If it was to be about optics and strong messaging in soft syntax, the Vatican meeting of Pope Francis with visiting prime minister Narendra Modi has fulfilled it purpose. Mr Modi has probably insinuated himself into the good books of a section of Catholics in poll bound Goa and church stronghold Kerala. And Mr Modi finally has invited the Pope to visit India. No dates, but Indian church hopes it will be  before 2022 is over. 

The official visuals of the 55 minute meeting show Mr Modi, sporting a well-styled mid-length beard, performing his practiced manoeuvre of a hug with the Pontiff. Francis smiles and reciprocates. Gifts are exchanged and after which the two move on to a desk for a formal talk. With interpretation, the actual talks take perhaps 20 minutes. But there is some triumph in that it exceeded the scheduled 30 minutes. 

But did the Pope tell Modi of his concern at the persecution of Christians and Muslims, the  curtailment of human rights and civil liberties, and the desertification of the Constitutional landscape? And did Modi repeat his party’s charge that Christians disturb the peace by fraudulent conversions, Muslims are anti national, and civil society seditious? Not in these words. The Jesuit who is now Pontiff  has his own words for the occasion. 

Modi himself would not go beyond tweeting “Had a very warm meeting with Pope Francis. I had the opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues with him and also invited him to visit India. @Pontifex.” His gift, officials tweeted, were a silver candelabra, and a book on India’s initiatives in Climate Change initiatives. Fitting gift, that book, for the Papal meeting is on  side-lines of the summit on that impending crisis, and the Pope’s own  oft voiced concern on what mankind has done to its home, the planet earth. 

It is in the Pope’s gift that optimists and activists seek meaning, and home. Francis gave a circular bronze casting illustrating the biblical verse “The wilderness will become a fruitful field”, a quotation from the Old Testament Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapter  32, verse 15. 

No one is, of course, expecting miracles. Not even those who ensured that the Vatican, and Italian, media give comprehensive coverage in recent days to the gross violation  of human rights and religious freedom in India. Reports carry the action of non-state and state actors, including the Sangh Parivar, and  prosecution and investigating agencies currently cracking down on individuals and groups in a finely choreographed black opera. 

There will be no withdrawal immediately of the central investigations of a cardinal’s books, or an assurance that a lesser bishop will be absolved of  serial sexual assault. FCRA regulations are not expected to be softened. And the  state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by an Indian pontiff no less, will not suddenly ask Sangh cadres to stop beating up pastors, assaulting nuns, and young Muslim men. 

But the Pope and his senior curia, such as his secretary of state who also met Mr Modi, are no doubt acutely aware of the Indian situation today even as the National Human Rights Commission or the National Minorities Commission who continue to be in a state of denial. The media has strongly spoken of the atmosphere of xenophobia. 

The Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in its greetings on Deepavali, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue speaks of the need for solidarity and fraternity. It hopes the festival will “light up” lives, even in the midst of the anxiety and uncertainty arising from the pandemic. 

“Both Christians and Hindus, can bring the light of hope in people’s lives in such challenging times”. There have been silver linings of solidarity and fraternity. The power of solidarity through assisting the needy, more so with an interreligious character and responsibility, gives visibility to the light of hope. Bringing light together in people’s lives through interreligious solidarity also validates the usefulness and resourcefulness of religious traditions in society,” the statement said. 

“It is incumbent upon religious and community leaders to nurture the spirit of fraternity among their followers with a view to helping them walk and work together with the people of other religious traditions, most especially during crises and calamities of every kind,” the Council statement concluded.

It is the verse illustrated in the bronze casting that theologians in the human rights family see refences to a hope of better governance in the land. It is, of course, not exactly the Raj Dharam mantra that the then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee sought to remind the then chief minister of Gujarat in the 2002 pogram against the Muslim community. The Pope doesn’t speak in such language. Jesus himself spoke in parables. The connect resonates. 

In the mouth of the Prophet Isiah, the most prolific predicter from the age before the birth of Jesus,  is the vision of an age of peace and prosperity after the end of the prevailing tribulations. As explained by a Biblical commentary,  the beginning of the chapter says “That magistrates should do their duty in their places, and the powers answer the great ends for which they were ordained of.” 

And on the 12^th verse, the subject of the gift, the Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament says it gives a comprehensive prophesy of hope, “the destruction of the false would be followed by the realization of the true.

 “Until the Spirit is poured out over us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is counted as the forest. And justice makes its abode in the desert, and righteousness settles down upon the fruit-field. And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the reward of righteousness rest and security for ever. And my people dwells in a place of peace, and in trustworthy, safe dwellings, and in cheerful resting-places.”

What more can people hope for, even those who do not believe in Abhramic Deity and prophesies of the Old Testament. To the believer, this is a chastisement of all that injures the people. 

The following is  Chapter 32 of Isiah in the Old Testament, which makes for salutary reading for everyone, Christian’s including:

.The Kingdom of Righteousness 

32 See, a king will reign in righteousness

and rulers will rule with justice.

2 Each one will be like a shelter from the wind

and a refuge from the storm,

like streams of water in the desert

and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

3 Then the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed,

and the ears of those who hear will listen.

4 The fearful heart will know and understand,

and the stammering tongue will be fluent and clear.

5 No longer will the fool be called noble

nor the scoundrel be highly respected.

6 For fools speak folly,

their hearts are bent on evil:

They practice ungodliness

and spread error concerning the Lord;

the hungry they leave empty

and from the thirsty they withhold water.

7 Scoundrels use wicked methods,

they make up evil schemes

to destroy the poor with lies,

even when the plea of the needy is just.

8 But the noble make noble plans,

and by noble deeds they stand.

The Women of Jerusalem

9 You women who are so complacent,

rise up and listen to me;

you daughters who feel secure,

hear what I have to say!

10 In little more than a year

you who feel secure will tremble;

the grape harvest will fail,

and the harvest of fruit will not come.

11 Tremble, you complacent women;

shudder, you daughters who feel secure!

Strip off your fine clothes

and wrap yourselves in rags.

12 Beat your breasts for the pleasant fields,

for the fruitful vines

13 and for the land of my people,

a land overgrown with thorns and briers—

yes, mourn for all houses of merriment

and for this city of revelry.

14 The fortress will be abandoned,

the noisy city deserted;

citadel and watchtower will become a wasteland forever,

the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks,

15 till the Spirit is poured on us from on high,

and the desert becomes a fertile field,

and the fertile field seems like a forest.

16 The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,

his righteousness live in the fertile field.

17 The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;

its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.

18 My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,

in secure homes,

in undisturbed places of rest.

19 Though hail flattens the forest

and the city is levelled completely,

20 how blessed you will be,

sowing your seed by every stream,

and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.

