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Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social iden
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Table of contents :
Anti-Christian Violence in India
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Anti-Christian Violence in Global Context
1. A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
2. A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict
3. "Everyday" Anti-Christian Violence
4. "Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men": The Riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, 2007–2008
5. The Social Construction of Kandhamal's Violence
Conclusion: A Geography of Anger
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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D
E
F
G
H
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J
K
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M
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Citation preview
ANTI-C HRISTIAN VIOL ENCE IN INDIA
Religion and Conflict
A series edited by Ron E. Hassner A list of titles is available at cornellpress.cornell.e du
ANTI-C HRISTIAN VIOL ENCE IN INDIA
Chad M. Bauman
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bauman, Chad M., author. Title: Anti-Christian Violence in India / Chad M. Bauman. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: Religion and conflict | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019053346 (print) | LCCN 2019053347 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501750687 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501751424 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501751431 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Christians—Violence against—India. | Christianity—India. | Christians—Violence against— India—K andhamal (District) | Christianity—India— Kandhamal (District) | Hinduism—Relations— Christianity. | Christianity and other religions— Hinduism. Classification: LCC DS432.C55 B38 2020 (print) | LCC DS432.C55 (ebook) | DDC 303.60954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053346 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2019053347 Cover photograph: Indian Christian villager Basmoti Diggal, n.d. Photographer Deshakalyan Chowdhury / AFP via Getty Images.
For Charles Ryerson III (1933–2016), who arranged my marriage with India
Co nte nts
Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xii
Introduction: Anti-Christian Violence in Global Context 1. A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
1 27
2. A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict 65 3. “Everyday” Anti-Christian Violence
115
4. “Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men”: The Riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, 2007–2008
143
5. The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence
183
Conclusion: A Geography of Anger
215
Notes 239 Works Cited 273 Index 291
A c k n o w le d g m e nts
The longer a writing project, the more difficult it is to adequately and thoroughly acknowledge the many generous friends and colleagues who in some way contributed to its success and completion. Chronologically speaking, the first person I must thank is Harry van der Linden. Around 2007, when I was contemplating shifting my research focus to the topic of this book, Harry, who was my department chair at Butler University at the time, encouraged it enthusiastically. Were it not for his confidence in the value of such a project, I may have never begun. Soon thereafter, I received a grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) at the University of Southern California, which was funded by the John R. Templeton Foundation. The grant was intended to fund research for a book on anti-Christian violence targeting India’s Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, but its munificence enabled the gathering of data for this one as well. That project also connected me with new friends and colleagues, like Brie Loskota and Dick Flory, who have been valued and supportive interlocutors ever since. CRCC staff also recommended me as a participant to directors of other, related projects, projects that have provided me with continual research funding and collegial support in the intervening years. Among t hese, I must in particul ar mention the Chris tianity & Freedom Project (sponsored by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs) and U nder Caesar’s Sword (a proj ect jointly managed by Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and the Religious Freedom Institute, at which I now serve as senior fellow). Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, and Rebecca Shah have been involved in the leadership of all three projects and have been immensely encouraging along the way. Daniel and Timothy both also played critical roles in helping me get this manuscript over the publication finish line. Among funders, I must also acknowledge the American Academy of Religion, which supported an international collaborative research grant that helped James Ponniah and me explore anti-Christian violence in Sri Lanka. Aside from providing an opportunity to spend more time with the inimitable James Ponniah, my regular partner in crime, the grant helped me develop a comparative regional perspective on ix
x
Ac know le dgments
antiminority violence. To all of t hese colleagues, project directors, and funders, then, let me express my deepest gratitude. The American Academy of Religion has been a source of support in other ways, as well, and I have been sustained by stimulating interactions with colleagues t here year after year. In particular, I am grateful for t hose associated (along with me) with the Religious Conversions Group and the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Group. In terms of scholarly companionship, I feel most at home when among friends and colleagues affiliated with the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies and the Conference on the Study of Religions of India. These two organizations promote leading-edge research, but more importantly, they have both created a culture of scholarly friendship and comradery. Among those particularly responsible for that culture, and therefore among my most valued colleagues, are Corinne Dempsey, Eliza Kent, Amy Allocco, Carol Anderson, Brian Pennington, Reid Locklin, Karen Pechilis, and Michelle Voss Roberts. Similarly, while I have known Arun Jones, Jon Paul Sydnor, and Kerry San Chirico since grad school, my appreciation for their fellowship, sustained now for over two decades, grows with every passing year. For the many drinks shared and things learned from people like these, then, I am eternally grateful. I am grateful as well for the support of research assistants both in India (Naveen John, Yehova Das, and Abel Raj) and at Butler (Ariel Tyring, Katie Harber, Matt Miller, and Stephanie Cheuvront) and for a variety of p eople who helped me forge contacts and relationships in India. Among them are Mihir Meghani, of the Hindu American Foundation, who put me in touch with R. Venkatanarayanan, former secretary of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. Venkatanarayanan entertained me on multiple occasions and helped me understand the views of his famous and important close associate, the late Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Vijayesh Lal, John Dayal, and Richard Howell not only helped me develop a research network among Christians in India but were also important conversation partners themselves. Other scholars and activists located in India, like Jacob Cherian, Asha Kowtal, Joseph Prabhakar Dayam, Ashok Kumar M., Satish Gyan, Paul Parathazham, and Gyanapragasam Patrick, influenced me in considerable ways with their analyses of Hindu-Christian conflict. Although I have surely lost track of all those who have read and provided valuable comments on e arlier drafts and/or presentations of this work, I would like, in particular, to acknowledge the help of Brian Hatcher, Corinne Dempsey, Rowena Robinson, Sarah Claerhout, Nathaniel Roberts, Robert Frykenberg, Richard Fox Young, Charles Ryerson, Tamara Leech, Reid Locklin, Arun Jones, Brian Pennington, James Ponniah, Sarbeswar Sahoo, Richard Wood, and—at
Ac k n ow le d g m e n ts
xi
Cornell University Press—Ron Hassner, Roger Malcolm Haydon, and two simply spectacular blind reviewers. This book is immeasurably better due to the contributions of those mentioned here. Ron Hassner additionally increased the beauty of this book by generously contributing toward the cost of photog raphs. Butler University supported my research on this project with two funded sabbaticals and a g reat deal of additional travel and research funding, while also making available the services of a copywriter, John Mugge, who patiently and charitably worked his way through a much longer, rougher, earlier version of the book. Additionally, I have benefitted, throughout my career, from the fact that my department is eminently functional and relatively drama-free, while being also full of colleagues who celebrate the accomplishments of others. I have also benefitted, over the years, from the presence in our department of two enormously capable administrative specialists, Mary Proffitt and Claudia Johnson, who have provided a g reat deal of friendship and encouragement in addition to so proficiently managing many of the logistical aspects of my work. Outside of the department, I have especially found collegial inspiration from colleagues in the programs of Gender, W omen & Sexuality Studies; International Studies; and Peace and Conflict Studies; and from the Desmond Tutu Center and its successor, the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab (both of which financially supported my research on this project). For providing such a fertile ground for the scholarly life, then, I am grateful to Butler, both in its institutional and in its more h uman manifestations. Portions of chapters 3 and 4 appeared first in Rowena Robinson and Marianus Kujur’s Margins of Faith (Sage, 2010), and I am indebted to Sage for permission to reprint them in this book. Similarly, some elements of the conclusion were first published in the Journal of Asian Studies. Thanks to the journal and to its publisher, Cambridge University Press, for republication rights. Many of us in academia write like we’re running out of time, as observers in the musical Hamilton repeatedly say of its title character. In a sense, of course, we are. But as Hamilton himself discovered, no m atter how respectable or noble the objective, time given over to ambitious projects also constitutes time stolen from loved ones. I do hope that I have done better at achieving what we now call work-life balance than our nation’s famously ambitious forefather. Nevertheless, I remain keenly aware of the many ways that my devotion to work has affected the lives of my children, Annika and Nadya, my wife, Jodi, and even my parents (Chris and Glenn Bauman) and parents-in-law (Carol and Wade Mullet). To adapt a line from Dickens, I love these people, and it is not a slight t hing that they still love me.
A b b r e v i at i o n s
ABS ABVKA ABVP AICC BEIC BJP CRPF CSM EFI FCRA FIR HJK INC KSCC MP NDA NEP NGO OBC PKJS RSS SC ST VBS VHP
Dr. Ambedkar Banika Sangh Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad All-India Christian Council British East India Company Bharatiya Janata Party Central Reserve Police Force Christian Science Monitor Evangelical Fellowship of India Foreign Contribution Regulation Act First Information Report Hindu Jagaran Samukhya Indian National Congress Kui Samaj Coordination Committee Member of Parliament National Democratic Alliance New Economic Policy nongovernmental organization Other Backward Class Phulbani Kui Jankalyan Sangh Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Scheduled Caste Scheduled Tribe Vacation Bible School Vishwa Hindu Parishad
ANTI-C HRISTIAN VIOL ENCE IN INDIA
UTTARAKHAND
MYANMAR
ODISHA
TELANGANA
PUDUCHERRY
Map of contemporary India.
