India to Curb Attacks on Christians

A new wave of assaults against India’s Christians has brought the first hints that the country’s Hindu nationalist leaders are prepared to squelch the violence.

This week, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee announced that he will visit a western Indian region that has been marked by more than 100 acts of violence against Christians in the past year. Vajpayee joined a chorus of denunciations against the perpetrators, and local police announced the arrest of at least 45 suspects in the attacks.

The government is said to be considering naming 2000 “The Year of Christ.”

“These incidents will be brought under control very soon,” Vajpayee said.

Vajpayee’s tentative steps came on the heels of an upsurge in anti-Christian violence, most of it clustered in the western state of Gujarat. In the recent flurry of attacks that began Christmas Day, at least 19 churches were burned or damaged, church officials said. The latest round of violence brings to 108 the number of attacks against Christians reported in the past year. In addition to sacking churches, mobs have stoned Christian schools, dug up graves and desecrated icons.

“Christians are living in fear,” said Father Cedric Prakash, a Jesuit priest in Ahmadabad, the capital of Gujarat. “This is a systematic attempt to terrorize us.”

In one notorious incident last year, four nuns were raped, though the motive in the attacks remains unclear. Government officials claim that several suspects arrested in the rapes are Christian; the Catholic bishop in the area says none of them are.

The attacks have sparked outrage among many Indians angered by what they see as an assault on religious tolerance. Although the Vajpayee government has issued statements in the past condemning the attacks, the violence has continued.

Most of the attacks have been blamed on Hindu nationalists angered over what they say are Christian attempts to convert Indians. More than 800 million of India’s nearly 1 billion people are Hindus; Christians total about 23 million.

Church officials say the latest round of assaults began after a Christmas Day rally convened by a group called the Hindu Awakening Platform. According to the officials, Hindu leaders distributed fliers saying: “Hindus awake!” and “Throw out the Christians!”

Shortly after the rally, the attacks began.

The anti-Christian violence poses a challenge to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that is challenging India’s five-decade tradition as a secular state. Many of the hard-core Hindu groups that have been blamed in the anti-Christian attacks are among the BJP’s more fervent supporters.

Most Hindu nationalist groups, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or VHP, have condemned the violence against Christians. Yet many Hindu leaders have also sought to excuse the attacks as justified reactions to what they say are “mass conversions” of the local people by Christian missionaries.

“We respect every religion--the trouble is, they don’t reciprocate,” said V.H. Dalmia, chairman of the VHP.

Some Hindu nationalists have even alleged that the violence was spawned by foreign organizations such as the CIA.

“Why not?” Dalmia asked. “America and India have never been friendly.”

Such statements have posed a dilemma for the Vajpayee government. In a series of recent interviews, Vajpayee and his colleagues have tried to distance themselves from the violence while echoing the charge of a conspiracy.

Although domestic pressure on Vajpayee to forcefully condemn the attacks had been mounting for weeks, some commentators noted that it took criticism from outside India to finally jar the government.

M.J. Akbar, editor in chief of the newspaper Asian Age, wrote: “Thank God for the rest of the world.”