[Reader-list] The One Year for Minorities in India

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The One Year for Minorities in India

John Dayal Thursday, June 4, 2015

On the night of Monday 4th June 2014, less than a fortnight of the
swearing in of the new government headed by Mr. Narendra Modi,
28-year-old Information technology manager Mohsin Mohammed Shaikh was
lynched in Pune, Maharashtra. The Times of India reported on 5th June
under the headline “In Pune, ‘Hindu zealots’ kill man over ‘offensive’
Facebook post, 13 arrested”. Shaikh was killed randomly after rumours
spread over an objectionable post on Facebook. His killers were
members of the Hindu Rashtra Sena, a police inspector said. Shaikh and
his roommate were returning home on their motorcycle after picking up
their dinner when a the gang blocked his way near the lane just behind
his house and started hitting him with hockey sticks. While the
roommate managed to escape, they bludgeoned the young man. Shaikh died
a little while later in the hospital where he was taken. Earlier, a
little before the murder, the same youths had beaten up two other men
at the same spot, the Times reporter said.

Shaikh’s was the first death in communally targeted violence in the
country after Mr. Modi assumed office, winning an election with the
promise of development for the emerging aspirational India, and an
unprecedented galvanising of the Bharatiya Janata party’s, and Mr.
Modi’s, majority core constituency. The pungent mix of supremacist
religious and nationalist rhetoric, and the accompanying demonising
the Muslim and Christian minorities raising the bogey of demographic
threat to Hinduism in India, polarised the electorate. Mr. Modi’s
failure, if not refusal, to name and chastise the Sangh Parivar
conglomerate has led to a singular aggression by cadres of the party
and the sangh in small towns and villages across the country. And
exacerbated the impunity inherent in the state apparatus, specially
the police. “Don’t you know this is a Hindu Rashtra,” the station
house officer of a Greater Noida police station in Uttar Pradesh told
a group of pastors as he beat them up to “appease” a mob from Kulesra
village that had attacked them, accusing them of carrying out illegal
conversions to Christianity. Unlike Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and
Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh neither has the notorious Freedom of Religion
Act, the ironically named law against conversions mostly to
Christianity, nor is it governed by the BJP. But that is the mood
prevailing in most states since May 26, 2014.

Since then, there has been a marked shift in public discourse. There
has been a relentless foregrounding of communal identities, a
ceaseless attempt to create a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Hate
statements by Union and state ministers, threats by Members of
Parliament, state politicians, and cadres in saffron caps or Khaki
shorts resonate through the landscape. The hate campaign is well
documented. The Evangelical Fellowship of India and Alliance Defending
Freedom recorded 44 separate cases of hate speech by prominent
politicians which merit criminal charges against them. But most cases
go unreported, unrecorded by police. Christians form about 2.3 per
cent of the population. The Muslim population, according to a
selective leak by the government of the 2011 Census data, has grown to
14.2 per cent. The Census report on religious populations has not been
officially published. Hate speeches have resonated in debates in the
Chamber of the Lok Sabha – an exceptionally and aggressively
provocative and virulent one by the BJP leader and lead speaker, Yogi
Adityanath, in the debate on communal violence -- and in meetings,
rallies and statements to the Media by leaders of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh and its associate organisations. Adityanath, now
head of a religious cult in Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, got away with
demonising the Muslim community and others.

RSS chief Mr. Mohan Bhagwat has repeatedly asserted that everyone in
India is Hindu, including Muslims and Christians, because this is the
land of the Hindu people and civilisation. Speaking at the 50th
Anniversary of foundation of its religious wing, Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Sarsanghchalak bluntly stated
that “Hindutva is the identity of India and it has the capacity to
swallow other identities. We just need to restore those capacities.”
In Cuttack, he asserted that India is a Hindu state and "citizens of
Hindustan should be known as Hindus". Mr. Bhagwat, arguably the second
most politically powerful and culturally influential person in the
country, has been unremitting in his pronouncements. Indian Express
reporter Shyamlal Yadav on 17 March 2015 reported under the headline
Ghar wapsi ‘thrust’ area: RSS chief says help those who want to ‘come
back’ to Hinduism: Among three programmes that the RSS has listed as
its thrust areas is dharma jagran, another name for ghar wapsi. The
other two are kutumb prabodhan (family values) and samajik samrasta
(social harmony)

This refrain was picked up by the Deputy Chief Minister of Goa, and by
big and small leaders across the country, going viral on social media
and the national TV News channels in their English and Hindi debates.
The Sangh ideologue, Mr. MG Vaidya, said on 19th May, three days after
the election results, that they can now tackle issues such as the
building of the Ram temple on the site of the Babri mosque they
demolished in 1992 Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Mr. Ashok Singhal,
said “If [Muslims] keep opposing Hindus, how long can they survive?”.
Another leader said “Modi will restore Hindutva rule, like Prithviraj
Chauhan (25th May 2014). The focus shifted to Love Jihad, and more
children to be produced by Hindu women to offset the increase in the
Muslim population. Sadhvi Prachi, a central minister, Members of
Parliament Sakshi Maharaj and Adityanath set targets for Hindu married
women – conceive from four to ten children, each. By February 2015,
the cry for a total ban on cow slaughter was in full peaking.
Maharashtra banned the slaughter of the cow and its progeny, and even
the possession of beef from other states, becoming the first of the
few states where such a ban does not already exist. The first arrests
under the new law took place in May 2015 for the possession of meat
suspected to be beef in a butcher’s shop in Mumbai.