Introduction Anti-Christian Violence in Global Context
The stories are unsettling. A Christian woman finds her husband’s head hanging from a tree in the jungle a fter he was killed by his cousin and can still not return to her village even years later because her neighbors are angry that she filed a police report in the killing. A Hindu woman, seventy years old, holds her son as he bleeds to death a fter being cut on his legs, hands, and penis by rioters enraged that he had tried to protect his Christian neighbors. After being gang-raped and paraded through town half- naked, a Catholic nun is molested in the presence of police officers, who sit idly by and talk amiably with her attackers. A Hindu woman is raped repeatedly in the presence of dozens of men shouting pious Hindu slogans, simply because her Christian uncle will not convert to Hinduism. A Christian dalit (a term referring to members of India’s lowest castes) witnesses her niece being raped and handled like a plaything, before suffering the same fate herself.1 A Christian woman, in terrorized flight from one village to another, watches along with her two young d aughters as a small group of men drag, kill, dismember, and burn the corpse of her husband.2 Young girls, studying in a Hindu ashram, cower in a corner as their beloved swami is gunned down along with four of his associates on the day of Krishna’s birth. Panic-stricken Christians flee to jungles and crouch in fields where they had once harvested turmeric, a plant traditionally associated, in India, with health, fertility, and protection from evil. 1
2 I NT ROD UCT ION
These are stories from Kandhamal, a remote, secluded district in the Indian state of Odisha, where, in 2007 and 2008, a series of devastating riots, largely but not exclusively targeting Christians, led to the destruction of six thousand houses and three hundred churches, dozens of incidents of sexual assault, the murder (officially) of around fifty people, and the displacement of more than fifty thousand.3 While the riots in Kandhamal constitute the most extreme violence ever suffered by India’s Christians, they took place within the context of rising levels of anti-Christian hostility and almost daily incidents of smaller-scale anti-Christian violence. These more regular incidents of vio lence are only rarely fatal. Much more commonly they involve mild to extreme physical violence, vandalism, theft, or the destruction of Christian property. Though sexual assault was common in the Kandhamal riots, sexual violence is much rarer in the context of the more diffuse, everyday incidents of anti- Christian violence. Before the end of the twentieth century, however, violence was not a regular feature of Hindu-Christian relations. Historically, Hindu-Christian conflict in India has manifested itself primarily in nonviolent forms, through mutual Hindu and Christian criticism and polemics, for example, or through social pressure brought to bear on t hose who do not conform to the dominant religious norm of their communities, or through the social and economic competition of communities aligned along the Hindu-Christian religious divide. Since the late 1990s, however, anti-Christian violence has been very much on the rise. The rising levels of anti-Christian persecution in India coincide with a global increase in religious restrictions and violence against all religions over the last two decades. In just the years from 2007 to 2016, for example, Pew researchers observed the percentage of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions on religion increase from 20 percent to 28 percent, while the percentage of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of social hostilities involving religion grew from 20 percent to 27 percent.4 The significant increase in anti-Christian hostility and violence in India since 1998 has also coincided with a global rise in specifically anti-Christian hostility. India was but one of 151 countries in which Christians suffered some form of harassment, restricted freedom, or violence in the six years between 2007 and 2013, and from 2007 to 2016, the number of countries in which Christians w ere harassed or discriminated against by the government grew from 79 to 114, while the number of countries in which Christians faced social harassment and discrimination (instead of or in addition to what they faced from the government) grew from 74 to 107.5 This trend shows no signs of reversing; the Christian advocacy group, Open Doors, contends that the percentage of Christians per-
Ant i-C hrist ian Viol ence in G lo ba l Co n t e x t
3
secuted worldwide in the 50 countries it monitors annually increased by 14 percentage points in the last year alone (from 2018 to 2019).6 The nature and causes of anti-Christian harassment, discrimination, and violence vary globally. In 1998, Indonesia’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy paved the way for majoritarian Muslim movements, some of them intolerant and intent on imposing shari’a-inspired laws even on non- Muslim citizens, and others organizing themselves into violent paramilitaries that contributed to the death of over ten thousand p eople in communal vio lence between 1999 and 2003.7 Christians in communist China and Vietnam have known many periods of official repression, but since the mid-to late 1990s, the governments of both countries have engaged in coercive and sometimes violent attempts to manage, contain, and impede the growth of Chris tianity, particularly in its evangelical and Pentecostal varieties.8 Nigeria’s transition to democracy in 1999 allowed for the democratically approved imposition of shari’a law in northern states, leading to simmering interreligious tensions that have boiled over into massive communal violence since the mid2000s.9 The 2003, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq led to widespread anti-Christian violence there and provoked the beginning of a massive outflow of Iraqi Christians. The later emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been even more devastating, and in Syria, Christians were threatened by ISIS, until its decline, and other rebel groups who faulted them for siding with Asad (whose authoritarian rule had kept a lid on antiminority violence) in that nation’s civil war.10 At around the same time, anti-Christian sentiment and violence increased in Sri Lanka, as Buddhist nationalists gained ground and consolidated their efforts to emasculate or eradicate the island nation of its non-Sinhalese and non- Buddhist communities.11 Pakistan’s Christians have also seen an increase in social discrimination and violence in the last two decades, as well as the broader, more regular, and more capricious application of long-standing antiblasphemy laws to Christians and other minorities.12 Since the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a military coup, Egypt’s Christian communities have begun to have similar experiences, prompting as many as 350,000 to emigrate in the period between 2011 and 2013.13 Even the meager details provided in the preceding paragraph highlight important differences among these cases. India is not a communist country like China or Vietnam, for example; nor has the increase in anti-Christian hostility in India been linked to processes of democratization, as has been the case in Indonesia and Nigeria. Nevertheless, while the intent of this book is to explain, analyze, and theorize anti-Christian discrimination and violence in India, one larger question is w hether and to what extent the explanations,
4 I NT R OD U CT ION
analyses, and theories I provide for the Indian context may be useful to help explain this more global rise in anti-Christian hostility or the more general increase in antireligious hostility and interreligious violence over the last de cades. I return to that question in the conclusion of this volume. In India, while Christians on occasion attack Hindus, as they did in the context of the Kandhamal riots, the vast majority of the violence between Hindus and Christians in contemporary India targets Christians. Large-scale and deadly riots like t hose that took place in Kandhamal receive significant attention from national and international media. What is less widely covered, however, and therefore less widely known, both in India and abroad, is the occurrence of hundreds of smaller-scale, more isolated incidents of violence against India’s Christians every year. Taking a variety of f actors into consideration, I estimate, on grounds discussed in chapter 3, that such incidents take place about 350 times a year, or approximately once a day.14 For this and other reasons, I refer to this phenomenon as “everyday” anti-Christian violence. While the book examines both everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence and the kind of larger-scale riot violence that affected Kandhamal, it is both useful and important to distinguish, analytically, between them. Because the everyday forms of violence against Christians go largely unnoticed, when incidents of anti-Christian violence do garner international media attention, t hose who learn about them outside of India are often shocked and mystified, in part b ecause of the tolerance and peacefulness that many romantically associate with Gandhi, with Hinduism, with yoga (in its many popularized forms), and therefore with India and its citizens. This mystification was apparent in December 2014 and January 2015 when half a dozen Catholic institutions were attacked in Delhi, where at least in several cases anti- Christian sentiment (as opposed to mere thievery) was the prime motivation. In the same period, regional and national organizations associated with the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar15 (or Sangh, with which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] is itself associated) engaged in a series of highly publicized ghar wapsi (homecoming) ceremonies intended to convert Muslims and Christians back to the Hindu fold. Praveen Togadia, the firebrand leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council [VHP]), a central Sangh organ ization, declared that in fact all Indian Christians and Muslims had originally been Hindu but had been lured away through acts of coercion and enticements of various kinds, and he pledged that the VHP would make India 100 percent Hindu. Rajeshwar Singh, the leader of a regional Sangh organization, promised to complete the effort by 2021. Such a goal would not be particularly controversial—after all, its mimetic appropriation of well-publicized Christian attempts to Christianize the world
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by the year 2000 is obvious—except for the fact that the reconversions came on the heels of the BJP’s resounding national electoral victory in 2014 (duplicated and bettered in 2019), which seemed to have emboldened Sangh activists while striking fear in the hearts of India’s religious minorities and those who advocate for their rights. The controversy was additionally fanned by news reports about the ghar wapasi ceremonies alleging duplicity (e.g., the “Christians” converting were really Hindus), inducement (e.g., those reconverting had been promised cash or other benefits), coercion, and the publication of salacious stories about internal Sangh squabbles and other unflattering shenanigans related to the reconversion affair. And then, in the midst of it all, various Sangh leaders renewed calls for a national law that would ban or curtail conversion. One BJP member of Parliament (MP) even suggested that conversion, along with cow slaughter, ought to carry the death penalty.16 Highly placed BJP leaders attempted to distance the party from the attacks and the reconversion ceremonies and even declared that the BJP would not put forward an anticonversion law without the (very highly unlikely) support of opposition parties. Nevertheless, the silence of the party’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, troubled India’s religious minorities and raised doubts about the government’s position. Supporters of Modi’s government offered that the prime minister refrained from comment in order to not deflect attention from his development platform. Of course, the fact that Modi was a longtime leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS, perennially one of the most controversial and aggressive of the organizations within the Sangh) and that many continue to suspect him of at least tacitly condoning a series of bloody anti-Muslim riots that in 2002 left hundreds dead in the state of Gujarat (which he governed at the time) gave minorities a legitimate reason to interpret his silence in more sinister ways. Visiting India in the midst of Modi’s silence, in late January 2015, U.S. president Barak Obama indirectly addressed the issue, declaring, among other comments, “India w ill succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith.”17 Perhaps feeling pressured by external or internal forces such as these, Modi did eventually break his silence on February 17, when he addressed a crowd of Christians, saying, “My government w ill ensure that t here is complete freedom of faith and that everyone has the undeniable right to retain or adopt the religion of his or her choice without coercion or undue influence. My government will not allow any religious group to incite hatred against o thers, overtly or covertly. Mine will be a government that gives equal respect to all religions.” He added, “We cannot accept violence against any religion on any pretext, and I strongly condemn such violence. My government will act strongly in this regard.”18 The VHP and other Sangh organizations
6 I NT ROD UCT ION
tried desperately to spin the prime minister’s words as a condemnation of Christian proselytization, and indeed Christians w ere troubled by the fact that Modi omitted a promise to ensure the freedom to proselytize. Nevertheless, many Christians w ere grateful that the prime minister had at least broken his silence on the matter. Reporting on these events, many news outlets, both within India and elsewhere, wrote of an “increase,” “rise,” “spike” in, or “slew” of, anti-Christian attacks and controversies in India since Modi’s January 2014 election, giving the impression that they w ere in some sense unusual, an aberration, and clearly related to BJP rule. But to me, and surely to all other consistent observers of contemporary Hindu-Christian relations in India, they appeared, rather, as more of the same, and not at all unlike the kinds of attacks and controversies that had taken place during the previous decade when India was ruled by the more secularist and pro-minority Congress Party, with the exception that the Congress Party, now in the opposition, had incentive to publicize and protest the attacks for political gain, as they did when their MPs, along with those of other opposition parties, protested so vociferously in late December that the parliament itself had to be shut down. Far from being an aberration, then, the events and controversies of late 2014 and early 2015 represent something more like an intensification of a far more widespread and deeply entrenched prob lem, one that has developed over several centuries within a discernible historical trajectory traced within the pages of this book. It is to make this point, more than any other, and to provide this context that I offer this book.
Aims and Limitations Paying adequate attention to both the contemporary manifestations and historical construction of Hindu-Christian conflict requires an interdisciplinary approach. Accordingly, the book pilfers unapologetically from the methods and theories of history, anthropology, religious studies, and political science. Scholars in the latter two of these disciplines (religious studies and political science) are prone to talking impertinently past one another, which is unfortunate, as Ron Hassner has argued, because interreligious conflicts are related to both politics and religion, and to understand and mitigate such conflicts requires the involvement and investment of both religious and political leaders.19 The problems that religion scholars and political scientists have conversing with one another is no doubt related both to the post-Enlightenment Western tendency to think of religion and politics as easily disentangled and preferably distinct, but it also derives from the tendency of religion scholars to take reli-
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gion seriously—sometimes naively so—a methodological orientation that grates against that of many political scientists, influenced as they are by the Marxist tradition to think of religious beliefs as epiphenomenal, a mere mask or justification for the “real” motivations lying behind human behavior. This book attempts to speak the language of both religious studies and po litical science, and it does so in part by adopting a constructivist approach to the analysis of Hindu-Christian conflict. In chapter 1, I more fully describe the distinctive nature of this approach relative to the well-developed literature on ethnic and religious conflict. For the introduction, suffice it to say that the constructivist approach differs from both the instrumentalist and essentialist (or primordialist) approach to interreligious conflict in important ways, though the lines dividing these approaches are often quite misty and nebulous. To put it simply, in the instrumentalist view, conflict between groups occurs as a result of competition over material resources and political power, either as individuals pursue their own interests or as they are convinced by political entrepreneurs to pursue the interests of some collective. In the essentialist view, conflict between groups occurs b ecause of long-standing, stable (“primordial”) differences between those groups in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, social custom, culture, and political governance.20 The constructivist position, as I understand and employ it, accepts from instrumentalist orientations the insight that h uman behavior is primarily driven by material and political interest. However, noting the regularity with which conflicts organize themselves along the fault lines of preexisting ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups (as opposed to class), a regularity that is not easily explained in the instrumentalist view, constructivists accept as important the essentialist insistence on the significance and enduring influence of culture. At the same time, recognizing that essentialists find it difficult to explain why distinct groups only conflict at certain times and places (and not others), constructivists desire to explore the particular social and historical processes (both local and global) by which a particular group comes into conflict with another group in a particular time and place, as well as the processes by which such conflict comes to be framed or interpreted as “religious” or “ethnic” (or something else). To do so in the case of Hindu-Christian conflict is, accordingly, one of the primary aims of the book, and chapter 2 provides a historical exposition on the development of Hindu-Christian conflict, or, to be more precise, a historical exposition on how certain conflicts in India came to be understood as “religious” conflicts between “Hindus” and “Christians.” Such an understanding, as chapter 2 demonstrates, developed only after well more than a millennium of Christian history in India.
