taint.

A string of violent attacks--some with the apparent complicity of government officials--on churches and missionaries has sparked a panic among India’s 23 million Christians and opened a debate about national identity in a country still tormented by its colonial past.

The gang rape of four nuns in this remote village in September was the latest in a series of more than 40 assaults that have included the demolition of churches, the desecration of images and the digging up of graves. The attacks began last spring, after the victory in nationwide elections of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a nationalist group that claims Hinduism as the religion of India.

The incidents started after Hindu groups affiliated with the BJP launched a campaign to oust from India “foreign” Christian missionaries, whom they accuse of tricking illiterate, lower-caste Indians into switching religions. According to witnesses, at least some of the attacks against Christians have been carried out by BJP officials or their allies.

Many Christians say that Hindu zealots, with the government’s sanction, are free to harass and terrorize.

“We don’t feel safe anymore--there are only a few of us,” said Nirmala Makwana after leaving a Roman Catholic service here. “They think Christianity is a foreign religion. But it is my faith, so how could it be foreign?”

Makwana, a mother and homemaker, is bracing for more violence. “What they did to the nuns they could do to us,” she said.

Leaders of the BJP in New Delhi have condemned the attacks, and officials here have sent guards to protect nuns and priests. Police have arrested 15 people in connection with the rapes, and Home Affairs Minister Lal Krishna Advani has called for their execution.

Yet for all these assurances, church leaders say the BJP’s chauvinistic appeals to Hindu identity--crystallized in the party’s slogan, “One nation, one people, one culture”--have emboldened extremists. Stirring up trouble against missionaries, church officials say, is a way for the mostly upper-caste BJP leaders to staunch the defection of lower-caste voters.

“This is the worst violence against Christians since independence” in 1947, said John Dayal, president of the All India Catholic Union in New Delhi. “There is a pattern to these attacks, and I am convinced that they are being orchestrated from above.”

Some BJP officials and members of affiliated groups have justified the attacks, arguing that the Hindu faithful are seeking vengeance for years of domination by Christians.

“We were slaves for 1,000 years, and now we have opened our eyes,” said B. L. Sharma, central secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or VHP, a Hindu cultural organization. “I demand that the government of India throw out these people who are out to convert Hindus and ruin our culture, language and attire.”

The VHP maintains strong ties with the ruling party and its parent organization, the National Volunteer Corps. Members of that organization killed Mohandas K. Gandhi, the independence leader and apostle of nonviolence, 50 years ago. The three groups have many members in common.

Ruling Party Avows Centrality of Hinduism

Since coming to power as the leading party in a coalition government, the BJP has broken with India’s 50-year tradition of being a secular state and promised to toss off the national inferiority complex it says India inherited from several hundred years of British colonial rule. Its leadership has pledged to create a powerful India united by Hinduism and armed with nuclear weapons that will force the West to accept it as a world power.

The gang rape of the nuns was wrong, Sharma said. But he argued that it was a “natural reaction” to what he called the forcible conversion of thousands of Hindus. “Their sole aim is to destroy a nation which is poised to be a superpower,” he said.

Most of the attacks against Christians have taken place in the “tribal belt,” which runs across the center of India from the Pakistani border in the west to Myanmar and Bangladesh in the east. The belt is home to 81 million indigenous people, whose ancestors inhabited India before the Aryan invasions of about 2000 BC brought the country its dominant ethnic group.

Christian missionaries have found the region especially receptive to the church’s emphasis on social service, such as the building of schools and free health clinics. The tribal belt is one of India’s most impoverished regions, and many of the tribal people do not practice Hinduism.

The four nuns, all Indians, were raped when their convent was surrounded at night by 25 men. According to witnesses, the nuns begged their attackers to leave them alone, saying they were Catholic sisters.

“Yes, but tonight you are our wives,” the attackers said, according to people who interviewed the nuns.

While the exact motive for the rapes is unclear, the villagers around Navapada in Madhya Pradesh state are convinced that outsiders--and the BJP--were behind them.

“The work was done by village people, but city people’s brains were behind this,” said Sister Marina Mary, who arrived at the scene just after the attacks. “We never had any problems here. These people want all the Catholics to go away.”

Other incidents, most of them in Gujarat state, seem more overtly anti-Christian. And some even appear to have been directed by BJP officials or their allies.

According to church officials, Hindu mobs have torched churches in the villages of Bhapkal, Singana, Lahan Kadmad and Borkhal. Christians have been beaten by Hindu extremists in the villages of Padra, Baroda and Borkhal, they said. In Naroda, the St. Mary’s Syrian Orthodox School had its windows smashed and a painting of the Virgin Mary desecrated--purportedly by a group of men angry that the school was not teaching Sanskrit, an ancient language employed by high-caste Hindu priests.