The hate campaign has mutated to a more coercive and threatening,
phenomenon that has percolated to the Universities and colleges on the
one hand and the villages and small towns over much of the country.
One group even set up a “Hindu Helpline” to assist anyone from the
majority community who is being harassed by Muslims, announcing its
cadres will come to the help of any Hindu parent who suspects his or
her daughter is seeing a Muslim youth.

Desecration and destruction of churches, assault on pastors, illegal
police detention of church workers, and denial of Constitutional
rights of Freedom of Faith aggravate the coercion and terror unleashed
in campaigns of Ghar Wapsi and cries of Love Jihad. In Chhatisgarh,
villages are passing orders banning the entry of priests of faiths
other than Hinduism.

At least 43 deaths in over 600 cases of violence, 194 targeting
Christians and the rest Muslims, have taken place in Between 26th May
2014 and 13th May 2015, marking almost one year of the National
Development Alliance government of Mr. Narendra Modi. The number of
dead is other than the 108 killed in Assam in attacks on Muslims by
armed tribal political groups.

The number of incidents of communally targetted violence could be very
much higher, but official records are not available. Many other crimes
are not registered by the police. Victims too are often coerced into
reaching a compromise with their In the very first few weeks of the
new government, by its own admission, 113 communal incidents took
place in various parts of the country during in just the two moths
May-June 2014 in which 15 people were killed and 318 others were
injured, Minister of State for Home Affairs, Mr. Kiren Rijiju told the
Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of Parliament. Many of the incidents of
violence were directed against individuals and places of worship of
the Muslim community. Uttar Pradesh, which saw large scale violence in
its western district of Muzzafarabad in the run up to the general
elections, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Assam have been among the states
where Muslims have been targeted.

Days before United States President Obama’s Town Hall speech in New
Delhi went viral for commenting on the need for communal harmony and
protection of freedom of faith as intrinsic to the thrust for economic
development, India’s President, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, noted the rise
of communalism and the targetting of religious minorities. In his
address to the Nation on 25th January 2015, the eve of Republic Day.
President Mukherjee said “In an international environment where so
many countries are sinking into the morass of theocratic violence … We
have always reposed our trust in faith-equality where every faith is
equal before the law and every culture blends into another to create a
positive dynamic. The violence of the tongue cuts and wounds people's
hearts. The Indian Constitution is the holy book of democracy. It is a
lodestar for the socio-economic transformation of an India whose
civilisation has celebrated pluralism, advocated tolerance and
promoted goodwill between diverse communities. These values, however,
need to be preserved with utmost care and vigilance.”

The Prime Minister, however, refuses to reprimand his Cabinet
colleagues, restrain the members of his party members or name and
silence the Sangh Parivar which proudly proclaims it has propelled him
to power in New Delhi. His response has been a rebuttal, accusing the
church leaders of making mountains out of trivial molehills. He has
accused them of internationalising trivial incidents in a motivated
campaign that injures India’s image and his development agenda. In
Tokyo, he mocked “secularists”. And in Delhi, in the wake of an outcry
over he desecration or attack on five catholic churches and a convent
school, the Delhi police commissioner and government trotted out a
list of temples which had reported thefts. The Ministry of Home
Affairs published data of the last three years of the Congress-led
United Progressive alliance government to say there had been no sharp
rise in violence against religious minorities. It did not release the
data for communal violence since Mr. Modi took over as Prime Minister.

PM Modi’s first formal response, made on August 15, 2014 in his
Independence Day address at the Red Fort in New Delhi, was to call for
a ten-year moratorium on communal and caste violence. But this was
followed by government declaring Christmas to be a “Good Governance
Day” in honour of the BJP leader and former Prime Minister, Mr. Atal
Behari Vajpayee. There are fears at a severe whittling down of the 15
Point Programme for Minorities, a lifeline for many severely economic
backward communities, and specifically their youth seeking higher
education and professional training. Since then, twice in Parliament
in brief interventions, and once in a major address to the Christian
community, he has assured protection. “Your security is my job”, he
told a Christian delegation which called on him to greet him on the
eve of Christmas 2014. He repeated that while addressing a Vigyan
Bhawan function of the Syro Malabar Catholic community.

The incidents of violence continue.

And so does the anxiety of the Muslim and Christian communities, in
particular, though a section of the Sikh leadership has also expressed
its unhappiness with the RSS Ghar Wapsi campaign in Punjab.

Cardinal Mar Baselios Cleemis, president of the Catholic Bishops
Conference of India and the National United Christian Forum, in a
statement on March 17, 2015 said: “The cultural DNA of India of
pluralism and diversity is being threatened. We are anxious about the
implications of the fundamentalist political thesis that India is “one
nation, one people and one culture”. A nation of cultural homogeneity
is an impossibility and any effort to impose it is fraught with grave
ramifications for country. We are deeply concerned about the physical
violence – arson, murder and rape of our religious personnel both men
and women - as with the structural violence which is manifest in urban
and rural India, in social and administrative excesses, and aberrant
judicial pronouncements. We welcome the occasional statements of those
in authority of adhering to the Constitution of India and, in
particular to its assurances of the Freedom of Faith. However, these
statements fail to have any impact on the leadership of
socio-political organisations that are polarising the nation with the
language and acts of intolerance, hate and violence.”

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