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It is now official. The Kerala Catholic Bishops Conference has confirmed that Pope Francis, known to the Catholic community of the world as the Holy Father, will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Vatican this Saturday, October 30. It is a courtesy call by Mr. Modi, who will be in Rome for a scheduled international conference. The meeting will take place reportedly at 8.30 P.M for 30 minutes.

The high-profile scheduled meeting of US President Joe Biden with the Pope, has invited global interest because of the issue of a woman’s right to have an abortion, and the Catholic Church’s stringent pro-life policy. A Modi-Francis meet will get eyeballs on the issue of persecution of Christians in many states in India. The custodial death of octogenarian and ailing Jesuit Fr Stan Swamy is much too recent to have receded from anyone’s memory. It was the Modi regime that incarcerated the activist priest known in India and the world for his outstanding work on the rights and dignity of India’s indigenous peoples (Adivasis).

The Vatican is acutely aware of the human rights and freedom of faith situation in India. Even before the Vatican officially confirmed the courtesy call of Mr. Modi, the information portals of the headquarters of the universal Catholic Church had carried a long report on the survey of churches in Karnataka. The Archbishop of Bangalore, Peter Machado, had in a press conference denounced the survey as likely to fan further persecution at the hands of militant and violent extremists.

And Mr. Modi himself has been urged by the Church to use his power to see that these elements stop attacking communities, churches and educational institutions. The latest such letter to Mr. Modi was written by Bhopal Archbishop Leo Cornelio who said the prime minister must “take effective steps to contain rising violence against Christians.”

No one really expects a miraculous end to the persecution of religious minorities in India after this meet. The Indian government simply does not acknowledge international criticism of its human rights situation. Its persistent defence has been that India has a secular Constitution, and it has institutions such as the courts, the National Human Rights Commission and the minority commissions as guarantors of the rights of citizens. It ignores even the criticism from the United Nations (UN) that the constitutional institutions have themselves suffered massive erosion during Mr. Modi’s term in office.

The Christian community makes up make up 2.3 per cent of India’s 1.3 billion population, and can be said to politically influential in Goa, Kerala and three small states in the North East, namely Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya. The rest of the population in most of these states (except Kerala where the Muslim minority is also a significant factor) are mostly Hindus.

Much is being made of impending elections in Goa with the BJP hoping that Modi’s meeting with the Pope will appease the Catholic voters, who make up a quarter of the state. The BJP has been in power for many years, but with the Congress, AAP and Trinamool Congress in the fray this time, BJP hopes that weaning away even a section of the Catholic vote may help it retain power.

Insiders say that the Indian government pushed hard for the visit to the Vatican to happen, with Kerala Bishops playing a key role. And yet, Mr. Modi has for seven years resisted repeated requests by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) to invite the Pope on an official visit. Pope Francis, who has come as close to home as Sri Lanka, is said to be keen to meet the Christian community in India.

From Modi’s point of view, it would have been strange for him to spend three days in Rome without making a courtesy visit to the Vatican which is in reality not much bigger than a district of Rome though it is a sovereign state with Pope Francis as its Head of State. Though it is not entirely clear which back-channel interlocutors made this courtesy meeting possible, but several important Malayalee leaders of the BJP, including a state governor, have been intermediaries between the Kerala church and the Prime Minister’s office.

Mr. Modi, had to listen to US vice president, Kamala Harris, stress democracy and human rights when he called on her during his United Nations visit. The Pope may not be so direct, perhaps, but his position on human rights, freedom of faith and expression, are well known. He is a Jesuit, and the community is passionate about issues of development, rights and justice. Fr Stan Swamy, who was unjustly incarcerated by this regime was a Jesuit too.

India has been indicted in various international indices for its human rights record, and in particular for the persecution of Muslims and Christians.

The Indian Christian community is not expecting an immediate change in the ground situation or the Sangh Parivar and BJP attitude. It does hope that the judicial process will uphold the rights of all minorities, as also those of Dalits and Adivasis amongst whom the Church works.

The September October season has seen the most vicious attacks and curbs in the Christian community, apart from the continuing debasing of the much larger Muslim population.

The Bhopal Archbishop wrote to the prime minister just two days ago, on October 26– days after Hindustan Times had announced Mr. Modi’s Vatican visit. “Very recently certain individuals and groups have stepped up a hate campaign against minority groups, especially Christians,” he said.  

He pointed to the harassment of two Catholic nuns in the Mau district of Uttar Pradesh on October 10. A Hindutva mob took the Ursuline Franciscan Sisters Gracy Monteiro and Roshi Minj from a Mau bus stand to the nearest police station accusing them of illegal religious conversion. They were kept in the police station for over six hours without any formal complaint. [This was carried by Sabrangindia in an exclusive interview with the Nuns.]

In this letter, Archbishop Cornelio also cited the hate speech case of BJP legislator Rameshwar Sharma, who appealed to Hindus in a speech to “stay away” from Christians and Muslims, stressing that contact would destroy Hindus. Such public discourse from elected representatives seemed to be a “deliberate attempt to whip up communal hatred against minority communities is a matter of great concern for everyone.”

Rising religious fundamentalism and hatred, the prelate said, is “a threat to the growth of the nation,” the Archbishop wrote to Mr. Modi.

Various Christian organisations, including UFI, United Christian Forum and Persecution Relief have documented 305 attacks on Christians spread over 21 states since the beginning of the year. BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 66 incidents followed by Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh (47), tribal people’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-ruled Jharkhand (30) and BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh (26), according to data collected since January. Karnataka, another BJP-ruled state in the south, also witnessed a spurt in violence against Christians with 32 incidents.

Will the October 30 meeting, in any way, mitigate the hate and violence that Indian Christians have been subject to, especially since 2014?

Related:

Madhya Pradesh: Mob gives Catholic school 15 days to install a statue of goddess Saraswati

Over 300 attacks on Christians reported this year, over 2000 women, Adivasis and Dalits injured

Survey of Churches, anti conversion laws only empower radical mobs: Archbishop Peter Machado

Chhattisgarh: A dead woman’s ‘ghar wapsi’ before final rites were allowed

Will Karnataka soon enact a tough “anti-conversion law”?

The post News of anti-Christian violence precedes Modi in Vatican call appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Till he was buried in a coffin, with a Christian burial liturgy helmed by the local clergy, in the cemetery attached to the Church of North India Parish in Gaya town in the state of Bihar, the state’s police and media insisted that 14-year-old Nitish Kumar was a Hindu, who had been murdered by his relatives.

This assertion absolved them, they felt, from not treating the crime under India’s otherwise rigorous hate crime laws, and of course its British era penal code for homicide and conspiracy.

