India: Religious violence and discrimination against Christians in 2007 01/03/2008
Executive summary
Despite the existence of strong constitutional and legislative protections for freedom of religion and belief in India, 2007 saw a continued pattern of societal opposition to the religious activities of minorities (particularly including Christians), which often erupted into violent attacks. There continued to be a chronic problem of impunity for perpetrators of religiously-motivated violence. These issues are compounded by specific legislative obstructions to religious freedom, in the form of state-level Freedom of Religion Acts (known dysphemistically as ‘anti-conversion laws’) and the religious conditionality attached to the definition of the Scheduled Castes, which governs eligibility for the ‘reservation’ system of quotas in the public sector.
A consistent pattern of religiously-motivated violence against Christians was recorded throughout 2007, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. During the last week of the year, large-scale communal violence broke out in the Kandhamal district of Orissa, resulting in the destruction of approximately at least 730 houses and 95 churches and Christian institutions, and the death of a small number of people. Although some Hindu properties were among those destroyed in the violence, the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) delivered the verdict that ‘there is no doubt that the Christian community and its places of worship were the principal target of attack.’1 NGO fact-finding visit reports and the NCM report interpreted the violence as the culmination of a long process of co-opting the local tribal population into Hinduism and the concomitant vilification of the minority Christian community and of conversions from Hinduism. This process was carried out by the Hindu extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), under the leadership of its local figurehead, Swami Lakhmananda Saraswati.
The propagation of a culture assuming the illegitimacy of religious conversions from Hinduism fuelled the wider pattern of anti-Christian violence in 2007. Such a culture is rooted in the extremist nationalist ideology of ‘Hindutva’, which in practice, seeks to preserve and defend the cultural hegemony of Hinduism at the expense of minority religions. Many attacks on Christian targets were incited or perpetrated by proponents of Hindutva, chiefly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its subsidiary organisations, including the VHP and Bajrang Dal. Such attacks were often justified by unsubstantiated allegations of illegitimate conversions carried out by the victims, perceived as a threat to the cultural and national integrity of India. The nature and severity of the attacks varied, but included murders, mob beatings, arson attacks and vandalism of houses, church buildings and schools.
Police inaction or complicity was a pervasive problem throughout 2007, with perpetrators of religiously-motivated attacks commonly receiving little more than a superficial censure. In numerous cases, particularly in Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, police refused to register the complaints of Christians or arrested the Christian victims instead of their attackers. In some cases, police were directly implicated in violence against Christians. Ineffectual or discriminatory police responses were most common in states under the governance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which espouses a Hindutva agenda.
The culture of opposition to conversions from Hinduism was also reflected in state-level ‘anti-conversion laws’, in force in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh, and introduced but not implemented in Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. Such laws appear to contribute towards dominant notions of the illegitimacy of conversions to minority religions and the consequent vilification of the minority Christian community.
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