Hindu militant groups, after weeks of Hindu violence across India in which at least one evangelist was killed and hundreds of Bible students were attacked, BosNewsLife learned Sunday, February 27.
The outburst of anti-Christian violence was the "direct result of repeated diatribe of [organizations] such as the [influential Hindu nationalist] Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Sangh Parivar [groups] against freedom of religion," said the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC) in a statement to the BosNewsLife New Delhi Bureau.
The Sangh Parivar groups have affiliates throughout the world under different names, including the US-based ‘India Development and Relief Fund’, to finance what church officials call "anti Christian programs", BosNewsLife established.
Another militant group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is active in at least 40 states of the US where it began to operate in 1970. It has a registered office in New York and is a non-profit registered Tax Exempt Organization. Since 1972, the VHP also opened branches in the United Kingdom, West Germany and the Netherlands.
The GCIC statement came just days after hundreds of its supporters and representatives of
other Christian groups and different denominations took to the streets of New Dehli to demand government protection for India’s Christian minority. They also called for a crackdown on militant Hindu groups as well as an end of violence and the "campaign of hatred."
LAPROZY PATIENTS
Among the demonstrators were over one hundred leprosy patients from different states of North India who expressed their worries about the apparent increase of attacks against
Christian believers across the country.
"Christians are serving us and helping our children in their education. Those who attack them
are jealous of their good work," stressed Muthuja, a leprosy-affected man from Sonipat district of India’s Haryana state.
Thursday’s demonstration followed reports this month that railway police in India’s Rajasthan state briefly detained "hundreds of Bible students" while at least one evangelist, 25-year-old Pastor Narayan, was killed in the small town of Channapatana in Karnataka state, apparently by Hindu extremists, church officials said.
DALIT RECONVERSIONS
In addition the VHP claimed it "reconverted" 5,000 Dalit Christians, back to Hinduism in
Uttar Pradesh state. "The present political leadership in India is not acting against the crimes"
of Hindu militant organizations, said GCIC National Convener Sajan K. George, in an interview
with BosNewsLife.
"Therefore it is imperative that the global community begins to ban these outfits in their nations," he added, as "the killing and terrorizing of innocent people…by extremist groups
is terrorism as defined and understood by the global community."
He said his organization and other demonstrators handed out a memorandum to India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Abdul Kalam this week, urging them "to check the increasing activities of Hindu fundamentalist organizations and to protect members of the Christian minority…"
Hindus constitute about 82 percent of India’s roughly 1.1 billion population, while Christians
make up just over 2 percent, according to government estimates.
(Based in New Delhi, Journalist Vishal Arora, 32, has covered persecution and other hard hitting news stories for a variety of international and national publications. He has traveled around the country on invitation by NGOs for seminars and talks on human rights, communalism, and religious persecution. Vishal Arora can be contacted at e-mail address vishalarora_in@hotmail.com or visit his website http://www40.brinkster.com/vishalarora/ )