Nitish Kumar, who helped a pastor conduct services in their house in Kamtanagar village in Gaya and elsewhere, was splashed with liquid fuel oil and set afire by three unidentified men on a motorbike on the morning of August 13, as he was coming home from buying vegetables for the family. Passers-by noticed the boy in flames. He died in a private hospital on September 26, after weeks in agony.

None of the state’s major newspapers covered the crime, and India’s East zone English and Hindi media majors did not deem it important enough. A minor crime in India’s Badlands, where targeted violence, sharpshooter gangs and paid assassins have a free hand. Films have been made on this, among them the blockbuster Gangs of Wasseypur.

Bihar is also known for its many cases of violence against Muslims and Dalits, and in recent years, for repeated cases of persecution of Christians, specially of itinerant pastors, home churches, and recent converts. It is second only to neighbouring Uttar Pradesh.

A month after the incident, The Morning Star, an international News portal, brought the case to light in a report on September 13. Its correspondent quoted family members to say the attackers were suspected to be from Hindutva fundamentalist groups. Nitish had suffered 65 percent burns, hospital staff said, with 15 percent deep burns, said Sushma Sharma, a hospital volunteer treating Kumar. Pastor Rajkumar Bharati, also known as Began Mochi, head of the church the Kumar family attends in Kurwa, confirmed the severity of the injuries.

Nitish’s mother and two brothers cared for him in the hospital, while his father pedaled a cycle-cart for a living. The family was not able to get Nitish to the hospital in Patna, the state capital 90 kilometres from their home, until four days after the attack.

Morning Star quoted Nitish’s 17-year-old brother, Sanjeet Kumar saying the family had faced opposition from Hindu extremists since hey adopted the Christian faith two years ago. He said, “A month before the attack, some extremists spread word in the village that they would expel all the people who follow the Christian faith from the village.” Sanjeet said, in December, some groups blocked the routes of Christians going to Sunday services in Kurwa and questioned them.

“They would question everybody as to why do they go for prayer,” Sanjeet said. “They used to ask us if we had been given money or other allurement to attend the meetings, or were we forced to do so. So, all of us clarified that nobody asks us to come to church. We all go to church of our own will, and we go there for the Lord.” The family continued with their home prayer services attended by about 20 persons.

After Morning Star News contacted Gaya City Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar, he obtained a statement from Sanjeet. “I have informed the SHO [Station Head Officer], and we are investigating the case,” Rakesh Kumar told Morning Star News. But no report was registered. The assailants remain untraced.

Eventually a major newspaper’s editor noticed the report and asked his regional correspondent to investigate. The correspondent rung up this columnist in New Delhi to ask what had happened in Gaya. Later correspondence was on WhatsApp. I wrote, “All indication is that the attack was possibly motivated by who are who opposed to his family becoming Christian some time ago, and refusing to do a ‘ghar wapsi’ [the coercive conversion to Hinduism that is done by Sangh groups in many parts of the country]. The crime must be condemned by everyone. I am surprised the local police and the state government have not acted. I call upon the chief minister to ensure the best medical treatment to save the child’s life. His family must get protection.”

The correspondent said, “I would have done a story, but during the one hour and 30 minutes I spent with the family members of the poor boy… They kept iterating that they were Hindus. There was nobody in Patna to keep them under duress. I asked them in every possible manner… Also showed them the news on BCCN news. The police are claiming it to be a result of fight among family members. There has been no police complaint or FIR till now.”

The correspondent was convinced only after he received photographs and videos of the funeral and burial. His report is still to be published.

The FIR, the first information report, is the all-important legal document in cases of crime on which not only investigations, but upon which the entire criminal justice process in India is based. Voluntary groups have for decades pointed out that vulnerable communities, among them Adivasis, Dalits, and religious minorities, find it almost terminally difficult to get the police to accept their complaints and register them under the legal process.

All too often, religious minorities and Dalits have found the police turn aggressive, and threaten to prosecute them. Christians though the decades, and Muslims from this year, have in fact been arraigned under the impossibly strident Anti-Conversion Acts prevalent in most major states.

India ranked 10th on Christian support organisation Open Doors’ 2021 World Watch List of the countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian, as it was in 2020. The country was 31st in 2013, but its position worsened after Mr. Narendra Modi came to power.

*The author is a human rights activist and columnist working in the field of minority rights.

Other pieces by John Dayal:

Modi and Sangh shape education in their own mould

The post The life and murder of a Bihar Christian youth, and State impunity in India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

First Published on 25 Jun 2020

On June 25, 1975, we woke up without electricity. Sanjay Gandhi had switched on the Emergency. My firstborn child was three months old, and I was a young newspaper reporter.

By the time we reached our office, the sun was high, the hush was loud. Blissfully, the ignorance of what lay ahead was total, from Editor in Chief down to the youngest on the Crime Beat.

 Our offices were on what we grandiosely called Fleet Street, which was not a very wide road, just a kilometre-long link connecting the Walled City and New Delhi, via a large Muslim graveyard, a former jail with a hangman’s noose, and a ruin where the British had shot dead the sons of the last Emperor of North India. Ominous, but in later months, a sort of a regular “beat”, for correspondents. It was the bodies that were brought in which told us of what had happened somewhere, in town. Much as now.

 Every graveyard, or cremation ground, has a “normal” day’s business, changing perhaps with season. An influx speaks of disaster, violence, police firing perhaps, or, as now, Covid’s strike. That is how reporters such as Jawaid Laiq, Ajoy Bose and some other colleagues, broke stories of Turkman Gate, for instance, iconic and historic memories of the State of Internal Emergency Indira Gandhi imposed when her membership of the Lok Sabha, and therefore her premiership, was struck down by a high court judge in Allahabad.

So what’s common across the chasm of 45 years to me as a reporter?

 Prime ministers are dictatorial. The post gives huge powers. Even the urine-drinking, his own, not a cow’s I may add, Morarji Desai, who came after the Emergency had been lifted in just under two years, was imperious. As was his successor Charan Singh. But Indira was an empress, no doubt about it. In those days without security concerns, young reporters could stand within inches of her, taking notes of what she told hired and I suppose a little frightened crowd brought to her house by her chamchas or by tycoons seeking favours. She could smile. But we took no selfies. 

This is not about what led to the Emergency, and made Indira so afraid of her own shadow. Even now, the final word is yet to be written. People who were involved have not written the honest biographies they should. The Left has been left with much guilt that it helped legitimise the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The scraps have come from people who also wrote notes of apology. The senior editors became complicit in the shenanigans of the rapid succession of prime ministers and short-lived governments. The good ones passed away.

The process is now complete. The media is owned by corporations, which have grown on government favours. The journalists are contractual labour, whipped into a screaming frenzy both by job insecurity and transmitted orders. But satellite television, 4-G Internet and Apps, which can be read even by the unlettered, have enormously multiplied their power, specially their power for evil.