8 I NT R OD U CT ION
A related second aim of this book is to emphasize—as constructivists are prone—the world-historical forces that played and continue to play a role in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict. Several of these forces, like colonization and globalization, are well known, though this book provides a much needed, detailed articulation of how precisely they have contributed to the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict over time. The point of emphasizing world-historical factors in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict is not to deny the role of local interests and politics nor to exonerate the perpetrators of interreligious violence. Rather, the point is to make clear that local individuals, interests, and politics exist in a far more complex and global context. Local groups compete with one another for material and political resources all the time. Attending to both local and global factors helps us explain why par ticular groups come into conflict, why at a particular time, and why in a par ticular way. Why, then, is there conflict between Hindus and Christians in contemporary India? T here are many reasons, of course. An important one, however, is the resistance of some Hindus to what they perceive as the undesirable but inexorable global diffusion of certain (but not all) modern, secular ideals, as aided by processes of globalization over which Western p eoples, governments, and institutions appear to have the greatest control. Christian ity, in this view, is inextricably embroiled in the diffusion of these ideals as both beneficiary and transmitter. A third aim of the book is to demonstrate that Hindu-Christian conflict now, at the end of t hese local and world-historical processes, is not the result of religious difference per se but rather the result of a framing of “Hindu” and “Christian,” primarily by Hindu nationalists, as indexes of total ways of life (“Hinduness,” or Hindutva, as opposed to what I call “Christianness”) that are incompatible with one another. For simplicity, and for heuristic reasons explained in chapter 1, I refer to the way of life that Hindu nationalists accuse Christians of espousing and perpetuating—this Christianness—as “Western secular modernity,” though I do so primarily in the plural—modernities—to make it clear that there are multiple, contested varieties of “Western” modernity. This way of life both characterizes and is diffused around the world by globalization, another term I use as a heuristic simplification, as described in the conclusion. What is important to emphasize, in this process, is that the construction of Hindutva as normative Hinduism in competition with Chris tianity, constructed as part and parcel of the project of Western secular modernity, is a construction that comes at the end of a long historical process that began in a time when none of these constructions would have made any sense. Thinking of Hindu-Christian conflict in these terms has several advantages. First, it helps us recognize that Hindu-Christian conflict is religious but not in
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the particulars of Hindu versus Christian belief and practice so much as in disparate understandings of what religion is and should be (e.g., universal versus ethnic, proselytizing versus nonproselytizing, portable versus space based, privatized versus part and parcel of a total public way of life, and so on). This element of Hindu-Christian conflict has not been adequately recognized or explored by Western scholars investigating the issue, and I suspect it is because many of them are blind to it b ecause they themselves unconsciously accept and operate within a Western secular framework. This blind spot, incidentally, is one that afflicts both political scientists and scholars of religion alike. A second advantage of thinking of Hindu-Christian conflict in t hese terms is that it encourages attention to both material/political interests and culture, thereby transcending the instrumentalist-essentialist divide. One of the reasons that Western secular modernities are resisted by the traditional elites who constitute the overwhelming majority of Hindu nationalist opponents of Christianity is of course because they perpetuate ideals that are a threat to the authority and privilege of t hose traditional Hindu elites (e.g., equality, secularism, individualism, merited versus ascriptive status, e tc.). However, Hindu nationalists also perceive in Western secular modernity a threat to certain of their most fondly regarded cultural values. Chief among these is tolerance. It is beyond historical dispute that there has been a long if inconsistent and imperfect history of tolerance for divergent religious pathways in India. In the view of many Hindus and particularly Hindu nationalists, this tradition of tolerance derived from the nature of Hinduism itself (or Indian religions more broadly). Certainly, the tradition of tolerance in India was made possible in part because of the fact that many Indian religious leaders have since ancient times proposed an understanding of other religions best captured by the phrase made popular more recently by Gandhi and o thers: sarva dharma sambhava (often translated in English as “equal respect to all religions”). As is true of most forms of tolerance, however, India’s particular variety has limits and struggles to accommodate such proselytizing religions as Christianity and Islam, which in their assertive universalism are perceived to contravene the spirit of sarva dharma sambhava, to the extent that some contemporary proponents of Hindutva suggest that such religions should not be considered dharmas at all (dharma is the word in sarva dharma sambhava that is usually translated as “religion”). Take, for example, the view of the early RSS leader, M. S. Golwalkar: When words like dharma and spirituality are uttered, [back] comes the remark: “Why do you bring religion into politics?” This question stems from a misunderstanding of our concept of dharma and confusing it with the Western concept of religion. The Western countries suffered for
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centuries because of their dogmatic concept of religion and the control of the state by the church. Our concept of dharma is as different from that as cheese is from chalk. Dharma or spirituality is not a dogma but a view of life in its totality. It is not a separate sphere of national life just as political or economic spheres. Spirituality is, in our view, a comprehensive vision of life that should inform and elevate and correlate all fields of society for the fulfilment of h uman life in all its facets. It is the sap of our national tree, the life-breath of our national entity.21 If religions like Christianity and Islam are not properly dharmic, in this view, they do not merit equal respect or rights. Indeed, the disparate and contested meanings assigned to the terms dharma and religion reflect different understandings of what religion is and should be, as suggested above, and therefore lie at the very heart of contemporary conflict between Hindus and Christians. This, then, leads naturally to the third advantage of emphasizing that Hindu nationalist rejections of Western secular modernity are at least one f actor in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict: doing so makes it quite clear why proselytization (which I take to mean activity intended expressly to convert another to one’s faith) has become such a flash point in the relations of Hindus and Christians. In the view of Hindu nationalists, proselytization is a rejection of the “traditional” Hindu culture of tolerance and thereby (in the understanding of nationalists) a rejection of Indian culture itself. But h ere again, in addition to cultural concerns we also find material and political interests operative, since to the extent that conversions provoked by proselytization lead (or could lead) to a numerical increase in the number of Christians in India, and to the extent that those Christians are bearers of certain ideals of Western secular modernities, the authority and power of the traditional elites who most regularly support Hindu nationalism in India could be challenged or undermined by the proselytization of Christians. Whether or not it reflects sincere belief, then, suggesting that desirable and proper religions (or dharmas) are nonproselytizing also very conveniently serves to maintain the hegemony of traditional Hindu elites. It is important to note that t here are several t hings that my theoretical emphasis on resistance to Western secular modernities as one aspect of Hindu- Christian conflict cannot accomplish. First, it cannot and does not displace the reality that other factors play a role, perhaps even a much more significant one, as discussed below. Resistance to Western secular modernities may be an aspect of the motivation for anti-Christian violence in contemporary India, but it is surely not a sufficient cause in and of itself. Second, the element of hostility t oward Western secular modernities cannot be isolated and investigated alone. It is not possible to perfectly disentan-
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gle Sangh hostility t oward Christianity from Sangh hostility t oward Western secular modernities. And the reason for this—as implied by my use of the term Christianness, above—is that most Sanghis and indeed most Indian Hindus do not naturally perceive a clear distinction between what most Westerners would distinguish as “the religious” and “the political.” Because of this, many Hindus presume an intimate link between Christianity/Christians and the Western secular modernities they helped birth and now directly and indirectly, knowingly and unknowingly, promote. Similarly, criticism of proselytization is not merely a criticism of Christianity but rather also of the sociocultural system it presumes and requires (e.g., one regarding religion as private, an individual affair, and portable). Many Western scholars w ill insist that my conceptual framework lacks clarity because it cannot easily disentangle religious from other cultural, politi cal, or economic factors in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict. However, this insistence, in my view, exposes an acceptance of the Western secular vision (and its presumption to be able to keep religion and politics distinct) as normative, an acceptance that may prevent scholars from hearing the Sangh’s critique of Christianity as I do, that is, as a more holistic critique of a totalistic, competing religio-politico-cultural system. To properly hear the Sangh Parivar’s critique of Christianity as part of a broader effort to preserve Hindu culture by resisting certain kinds of secular modernities, one must listen with Sangh ears, so to speak. As I explain more fully in chapter 1, the earliest Sangh ideologues articulated an argument that remains influential today. According to that argument, religion informs and is part and parcel of a civilizational nexus that includes culture, politics, and economics. Western forms of secularism, which attempt to remove religion from politics and other areas of life, are therefore based on an incorrect and naively minimalist understanding of religion. Additionally, the strength of any nation lies in its distinctive but comprehensive integration of religion, culture, and politics. For this reason, Western forms of secularism are a threat to the Indian nation both because they seek to differentiate religion from other aspects of civilization and b ecause of their universalizing pretensions (as a result of which they do not respect individual nations’ distinct ways of life). Because the inseparability of religion and culture/politics/economics applies not only to India but everywhere else as well, Christianity cannot be disentangled from the Western secular modernities it helped spawn. For early Sangh critics like Golwalkar, then, Christianity and these secular modernities w ere just different facets of the same civilization, one that was a competitor and threat to Hindu civilization, or Hindutva. Resistance to the growth of Chris tianity in India, then, was right from the beginning of Sangh history also
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always resistance to t hose other aspects of Western civilization with which it was presumed to be deeply enmeshed: Western-style secularisms and selfstyled (though perhaps never fully) territorial (rather than cultural) nationalisms based on equal rights of all citizens. The conflation of Christianity and Western civilization is therefore a feature of Sangh rhetoric right from the very beginning. And it remains so today. Praveen Togadia, the VHP leader mentioned earlier, for example, has called both for the beheading of those who try to convert Hindus to Christianity and for the removal of the word secular from the Indian constitution. Third, my assertion that resistance to Western secular modernities is a factor in anti-Christian violence cannot be proven apodictically based on the nature and targeting of anti-Christian violence. As discussed below, theorists have offered many explanatory hypotheses for incidents of anti-Christian vio lence in India: that they emerge from economic or political competition, for example, or are provoked by the proselytizing of Christians or that they manifest prejudice against members of India’s lowest castes (the dalits). No m atter which of these factors or combination of factors motivates anti-Christian vio lence, the targets would remain largely the same. Destroying the bodies, homes, churches, institutions, possessions, and livelihoods of Christians undermines their political and economic power, certainly. In addition, however, it also serves as a warning to Christians that they must keep their heads down, thereby discouraging proselytization, while encouraging Christian outmigration, thereby reducing evangelistic gains. Meanwhile, anti-Christian violence also tamps down dalit Christian assertion, since most of the victims of anti- Christian violence are dalits. It even squelches dalit assertion more generally, since India’s Christians are known to deploy human rights talk and development work on behalf of all manner of marginalized communities. That the targets would be largely the same if the sole motivation were resistance to secular modernities, as embodied and perpetuated by Christians, means that my emphasis on this f actor has little predictive value, which further means that it fails the most basic test of t hose forms of political science that are concerned primarily with the testing of falsifiable hypotheses. This does not mean, however, that it has no value in helping us understand the violence or in how we might go about attempting to combat or diminish it. Moreover, on occasion, there have been attacks that would seem illogical if anti-Christian violence w ere motivated by economic or political competition, anti-dalit bias, or provocative proselytization but that would make somewhat more sense if they w ere motivated by Christians’ putative assertion with Western secular modernities. Attacks on Christian-run schools, for example, strike a blow against the introduction of modern Western ideals and
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technologies, but since in most cases the majority of their students are Hindus (particularly middling and upper-caste Hindus), these attacks could not be easily interpreted as expressing a material motive or anti-dalit sentiment. Similarly, attacks on development-oriented nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work with all religious communities do not follow the logic of violence intended to diminish the economic power of Christians, to put dalits in their place, or to put an end to proselytization. Such NGOs are, however, important symbolically as purveyors of modern ideals often associated with the West: for example, equality, individuality, the rights and empowerment of women, and rational, capitalistic economic behavior. The existence of attacks on institutions such as t hese would therefore support the argument that resis tance to Western secular modernities is at least one factor among o thers in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict and the production of anti- Christian violence. As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, violence against these kinds of institutions was common in Kandhamal, as was the targeting even of Hindus who worked for them. Nevertheless, one must be careful to recognize that not all riot violence is logical and that riots frequently involve improvisation, indiscriminate violence, and vandalism for vandalism’s sake. There w ere, additionally, reports of incidents in which schools and social service organizations that had developed good reputations locally (for serving all communities equally) w ere destroyed by out-of-town rioters over the objections of local Hindus participating in the riots. This would suggest that, at least for locals, economic interest remained an important f actor. But it may also suggest that cultural, more than economic, factors are more salient in the motivation of those without local economic interests, without—so to speak—some economic skin in the game. While my emphasis on this aspect of Hindu-Christian conflict (resistance to Western secular modernities) is unique, it is therefore intended as an additive or corrective rather than a replacement for other theories. My intent, in foregrounding it, is simply to bring attention to what I consider an underrecognized element in the story of Hindu-Christian violence. The foregoing discussion should make it obvious enough that I accept the compelling role of material and political interests in the formation of Hindu-Christian conflict and also that I accept certain elements of the essentialists’ emphasis on culture. What I find particularly compelling about thinking about the role of resistance to secular modernity in Hindu-Christian conflict, however, is how it is a perspective that directs and enables attention to both the material and the cultural and thereby encourages the articulation of a more complex theory than has generally been offered. Mine is not an attempt to simplify but rather to compli cate the theorization of Hindu-Christian conflict, and it is my hope that doing
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so brings us closer to the fuller truth about that conflict. Accordingly, in the next section, I acknowledge the importance of and my indebtedness to other theoretical orientations in this still incipient field of Hindu-Christian conflict.