In the village of Kapadvanj, a crowd dug up the grave of Samuel Christian, a recently buried Methodist, and dumped the corpse on the steps of a church. Witnesses said local VHP leaders led the way. In Rajkot, a gang--witnesses identified its members as local VHP activists--stormed a Protestant school for girls and burned its Bibles.

One of the most brazen attacks occurred in Naroda, where a crowd of 400 used tractors and iron bars to destroy St. Antony’s Catholic Church. The crowd smashed icons and made off with the contents of the donation box. Witnesses said the crowd included members of the police, the VHP and the local BJP government.

In an interview, Sumbubahai Maiatbhai, the head of the village council and a member of the BJP, conceded that he attended the demolition. He said the church was razed because it stood in violation of a local building code. Church officials said they were unaware--and were not notified--of any such code violation.

India, where all the world’s major religions can be found, has a history of communal bloodshed. In recent years, the most frequent antagonists have been Hindus and Muslims, the latter a minority of 100 million in a nation of nearly 1 billion people. One of the worst outbreaks came in December 1992, when a crowd of Hindu extremists demolished the nearly 500-year-old Babri Masjid mosque in the central city of Ayodhya, claiming it rested atop the birthplace of a god. The ensuing riots, which BJP allies in Bombay have been charged with inciting, killed about 2,000 people.

Minister Implicated in Destruction of Mosque

Among those implicated in instigating the destruction of Babri Masjid was Advani, the BJP home affairs minister, who is still under investigation in the incident. He concedes that he was present at Ayodhya but denies that he played any role in the mosque’s destruction.

The construction of a Hindu temple atop the old mosque remains one of the government’s highest priorities.

Christian leaders and the ruling party’s critics worry that the pattern of Hindu violence against Muslims is being repeated against Christians. They say that the BJP is concerned that lower-caste voters--particularly the most downtrodden, the so-called untouchables--are drifting away.

“The BJP wants to co-opt the tribal people and the untouchables, and they do that by giving them something to hate,” said Achyud Yagnik, director of the Center for Social Knowledge and Action in Ahmadabad.

The VHP and other nationalist groups charge that the Christian missionaries are holdovers from the British colonial era, foreign agents who are abetting the various armed insurgencies launched by tribal peoples in northeast India. The missionaries’ ultimate aim, the nationalists say, is to set up an independent Christian state in India’s tribal belt. The Christians, they say, are converting nearly half a million Hindus every year.

“Yesterday’s traders are out to plunder our motherland in the garb of these English missionaries,” said Sharma of the VHP. “In their schools, students are beaten and caned for speaking Hindi; our sisters and daughters are made to wear skirts, which is an obscene dress.”

One common method of converting Hindus to Christianity, Sharma maintains, is for nuns to toss statues of Hindu deities into a pond and let the local villagers watch them sink. Then the nuns toss in a plastic Jesus that floats on the water--and the conversion is complete.

“See, Jesus can swim and the Hindu gods can’t,” Sharma said.

Church leaders say the only people they convert to Christianity are those who ask--and not many do. “Some people are attracted to us by our services to the poor,” said Bishop George Anathil of the Catholic diocese that includes Navapada. “But there are no large-scale conversions taking place.”

Catholic and Methodist churches say their ranks include almost no foreigners--only holdovers from 30 years ago, when the Indian government expelled most foreign missionaries. New arrivals hoping to proselytize on behalf of Christianity are usually denied entry.

District Must Approve Christian Conversions

In Jhabua, the district where the nuns were raped, anyone wishing to convert to Christianity must receive government permission. Waseem Akhter, the chief administrator for the district, said he could not recall ever receiving an application for a conversion.

On a recent Sunday in Ghopalpura, a village close to where the nuns were raped, about 100 parishioners gathered at St. Francis Xavier’s Catholic Church to celebrate Mass.

Most of the villagers trace their faith to their grandparents, many of whom were converted before India gained independence. Yet like many Christians in India, some of the congregants retain traces of their old religion: The women wear red bindis, or dots, on their foreheads, and the congregation recently celebrated Diwali, a Hindu holy day.

In Jhabua, the church has set up a free health clinic and schools for 4,000 children, the overwhelming majority Hindu, Father John Sunny said.

Sunny, who wears a beard and white robe, finds a certain irony in the recent campaign by the Hindu extremists to vilify Christians.

“All the Hindus send their children to our schools,” the priest said. “And still they talk bad about us.”