In retrospect, two things emerge out of the emergence.

The first is the Concentration of Power, and with it, its accompaniments of one or two Extra-constitutional Centres of Authority and their sub-agendas. The suspension of human rights, constitutional rights and civil liberties becomes a mere mechanism or instrument, just as the intuitive subservience of Constitutional offices, police and the justice system.

The second is the salesmanship, the selling of the Grand Lie that the State of Emergency is Good for You, good for the nation, good for the future generations, good for the majority religion, and good for the minorities. The bitter pill to ward off illness, the Chloroquine of governance, so to say.

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi is not a match on Narendrabhai Damordardas Modi. She had just one centre of extra-constitutional authority, her son Sanjay. Sanjay’s wife and son are now with Modi. As are many former Congressmen and all the corporate giants that she helped birth and grow. Mr. Modi has the entire RSS with him, which Indira helped sanitise from its earlier state of total exclusion. Its current commander, Mohan Bhagwat, can dare say he is capable of raising an army to defend India in three days. A time frame borrowed, alas, from a man of the Abrahamic religions he so despises.

Modi’s trains, instead of running on time, may get lost and wander through the countryside with hungry migrant passengers on board, but he is he world master in selling the Grand Lie, the Fake News.

Easy, actually, when you have call centers with thousands of hands, writing programmes, evolving algorithms, morphing and photo shopping photographs, to multiply and transmit the hate slogans and mimes the core teams in Nagpur and New Delhi have created. Black, then, is white. Islamophobia is nationalism.

 Above all, Modi has Amit Shah.

Indira, and the Emergency, had nothing comparable.

(The author is one of India’s foremost voices on human rights, civil liberties and religious freedom. A researcher, and writer, he has a long record of investigating and producing substantive and influential documentation on targeted violence against religious minorities, Dalits and Tribals. His work has been published in magazines and newspapers  in India, Asia and Europe. His books include For Reasons of State – Delhi under the Emergency [Penguin] [published 1977, republished 2018 with Ajoy Bose], Gujarat 2002 – Untold and Retold Stories, A Matter of Equity – Interrogating Secularism in India.  With activists Harsh Mander and Natasha Badhwar, he co-edited Reflections: Karwan-e Mohabbat’s Journey of Solidarity Through a Wounded India. He is a frequent commentator on human rights issues, politics and strategic affairs.)

“In 1977, two reporters, both in their 20s, occupied highly advantageous positions during the 19 months of the Emergency to observe the turmoil wrought in  Delhi. The nation found itself in a whirlwind of fear, confusion, violence and destabilization, stemming from forced sterilizations, heartless evictions in the thousands, and the cruel imprisonment of many. Part reportage and part human stories, this definitive volume evokes the life and times of the Emergency and how it unfolded, and remains perennially relevant.”

Related:

How the RSS leadership bowed to Indira Gandhi: 45th anniv of the Emergency

The New ‘Emergency’!

When the Government tried to browbeat the Judiciary The NJAC Controversy

This government has all but actually declared a war on its own people: Teesta Setalvad

The post Time flies, memories fade, nightmares become real appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Swami Agnivesh retrieved the sanctity of the ochre/saffron robes from hijackers posing as nationalists, challenged them on their turf, and defeated them more often than not. I’ve known him four decades, perhaps, as a political activist, a minister in Haryana, the campaigner against bonded labour and child rights, as a fighter against the Sangh Parivar. We were together on hundreds of common platforms in India and the world.

We differed too. The man from Srikakulam, now in Andhra, who was also a man from Orissa, taught at a Jesuit institutions in  Kolkata, vigorously opposed evangelisation. He was against conversions, even when challenged and asked if he also opposed freedom of faith of the dispossessed and the so called outcastes. I have a bitter personal experience with him in Gujarat 2002, too.

But who else, clad in the dress once worn by Swami Vivekanand, could argue and answer back everyone from a Shankaracharya down to the knife bearing thug who said he was protecting India?

Of course they attacked him, more than once, grievously injuring him sometimes. This photograph from my archives is when he was recovering from the last vicious attack on him in Jharkhand. Delhi Archbishop Anil Couto, Fr  Felix of the Catholic archdiocese. Commission for Interfaith Dialogue, and I had called on the Swami in his Delhi home.

Saluts Swami Agnivesh.

The post One of the bravest man I’ve met, Swami Agnivesh: John Dayal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

We have called it the biggest atrocity in the Indian subcontinent on the Christian community since the tragedy of the West coast Catholics who were taken into captivity and marched to Seringapatam.

The question facing us today is; have we as Christians, now remembering Kandhamal, ever had empathy for other victims of targeted religious violence? Do we see the political and social linkages that exist even in recent history of targeted violence in India? Do we see the connect between the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur and Bhilai, the earlier killings and forced disappearances in the Punjab, the scores of terrible massacres and pogroms against Muslims even before 1992 and the demolition of the Babri mosque, and certainly the many more after that?

The current phase of lynching, “goli maro sa**** ko, the fake FIRs, the lying charge sheets, and the bigoted magistracy are the common links. They trace the route of the virus of communalism in Indian politics, and in the criminal justice system.

Many rulings of the Supreme court in recent months have sent us reeling, shaking our faith in the system. The media was never on our side, really. Today it is ranged against us, a part of the battery of weapons marshalled by the religious nationalist forces.

The Education policy, the food policies, the environment policies, each one of them seems weaponised.

The impunity generated by the Corona pandemic lockdown, and the consequent absence of civil society on the streets and in the courts, has aggravated the environment of targeted hate and violence. The targets are not only Muslims, but also Christians in most of the major states and the National Capital Territory. This is complemented with the insufficient, even suppressed, data on crime recorded in the country.

Thousands of decent journalists in the Covid economic crash have also severely constrained accurate collection of data from the field about the persecution of religious minorities, especially of the Christian community. Even in normal times, the police were loath to register cases. Communally motivated crime is either unreported, or under reported. The victims have no recourse to the normal systems of reporting to the police, and severely restricted access to courts for relief.

The consummately organized hate campaign against the Muslim population, beginning mid-December 2019, and erupting violently in mid-February 2020 in the North eastern suburbs of Delhi has raised structural questions on the security of all religious minorities in the country, with the Christian community questioning how safe they are if the Muslims are so brutally targeted.  Islamophobia reigns. And Christo phobia is as potent.

In the violence that was unleashed in Delhi, nine mosques were burnt to the ground, as were academic institutions and the small shops that were the economic stay of the Muslims. Thousands were rendered homeless. At least 43 Muslims and 10 Hindus were killed. Front-line lieutenants of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party called upon their followers to shoot the ‘@#$*! %’, a thinly veiled targeting of Muslims and activists protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by the government.