Interpretations of Hindu-Christian Conflict Sangh Political Interests By far the most common explanation given for anti-Christian harassment and violence in India is that it is part of a conscious strategy on the part of the Sangh Parivar to marginalize Christians and other religious minorities and thereby solidify and expand Hindu unity (by giving Hindus a common e nemy), both to increase the social, cultural, and political power of Hindus, Hinduism, and more “traditional Hindu” cultural norms (as understood by the Sangh Parivar) and also to maintain and expand Sangh political power. This explanation is widespread largely because there is a good deal of evidence for it. While not e very person associated with the Sangh Parivar is a violent nationalist, most of those identified by victims or in the media as perpetrating acts of violence against Christians are associated in some way with one or another Sangh organ ization. T here is no doubt, then, about the regular involvement of Sangh actors in anti-Christian violence. Following this interpretation, Christians are problematic b ecause they are perceived to represent a fifth column, a potentially subversive community with foreign loyalties and secessionist tendencies. The perception that Indian Christians have divided loyalties is exacerbated by the regular Christian use of theological language indicating primary loyalty to and citizenship in the “kingdom of God,” “heaven,” or “Zion” and martial and colonial metaphors for evangelism that function as part of what Pradip Ninan Thomas has called the “routinized triumphalism” of evangelical Christianity.22 That said, it is once again worth reiterating that loyalties to God, Christianity, or the transnational Christian community are problematic only if one conceives of the nation as Hindu. Anxiety over the “divided loyalties” of Christians must therefore be recognized as a production of those who share and benefit from this conception. According to this view, then, anti-Christian violence should be understood as a cynical, conscious, and nefarious strategy for achieving two related aims: neutralizing the Christian “threat” by dealing them a psychological, bodily, po litical, or economic blow, and manufacturing antiminority sentiment and vio lence to create a fear of minorities, solidify the Hindu vote, and bolster the
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power of the BJP and its political allies while undermining that of the more secularist Indian National Congress, which the BJP regularly accuses of “pandering to minorities.” Theories that emphasize the political roots of anti-Christian hostility and violence are certainly compatible with my own. However, while these instrumentalist theories focus on the cynically self-interested machinations of upper-caste Sangh leaders, and while they help account for why upper-caste Christian communities often ally with their Hindu counterparts against lower- caste Christians (and vice versa),23 such theories tend to frame the threat of Christianity as a primarily numerical one and miss the cultural challenge Chris tianity represents in terms of its alleged association with Western cultural norms, as discussed above.
Anti-Dalit Prejudice For those whose analyses of Sangh Parivar activities focus more on their social and cultural aspects than on the purely political, another argument about anti-Christian violence emerges: it is not in fact anti-Christian but is, rather, anti-dalit. The conflict between Christians and those who attack them is not, therefore, between two religious groups. As an official who worked for the Catholic Bishops Conference of India in Delhi told me: “The conflict is between two interests: dominant and marginalized.”24 Similarly, Clarke, Manchala, and Peacock aver, “A close look at the reality on the ground w ill show that most violence against Christians involves rage against one particular type of Christian, that is, Dalit Christians.”25 Because of the Sangh Parivar’s historic support from and association with upper-and middle-caste Hindus, many are inclined to see the Hinduness promoted by Sangh activists and politicians as a distinctively upper-caste and Sanskritic one. While in its resounding 2014 and 2019 election victories, the BJP received strong support from upper-caste communities and the middling castes classified as “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs), support for the BJP was paltry, in comparison, among the lowest castes. From the perspective of many members of these lower-caste communities, the fact that the Sangh vision of Hinduism is often of the upper-caste, transregional, (Sanskritic) textual variety and that Sangh workers and educators frequently denigrate and try to subsume or displace more local, regional, and lower-caste religious traditions suggests that the Sangh’s primary agenda is not the promotion of Hinduness, broadly construed, but rather the protection and expansion of traditional upper-caste and elite privilege. This leads to a paradoxical situation in which
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the Sangh seeks to solicit the support of dalits in order to broaden the Hindu vote, while venting the antiminority anger it stokes in service of this goal particularly on dalit Christians and Muslims. It is not hard to see how such theories can be harmonized with my own. To the extent that they remain unassimilated into and unaccepting of the Sangh’s upper-caste values, hierarchy, and hegemony, dalits (and India’s tribal communities, as well) represent not only a numerical threat to the Sangh Parivar but also a cultural one.26 But the threat of unassimilated dalit and tribal communities that identify only partially with the Sangh’s vision of Hinduism pales in comparison to the possibility of dalit and tribal communities assimilating to the “foreign” faith of Christianity. Christians therefore exacerbate the numerical and cultural threat of unassimilated dalit and tribal communities not only by encouraging them to resist assimilation into the Sangh’s vision of a Hindu India but also by actively attempting to assimilate them into Christianity. While Christian missionaries and evangelists working among dalit and tribal groups both past and present no doubt taught them quite a bit about the particularities of Christian theology, what such missionaries often foregrounded, and what dalit and tribal converts often heard most clearly, was the Christian assertion that all peoples were equally worthy of respect and dignity and that converts would find that respect and dignity within the Christian church. Once again, that message is one that not only shares a vocabulary with modernity (e.g., “equality,” “dignity,” “human rights”) but also presumes and relies on certain pillars of post-Enlightenment Western secularism (e.g., the portability of faith, the importance of individual conscience, the distinction between and distinguishability of religion and culture).
Proselytization Above, I argued that Hindu-Christian conflict in India is fueled at least in part by the Sangh’s resistance to Western secular modernities and offered as one advantage of giving attention to that factor the fact that it illuminated quite clearly why Christian proselytization is perceived as such a provocative act. The putatively provocative nature of proselytization is in fact so significant a f actor that some scholars trace the roots of Hindu-Christian conflict nearly entirely to Christian proselytization itself.27 While Sangh activists, religious leaders, educators, and politicians are the most likely to offer this explanation, it must be noted that some scholars and even many Indian Christians themselves (particularly mainstream Christians) do as well. Of course, it is one thing to acknowledge that proselytization is provocative and potentially disruptive and
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another altogether to blame t hose who engage in it for the conflict between Hindus and Christians or to suggest it should for that reason be legally proscribed.28 While acknowledging the potentially provocative nature of proselytization, scholars and pro-Christian activists tend to avoid blaming Christians directly. In the way that it delicately toes this line, the following statement, from Ajai Sahni, the executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management in New Delhi, is typical: “Aggressive and unprincipled missionary work that exploits the distress and ignorance of marginalized groups . . . can constitute a catalyst to localized violence.”29 Sangh leaders and activists, however, are generally not so reserved, and increasingly, mainstream (and especially upper-caste) Indian Christians also openly censure their more aggressively evangelistic brethren (e.g., evangelical and Pentecostal Christians) for souring Hindu-Christian relations and provoking what is portrayed as a “natural” and unavoidably violent response to Christian “fundamentalism” or “zealotry.”30 One of the issues, of course, is that while many Hindus and Muslims have a certain degree of sympathy for India’s Christians b ecause of their widespread social service work and dedication to secular ideals, most Hindus find the idea of evangelism distasteful at best. Because of this, even many otherwise secular- minded Hindus find it difficult to speak out forcefully in favor of the rights of Christians to engage in evangelism or against those who react negatively to it, and this ambivalence about proselytization regularly manifests itself in government policies, laws, and legal rulings. For example, in its ruling that Dara Singh’s involvement in the death of the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Odisha in 1998 did not merit the death penalty, India’s Supreme Court appears to have taken as a mitigating circumstance the fact that Singh had been angered by Staines’s missionary work, of which the court took a dim view, declaring, “It is undisputed that t here is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other.”31 Implicit in this judgment, of course, is the assertion of sarva dharma sambhava—all religions are equally valid—and, following from this, the conclusion that proselytization proceeds from an erroneous understanding of true spirituality. Also implicit is the assertion that conversions are generally brought about by “use of force,” or incitement, which mirrors the contestable assumption common to Gandhi, the Sangh, and contemporary anticonversion laws that the primary driver of conversion to Christianity is allurement of one kind or another (as discussed at various points throughout the book). The issue of allurement and what kinds of allurement are acceptable and not is a root cause of the conflict over proselytization in India. Because of their general objection
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to proselytization, many opponents of Christianity would reject as illicit forms of allurement that others more generously predisposed toward Chris tianity would not, such as the promise of dignity and equality within Christianity, threats of damnation for those who don’t convert, or the offering of educational or medical services (even if offered to all communities equally, without any reciprocal expectation even implied). One of the reasons opponents of Christianity find these relatively innocuous aspects of Christian life and work troubling is the widespread presumption that Indian Christians have greater and easier access to Western wealth and make use of that wealth to dazzle and lure impecunious Hindus to the fold. My own estimates, based on data gathered u nder India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (2010), suggest that foreign Christian organizations send almost a $1 billion to India e very year.32 Some foreign missionary organizations at work in India even admit to using the provision of social service as an opportunity to evangelize. One such organization is Action International Ministries, an American mission agency that includes “evangelistic feedings” on a list of its “evangelism efforts.”33 Such admissions prompt Sangh assertions that conversion to Christianity is fueled by illicit forms of allurement. In 2006, for example, when he was head of the BJP, L. K. Advani said: “We strongly condemn the campaign of proselytization, which poses a g reat threat to Hindu society and to the national integration as well. . . . It is bad enough that religious conversions are conducted in a systematic manner through inducements and coercions. But such activities acquire an extra edge of ominousness when they are facilitated by foreign funded organisations ostensibly u nder the garb of social service for poor and under-privileged families.”34 What is obscured by Advani’s comments, of course, is the substantial financial support of Sangh activities by Indians abroad. The extent of this support has not yet been adequately investigated, though a report issued by the South Asia Citizens Web in 2014 documented more than $50 million in donations from US groups to Sangh organizations in India in the period between 2002 and 2012, which adds, of course, to substantial funding solicited within India itself.35 The whiff of paranoia in Advani’s statement above, which hints at the “ominousness” of foreign funding for Christian evangelistic efforts in India, may seem astonishingly conspiratorial. However, conspiracy theories regarding the imperialistic political agenda of Christians are given some degree of legitimacy by missionary use of the language of spiritual conquest, colonization, insurgency, and espionage. Finally, it should be noted that among the most aggressively evangelistic Christians in India are many who agree with the assertion that anti-Christian violence results from Christian proselytizing activities. The difference, how-
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ever, is that for them such violence is a satanic response to the gospel’s radical critique of ungodly culture, a response predicted by scripture (e.g., in Acts 19:23–41, which describes a riot provoked by the apostle Paul’s evangelizing) and one that confirms rather than calls into question the rectitude of their evangelistic work. As one head of a prominent south Indian mission agency told me, “When you proclaim the gospel, the disturbance in society is natural, it is a natural result, and that itself is evidence that you are preaching the truth. . . . Violence is the natural result when you are preaching the truth.” Nevertheless, while the conversion of individuals or groups within a community can be disruptive to the extent that it alters their relationship to that community, it is important to reiterate that such disruption increases in correlation with the extent to which members of the community are invested in maintaining religious homogeneity and the sociocultural status quo. Once we acknowledge this, it becomes clear that the purported disruptiveness of conversion is not inherent and necessary but is rather itself a by-product of the social construction of religions as mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic. Even in India, as Nathaniel Roberts has skillfully argued, such a construction is neither universal nor inevitable.36 Theories linking anti-Christian violence to Christian proselytization clearly complement my own. As suggested e arlier, the very act of proselytization presumes a definition of religion as something individual and portable (not communal or tied to a particularly p eople or land). Such a definition correlates not only with most modern Christian understandings of religion but also with that of post-Enlightenment secularism. Sangh conceptions of religion exaggerate the tendencies of Hindus more generally to think of it as something intimately connected to people and space, something indistinguishable from community and custom. Proselytization is particularly irksome to supporters of the Sangh, therefore, not only b ecause it represents a numerical and political threat but also because it imposes on them and their society what they perceive as an alien understanding of religion itself. Making this imposition particularly troubling is that it is additionally perceived, by Sangh activists, to be aided unfairly by Western wealth and political power. As Arvind Sharma has argued, the prevailing conception of religious freedom deployed by international organ izations and espoused by many Western nations is one that “imposes a Western conception of religion and religious freedom on the rest of the world” and thereby privileges proselytizing religion.37 As I argue in the next chapter, the reason that it does so is at least in part related to the fact that religion itself is a term with a Western history. As Cassie Adcock puts it, “Because religion is a category derived from a modern, European history, we need to ask what forms of politics religious freedom excludes.”38
