When Narendra Modi was contesting elections for the office of prime minister last year, a lot was said and written about what that might mean for the country’s Muslim minority. No great change seems to have been wrought in their lives by his victory one way or another.
The worst that can be said is that two state governments have outlawed all kinds of beef. Even this can’t really be construed as aimed at the Muslims, especially since there is a new narrative building of attacks on the country’s Christian minority.
That story reached as far up as it could go on planet Earth, with US President Barack Obama expressing his concern at acts of religious intolerance in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded by going to a church ceremony celebrating the beatification of two Indians by the pope.
Speaking there, he condemned all incidents of violence against minorities. Modi also summoned the police commissioner of Delhi to personally take stock of alleged attacks on Christian institutions there, and ordered fool-proof security for those institutions.
However, it is not clear yet if any organisation was involved in those attacks, or even if they were attacks at all.
"The St Sebastian Church in Tahirpur, next to the Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital near Dilshad Garden in east Delhi, was burned down in the wee hours of 1 December 2014. By the time fire tenders arrived, a little after 7 am in the morning, the altar and the main hall had been reduced to ashes. I spoke to two guards in the vicinity, Peter—a guard at St Sebastian church who is on afternoon duty—and Ravi—a guard from an adjacent church—who said that they did not believe that it was arson. They both asserted that there had never been any communal tensions related to the church in the neighbourhood. Both of them proceeded to take me through the interiors of the church, as they explained that the fire had probably started in one of the rooms on either side of the altar, in which a lot of the church’s clothes, candles and other important objects were stored after mass the previous evening. They claimed that the guard on morning duty had not been present when the building caught fire, and by the time he unlocked the main door—the only door that was locked from the outside—the fire had already spread to the ante room and reached the plywood altar. The case is being investigated by the Delhi Police’s Crime Branch and they haven’t yet announced whether or not this incident was an act of arson. However, a day after the incident, the Hindu reported that a can of kerosene had been found on the second floor by the police during their investigation. However, Peter told me that he kept a can of diesel on the second floor for the generator, which was on the roof."
Another “attack” turned out to be a case of a single stone thrown by a boy hitting a church window. Eyewitnesses said the boy had thrown the stone at another boy but hit the window instead. A third case of a burnt crib in a church turned out to be the result of a drunken dare, according to confessions of the men who did it. Their act was caught on CCTV and they were arrested.
Despite this, the narrative of attacks on Delhi churches took on a life of its own. Even the Caravan carried its report as part of a series on communal violence, though there was nothing in that report -- apart from some alarmist statements -- to suggest any communal angle in the incidents.
The narrative of attacks on Christians by the Hindu right-wing got another fillip when RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said there was a motive of conversion to Christianity behind Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity’s service to the poor.
The condemnation of Bhagwat was great, and global. This may have been because of who he is rather than what he said, since it is hardly an affront to suggest that a missionary may be interested in missionary work.
Moreover, far worse has been said of Mother Teresa in the past by Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali, among others. Hitchens and Ali made a documentary about her called Hell’s Angel and painted her a bigot who fetishised poverty.
Two Canadian academics, Serge Larivee and Genevieve Chenard, had accused her of raising millions of dollars for charity but offering only prayers for the poor. The German magazine Stern had accused her of salting away millions of dollars in secret bank accounts.
None of this would merit recounting if the cries of “Christians under attack in India” had not become so insistent. If critical statements about Mother Teresa are the benchmark, clearly Christians have long been under attack in England, Canada, and Germany as well.
The latest round of this new narrative of attacks on Christians is now being played out. An under-construction church building in a village in Haryana was allegedly attacked recently. A more grave attack occurred on March 14 when dacoits broke into a school in West Bengal and stole lakhs of rupees, laptops, and mobile phones. They also allegedly gang-raped a 71-year-old nun.
This sounds like a horrific crime. However, there are no reports so far that suggest involvement of any organisation in the crime. That has not stopped the archbishop of Kolkata and other senior church members from blaming the BJP and Mr Modi’s government, saying attacks on minorities had increased in their tenure.
The archbishop also lauded West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who holds the Home Ministry and is responsible for law and order in the state for prompt action, though no arrests have been made yet.
The church is clearly taking a political stance. The wisdom of such a stance is questionable. It mixes religion and politics, which is definitely not secular; the church has, of course, never been secular anywhere.
Moreover, conflating accidents, crimes, and political violence and presenting all of these as political violence is atrocity propaganda. This runs the risk of creating genuine divides where none exist.
It also risks the church’s credibility. There are Hindu bigots just as there are Muslim bigots and Christian bigots. Crying wolf all the time is certain to ensure that fewer people will believe there is an attack if one actually happens.
Samrat Choudhury is a senior journalist and author based in Mumbai.