Reports of the Delhi Minority Commission, Amnesty International and others detail them in shocking minutiae.

The Christian community perhaps had supported the citizen agitation against the CAA, particularly the protest at Shaheen Bagh, the site of the protest by women which triggered over 250 similar agitations across the country by women and youth. But not as vigorously as Sikhs, Dalit and Tribal people also joined the protests.

Alas, not many come to our aid, or join our movements against persecution, for the rights of Dalit Christians.

In the year 2019, the Christian community in India continued to face incidents of targeted violence and hate crimes. Incidents collated by the Religious Liberties Commission of the Evangelical fellowship of India, the United Christian Forum Helpline and  Persecution Relief  showed over 370 cases of violence against Christians during the year. These included violence, intimidation or harassment against worshippers and priests, as also attacks of various intensity on church buildings and house churches in villages.

Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state of India maintained its position as the worst offender in the persecution of Christians. Compared to the 2018 high of 132 incidents, anti-Christian violence in Uttar Pradesh reduced somewhat to 86 incidents with the focus shifting from the eastern districts around Jaunpur which had been targeted in the past.

Disturbingly the state’s Law Commission, in November 2019, drafted a controversial report recommending heavy penalties of up to seven years in prison to persons deemed to be violating a proposed new law against conversions. The cover page graphic and illustrations of the 268 paged report are taken from www.hindujagruiti.org, the website of Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, whose explicit goal is to establish a Hindu Rashtra.

The situation has remained grim after the Covid Lockdown. Targeted violence against Christians seems to continue unabated. Most distressing is the massive ostracisation and misuse of state machinery in rural India.  All too many cases have been recorded by Church groups despite the national lockdown being in place.

In most incidents, Christians were summoned to village meetings when they refused to participate in religious rituals that violate their conscience. They were called on the pretext of working out a compromise but were instead threatened to either comply with the diktats of the village council or face consequences. When the Christians refused to go against their own beliefs, they were physically attacked by mobs, often 50-strong.

Jharkhand, which had seen two cases of lynching of Christians in 2018 during the rash of similar cases against Muslims by cow vigilantes, saw four major assault cases in May alone. Though no one was killed, women were molested. On May 25, local authorities had banned Christians in Pundiguttu village from getting rations from the government outlet.

At a village council meeting at Pundiguttu village on May 27, 2020, the following decisions were taken: Christians should revert to their previous religion within a period of five days or else face the consequences; they will not be allowed to use the village watering well, or to buy from the local shops. In fact, they were not allowed to talk with non-Christians, and told they would be fined Rs. 5000/- if they broke these rules.

This is a call to our community, of course, but also to civil society. Targeted violence against Christians goes unreported, unseen, unrepresented. The victims cry alone in this sectioned environment. Only a collective, united struggle by all communities and the powerful civil society can stand up to the militant political communal elements. This alone will also persuade the Institutions of State to realise their duty to an India where people of all persuasions, all communities live not just in harmony, but in fraternity, as equal citizens. A secular India, as some of us call it.

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The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has saved us all a lot of time writing long critiques, with its admission that the Education Policy the Union Cabinet approved in the silence of the Covid catastrophe bears its imprint. The Sangh’s several spokespersons focussed on the mother tongue – a polite phrase to mean the official language of a state, and not really the tongue spoken at home such as Maithili in parts of Bihar or Kui, of the Kondhs of Kandhamal – as the medium of education at the primary level. This was an early climbdown after Tamil Nadu rejected early attempts to foist Hindi. But the education policy bears the Sangh stamp much through its dreary path. 

It also bears Mr Modi’s distinct stamp, of course, who wants the Indian mind purged of all the garbage that Jawaharlal Nehru dreamt for the people of the newly independent India back in 1947. 

The vicious attacks in recent months on the many giants who led the Education Ministry, among them Maulana Abul kalam Azad, the preeminent jurist MC Chagla, Professor Humayun Kabir, Dr KL Shrimali, Dr VKRV Rao, and Professor Nurul Hasan, is an indication of the mindset, if an indication was needed. 

One wonders if a President Kalam would have emerged if his Education Policy was in force when he was a student. Instead of becoming the redoubtable rocket engineer that he became because of his single minded determination, he would have perhaps become a wonderful expert fisheries engineer. All that gentle persuasion to students to take the easy way to vocations instead of philosophy, economics, literature, or physics, the subject I love, is even older than the Sangh. Dates back to Manu. 

A New Education Policy was proposed by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, within weeks of returning to power for a second term in May 2019. It was a part of the Alliance’s election promise. The people at large were called upon to respond to the policy draft of over 470 pages, published on the website of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). 

The Modi government produced not one but two Draft National Policies. The current one is the third and possibly final one, unless Parliament, whenever it meets, forces changes in it. Or the Supreme Court rules on challenges that will emerge from impacted groups.

All versions have to be located in the political and social environment that has evolved in India since 2014. Political polarisation, the rapid rise of cultural nationalism, a euphemism  for religious majoritarianism, and the open championing of religious mores as national ethos by ministers and elders of the ruling party, competitive pandering by the opposition to communal electoral politics, and a substantive dent in federalism and democratic tolerance mark the new political climate. Persons facing charges of terrorism praising the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliamentary debates, and mob lynchings in many states of men belonging to religious minorities or Dalits, create the grassroots  political surface in which education, as much as other aspects of life, seek to find their place.

The MHRD minister, Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ told the Rajya Sabha in November that more than two lakh [2,00,000] suggestions were received on the policy draft, produced by a committee chaired by the eminent space scientist K Kasturirangan. It was said to be the world’s largest virtual consultation. 

In July, a national consultation was called in Delhi of the Christian and Muslim communities, as also educationists and experts, in Delhi, jointly by the United Christian Action, the Baptist Church Trust Association, the Evangelical fellowship of India. The Archbishop of Delhi, Most Reverend Dr Anil Joseph Thomas Couto presided and the former Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and a former Deputy Chief of the Army Staff, retired Lt. General Z U Shah delivered the inaugural address. One of the decisions of the National Consultations was to bring together a series of reflections on the Draft National Education Policy 2019, and the government’s approach to human resource development and allied issues. The book is now available to scholars, academics and those involved in school education and institutions of higher learning in India and abroad. 

The MHRD website uploaded the National Education Policy 2019 without fanfare. It did not refer to minority institutions and painstaking avoided direct reference to contentious issues.  

The New Education Policy 2019 was the National Democratic Alliance government’s long-term ideological investment in the country. It sought to change the neurons of the Indian mind, to raise people who will conform to the dreams of its founding fathers, of an India which is one people, one tongue, one culture.  

