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The Rediff Special

The Anti Christs

N V Subramanian

Bhuvan Chandra Bhatt has gone and built himself up in a gymnasium and his condensed Sylvester Stallone looks, black corduroy waistcoat, tight white tee shirt and black jeans, and a Yamaha motorcycle, suggest a trademark undergraduate high on sulphur and low on seismics.

Except, Bhatt, 24, who has left college and studies privately, one day last month, set the district administrators of Udham Singh Nagar in Uttar Pradesh scrambling after he, Raju Bhandari, a Hindu Jagran Manch activist with political ambitions, and ten other boys of the Bajrang Dal and the HJM installed a Shiva idol in a disputed church.

This was an alteration of his leaked late-night plans to demolish it a day earlier on October 22. He was for a time in Haldwani jail, but he still smoulders at the existing church. 'It will go,' he says, 'because it is not a church in the first place.'

Bhatt's 'non-church' is a naked-brick and tin-roofed former schoolroom beyond a railway line off the Khatima Tanakpur road in the poor, staunchly-Hindu Tharu community village of Amau. A padre of a Hindi church in Banbassa remembers that district officials removed the Shiva idol on the night of October 23 with no assistance forthcoming from villagers who stood in a sullen circle of silence.

Inside, roughly made pews have been piled on a side. In a corner is a high, dusty heap of church literature. In place of an altarpiece is a peg from which a rough worn khaki shirt, a camouflage jacket and a beret hang, and the altar itself of cheap white Formica stands in neglect in another corner.

Bhatt says the church has been the centre of clandestine conversions of Hindus to Christians. He is specially perturbed by the 'activities' of its padre, Harish Chandra, the minor of whose alleged misdoing is that he so influenced a teenage boy to Christianity that his family's opposition led him to commit suicide.

Has he proof? Did he complain to the administration? 'I sent a petition to the subdivisional magistrate,' says he, not remembering whom he sent it to, or when. And what did the SDM do? 'He asked for proof.' Did he have any to give? 'No.'

'These things are so difficult to prove,' says Bhatt. 'So many Tharu families have been converted.' You recall then that Amau's headman, Narayan Singh Rane, a co-accused with Bhatt in the desecration of the church, has said, in an interview in his home, that only 'one family' has converted, and you reckon that Bhatt, now, is either lying or exaggerating. You hear him continue, saying, 'If you say they were forced (conversions), the church gives them affidavits to sign that they weren't. What proof can you get?'

But can any administrator act without that? Bhatt becomes silent. He sucks in his mouth looking having run out of arguments. His thin lips are dry. And does it helps, you press, sitting in his bus-station hotel called Durga, under a wall of calendar gods and goddesses, in sight of an inside dark room where a trucker and his cleaner are commencing on their first sips of whisky in happiness, to break the law? How about being in jail?

He shrinks just a little and then speaks low-voiced, earnest, eyes elsewhere, in the take it or leave it way of any Vishwa Hindu Parishad pracharak, 'Seva Ke naam par, Hindu Jagaran Manch aur Bajrang Dal ke karyakarta ko jo nischit kadam uthana hoga, uthaenge.' Even if it is illegal? 'Whether it is legal or not,' he replies, 'we will not tolerate anything done against Hindus.'

He left hand unconsciously strays over his bulging upperarm. Hours later, he is to be seen motocrossing Khatima, a saffron flag on his handlebar, for the biggest turnout of school and college students for an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad rally. It is a show of powerful force.

It is a small miracle, then, that the Amau Union church remains. In 1992, in Pehenia, nearby, Tharu villagers marched in strength and demolished another church. Church authorities filed a law-suit, but the church hasn't risen again. Nor has the Amau church's controversial pastor, Harish Chandra, come to bodily harm like some others of other orders who have faced vicious -- and sometimes fatal -- attacks in recent months and years.

Indeed, in the new anti-Christian wave that responsible church leaders perceive to be spreading countrywide, the Khatima outrage is a speck. Unchecked, it may become the blot that has stained town after of Gujarat, or Bihar's Gumla or Dumka or Hazaribagh, Meerut or Gajraula in Uttar Pradesh, even Ludhiana, and Jhabhua, in Madhya Pradesh.

James Massey, who has been a member of the Minorities Commission since September 1997, has travelled extensively investigating alleged violations of their rights. 'There is a kind of fear among Christians that was not there 50 years ago,' he says cautiously. 'A growing number of cases are being reported to us from Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and even southern states like Tamil Nadu. There is uncertainty: a feeling that anything can happen. There is for the first time the threat of physical violence. Whoever I spoke to said, ''Please don't name me."'