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Micro-or Macroeconomic Competition While the three broad explanatory frameworks described above are by far the most commonly utilized to make sense of Hindu-Christian tension and vio lence, another explanation given by activists and social theorists, particularly those with an appreciation for Marx, is that Hindu-Christian conflict is the result of economic competition between Hindus and Christians. For the most part, those who emphasize such an explanation focus on microeconomic competition. For example, many believe it was the economic competition of the highly Christianized, Scheduled Caste (SC) Panas with the less Christianized, Scheduled Tribe (ST) Kandhas that provoked or at least provided the fuel for the Hindu-Christian rioting in Kandhamal.39 “Why was Kandhamal, and not some other place, the location of the largest and deadliest anti-Christian violence in modern India?” I asked a Christian who had survived it. A fter talking a bit about Christian proselytization and growth in the region and the Sangh’s response to it—that is, after employing two of the explanatory frameworks described above—he replied, “Christians were developing good. . . . If they didn’t have financial resources, then nothing [would] happen to them.” Chapter 3 provides statistical data that support the notion that anti-Christian violence is more likely when Christians approach Hindus in their competitiveness for jobs and other social resources. Another factor in this perceived economic competition is the widespread and disproportionately high involvement of Christians in the social service sector. While Christians probably comprise 2.5 percent to 5 percent of the Indian population—estimates vary widely—they run, according to some estimates, as much as 25 percent of its voluntary service sector.40 Many non- Christians in India find the significant Christian investment in social service impressive and admirable—a feather in the community’s collective cap. O thers, however, are more skeptical, perceiving the Christian investment in social ser vice to be a carry-over from the colonial era (one that perpetuates certain kinds of paternalistic and condescending attitudes t oward India and Indians) and suspecting it of being a ploy to advance Christian ideological, religious, and economic interests.41 In some cases, however, the economic explanation for Hindu-Christian conflict is placed within a broader discussion of globalization and its effects in India. In this regard, Lancy Lobo’s Globalisation, Hindu Nationalism and Chris tianity in India (2002) represents an early, groundbreaking, and somewhat solitary scholarly intervention into the theorizing of Hindu-Christian conflict. Globalization has had a significant effect not only on India’s economy but also
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on its culture and politics. These effects are doubly disconcerting for those concerned not only about ensuring the economic health of India but also about preserving its political sovereignty and “traditional” culture, as many associated with the Sangh Parivar are. The cultural effects of globalization in India cannot be overstated, a fact that impressed itself upon me on a train somewhere between Delhi and Dehradun. Sitting across from me were four young men. They were playing Uno, an American card game (despite its Spanish name), while browsing Facebook on their laptops and smartphones. One of the young men was blaring music from his laptop. On the playlist was “Gonna Fly Now” (the theme song from Rocky), Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters,” Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” and a dance remix version of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” These songs—all of them written and recorded in the West and all but one in the United States—drowned out the Bollywood tunes playing more softly on an older passenger’s not-quite-as-smart flip phone. The easy identification of so many young and wealthy Indians with all things Western is frequently perceived by those intent on preserving Indian ways of life as a cultural invasion. And t here, on that train, it was: m usic recorded in the United States playing on a laptop produced by an American company running an operating system developed in the United States and an American internet browser pointed at an American social networking site metaphorically (and not just metaphorically) drowning out Indian aesthetics, values, cultures, and technologies. What is intriguing about the Indian situation is that the anxieties produced by the cultural, economic, and political invasion we call globalization (and produced, for effect, by the Sangh) so rarely manifest themselves in political opposition, protests, or violence targeting multinational corporations, foreign nations, or global economic institutions like the World Bank. Rather, and for reasons explored in t hese pages, Christians appear quite often to be perceived as the primary beneficiaries of—and are therefore treated (poorly) as proxies for—the forces of globalization. As Lobo puts it, Christians are, in the mind of many associated with the Sangh Parivar, “symbolic extensions of globalisation.”42 Lobo’s work is one significant exception, but in general, the macroeconomic dimensions of Hindu-Christian conflict have been rather rarely explored. It is in part to rectify this lack of attention that I have so emphasized the world-historical elements of Hindu-Christian conflict. To reiterate, I view this volume’s emphasis on resistance to Western secular modernities as an important factor in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict as a complement to and expansion of the four prevailing theories
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described just above. Indeed, many of my Indian interlocutors would, in the course of a single interview, advance multiple interpretations, emphasizing one or another of the theories above depending on context or on the nature of the specific question I had asked. Each of these explanatory frameworks, as I have indicated, contributes something important to our understanding of Hindu-Christian violence. But each could also benefit from refinement, revision, and extension. In adding my own emphases, I undoubtedly complicate the interpretation of Hindu-Christian conflict, and I do so intentionally to resist the presumption that simpler explanations, by Occam’s razor, are superior. Human behav ior is complicated, and the motivations for h uman behavior are varied and obscure. Accordingly, as I argue in the conclusion, messier theories of human behavior are more likely to provide us with a more accurate understanding of the topic at hand, no m atter how frustrating and difficult they may be to conceive, understand, and articulate.
Plan of the Book Chapter 1 provides an overview of extant theorizing on ethnic and religious conflict, bringing it into conversation with my own theoretical orientation, while applying it, when appropriate, to the context of Hindu-Christian conflict. This chapter may be particularly useful to those new to the academic study of conflict, but it also presents an articulation of what is distinctive about my own approach that goes well beyond the introductory comments provided above. While a substantial proportion of this book is dedicated to describing, analyzing, and accounting for contemporary manifestations of anti-Christian vio lence, doing so requires that the violence be placed within its proper historical, social, and political context. For this reason, chapter 2 traces the historical development of Hindu-Christian tension and conflict over the course of Christian history in India. The next three chapters explore contemporary Hindu-Christian violence: its nature, c auses, manifestations, and implications. Chapter 3 provides a description and an analysis of the “everyday” incidents of more isolated anti- Christian violence. Chapters 4 and 5 provide the same for the riot violence in Kandhamal, Odisha, which affected and continues to affect both Hindus and Christians. Finally, the conclusion offers some culminating and synthesizing comments and argues that paying heed to the effects, in India, of globalization (taken as a world-historical process with social, economic, cultural, and political rami-
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fications) not only allows us to refine and advance the explanatory frameworks outlined above but also encourages us to transcend them by recognizing their interrelatedness, or what Mark Taylor has called the “webbiness” of all social phenomena. This volume is informed by interviews with around 150 Indians, most of them Christian but a few of them assertively critical of Christians and Christian evangelism. The interviews took place primarily in person, during several research trips to India spanning the fifteen years between 2004 and 2019, with a few additional interviews conducted by phone or Skype during that same period. The text, I hope, derives a good bit of nuance and immediacy from t hese interviews, but the novelty of the book derives, as well, from several other factors. First, while the historical overview provided in chapter 2 is based primarily on secondary published sources that I supplement with data from my own original archival research, it is to my knowledge the first extended scholarly attempt to tell the history of Christianity in India through the lens of Hindu- Christian conflict. With few exceptions, the scholarly historical sources quoted in this historical overview had other goals in mind. My contribution has been to digest these varied sources, drawing out from their narratives material pertinent to the development of anti-Christian violence and in this way tracing the construction of conflict understood as religious between people understanding themselves, respectively, as Hindu and Christian. Second, the book is distinctive in its sustained focus on the development and multiple contemporary forms of Hindu-Christian violence. Sebastian Kim’s In Search of Identity remains the best overview of the public debates about conversion in India, as well as the varied Christian theological responses to them, but it was first published in 2003, long before the violence in Kandhamal, and contains only scant reference to the everyday incidents of anti- Christian violence that were already, at the time, on the rise.43 Two more recent books, Ankur Barua’s Debating “Conversion” in Hinduism and Christian ity and C. S. Adcock’s The Limits of Tolerance, also contribute in important ways to our understanding of the history and nature of public debates about conversion and the contested meanings of tolerance and secularism in the Indian context.44 Adcock’s work also helpfully reviews the history of shuddhi (purification, in this case a ritual intended to bring lower-caste and non-Hindu communities more fully into the Hindu fold) and the emergence of Gandhi’s particular, but now in many ways predominant, understandings of tolerance and secularism. My own coverage of t hese issues, in chapter 2, relies heavily on Adcock’s. But t hese books, like Kim’s, do not deal in any extended way with actual violence between Hindus and Christians.
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In addition to t hese scholarly texts, a variety of journalistic, advocacy, and scholarly reports focusing on Kandhamal have emerged since the anti-Christian riots t here. Some of them are quite good. The footnotes in chapters 4 and 5 indicate my indebtedness to the best among them. However, none of these reports have considered the riots in tandem with the everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence as I have here; nor have any of them attempted to construct a genealogy of Hindu-Christian conflict, as I do in chapter 2. Unlike the scholarly volumes discussed above, Goldie Osuri’s Religious Free dom in India (2013) does discuss the violence in Kandhamal and makes occasional reference to everyday acts of anti-Christian violence as well. Though her coverage of the actual violence is not as thorough or detailed as my own in these pages, and though her arguments (unlike mine) are couched in the critical idiom of “sovereignty,” her work and mine complement each other in a number of ways. One of her primary and most innovative theses is that objections to conversion demonstrate a “complicity between secular and Hindu nationalisms” in which conversion both is a “key site in the consolidation of a Hindu religio-cultural sovereignty” and plays a role “as a site of anxiety for secular national sovereignty.”45 Conversion as a site of anxiety for secular nationalism becomes manifest in the legislation of anticonversion laws that subordinate religious freedom to “public order,” which is “abstracted to refer to the government as a neutral adjudicator in communal strife, and [yet] the converts and converters bear the brunt of the restriction of the right to propagate subject to public order rather than Hindutva activists who historically and at present have been the agents of communal strife where it concerns the matter of conversion.”46 In Osuri’s view, then, “postcolonial secular and Hindu nationalism reproduce” the violent colonial separation of discrete religious communities through the censuses (and other processes I describe in chapter 2) by regarding “conversions to Islam and Christianity not only as religio-cultural threats (threats linked to the decline of Hinduism) but also as religio-national threats (threats linked to both secular and Hindu national sovereignty).”47 Though I read Osuri’s work only after writing the vast majority of this manuscript and developing the theses articulated above, and though Osuri’s concerns and vantage point differ from mine, it is not hard to see how her arguments converge with my own and how her language of “Hindu religio-cultural sovereignty” and “secular national sovereignty” can be mapped onto my own emphasis on both cultural concerns and material/political interests. Finally, this volume benefits from the passage of some time since the onset of more regular attacks on Christians in the late 1990s and from the riots in Kandhamal that took place primarily in 2007 and 2008. In the wake of t hose riots, many scholars produced articles and books trying to make sense of them.
