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The report becomes important with the news that the government of Arunachal Pradesh – once called NEFA [North East Frontier Agency] as it borders Bhutan, Myanmar and China through Tibet – will shortly enforce the anti-conversion law it passed in 1978 to stop the growth of Christianity in the state. Also likely to be raised is the political demand that those already converted to Christianity be stripped of all privileges given to the members of the scores of big and small tribes inhabiting this Himalayan redoubt.

Stripping tribals, also called Adivasis in North and Central India, of their scheduled status is an important national project of the BJP and the Sangh to contain the growth of Christianity among Tribals and Dalits. The Presidential Order of 1950 became the biggest anti-conversion law of the newly independent India, with converts penalised by being denied reservations in government, legislatures and education. Tribals, till now, can retain such rights even if they become Christians, and very rarely, Muslims.

These rights were the fuse that lit the conflagration in Kandhamal, Orissa which saw 56,000 people displaced from their homes and seeking safety, first in the nearby forests, and then in government refugee camos for up to a year. Many women, including a Catholic Nun, were raped, more than 400 churches and 4,000 houses burnt, while 400 villages were cleansed of Christian presence. The subtext was that converts to Christianity should not be given the Scheduled Tribe benefits.

This was also one of the subtexts of the violence in Manipur which began on 7 May 2023, and continues with the toll mounting every day. Over 70,000 people, mostly tribals of the Kuki-Zo group are homeless.

They have also forced Meitei Christians to return to the older Sanamahi faith by making them sign conversion affidavits and burning their bibles in what they described as acts of ghar wapsi, or homecoming – the preferred BJP term for the reconversion to Hinduism of Indian Christians and Muslims.

As in Kandhamal, over 400 churches are reported destroyed. The majority Meitei, who are not tribals, want the same scheduled status. This would in effect make everyone the state equal and give the Meitei egress into the hill districts which have mineral deposits, and allegedly now grow contraband poppy, from which many opiate derivatives find their way to the billion dollar international drug trade in which reportedly politicians are also complicit.

Arunachal Pradesh is home to 26 major tribes and over 100 sub-tribes, collectively 68.78% of the 1.3 million population [2011 census].

The first Church in Arunachal was set up in 1957 at Rayang village in the present-day district of East Siang, close to the Assam birder.

Christians now constitute just over 30 per cent, with Hindus close behind at 29.0% , the Donyi-Polo at 26.2% and Buddhism, both Theravada and Mahayana at 11.8%. The many indigenous tribal religions, many nature or ancestor worshipping, total some 3 per cent .

The strength of the Hindu population may be significantly more as the Donyi Polo often also so identify themselves. Many of their social, political and religious leaders are also members of the RSS

In such a mixed population, English is a link language, but also Hindi, which many people if the state speak fluently as it was taught in Vivekanand schools. Hindi also makes it easy for the Hindutva activists to emphasise its connectedness with the Hindu majority Indian mainland. The other tribal states of the North East use English as their link language.

Over the last three decades which saw Christian evangelisation, the RSS was working with equal zeal radicalising Hindu tribal groups, and ones following various indigenous faiths. the RSS and its affiliates, who view the state’s “indigenous faiths” as part of “Sanatana Dharma”. This has now effectively pitted them against the proselytised Christians.

The Sangh, not working exactly under the radar, set up an education network which parallels the one by Christian missionaries, quite matching it in expanse and facilities. These Ekal Vidyalaya are similar to the ones which impart Hindu nationalist philosophy to tribal children from Orissa in the south and Rajasthan in the west. Demonising Christians is part of the extra-curricular activity.

The Anti-conversion Act was not passed by a BJP government in the state or in the Centre. It was enacted in 1978 when Arunachal was not even a state but a Union Territory. It remained in cold storage till 2024 when a series of steps became harbingers f a toughening if stance against the Church.

As other similar laws in a dozen central and north Indian states, it too does not name Christianity or Islam, and prohibits conversion “by use of force or inducement or by fraudulent means”. Many states have now weaponised this law and punishment can range up to ten years for the pastor engaged in proselytising, or a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman and making her a Muslim. Every act of conversion is to be reported to the Deputy Commissioner of the district concerned.