A dream ‘heavy with nationalist and moral overtones’ has moved many leaders in the world. But no people are a homogenous singular entity, bound together in shared ethnicity, mother tongue, and perhaps faith or what goes for it when defined in the language of religion. Subcultures, immigrants, microscopic groups left behind by ancient cultures, and now trapped as some precious gemstone in a larger surrounding mass of a different people, have made modern countries a vibrant and lively cultural melting pot, or bouquet.  

Conquering medieval hordes have left their mark in the gashes of their swords and lances, language and some small syncretic cultures nursing their dialects and recipes. Colonialism, the two World Wars, have vastly influenced the new nations in North and South America, and Australia, recipients of larger migrations. As has the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, creating two nations, a Muslim majority Pakistan and India as a secular nation. 

That Pakistan, within a lifetime, broke into two, with-Bengali speaking East Bengal emerging as the independent state of Bangladesh, was evidence that no single bond can keep a nation together, especially religion, if inequity, economic and developmental imbalances and lacunae in distributive justice distort the critical equilibrium. 

While most nations struggle with issues of race and religion, India has the additional burden of Caste, unique to its soil, and carried as an heirloom wherever Indian people migrate in search of economic opportunity. Ironically, it was Caste rather than economic status that kept a large section of the Indian population away from education, classically reserved only for the ‘higher’ Castes.   

The basic social reforms of the 20th century were to devolve mass education to not just the economically backward, but the culturally deprived Castes and classes, once called the untouchables, and now classified in the more sterilised terminology of Scheduled Castes. The struggle eventually fructified in the passing of the Right To Education Act (RTE), recognising education as a basic human right, an important catalyst in a person realising to the full his or her inherent intellectual potential. The 86thAmendment in 2009 to the statutes inserted Article 21 A on the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education.

In its two phases, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political face of the now nearly a century old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the lead party in the National Democratic Alliance, has sought to consolidate a nationhood based almost entirely on religion, silencing fitfully the divisions of caste, ethnic origins and language.  

The government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004) tinkered with the education policy at the Centre, and more so in states where the party was in power, using modifications in text books and pedagogy to inject its ideology in as blatant a manner as was possible, and no longer surreptitiously through individual ideologues in positions of importance as had been its wont. 

It did not succeed as much as it had hoped for, partly because of its political fragility, and also because of the alertness of an Opposition and a civil society which had been galvanised by the occurrences of the early 1990s in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the consequent polarisation of the nation and a series of communally targeted incidents of violence.  

The period saw the setting up of the Ekal School movement by a frontal unit of the Sangh Parivar, a concept of one teacher schools in rural, and the remote and forested Tribal areas of central India, to ideologically challenge the influence of Christian missionaries. They are outside the government scrutiny or administration, and exact numbers are not known, but statements by political functionaries suggest there may be as many as 1,00,000 such schools.

The incomplete task of correcting perceived colonial or Nehruvian biases in education and bringing it in line with the cultural nationalism propounded in the ruling party’s election manifesto. Its campaign rhetoric was left to be completed by Mr Narendra Modi who led the National Democratic alliance to an overwhelming victory in the general elections in May 2014. 

While he quickly moved through such measures as demonetisation of high value currency notes to leave his mark on the economy, the Ministry of Human Resource Development was his instrument of choice to mould the nation to one of his dreams. The massive political mandate in his second term left Mr Modi free of any pressures from friends, allies and foes. 

Covid, the lockdown and the evaporation of the Opposition’s resistance, the emergence of a proto Presidential governance system, paved the way for the New education policy that comes into force ironically at a time when there is no Parliament in session, and there are no schools physically open.

Education, mercifully , remains in the Concurrent list and the states have a stake, and a hand on the pilot’s controls. 

The decades since Independence have seen a series of education commissions, operations and national campaigns attempting, with varying success, to see that education did not lose pace or slow down its momentum. The birth of the Central Board of Secondary Education, the Open School system, the National Education Policy of 1986, the 2001 Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, mid-day meal scheme at the primary level, and scholarships to Scheduled Caste  and Tribes, to religious minorities and other backward groups have sought to ensure that the economic status of the family was not a hindrance in the pursuit acknowledge for a student of capacity and talent.

The impetus has seen a massive growth of infrastructure. After China, India is the second in the world in terms of number of educational institutions at various levels and the population of its children in school. According to Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s (FICCI) 2017 data, India had over 250 million students enrolled. But there were major hurdles in access and infrastructure. The approximately 17,000 teacher education institutions in the country, over 92 percent privately owned, have been found wanting in producing the quality of teachers the new education system needed. 

The Justice J S Verma Commission exposed this, saying most of these teaching colleges were not even attempting to provide good education, instead remaining mere commercial shops. Government data shows over one million teacher vacancies. Pupil-teacher ratios were consequently larger than 60:1, especially in rural  areas and small towns. Government claims gender parity in school enrolment, but elementary infrastructure issues as separate toilets for girl students, and transport, have perpetuated real-time gender skewness, especially in the post-primary sections. 

The NDA’s first Draft Education Policy had a short life. The Government’s weak position in the Rajya Sabha and the erudition of Marxist member of Parliament Mr Sitaram Yechuri and Congress lead speaker, Mr Rahman Khan, a former deputy chairman of the Upper House, saw the then HRD Minister, Mr Prakash Keshav Javadekar, beat a retreat, assuring Parliament he would come back with an education policy after due diligence and consultations with all stakeholders including Members of Parliament. 

Two years later, the Draft National Education Policy 2019 was put on the internet portal of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. It was over 475 pages. In a first reading, it seemed to include the most vulnerable and marginalised members. A second, more careful reading by experts raised many red flags. 

At the heart of the policy was the Rashtriya Shiksa Ayog (RSA) / National Education Commission (NEC), an overarching institution with a mandate beyond MHRD was directly under the Prime Minister. “The Prime Minister can bring his/her authority to create necessary synergies and provide direction to this national endeavour, as part of the country’s overall vision of a knowledge society,” the DNEP said.

In its non-minority schools, the policy writers noted “the provisions of the NEP 2019 are for students from religious and linguistic minorities and not for minority “schools” per se. It reaffirmed  that linguistic minorities were to be encouraged. Special provisions included Special Education Zones for high population Muslim areas. It said “Traditional and religious schools such as madrasas, gurukuls, pathshalas, maktabs and religious schools form the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and other traditions may be encouraged to preserve their traditions and pedagogical styles, but at the same time supported to integrate into the NCF.” 

A contentious issue that roused immediate protest was on Minority Status of schools and colleges. The DNEP alleged “judicial exemptions granted by the Supreme Court have been misused… will be stopped.” As if in counterpoint, it commended “alternative models of education such as gurukuls, pathshalas, madrasas, and home schooling will be allowed. Other models for schools will also be piloted, such as philanthropic-public partnerships.”

