Pope John Paul II concluded his regular Wednesday public audience on June 28 calling for an end to the attacks on Christians in Indonesia and India. Two days earlier, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee—leader of the federal coalition government led by the pro-Hindu BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)—had called on the Holy Father in the Vatican. The focus of the meeting was the concern over unabated incidents of anti-Christian violence in India.

Insisting on respect for religious freedom in India where attacks on Christian targets has crossed the three dozen mark in the first half of the Jubilee year, the Pope reminded Vajpayee that “the startling increase in violent attacks on the Christian minority in India” goes against the “traditions of religious toleration which have marked the history of India.”

For his part, Vajpayee had issued a “strong” statement deploring the anti-Christian violence on June 23 in New Delhi even as senior officials were trying desperately to arrange a meeting with the Pope during Vajpayee’s visit to Rome and Lisbon for his summit with European Union leaders over three days.

“Reports of recurring incidents of violence against institutions and individuals belonging to the Christian community are a matter of deep concern to all those who believe in communal harmony and national unity,” the prime minister said. Vajpayee said his government was committed to upholding the law of the land which guaranteed equal rights to all citizens without discrimination, but no rights to anybody or any organization belonging to any community that spreads ill-will and hatred towards another community.

“PM [Prime Minister] remembers Christians before Rome visit,” commented the Asian Age English daily in a front page headline on Vajpayee’s statement referring to the BJP government’s “damage control” bid on the eve of his European visit. Indian and international media had reported extensively on the surge in anti-Christian violence in India from early 1998 when the pro-Hindu BJP assumed control of the federal government. With the emergence of BJP as the national “ruling” party in 1998, nearly 300 incidents of attacks on Christian targets—including burning of churches, looting of Christian institutions, rape of nuns, and murder of missionaries and priests, allegedly by Hindu extremists owing allegiance to BJP—have been reported across the country.

Though the BJP and its cadre groups have attempted to wash their hands of their role in the anti-Christian assaults, the media has consistently pointed out the patronage BJP extends to Hindu extremist groups including VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad—World Hindu Council), RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—National Volunteer Corps) and Bajrang Dal, that are waging a vicious and violent campaign against Christians.

That the prime minister’s assurance to protect the minority Christians did not elicit enthusiasm in the Christian community was evident in the comments made by Archbishop Cyril Mar Baselios, new president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), at a news conference in New Delhi the next day.

“The present situation the Christian community faces is serious. The tolerance and silence on the part of the government amounts to consent [to the anti-Christian violence],” said Archbishop Baselious of Trivandrum in southern Kerala in his first news conference after his elevation as CBCI president following the tragic death of CBCI president Archbishop Alan Basil de Lastic of New Delhi in a car accident in Poland a few days before.

“Let Actions Speak, Not Words,” said the front cover of Indian Currents, a Catholic weekly published in New Delhi, in its July 9 cover story on recent assurances made by the prime minister to the Pope and Christians in India.

The mainstream media has gone further and focused on the “double-speak” of the BJP-led government on the burning issue. “Ironically, even as Prime Minister Vajpayee hands out assurances abroad, in India his ministers insist that the recurrent attacks on minorities are ‘sporadic.’ The BJP sees the customary ‘foreign’ hand behind them but fails to come up with any proof to back such assertions,” commented the Times of India in its editorial on June 29.

Hardly before readers were finished with the newspaper, federal home (interior) minister Lal Krishna Advani repeated his “foreign conspiracy” theory for the anti-Christian violence—this time while addressing a national meeting of state police chiefs to review the internal security situation.

Advani, second to Vajpayee in the government, was unambiguous in his claim that “anti-India forces” (i.e., Pakistan) seemed to be behind the recent attacks on Christians and their institutions. “The possibility of anti-India elements trying to create disaffection in society and giving the country a bad name cannot be ruled out. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to find out the truth,” Advani said.

Even the secular media reacted critically to the federal home minister’s statement blaming Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) for the violence perpetrated on the hapless Christian community who account for 2.3 percent of India’s one billion people. In its editorial titled “Blame it on ISI,” the Hindustan Times Daily pointed out that Advani’s claim “will not serve to reassure the minorities that their social well-being continues to be the government’s concern.”