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Angana Chatterji’s Violent Gods (published already in 2009, while many survivors of the violence were still in relief camps) was the first book-length scholarly treatment of the topic. While literary, thoughtful, accurate in many ways, and acerbic in its excoriation of Sangh interventions in Odisha’s interreligious affairs, not enough of the dust had yet settled in Kandhamal for the actual vio lence of the riots to be given the treatment it deserved. Similarly, a book chapter I published in Rowena Robinson and Joseph Marianus Kujur’s Mar gins of Faith a year later, and from which I borrowed some material for the first part of this volume’s fifth chapter, got many t hings right but also missed several important elements of the Kandhamal story (most seriously, the significant involvement of Oriyas in the conflict, particularly in the development of the tensions that fueled it).48 The passage of time has given me opportunity to fill in some of the blanks left behind by this earlier scholarship and to correct some of the inaccuracies of my own. In the end, my intent, in writing this book, is to provide an overview of one particularly troubling aspect of contemporary Hindu-Christian relations. It should be kept in mind, of course, that there are many far more positive aspects of t hose relations that could and have been discussed by scholars, but as I peruse the literature, it seems to me that the issue of anti-Christian vio lence itself remains inadequately contextualized and inadequately theorized, in part b ecause of its relative novelty. This book begins, in a small way, to address that problem.
A church in the village of Raikia, in Orissa’s Kandhamal district, some three hundred kilometers southwest of the state capital, Bhubaneswar, a fter it was allegedly stormed by Hindu fundamentalists on August 31, 2008. Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP via Getty Images.
Ch a p ter 1
A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
Social theorists dealing with the relationship of religion and conflict are animated by a number of organizing questions. The first and most central of t hese questions is w hether religion causes violent conflict and, if so, whether it does so inherently and unavoidably, frequently but not inherently, or rarely and only in certain contingent circumstances. The second important question is whether conflicts that participants understand or frame in religious terms differ significantly from other forms of conflict. To put it another way, does it make analytical sense to treat “religious” conflict as sui generis, or is it merely a species of ethnic or intergroup conflict more broadly construed?1 The third organizing question has to do with the appeal of violence. There are, of course, many instances of religious communities coming into conflict with one another without resorting to violence. Why, then, and under what circumstances might violence become an attractive or likely option for religious actors? The fourth and final animating question is a more contextual one: What explains the global increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? In what follows, I provide an overview of these debates and situate my own approach within them. My approach is a broadly constructivist one I call socio-cosmological, following but slightly altering—for reasons indicated below—Mark Juergensmeyer’s “socio- theological” method.
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Question 1: Does Religion Cause Violent Conflict? The short answer to this fundamental question is no. Religious identities are no more inherently prone to conflict than any other identities. Most conflicts are, at root, about competition for economic, social, or political resources. However, those that seek or stand to benefit from conflict are liable to produce and frame it in the ways that best serve their purposes. In certain circumstances, constructing conflict as religious (as opposed to constructing it along ethnic, linguistic, or class lines) better serves t hose purposes, and indeed, religions provide resources (for example, group solidarity, dedication to a higher cause, justifications for violence) that can contribute to this construction. However, religions also circumscribe the extent and manner in which the pious can be manipulated and frequently provide resources for those opposed to vio lence. The construction of conflict as religious, then, and the participation of religious actors in it as such emerge not from the inherent nature of religion but rather only discursively, through complex processes of contestation. These assertions require greater explanation. Broadly speaking, con temporary social theorists approach this question in one of three ways, providing answers often designated (as discussed briefly in the introduction) instrumentalist, essentialist, and constructivist. Instrumentalists emphasize and search for the material motivations of human behavior and tend to interpret religious conflict as an outgrowth or mere mask of conflict over material resources. At the other end of the spectrum lie t hose we might call essentialists, who take religion seriously and consider it an important causal factor in conflict, even suggesting sometimes that religion is inherently predisposed toward violence. The contrast between the instrumentalist and essentialist positions has been articulated in a variety of other terms signaling slightly different points of emphasis: microrational versus macrocultural, rationalist versus cultur alist, strategic versus cultural, interest versus identity, materialist versus primordi alist. The instrumentalist view has tended to predominate in political science, economics, and international relations, while the essentialist view has tended to predominate in the fields of sociology, history, religious studies, and anthropology.2 The views described by these contrasting pairs are rarely found in pure form, and t here are many possible mediating positions. Among them, the best known and most thoroughly theorized is the position closest to my own: constructivism. Constructivists argue that while religion generally plays a rather small role, if any, in generating violence, it frequently plays a significant role in the framing, shaping, acceleration, perpetuation, or exacerbation of vio lence.3 Constructivists also emphasize the social construction of conflict—that
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is, the way that conflicts come to be understood and carried out in particular ways in particular times and places as a result of infinitely variable social and historical factors. Before articulating the constructivist position further, we must first briefly describe the instrumentalist and essentialist alternatives. Instrumentalists tend to agree that h umans, or at least their leaders, conduct themselves according to the rational pursuit of rationally chosen economic and political goals. While t here are many possible versions of instrumentalism, most tend to share two emphases.4 The first draws substantially on certain interpretations of Marx to argue that the apparent religious aspect of conflict and violence is merely epiphenomenal. What truly drives conflict is contestation over material and political resources. Instrumentalists do not deny the resurgence of religion or the recent rise in religiously inflected violence. However, they tend to ascribe causality for this violence to factors like rising in equality, poverty, or social/political marginalization. As Amartya Sen puts it, “Given the coexistence of violence and poverty, it is not at all unnatural to ask whether poverty kills twice—first through economic privation, and second through political carnage.”5 The second emphasis of instrumentalists is on the tendency of powerful elites to manipulatively and cynically enlist the masses in the pursuit of elite economic and political goals (oftentimes even against the masses’ own material interests) by creating solidarity and motivating action through the instrumental use of religious images, ideas, and identities. This manipulation is possible and often successful b ecause the marginalized and dispossessed frequently turn to religion in search of that which the prevailing political and economic order has denied them: solidarity, social support, personal confidence, and communal pride. Nevertheless, instrumentalists would deny that religion plays any significant or real role in the generation (as opposed to the framing or aggravation) of violent intergroup conflict.6 The instrumentalist position is appealing for a number of reasons. For example, it seems clear enough that economic f actors play a role in religious conflict. Rarely do socially powerful or wealthy religious communities clash violently with one another. Such clashes far more regularly involve, on one side at least, impoverished and politically weak communities.7 Similarly, Gabriel Almond, Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan have persuasively argued that increased economic prospects tend to undermine support for the kinds of religious movements that regularly condone the use of violence.8 Nevertheless, the instrumentalist position suffers from a number of impor tant deficiencies. While it is laudable in its recognition that even violent actors can be rational and may be strategically pursuing their goals, it overemphasizes the rationality of h uman beings, who obviously do not always
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act in perfectly logical or rational ways.9 Moreover, to the extent that it emphasizes the exploitation of the masses by rational elites, the instrumentalist position tends to imply that what most characterizes the masses is their irra tionality and easily and infinitely manipulated nature. This is a prejudicial position, indeed, though one that could perhaps be at least partially avoided if instrumentalists more regularly employed a broader definition of interests, one that included not only material but also what Max Weber called “ideal” or “value-rational”10 interests, like those proposed or found in religion and religious communities (e.g., pride, respect, belonging, meaning, purpose, community). In such a view, manipulative elites would not need to convince the masses to work against their own best interests, broadly construed. They would need instead to succeed at what would appear a somewhat easier task: convincing them to privilege their ideal interests above their material interests. Indeed, such an arrangement could help explain why low-caste Hindus on occasion support upper-caste-dominated Sangh organizations (despite the historical economic exploitation of lower-caste Hindus by upper-caste Hindus) in projects like the intimidation and harassment of low-caste Christians and Muslims that primarily serve to bolster and perpetuate upper-caste Hindu hegemony. That said, it is also sometimes the case that the material interests of the elites and the masses align and that both might conspire together to articulate their interests in religious terms for mutual benefit. For example, as I argue in chapter 4, a significant cause of the Pana-Kandha (i.e., Christian–tribal Hindu) conflict in Kandhamal appears to have been economic competition and frustration. The Kandhas could of course have joined with the Panas along class lines (and across religious lines) to fight their exploitation by local upper-caste Hindus and other elite communities. The fact that they did the opposite—that is, join with those upper-caste and elite communities against the Pana Christians—may not manifest their susceptibility to manipulation so much as indicate that they found it more natural and easier to join forces with upper- caste and other elites than to ally with low-caste Christians, even if the degree of improvement they could expect would be significantly lower than in successful caste or class warfare. Explaining why they found the alliance they chose more natural and easier, however, requires attention to culture and history, as essentialists are prone. Essentialist approaches to religious conflict tend to reject the instrumentalist view that religion plays no real role in its causation and to argue instead that religion does (or specific religions do) cause conflict and violence, as a result of (1) the nature of religion in general, (2) the nature of particular religions or particular religious ideas (e.g., jihad), or (3) the strength and depth
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of feeling religion generates and the significant role it plays in the creation of distinctive and putatively conflicting cultures (or “civilizations”). Respectively, we may denote these three positions asserting that religion c auses violence structural essentialism, theological essentialism, and civilizational essentialism. The best-known proponent of civilizational essentialism is Samuel Huntington, whose “clash of civilizations” thesis has been much debated in the quarter c entury since it was first published. Huntington’s view was that a fter the collapse of the Soviet Union, f uture conflicts w ere most likely to be “cultural” or “civilizational,” not “ideological” (as in the Cold War) or economic.11 Civilizations are based on subjective self-identification as well as ostensibly “objective” elements like language, history, and religion.12 Civilizational differences are “basic” or “fundamental,” and they are the “product of centuries of development” and “will not soon disappear” (which is why the view has sometimes been called “primordialist”).13 Unlike conflict over ideology or economics, the question in civilizational conflict is not “What side are you on?” but “What are you?” And, according to Huntington, “that is a given that cannot be changed.”14 The ostensible immutability of civilizational identity was importantly related, for Huntington, to what he considered (reflecting a Western religious bias) the indivisibility of the religious identities that so significantly informed them. For these reasons, civilizational essentialists like Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Gilles Kepel, Jeffrey Seul, Bassam Tibi, and others expect civilizations to conflict where they come into contact with one another. The “clash of civilizations” thesis is considered outdated and untenable by most social scientists, including me. Nevertheless, there is certainly truth in the assertion that civilizational differences m atter. What I find salient about these differences, however (in general and as they pertain to the thesis of this book), are not the particularities of custom, culture, and religion so much as the particular structures of power that different civilizations enable, embody, and promote. In my view, then, civilizations clash not—to use one of Huntington’s examples—because Western civilization is Christian while Hindu civilization is Hindu. Rather, to the extent that civilizations do clash, they do so because they promote competing power relations and privilege different kinds of people. To be more specific, the thesis developed in this book is that one of the reasons that supporters of the Sangh resist Christianity is because they see in it both explicit and more implicit support for secular modernity of the Western (and particularly American) variety, which threatens to restructure global politics in a way that disfavors India’s traditional elites and what the Sangh has constructed as the Hindu way of life, or Hindutva (which includes a sociopolitical system that competes with Western secular modernities). The important point of difference is not merely the competing religious or cultural
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values, though the conflict often gets framed that way. It is, rather, their competing structures of power and privilege. Once again, we see why it is impor tant to keep both the material/political and the cultural in view. Thinking of religious conflict in this way also helps account for why Christians and Muslims might find themselves allies as religious minorities in India despite being civilizational rivals in Huntington’s view of the global order. Whereas in Pakistan or Afghanis tan, Christianity may be resisted for similar reasons as in India (that is, at least in part b ecause of its association with Western secular modernities), in India, Muslims are drawn to Christians as allies precisely b ecause of that association and b ecause Western secular political formations f avor minorities in a way that religious nationalisms like that of the Sangh do not. Essentialist interpretations of religious violence are useful in certain ways. In contradistinction to instrumentalist approaches, all three forms of essentialism take culture seriously, taking their theoretical cues from Emile Durkheim’s emphasis on the social, Clifford Geertz’s attention to the symbolic, and Weber’s insistence upon the ability of ideal interests to influence h uman behavior.15 This in turn helps essentialists account for why much violence, particularly religious violence, is symbolic rather than strictly strategic in nature and why the desecration of religious objects or spaces—not a particularly serious threat from a purely instrumentalist perspective—can provoke violence.16 However, in valuing religion and culture, essentialists tend to ossify it. In essentialist accounts, identities become immutable and singular, when, in reality, human identities comprise multiple constituent parts (e.g., language, ethnicity, race, religion, class, caste, education, nationality), different constellations of which may be emphasized at different times and in different contexts.17 The constructivist approach draws from both the instrumentalist and essentialist positions and is often difficult to disentangle, particularly from the former. Both constructivism and instrumentalism, for example, “treat identities as the fluid and situational choices of instrumental actors.”18 Moreover, both tend to see little difference in whether groups are mobilized according to religion, say, as opposed to language or race. Groups can be expected to mobilize along whatever are the most effective lines in terms of “the relative sizes of groups, institutional factors that favor one group over another, and the manner in which political entrepreneurs exploit those differences to their advantage.”19 This last point, the importance of political entrepreneurs in shaping and framing conflict, is another important point of agreement between constructivism and instrumentalism. The constructivist approach shares with essentialism its respect for culture and the symbolic and the acknowledgment that culture (including, of course,