It is worst in Gujarat that Ashis Nandy, the sociologist working with the Centre for the Study of Developing societies, deems the most sectarian state of India. From only March this year, nearly two dozen cases of harassment of Christians have been reported.

Among the more shocking incidents has been the burning of 300 copies of the New Testament, distributed by the International Gideon Society to students of the Indian Pentecostal Mission Girls School in Rajkot, by nearly 100 VHP and Bajrang Dal activists because on its backcover 'readers were expect to sign a note stating that they accepted Jesus as their Saviour.'

Not a single copy seized and burnt by the hoodlums were signed, incidentally. On the other hand, they roughed up some girl students unstopped. Pravin Gogadiya, the VHP's general secretary for Gujarat, has said in a newspaper interview, 'We have condemned the Bible-burning incident, and though six VHP activists have been arrested in Rajkot, we have not supported them. Let the law take its own course.'

Elsewhere, he says, the VHP activists were acting on complaints of 'parents who worried for clandestine conversions under the garb of education.' They are his words, however, against the 100-year-old school's management that contends there was no parental or staff objection to the distribution of the Gideon Testament nor any manner of coercion. Without proof of intent, it would seem, Togadiya's volunteers operated in the same grey area as did Bhuvan Bhatt and his Khatima boys. To then condemn the incident appears doubly dishonest.

Another telling event occurred 12 days before those Bibles were burnt. The body of one Samuel Christian was exhumed from a disputed cemetery and dumped before a Methodist church in Kapadvanj taluka of Nadiad district. Togadiya denies VHP involvement, but the police complaint names its president Arun Suthar, a corporator, Ghyansham Patel, and a local co-operative banker, Hasmukh Patel, as having headed a VHP mob.

A backward community of Vagharis claims the graveyard as part of its ancestral land while the Methodists, among them say revenue records show it as a graveyard. Togadiya, while admitting that; 'the plot was earmarked as the Christian burial ground by the government five decades ago' counter-questions, 'Where are the Hindus involved?'

If you accept the police complaint against Suthar and others leading a VHP mob to be a big lie, then it surely is a Vaghari-Methodist fight. Except that the Vagharis allowed Samuel Christian to be reburied. Would an uninstigated community countenance this? Would the local administration knowingly compound a crime?

And the Rajkot and Nadiad incidents are only two highlights of a communal churn-out in the state. Intolerance is increasing. Suspicions abound. Prayer and healing services have been disrupted, daises burnt and participants mauled; unconstructed churches have been demolished; and schools vandalised; in one instance, a playground was ploughed up.

Also, prayer halls have been burnt; priests stoned and evangelists beaten; and Christian auspicious gatherings and routine conventions have been violently stalled. These happened sporadically until the recent VHP and the Durga Vahini's Savdhani Abhiyaan (or Awareness Campaign) against 'forced conversions' gave them legitimacy and frequency.

Ahwa Dangs bordering Maharashtra in the south where a large Adviasi upheaval is on, the city and districts of Baroda and Surat, and the outskirts of Ahmedabad have all witnessed such crimes less or more intensely.

Even Gandhinagar is unsafe. On October 30, Bajrang Dal zealots stormed a missionaries convention in Baroda and beat up participants. More than ten Christians institutions set to meet in the Bible House in Gandhinagar to discuss this and other incidents. Local newspapers that have slanted their coverage against Christians played up the proposed meeting. The police had to cordon off the venue the next day to pre-empt any break-in.

In August, Gujarat police chief C P Singh had admitted to the deteriorating law and order situation at a press conference. To the embarrassment of Keshubhai Patel's Bharatiya Janata Party government, he plainly attributed it to the growing aggressiveness of the VHP and Bajrang Dal.

Within hours of his statement, there was a mad scramble to have him withdraw it. But the news was out already. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Singh was attacked by ministers. Some of them demanded a media ban on police officers. Patel kept quiet.

Later, speaking to reporters, he said he condemned the incidents involving the two organisations 'if they were involved.' And of Singh, he said, he is a responsible officer, head of the police. He must have spoken the truth. He does not have to seek anybody's guidance.'

The October attack on the missionaries convention comes more than two months that admission of lawlessness. Professor Simon Dabhi, made the Christian community's spokesman in that Bible House meeting, said in a newspaper interview, 'Apprehensions of the Christians in Gujarat are increasing as no steps are being taken by the police to stop the repeated attacks.' Said his wife, 'Christians are now unwilling to reveal their identity even when their vehicles are involved in minor road accidents.'

Kind Courtesy: Sunday magazine

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