reportedly pledged to reconvert every Christian and Muslim to Hinduism, within five years.
K.S. Sudarshan, who heads the hard-line Hindu organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), set 2011 "as the target year for making every Christian and Muslim a Hindu," reported the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN), an independent Christian news agency.
Up to 300,000 Hindus were estimated to have participated in the February 11-February 13 event in Gujarat’s Dangs district, far less than the half a million organizers had anticipated.
Local police told reporters that local residents were not happy with the festival for fear of renewed religious violence.
GUJARAT CHRISTIANS
Hindus account for about 80 percent of India’s nearly 1.1 billion people and Christians just over two percent. However in Gajarat Christians comprise about 15 percent of the Dang population, according to estimates.
Gujarat has had a questionable record when it comes to protecting minority rights, but administration officials said this time police and paramilitary forces protected especially Christian households, the main potential targets of Hindu violence.
Hindu groups have expressed concern over the growing number of Chris tians among tribals. On Sunday, February 12, Sudarshan told a crowd of about 200,000 people that "satanic powers from the West are re-emerging and must be defeated," ICAN said. He also called for the "Indianization" of Indian Muslims and Christians.
He suggested that Christian missioners influence tribal and poor people through their schools. "We should also set up quality schools to provide an alternative to convent education," Sudarshan was quoted as saying. "We can’t throw our Muslims and Christians into the sea — we have to Indianize them. And for this, we have to communicate with them the importance of this objective," he reportedly told the gathering.
VILLAGERS THREATENED
Christian tribal villagers in Gujarat told reporters they had been "threatened" by hard-line Hindu activists. "They suddenly appeared and said that Christians should no more call themselves Christians. They wanted us to immediately change to Hinduism or get out of the village," UCAN quoted villager Jivabhai Monia as saying.
The "hate campaign" has "upset Christians in the area," Father C.M. Raphael told UCAN. "We are not against ‘spiritual awakening,’ but it should not be at the cost of maligning us, our work," said the assistant parish priest of the local Jesuit’s Subir mission.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi opened the festival. His government, led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian People’s Party, has been accused of tacitly supporting attacks on Christians and Muslims in the state, charges officials have denied.
Although no serious violent incidents against Christians were reported during and in the aftermath of the festival, the Christian community in Gujarat remained on high alert Tuesday, February 14, as attacks broke out elsewhere.
BURNING CARDS
Hard-line Hindu groups and radical Muslims burned St. Valentine’s Day greeting cards and held protests across India against celebrating the annual day of love, saying it was a Western import that spread immorality.
The organizations also warned couples not to take foreign celebrations of Valentine’s Day too seriously because they allegedly "corrupt" traditional values.
Various Hindu nationalist groups reportedly warned people to stay indoors Tuesday, February 14, saying they would confront and attack young couples showing affection in public and show their pictures to parents or force them to get married.
About two dozen women separatists, veiled in black from head to toe, rummaged shops and burnt Valentine’s Day cards in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, witnesses said.
In published remarks the women of the separatist group Dukhtaran-e-Milat, or Daughters of the Muslim Faith, said that "Valentine’s Day spreads immorality among the youth" and that they appealed to their "children to stay away from this western culture."
MORE ATTACKS
In Bangalore, India’s technology capital, as well as Hubli town, both located in the southern state of Karnataka, groups of Hindu nationalists reportedly burnt a big heart-shaped card. About 50 Hindu activists wearing holy saffron-colored scarves held a noisy protest in a popular market near the Delhi University campus, a Reuters news agency photographer said.
They burnt greeting cards which they were carrying and shouted "Down with Valentine’s Day". The day was named after Saint Valentine, or Saint Valentinus, one of at least three martyred ‘saints’ of ancient Rome, historians say.
The feast of St. Valentine was first decreed in 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who included Valentine— and Saint George— among those "…whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God." (With BosNewsLife News Center, BosNewsLife Research and reports from India).