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religion) influences how people think, act, experience the world, and interpret what goes on around them. This acknowledgment provides an important check on the instrumentalist approach, which is sometimes accused of portraying “the ability of political entrepreneurs to instrumentalise old myths and sacred traditions for their own aggrandisement as virtually unlimited.”20 Culture places certain limits on how much and in which direction political entrepreneurs might be able to manipulate the masses in conflict contexts. It also, as indicated above, makes certain alliances seem more natural than others (e.g., religion rather than class) such that groups do not always ally in ways that would most perfectly serve their material or political interests. However, constructivists reject essentialists’ quasi-deterministic view of identity and culture as primordial, immutable, and—in the interaction of people with different identities and cultures—inherently conflictual. If in instrumentalist interpretations of religious violence the explanatory arrows point ever upward from material and political interest, and in essentialist interpretations the explanatory arrows point ever downward from cultural beliefs and norms, in constructivist interpretations the explanatory arrows point every which way. Accordingly, religious conflict demands theorizing in many ways similar to and as complicated as that demanded by religion itself. Such theorizing, as Manuel Vasquez has put it for the study of religion, should highlight “complexity, inter-level connectivity, emergence, situated knowledge, and relative indeterminacy and openness against monocausal, unidirectional, and totalizing explanatory schemes.”21 Theories that emerge from this kind of approach will inevitably lack the reassuring parsimony of other explanatory frameworks. But what they lose in simplicity they gain in accuracy. Constructivism takes its name from the basic premise that religious conflict, like all social reality and behavior, is in significant ways socially and culturally constructed. Conflict— and more importantly, the presumption, production, and framing of conflict—is the result of a variety of historical and contemporary factors, as well as the behavior of local individuals as they interact with world-historical processes well beyond their control. T hese factors and behaviors, in the aggregate, make it such that a particular conflict happens in a particular way in a particular time. Instrumentalists would expect conflict between any two groups competing for material or political goods but c an’t easily explain why ethnicity or religion often trumps class in the organization of groups in conflict. Meanwhile, essentialists would expect conflict instead between any two clearly defined (ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc.) groups but cannot easily explain shifting identities and alliances. To ameliorate these issues, constructivists attempt to pay attention to the particular factors that lead to alterations in the landscape of conflict, as well as to the
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reasons that particular conflicts come to be framed as religious or ethnic or economic and so on. It is certainly the case, as essentialists would have it, that religious beliefs, practices, and norms (along with t hose of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, e tc.) will play a role in shaping adherents’ interpretation of conflict, in defining in- and out-g roup distinctions, and in delimiting the range of acceptable conflict behavior. And while economic and political conflict and competition can reshape religious (and, again, ideological, national, ethnic) beliefs, practices, and norms, t hese beliefs, practices, and norms also in a sense exist prior to and in dependently of any particular conflict.22 They are a lens through which the image of conflict gets filtered for t hose involved in it, and they can set bound aries on how p eople w ill conduct themselves in a conflict context (including boundaries circumscribing appropriate uses of violence). The power of religion and religious identity (along with other elements of culture and cultural identity), then, puts limits on w hether and how religion can be used to promote conflict and violence. However, religious actors and leaders do not necessarily incline t oward vio lence or toward interpreting conflict along religious lines. The primary source of conflict in the constructivist viewpoint remains socioeconomic and political inequality, and conflict along religious lines remains most likely, as Matthias Basedau, Johannes Vüllers, and Peter Körner have suggested, when the fault lines created by social and political inequalities run along religious boundaries.23 However, violent responses to conflict between religious groups require legitimization, and religious ideas and religious leaders can e ither provide or withhold it. They can also help determine w hether conflict w ill be framed along religious lines or along nonreligious lines, like class, caste, ethnicity, or nationality. Religion therefore functions as an “intervening variable” between “a given conflict and the choice of conflict behavior,” and no m atter how conflicts proceed, religion and religious actors play a role in the construction of conflict, religious or otherwise.24 Among the minority of Hindus that encourage and engage in conflict with Muslims and Christians in India, few frame the conflict as what Juergensmeyer has called “cosmic” or holy war, despite the fact that the Hindu tradition includes scriptures that describe dharma yuddha—that is, war fought in righteous ways and for a righteous cause.25 Nevertheless, the Sangh does regularly portray both Muslims and Christians as a threat to Hindu dharma, encouraging majority-minority conflict and framing it along explicitly religious lines. Moreover, many of the names of Sangh outfits, particularly more local ones, contain terms like sena (army) and raksha (protection/defense), which both frame the conflict in religious terms and suggest a need for a martial response. How-
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ever, while the idea of religious war may enable Hindus to conceive of vio lence against Christians as an expression of religious obligations, and while the idea of religious war certainly provides certain of the symbols that accompany that violence (e.g., the names of the groups that carry it out), the justification for violence against Christians is predicated elsewhere, on the constructed difference of Hinduism as nonproselytizing and therefore vulnerable to decimation at the hands of proselytizing religions. According to the instrumentalist view, if and when political entrepreneurs believe (a) that conflict and violence will serve their purposes and (b) that they can succeed in promoting it (the constructivist caveat), they are likely to do so. As already indicated, this second point is an important one—the power of manipulative political entrepreneurs is not absolute. Political entrepreneurs seeking to mobilize religious actors to act belligerently in pursuit of their goals are likely to meet resistance from others with contrary goals or from religious actors activating alternative or more pacifistic aspects of their religious traditions. The inclination of religious actors to engage in violence is not innate, then, but rather emerges only in a contested fashion, discursively. It is for this reason that Philip Gorski and Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu urge attention to what they call the “meso” level of political entrepreneurship in collective mobilization and conflict, in which “the crucial mechanisms . . . are not to be found in the autonomous structures of culture [the essentialist approach], nor in the self-interests of individual actors [the instrumentalist approach], but in between the macro and micro levels.”26 In the context of anti-Christian violence, the activities of Christian and Hindu religious organ izations operate, importantly, at that meso level. In a provocative and suggestive study of Israeli settlers, Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Daphna Canetti, and Ehud Eiran conclude that religious identity correlates with radical action, including violent action, but “only if mediated by membership in an organization that has political goals.”27 Their conclusion suggests that one of the primary mechanisms by which political entrepreneurs can mobilize religious actors is through engagement with politically active organizations. Recognizing this may help explain why the dozens of local, regional, and national Sangh organ izations have been so successful in the activation of otherwise nonviolent Hindus in violent action against their Muslim and Christian compatriots. Relatedly, Eli Berman and David Laitin have found that religiously defined terrorist organizations that provide greater social services are more likely to succeed in their attacks than those that do not, presumably because such social services create a greater sense of loyalty and belonging.28 These studies suggest a partial explanation for why Sangh opponents of Christianity are so intent on portraying Christian medical, educational, and vocational services
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as illicit “allurement,” that is, b ecause such social services may create a sense of indebtedness to Christian institutions and the Christians who run them, an indebtedness that would no doubt undermine the efforts of Sangh organ izations to motivate their members to act violently against Christians (in part by creating loyalty through their own development schemes). In fact, these studies help provide some context to Sarbeswar Sahoo’s claim that competitive rural development schemes are both a cause and manifestation of Hindu- Christian conflict in tribal Rajasthan.29 We can derive from the foregoing conversation a list of factors that make it more likely that social conflict will come to be framed in religious terms and that religious actors w ill be mobilized to act violently against one another or in the name of religion. Such a situation is more likely, first, when horizontal inequalities among groups overlap with religious differences. Second, violent interreligious conflict is more likely when political entrepreneurs believe that their interests would be served by it and when they believe they can effectively and safely mobilize it. Third, these political entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful in mobilizing o thers in the context of strong, politically active organizations that can provide social services and curate a sense of loyalty and belonging among members. The second and third factors are clearly present in the context of Sangh- produced conflict and violence against Christians in India. The absence of clear political and economic inequalities between Hindus and Christians at the national level merely underscores the importance of local dynamics and the power of framing. As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, while the Kandhas could have chosen to frame their competition with the Panas in economic terms, their interests (in terms of gaining support from other castes and from outside the region) and the interests of Sangh political entrepreneurs were better served by the transformation of this conflict into religious terms and the transposing of this local conflict over the national frame of Hindu-Christian conflict. The explanation given in the previous paragraph does not advance far beyond the usual instrumentalist explanation. What a constructivist approach offers is an explanation for why the framing of this conflict as religious works at this particular place in time. What I argue below, both in this chapter and the next, is that this framing works well b ecause of a variety of local and global processes that have been underway for centuries and that have come, in the contemporary moment, to focus not on substantive differences in the beliefs or practices of Hindus and Christians but rather on radical differences in the way that many Hindus conceive of what religion is and should be (i.e., ethnic and nonproselytizing) relative to the way that many Christians conceive of
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what religion is and should be (i.e., universal and expansionist) and the way that global politics have enabled Sangh activists to effectively exploit this difference to express and activate fundamental anxieties about the possibility of Hindu extinction. Relatedly, and in addition to its other advantages, the constructivist position also helps address a more fundamental problem with instrumentalist/essentialist debate, which is that it presumes and proceeds from a problematic implicit definition of religion. The problem is discernible even in the way that scholars often form the question: Is conflict X “really” about religion, or is it “really” about economics (or politics or ethnicity e tc.)? Framing the question in this way leads scholars to differentiate conflicts in which religious identity itself is the central point of contention from conflicts in which the primary point of contention lies elsewhere (e.g., in economic competition) but in which religious identity continues to play a role because the conflicting parties’ identities differ. But what if religion cannot be so easily distinguished from economics, politics, or ethnicity? The presumption that religion can and should be distinguished in this way has, of course, a particular genealogy and has certainly not been transculturally and transhistorically universal. Moreover, the notion that religious and ethnic conflicts can be differentiated from one another seems generally to emerge from investigations of universalizing religions like Christianity and Islam that claim to transcend culture. Hindu-Christian conflict in India calls t hese presumptions into question, primarily because Hindus tend to understand their religion primarily as an ethnic rather than a universalizing religion and b ecause the ideology that animates those who antagonize India’s Christians, Hindutva, explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of particular religions from the ethnic communities that incubate them. Is the clash between Hindus and Christians “really” about religion, then, or is it animated by other concerns? The ideology of Hindutva rejects the distinction. Is this a religious conflict or an ethnic one? Again, the ideology of Hindutva rejects the distinction. This, then, is why proselytization and conversion have become such potent symbols of the Hindutva grievance against Christians. The attempt to convert another to one’s faith with the understanding that they could thereby gain something valuable and significant presumes not only that religions are and should be universal (rather than ethnic) but also rests on important elements of Western secular modernity (e.g., individuality, the privatization and portability of religion, the separation of religion and politics) that proponents of Hindutva find culturally, politically, and economically threatening. Conversion therefore becomes a symbol for Christianity, and Christianity, for the modern
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Western secular order. Nevertheless, it remains easier to attack a person at hand than a faceless, abstract world order. And this fact, I argue in these pages, accounts for why proponents of Hindutva construct India’s Christians as the primary purveyors and beneficiaries of secular modernity and why at this world-historical moment that construction is effective.