Such blind absolutions to the Sangh Parivar (a collective family of Hindu nationalist groups) from their political patrons stirred the autonomous National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to seek from the federal and state governments a comprehensive report on recent incidents of attacks on Christian targets. The anti-Christian violence, NHRC said, has “created reasonable apprehension in the minds of Christians throughout the country that they are being victimized and their human rights are being endangered.” The directive, the human rights watchdog said, is “to take a holistic view as well as to inspire confidence [in] the Christian community which appears to be feeling insecure at this time.”

The NHRC decision followed a complaint by the CBCI demanding an inquiry into the death of Vijay Kumar Ekka, a cook at a Catholic school near Mathura, 150 kilometers south of New Delhi, in illegal police custody on June 17. Reports say Ekka, who leaves behind a pregnant wife expecting his first child, was tortured to death by the police in their bid to make him own up to the June 7 murder of Brother George Kuzhikandam. The murder of the missionary who was beaten to death on June 7 in the Catholic school compound in Navada village marked the culmination of a series of attacks on Christian schools around Mathura since April.

Father K. K. Thomas, who survived a similar brutal attack in his school at Kosi Kalan near Mathura, told CWR in April from his hospital bed that “the aim of the assailants was to kill me.” The priest from Agra archdiocese recounted that he pretended to be dead after masked assailants hit him on the head with iron rods. “They watched me for some time and said (in Hindi) ‘vo tho margaya, chalem’ (he is dead, let us go),” he said.

Even as the BJP leadership denied any anti-Christian agenda and claimed that recent incidents of violence against Church institutions in Mathura are the handiwork of Pakistan, its associates made no bones about their intention “to drive away Christians.” A Bajrang Dal leader in Mathura was quoted in a national daily declaring that “Christians were now bigger enemies than Muslims” in the nation with an 82 percent Hindu population.

Dharmendra Sharma, a Bajrang Dal leader in Mathura region, said that his organization was ready to fight wherever Church institutions were active. “We are prepared to use violence. There is no limit,” he proclaimed even as he denied any role in the murder of the missionary. All the same, he said that his outfit is not afraid of the charge, asserting that “we feel that every time there is a crime like this, the Bajrang Dal’s name should be taken. Hindus will respect us more and Christians will fear us.”

“The Christians want to take over the country. What is the point of us targeting one or two? Our aim is to drive them all away,” he said, spelling out his ultimate goal.

The sensational report evoked sharp reaction even from within the BJP-led government which usually maintains stoic silence on the bravado of its committed cadre outfits.

“Persons who make statements that Christians are bigger enemies than Muslims should be locked up either in jail or in a lunatic asylum,” declared Soli Sorabjee, attorney general of India. “Such scurrilous statements cause immense damage to the secular image of our country and government, and induce a sense of insecurity in the minds of minorities,” he said.

The top legal officer of the country was indeed concerned about the international ramification of such threats. The Bajrang Dal leader’s statement, the attorney general pointed out, would “provide ammunition to hostile elements for anti-India propaganda”—a concern about which the BJP government is very conscious.

Despite the attorney general’s condemnation, the police in Uttar Pradesh state, which is governed by BJP, have not moved against the Hindu leader for “provocative statements endangering peace and communal harmony.” Nor have the police arrested anyone for the murder or taken any other action except for the incident in which they allegedly tortured to death the key witness to the murder—who could have perhaps revealed the identity of the assailants.

Despite such lukewarm response from the government to the orchestrated violence against Christians, protests are growing over inaction to stem the rot. One of the finest examples of the general public’s solidarity with harassed Christians was reported from the eastern Orissa state at the end of June.

When a mob of VHP activists surrounded a Hindu house threatening to kill the family if they did not throw out a Catholic priest living in their house, the middle-aged housewife threw boiling oil on the mob and scared them away. The Gobardhan Pradhan family had been resisting the VHP demand for months saying they would not evict the Catholic priest “just because he belonged to a different religion.”

Ironically, the incident took place in the same Orissa state that witnessed the “reconversion” of 72 tribal Christians in a solemn ceremony led by a prominent Hindu seer the first week of June in the presence of police officials and BJP members of the State Legislative Assembly. As usual, Christian protests over the government patronage of the religious “reconversion” ceremony evoked no response from the state government in which BJP is a coalition partner.

“It is clear that there is a pattern behind the attacks on Christian institutions,” asserted CBCI president Archbishop Baselios in a July 4 interview. “Advertently or inadvertently, an anti-Christian feeling is spreading. Ending this hatred is essential not only for the Christian community but also in the larger interest of the nation. What is essential is to probe, identify and eradicate the real motives behind the attack.”