The draft caused a near explosion in Tamil Nadu on the issue of language with charges that the government was foisting Hindi and Sanskrit. The DNEP 2019 had said of English as a medium of instruction and conversation: “Logically speaking , of course, English has no advantage over other languages in expressing thoughts. Moreover, Indian languages are very scientifically structured and do not have unphonetic, complicated spellings of words and numerous grammatical exceptions; they also have a vast and highly sophisticated ancient, medieval, and modern literature in the Indian context, as a consequence they have a certain home-feel and “apnapan” quality in the Indian context, making them easier, more relatable and more relevant for children. It is recommended that in interactions between people within India be conducted in languages native to India; thus Indian languages must be heavily promoted again and with new vigour.” 

Private sector in schools

The Federation of Central Universities (FEDCUTA) noted the “reforms” and restructuring pushed by the Government aimed at selling education as a commodity. Instead of strengthening and repairing the public-funded higher education system, the Government has been pushing privatisation and commercialisation of education at a frightening pace through a slew of regulations such as Graded Autonomy, Autonomous Colleges, HEFA for loans instead of grants, Tripartite MOU, Institutions of Excellence, HECI Bill etc, all of which aim to push Higher Education Institutions into a self-financing model increasingly at the mercy of market forces. The immediate corollaries of each of these have been the jeopardising of service conditions of employees, steep fee-hikes (euphemistically called “user-charges”) and a crackdown on all democratic spaces and practices to stifle resistance to these policies. The Policy notified in June 2019 seeks to concretise and complete this process with its core agenda of “deregulation”(or privatisation) overseen by a centrally controlled Shiksha Aayog. 

While the DNEP 2019  suggested creating a ‘Special Education Zone’ to ensure access to education for all, there is no clarity about the sources and methods of funding quality education, especially in educationally, and economically backward states that face an acute resource crunch. Scepticisms arose from the fact that in the past most states have failed to provide financial wherewithal to support quality education, which is why nearly 50 percent of the students, mainly from poor families drop out before completing their secondary education.

Education Cess has been collected since 2004 from Income Tax payers, to augment the additional funds for investment in school education. The money collected on account of ‘educational cess’ has never been efficiently utilised. 

Covid has sharpened the chasm between the privileged and the underprivileged, or non-privileged. We now call it the Digital Divide.

How will the immediate young generation bridge that gulf in the strained resources of the near future remains a challenge, a. question mark before Mr Modi, the political apparatus, educationists, And most of all, the children and their parents. 

*Excerpted from the Editor’s introduction in Educating India – a critique the Modi Government’s Education Policy, edited by John Dayal and Sunny Jacob SJ, published by Media House, New Delhi  in January 2020

Related:

Are citizenship and secularism ‘disposable’ subjects for Indian students?

OBCs and their due in reservations in medical courses

‘Lawaris’ or let’s just admit it, Children of a Lesser God

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You were called Kalu, dear Sammy, because you are dark.  

Like I am. Like Mr. Modi was long years ago when I first met him.  

Called that in school. Even a Reporter, one Gupta who is now a Member of the Editors’ Guild (Not Shekhar, I hasten to clarify) called me that in the corridors of the PIB. 

Learn to live with it when in India. Even Sholay, now termed s classic and not a curry western,  has he classic line which raises laughs still, Ab Tera Kya Hoga, Kaliya?.

And, dear Sammy, we are males. Ask dark Indian girls.

Next to Africa, we buy the most of Fair and Lovely and other bleaches.  If rich and powerful, we buy Japanese mushrooms which bleach us from the inside.  

Like Africans and Caribbeans, we were ruled centuries by the British, Portuguese, French, Dutch – in descending order- and they then were very white. Not now. 

When the Turks, the Mongolians, the Pathans ruled us, it was less so. Many of their soldiers, commanders, and governors were Abyssinians, Ethiopians. Black.

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In days of old, when life was normal – in a manner of speaking – many a Muslim young man would reach out to Dr Zafarul Islam Khan for wise counsel to get out whatever difficulty they had encountered at work, or play, or God forbid, if they found themselves in some serious trouble.

Long before he was named chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission by Chief minister Mr Arvind Kejriwal, the 72 year old academic, publisher and editor, was already a compassionate ear for those seeking help, advice, or just solace. An avuncular uncle, a community elder to be trusted to come to their relief.

His office as chair of the minorities commission perhaps just added a government stamp on a reputation well earned by himself, and through his family.

He is the son of the venerable Islamic scholar, Mr. Wahiddudin Khan,  a peacenik and proponent of inter-religious harmony if ever there was one in the country. Dr Zafarul Islam Khan himself is no mean scholar, with his higher studies  abroad, and rare scholarship in Arabic.  His English language magazine, Milli Gazette, was the go-to journal for researchers and fellow journalists, for its documentation of news, and insights. He ran the magazine in its print format for as long as he could, before turning it into an internet news portal. Milli Gazette was perhaps the only non-political party published English magazine from the community. It covered issues of other  minorities too, but became a window to developments across the country narrated until then only in the Urdu press.

But Dr Khan came into his own as head of the Delhi Minorities Commission.  I have for decades interacted with the National Commission for Minorites and various state commissions, and found most of them useless, not even paper tigers. It is unfortunate that most of the commissions set up in the country for the welfare of religious minorities forget that their role is in the nature of a watchdog smelling out any violation of the rights and liberties other wards. Most are subservient to the appointing authority, the Prime Minisger or the chief minister, sometimes at the cost of the common people.

Dr Khan broke the pattern. When occasion came in the last two years, he spoke against the  ruling dispensation. Delhi’s complicated multi-tier governance is structurally biased against the underdog, the victim, the poor. The police is with the Prime Minister, doing his bidding through the Union Home Minister and the Lt Governor of Delhi, almost always a retired and very subservient bureaucrat.  To challenge police highhandedness, and atrocities, implies challenging the highest in the land.

Delhi’s revolt  against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019) and the National Citizenship  Register found him in fine fettle. He had already spoken out against the raging islamophobia, the atrocities in Assam on the issue of citizenship, and the police violence in Aligarh Muslim University where sten guns, grenades and tear gas were both used to flush out peaceful students from their hostel rooms.

Shaheen Bagh, replicated a score and multiple times in Delhi and more than a hundred times across the nation. The protest (or protests) were followed soon thereafter with the massive targeted  violence in East Delhi.

The public discourse on the violence was altered by the death of an off duty junior employee of the central Intelligence Bureau [his family has since then been granted a Rs One crore compensation by the Delhi government, in addition to grants from the central government]. The police was clear. Its job was to hunt out Muslims involved in this murder, and the murder of other Hindus.