The Act was contested even before it received Presidential assent. The Christian community formed the Arunachal Christian Forum which has ensured that the law remained in abeyance all these decades. Forum president Tarh Miri says, to push for the repeal of the Act. It continues to lead the push against the Act” which Miri called an “anti-Christian law.” “If the bill is enforced, there are chances of it being misused by the district administration or police,” he said.

The number of Christians in the state has grown rapidly over the years, and in the last census of 2011, they were enumerated as 30.26% of the population, making Christianity the largest religion in the state, if by a whisker.

In 2018, Chief Minister Pema Khandu had told a meeting of the Arunachal Pradesh Catholic Association that the state government was considering to repeal of the Act.

But, as in Manipur in yet another parallel, the call to stop conversions was routed through a public interest litigation in 2022 by a lawyer, Mr. Tambo Tamin, in the Itanagar bench of the Guwahati High Court appealing for judicial intervention over the “failure” of the state government to frame rules for the Act.

On September 30, 2024, the State government told the court that draft rules had been framed and would be finalised in six months. That would mean March end or April may see the law operationalised.

Preparations apparently had begun last year when government strengthened the existing Inner Line Permit system that makes it mandatory non-residents including foreigners to apply for a permit to enter the state. Such permits are also required for some other North East states, including Manipur.

The entry permit system gives the state powers through its police to check any evangelist to enter the state.

The church in Arunachal no longer really needs people from outer areas to reach out to various remote areas to preach. Unlike in North Indian states, or even in. Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west of the country where the Christian population is small, Arunachal now has a sizeable community which can take of itself if the state itself does not turn on the people.

The Sangh may possibly have met its match in this state.

Courtesy: Mainstream Weekly

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It is a tense 48 hours between the Exit Polls that consumed television time on March 7, when the last ballot was cast in Uttar Pradesh for its legislative assembly, and when the actual results will be available on March 10.

The “predictions” on TV will not matter later this week, but they have sent pulses racing, and anxieties mount. Visions of hung assemblies in Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur have sent a complex set of actions in motion, that speaks of the fear people have of corruption, strong-arming and sheer political manipulation than a celebration of a successful exercise once again in parliamentary democracy.

Political parties have rented out every spare hotel or resort they can spot to house their newly minted members of legislative assemblies. They remember that in Goa, five years ago, it was the Congress that had a majority of its candidates winning, but when the dust lifted, it was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that had formed the government.

This time, therefore, they have sent their most aggressive political plug-uglies to keep their flock from jumping over the stiles. And this I guess, they have also sent in their cash chests, just in case Rs 500 notes in stacks, just so they do not fall short of someone’s greedy expectations. This too is a lesson from last time.

Life is no less easier in Punjab, where the soothsayers say the Aam Admi Party (AAP) and its comedian star leader will form a government with the Dalit chief minister of the Congress; its former chief minister, his predecessor from the Akali Dal and the BJP may trail far behind. The real controllers know that the exit polls are just an expensive guesswork.

The real anxiety is in Uttar Pradesh, even though everyone said it is a foregone conclusion in favour of the BJP. But it is an ominous wait which leaves a big hollow in the pit of the stomach, specially of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Adityanath. There can be good news for only one of them, irrespective of how the votes add up.

Modi has fought the UP elections as if it was Gujarat and he was competing to be chief minister for the fourth time. Adityanath has seen several times that his face is not on the same billboard as Modi’s.

If the margin over Samajwadi Party (SP) led by former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav is high, will Modi think the people have chosen his successor? And if it low, will Adityanath fear for his political future.

Just imagine if exit polls had been held after each phase of voting in an election spread over so many weeks. Government machinery, the war chests of the ruling party and its crony capitalists and the muscle on the ground would have made sure there would be nothing left to the vagaries of the decision of actual voters, with or without the EVMs.

It was for this reason, that the courts some years ago, banned exit polls till after final voting lest they influence voter behaviour, or voter safety.

Anyway, no one would link the life and death of India, its marginalised communities and, in particular, its two main religious minorities, merely on the continuing rise of the RSS BJP hold on state governments. 

Even if a political party with a clear secular ideological mooring gets no seats, it is present at the grassroots. It wins municipal or ward elections, or the occasional seat in the Legislative Assembly, surprising friends, and foes in equal measure. 

