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India’s Two Plagues: The “Missing Women” and Violence Against Christians
The first of these number in the tens of millions, killed in their mothers’ wombs or as infants. As for anti-Christian intolerance, the latest explosion has taken place in Orissa. Behind it are fanatics of Hinduism and of the higher castes
by Sandro Magister
It is a violence that has risen to a crescendo in recent years, especially in certain states. Gujarat and Orissa are among them. In Orissa, which faces the Bay of Bengal, south of Calcutta, Australian Protestant missionary Graham Staines and his two children were killed after their car was set on fire in 1999.
Those who are hostile toward Christians accuse them of proselytizing, and therefore violating the Hindutwa, the identification between India and Hinduism asserted by intolerant Hindu nationalist currents. In reality, out of 1.2 billion Indians, Christians of all confessions make up little more than 2 percent. And they are not expanding, but slowly declining: from 2.6 percent in 1971 to 2.3 percent in 2001.
But at the same time, Christians run one of every five elementary schools in India, one of every four houses for widows and orphans, and one out of three houses for lepers and AIDS patients. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is the nation’s pride. Except among fanatical Hinduists.
In fact, the latest explosion of anti-Christian violence that took place in Orissa did not even spare the sisters and brothers of Mother Teresa. Last Christmas three of their houses in the district of Khandhamai were attacked by an enraged mob armed with swords, axes, iron rods, and clubs. The sisters and brothers had to flee into the woods. The aggressors vented themselves by devastating the houses and chapels.
This wave of aggression against Christians began on Christmas eve and continued during the following days in various locations, with attacks on churches, the burning of houses, and destruction of shops.
Cardinal Telesphore Toppo, archbishop of Ranchi, after a visit to the stricken zones, described what he had seen to the agency “Asia News” in this way:
“An expanse of ashes is what remains in the areas stricken by anti-Christian violence at Christmas in Orissa. It was diabolical; churches desecrated and houses burned. The villages upon which the extremist Hindu violence fell are today a vast cremation ground.”
Raphael Cheenath, the archbishop of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, the diocese hardest hit, in an assessment of the attacks released at the end of January numbered the victims at 6 dead and 5,000 homeless, and the destruction at 70 churches, 600 houses, 6 convents, and 3 seminaries. The Indian bishops’ conference gave the same report in a memorandum delivered to the national commission for human rights.
In his report, archbishop Cheenath points the finger at those whom he maintains are the promoters of aggression against Christians: the ideologues of intolerant Hinduism, ensconced in the group Vishva Hindu Parishad, and the members of the high castes, who are unfavorable toward the social advancement of the Dalits, the poorest, the outcast and “impure,” many of whom are converts to Christianity.
save a life sign the online petition to the Indian prime minister,
petitiononline.com/orissa/petition.html