There was, to all intents and purposes, no pursuit of political leaders, including a sitting minister of state in the Union council of ministers, and a former legislator of Delhi, who had in direct and pungent Hindi advocated  shooting down of dissenters. The police were in no hurry to look for the killers of scores of young men trapped and killed in East Delhi. When an angry high court bench indicted the police, the judge was summarily transferred, and the chief justice reversed  the orders. There is no evidence in the public domain to indicate how many of those involved in the murder of Muslim men have been arrested.

The  suspension of civil society and the media in the Covid Lockdown is just the environment the political dispensation and the police have been praying for, it seems. Without let and without hindrance, the police are on a spree arresting JNU students for so-called anti-national activities, harassing and intimidating others , and absolutely terrorising  young Muslims they brand as activists.

This is worrisome for all of us in Civil Society. Internet petitions, which we have signed by the dozen, have no legal value, and the union government routinely  sweeps them out as spam.

The total lack of movement has restricted even family members trying to go to court, further hindered by ‘procedure’: of absolute illiteracy in seeking genuine relief in virtual hearing through a laptop App.

The country’s tallest civil rights lawyers, Dr. Colin Gonsalves among them, and Dr. Khan’s own counsel, Ms Vrinda Grover have pointed out that the FIR filed against Dr Khan is frivolous, malicious and without legal merit. Absolutely no criminal act or intent is made out against the chairman of the Delhi minorities commission. At worst, if one were to put it this way, perhaps the wise Dr. Khan need not have been so warm in welcoming tweets by princesses and officials in the Gulf region who had hit out at the virulent islamophobia that was competing with Covid in its anarchy. An indiscretion, at best. Not a crime.

The police have soiled their reputation in their raid on Dr. Khan’s house, just a few minutes before he and every Muslim in the city was about to break the Ramzan Roza, or fast, in the traditional Iftar.  Their insistence that he accompany them to the police station – a sort of informal arrest  and humiliation – was thwarted by the local people collecting in large numbers in the lane where his house is situated. Ms Vrinda Grover also issued a grave warning to the police not to dare take her client to the police station by force.

At 72 years, Dr Khan is protected by existing rules from such dire action by  the police. Not that the city’s police force cares much about standard operating procedures and human rights. In the many arrests after December 19, 2019, following the myriad anti-CAA, anti-NPR/NRC demonstrations, were men and women in their 70s, some of them with chronic ailments, including cardiac diseases and diabetes. They were rounded up and kept without food and water for long hours.

The police do not really need to arrest Dr. Khan for a tweet. If that were so, they had their hands full looking for the trolls who have threatened Muslim youth with murder, violence, and gang rape.

Mr Modi’s police is not simply harassing or trying to intimidate a 72 year old scholar. In targeting the chairman of the state minorities commission,  the central government is intimidating the entire community, already victimised beyond comprehension in the past five months and more.

Mr Modi’s government  has also thrown down a gauntlet to civil society, to every decent citizen; that the ruling party, their ideological phalanxes in the larger Sangh Parivar, do not care for civilities, or the dignity assured each citizen by and under the Constitution. They think that the Covid-inspired curfew, which the police has capitalised to the full, provides them enough cover to do dirty by the Constitution.

But even this curfew has a shelf life. And therein lies hope.

[Dr John Dayal, civil liberties and human rights activist,  was nominated to the National Integration Council in 2004, and re-nominated in 2009. The Prime Minister, who is the chairman of the NIC, has not called a single meeting of the NIC in his six years in office.] 

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Image: picscristmas.com

It was a ridiculous tableau. But a dangerous one. India has found 2017 a year of hate, and bloodshed. With elections in Gujarat, and more coming in the new year ending in the general elections in 2019, the atmosphere is already surcharged. The Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, has led from the front in radicalising his vote bank with his challenge to the Congress and the opposition, asking them “do you want a Ram Mandir, or not?”. Muslims and Dalits face lynching at the hands of self-styled Gau Rakshaks, or cow protectors, almost daily, sometimes even in the national capital New Delhi. With impunity at its peak, and much of the young cadres of the police force indoctrinated in the Hindutva theology, it is the Dalit, the Muslim and the Christian victim of violence who finds himself in jail.

“The anxiety of the religious minorities is increasing because of the lack of confidence in the administration. So, the onus is on the government to bring back the confidence of religious minorities.”

Every Christmas season these last twenty years, since the National Democratic Alliance under the great Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee took the reins of power in New Delhi – they already were rulers in many of the provinces, or States – Christians have their Joy of Christmas mixed with just a tinge of fear.

Churches across the countries now have more closed circuit TV and long lengths of bared or blade wire on their high walls. Police, many armed, will be deployed in front of major churches in the National Capital, and elsewhere. It is the new normal. In Kandhamal in Odisha, scene of two rounds of a systematic pogrom in 2007-08 – 120 killed, scores raped, 320 churches burnt, 6,000 houses demolished and 60,000 Christians forced to flee by hoodlums of the collective Sangh Parivar under the benign gaze of local police and civil officials – an assertive survivor community celebrates the birth of their Saviour hoping the police around them will protect them, just in case, and not turn on them.

Impunity reigns, drawing strength from Mr Modi who infamously made longer Christmas into Good Governance Day, and his patron, Mr Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, proclaiming that everyone in India is a Hindu, or else. His lieutenants have translated that into hate speech calling for action – violence ranging from a thrashing of a priest to the molestation of a woman, or a full-bodied assault that threatens death.

More than 700 cases of attacks on Christians were reported on the United Christian Forum (UCF) toll free helpline number 1800-208-4545 since 2014. Last year, 216 incidents were recorded and this year 216 incidents have already been reported as on date. 

Out of 29 states in India, at least 19 regularly witness attacks on Christians. Tamil Nadu tops the list with 41 incidents as on November 30th followed by Chhattisgarh (39) Uttar Pradesh (27), Madhya Pradesh (22), Maharashtra (16).

The Modi Government admitted in Parliament on the 7th of February this year that over the last three years, over 278 persons, most Muslims, have been killed and over 6,500 people were injured due to communal violence in over 2000 incidents.  The World Watch List 2017, ranks India 15th in the list of countries where the practice of the faith is a high-risk activity. India was ranked 31 only four years ago. the police filed complaints only 43 criminal complaints or First Information Reports (FIRs) despite the information about attacks against Christians being provided repeatedly to them in over 200 incidents. 
The data is incomplete.

The fear high.

But then, Christmas is also a reminder of Herod and Cesar.

That it will pass off with minimal violence is a test of India’s democratic and secular tradition.

(John Dayal is a human rights and political activist. He is a member of the National Integration Council (NIC) of India, Secretary-General of the All India Christian Council and a past president of the All India Catholic Union.)
 

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