Also importantly, it leads protests, holds demonstrations. It stages that popular Indian thing, the Dharna, or peaceful sit-in at police stations and before embassies when untoward things happen at home and abroad to the people of India. It issues situation white papers. Above all, it calls press conferences to draw the media’s attention to unfulfilled official promises, and the crisis of confidence.

The reference to press conferences is not a veiled reference to the current prime minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi, and to the fact that in the years he has been in office since his election in May 2014, he has just never addressed an assembled press.

His policy is not holding a press conference. Instead, it is to chat casually with some chosen television reporter, most often to one from a news agency of his choice, on items as diverse as biting into a ripe mango, and reminiscences of his childhood as someone who sold tea at a railway platform.

He also addresses young and old citizens in a monthly monologue on the government radio, on similar issues. There is no opportunity to ask him a question.

But to come back to the story of political parties in the opposition, all that public interaction their leaders have with the people and the media is often the solitary evidence that India has a thriving democracy.

The noise of the opposition motivates ordinary citizens, especially those not captive to the Hindutva ideology of the ruling dispensation or the leader’s definition of nationalism and patriotism, it’s Islamophobic rant, and its apparent lack of concern for the poor.

It is not always that such parties win. Often, they don’t. But they remain important.

Without that semblance of opposition and challenge, we end up as Hitler’s Germany, El Duce’s Italy, or a Latin American dictatorship. We, in India, recall that every major industry and bank in Germany supported Hitler. Crony capitalists benefited the most. 

But a colonial, racist and anti-worker Winston Churchill, who had supreme powers as prime minister in the war years, was immediately thrown out of office after the war, as he was now seen as an anachronism. That happens in functional democracies.

This generates hope in India. 

Mr Narendra Modi won in the general elections of 2014 and 2019, in which he went into battle with a highly surcharged campaign that targeted Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and possibly its most popular leader, and his “dynasty”.

Mr Modi then turned to the followers of Islam. He conflated a thousand years of history into the dog whistle words Moghul, Babur, Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb’s name has been wiped out of road signs. The 5- century old Babri mosque had been demolished back in 1992.

With all that engineering with historical timelines, and occasional war talk against neighbour Pakistan, Mr Modi has never been able to entice a majority of the Hindu community. 

On the other hand, the main opposition to his ideology has come from the Hindu community.

Much, though not all, of the Left support is from various sections of the Hindu population. Every single one of the caste-based political parties of north India are of the same religious identity.

These include the various segments of socialist parties that were part of the Jai Prakash Narain movement against the Congress of Indira Gandhi in the ‘Seventies. They were empowered by the implementation of the Mandal Commission report on Backward Communities in the 1990s, and rose to rule some of India’s biggest provinces, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. 

Each one of them remains strongly opposed to the BJP in general and to Mr Modi particularly. Most have been warm to Muslims and Christians.

That too is the stance of the many groups formed in several states by splinters of the old Congress party. These include the Trinamool Congress (TMC) that rules Bengal, the Nationalist Congress that has ruled Maharashtra in various coalitions, and the ruling parties of the two Telugu stages of Telangana and Andhra.

Mr Modi’s pocket media and the exit polls cannot take attention away from the current reality of post Covid India. Government has withheld unemployment data, but it is common knowledge that people have been hit hard. Millions remain jobless. The worst sufferers have been working women, and those in the rural and unorganised sectors.

Tens of millions of the children of the poor have lost two years of school for want of a smartphone and of internet connection for virtual classes. In the process they also lost that crucial and free mid-day meal which provided vital protein and vitamins to the children.

The situation of religious minorities is all too well known to need narration. The years of mob lynchings segued into an institutionalised vengeance in further expanding and weaponizing the anti-conversion laws. These now cover a large chunk of the political landscape. Karnataka and Haryana are the last two who passed the laws while the election campaign was at full throttle in Uttar Pradesh.

Will the campaign rhetoric and the din of the exit polls dishearten political parties, and their cadres, to render them comatose? That would be fatal with the general elections just two years away, in 2024.

Intelligentsia and civil society have called upon all sections of the population not to give up hope. They must continue to dream of a better future, irrespective of the exit polls, and the results.

Related:

Assembly Election Exit Polls: Will media pundits be proved wrong again?
Opposition parties demand transfer of Varanasi DM
EVM security: Whose responsibility is it anyway?

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