Question 2: Does Religious Conflict Differ from Other Forms of Conflict? A variety of qualitative and quantitative analyses have suggested that conflicts framed as religious escalate more quickly, last longer, or are more deadly. Religion may not be intrinsically violent, then, but religion does provide to po litical entrepreneurs who stand to benefit from violence a set of resources in addition to and somewhat different from those offered by ethnic, linguistic, caste, class, or national identity. We may identify four broad ways in which religious resources can be used to initiate, justify, or intensify violence: (1) by providing opportunities for provocation, (2) by raising the stakes, (3) by supplying the soldiers, and (4) by increasing their commitment.30 None of these mechanisms is unique to religion, though t here are situations in which politi cal entrepreneurs may deem the mechanisms provided by religion more conducive to the pursuit of their goals than those provided by others. In terms of the more deadly nature of conflict constructed as religious, Bruce Hoffman’s research shows, for example, that the attacks of self-styled religious terrorists lead to more fatalities than those of their secular equivalents.31 Similarly, Monica Toft’s analysis of religiously inflected civil wars suggests that they last longer and involve more noncombatant deaths.32 Why might this be? Intervening variables may explain some of the differences. Nevertheless, it is clear that religion does provide “a potent assemblage of moral, ideological, and organizational resources that can, in certain contexts, inform, legitimate, or sustain violent conflict.”33 But as noted above, religious resources can also be used to reduce desire and competition, resist the framing of conflict as religious, or delegitimize violence or certain forms of it. As always, po litical entrepreneurs and religious leaders play a significant role in determining which resources w ill be activated in particular conflicts. Actors engaged in conflict, particularly more localized forms of conflict, frequently point to a precipitating event or provocation. T hese precipitating events provide a rallying cry and an implicit justification for retaliation. Often, conflict actors’ identification of a precipitating event obscures the fact that conflict had been developing for some time in less easily identifiable ways. In
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Kandhamal, for example, Hindus used a Christian assault on and then the eventual assassination of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati to justify their violent attacks against Christians in the Kandhamal riots of 2007 and 2008, respectively, but t hese justifications illogically also provided anachronistic, retroactive cover for earlier, less obviously provoked attacks on Christians in the region. Focusing on Christians’ alleged violence against the swami, however, served to frame the conflict as religious, as those involved in that framing preferred. Religion also offers one source of provocation unique to religion: profanation—that is, the offense created by a deliberate desecration of places of worship or religious objects or bodies. Rumors of bullet cartridges greased in cow fat, for example, played a role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and contributed to its development of a distinctly anti-Christian edge, as I argue in the next chapter. Similarly, accusations that Christian evangelists have maligned their gods and goddesses often serve as a rallying cry for Hindus engaged in acts of violence against Christians today. Religion, secondly, can raise the stakes of intergroup conflict through cosmicization, as discussed above, and through what I call providential othering and prophetic dissidence. Religions possess the rhetorical and ideological resources to turn ordinary conflicts into “cosmic wars.”34 “Religious traditions . . . contain elaborate and distinctive resources for constructing urgent threats and mobilizing and legitimizing action against them,” Rogers Brubaker writes. “Idioms of sacralization and profanation, of cosmological good and evil, of divinely sanctioned mission or holy war, and of imminent catastrophe or millenarian transformation can be enlisted to raise the stakes.”35 The cosmicizing of conflict leads naturally to providential othering, by which I mean the construction of the enemy other not merely as my enemy but as the e nemy of my religion or even my God (or Goddess, etc.). Following Brubaker again: “As authoritative systems of classification, many religious traditions contain specifically religious categories of extreme otherhood: heretic, apostate, infidel, and so on. . . . And they justify and authorize violence, in certain contexts, against members of these categories.”36 Providential othering encourages suspicion of the e nemy and discourages compromise, and at least one study has suggested that “theological ideas propagating a sharp distinction between religious groups increase the risk of inter-religious vio lence occurring.”37 Finally, religions that employ a rhetoric of purity or rupture (the Islamic State or certain forms of Pentecostalism, for example), and which therefore construct themselves in opposition to all governments and competing religions and cultures—what I call prophetic dissidence—may provide rhetorical resources for the raising of stakes in conflict situations by absolutizing intergroup differences and delegitimizing compromise.
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It is important to keep in mind, of course, that religions also possess many resources to c ounter the forces described in the previous paragraph. Moreover, each tradition provides its own unique constellation of resources. For example, the cosmicizing of contemporary Hindu-Christian conflict is weak even among proponents of Hindutva. As a general observation, we may say that while in their conflict with Christians Sangh activists utilize symbols of Hindu identification and a strong, defensively martial Hinduism (e.g., the trishul, or the gods Hanuman and Rama, whose mythology associates them with cosmic b attles), they do not regularly draw on their scriptures, as Christians and Muslims might, to ethically justify their actions. As Veena Das has observed, in their public rhe toric Sangh leaders rarely engage with the “archive” of Hindu scriptures.38 The point is not that Hindu traditions are therefore less prone to violence. Rather, the point is that Hindu political entrepreneurs wishing for their own purposes to provoke violence may need to search somewhat harder than those in other religions—or look elsewhere. As I have suggested above, one of the most common ways that proponents of Hindutva have done this is by focusing on the Christian practice of proselytization as indicative of Christianity’s incompatibility with and threat to Hindu conceptions of tolerance and religion and therefore—because nonproselytizing religions are likely to shrink in the face of a proselytizing ones—to Hinduism and the “Hindu way of life” itself. One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from this study, however, is that even this framing (i.e., of a clash of incompatible ways of life) is religious if one discards the minimalist definitions of religion favored in post- Enlightenment, secularized Western societies and conceives of religion in terms more typical among Hindus, that is, as a comprehensive, integrated socio-religio-cultural system. A third way that religious resources may be used to initiate, justify, or intensify violence is through the supply or motivation of combatants. Religious resources can be used to provoke or intensify conflict by creating what Brubaker calls “hypercommitted selves.”39 The production of hypercommitted selves is aided by the cosmicization of conflict, of course, but is also enabled by the fact that certain religions encourage a devaluation of the body and a denial of this- worldly ends in pursuit of longer-term and other-worldly aims. Similarly, many religions offer this-worldly or other-worldly rewards for loyalty and commitment and particularly for the particularly loyal and committed. Hypercommittment need not necessarily lead to violence, but the factors that produce hypercommitted selves can be deployed, in certain circumstances, to convince believers to risk their bodies, livelihoods, and lives in ways that might ordinarily be prevented by material self-interest and instinctual self-preservation.40
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Long-established and well-developed ascetic traditions within Hinduism demonstrate the religion’s potential for devaluing the body and privileging other-worldly over this-worldly gain. Additionally, t here are Hindu scriptures that apply this calculus to situations of conflict. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna famously counsels Arjuna to fight in his dharmic war, saying, “If you are killed, you win heaven; if you triumph, you enjoy the earth.”41 Nevertheless, apart from the common Hindu tendency to refer to all manner of personal struggles and battles against one’s opponents by the name of Arjuna’s battlefield, that is, as one’s personal kurukshetra, such justifications for violence against Christians are rarely, if ever, invoked to justify contemporary anti-Christian violence. This may be the case because, as indicated earlier, t hose who engage in that violence justify it on other terms. But it may also be b ecause the risks of engaging in anti-Christian violence are relatively low. Few of those who attack Christians are ever prosecuted or injured, let alone convicted or killed, and the risks of being killed have been practically nonexistent outside of the riots in Kandhamal, during which Christian assailants killed perhaps as many as a dozen Hindus. Before leaving aside the question of whether religious violence differs in any significant way from other forms of violence, we must consider the particularly intriguing and provocative response to that question recently offered by John McCauley’s The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa. McCauley’s approach is generally constructivist. He accepts the instrumentalist assertion that h umans act rationally in pursuit of their own interests, though he insists, as I do, that ideal interests, or what he calls “non-material” interests, play an important role. He also shares with most essentialists and constructivists their attention to culture and the symbolic and their focus on the significance of political entrepreneurs in framing conflict. However, McCauley’s conclusions are distinct from many constructivist approaches in insisting that the choice of how to frame a conflict (e.g., as ethnic versus religious) has real consequences because different “priorities and preferences” and therefore “mobilizational differences” inhere in different forms of identity. These mobilizational differences limit w hether and to what end political entrepreneurs may activate different forms of identity. Why, then, do political entrepreneurs construct some conflicts as religious and others not? “It is not because some identities are innately more important to p eople (as primordialists might claim) or b ecause certain identity groups possess characteristics that increase the likelihood of conflict (as some scholars of religion and politics may argue). It is also not simply a m atter of optimally sized identity coalitions (as constructivists or instrumentalists might suggest). . . . Instead, conflicts become ethnic or
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religious because those identity types evoke distinct preferences that can be exploited for political ends.”42 Moreover, McCauley asserts, “Political entrepreneurs understand this and seek to mobilize supporters in terms of the identities that have the most useful behavioral consequences, vis-à-vis the leader’s own strategic goals.”43 For example, ethnicity tends to inspire concern for material well-being and therefore for control of land and local resources; it is a “land-based identity.” Meanwhile, world religions inspire “only weak ties to land” and instead encourage concern for moral well-being, that is, for preserving certain kinds of rules, lifestyles, and moral norms; adherence to a world religion is a “rule-based identity.”44 Different identities also produce different levels of intensity in terms of their priorities. For example, while world religions encourage intense concern for rules and African traditional religions promote intense concern for land, Islam in the Middle East produces concern for both, as do Western demo cratic political parties, though at relatively less intense levels. One of the advantages of McCauley’s approach is that it recognizes that the masses m atter. Different forms of identity present political entrepreneurs with different opportunities and resources but not to an unlimited degree. Thinking of the role of various forms of identity in this way also helps us make sense of the Indian scene. As I have adumbrated earlier, the attempt to identify Hindutva-inspired violence against religious minorities in India in either instrumentalist or essentialist terms or as either religious or otherwise falters in the face of the self-conception of Hinduism as both what post-Enlightenment Western thinkers would generally call a religion and a way of life. Like many forms of Middle Eastern Islam, therefore, it produces concern for both rules and land. Hindutva (relative to Hinduism) intensifies both concerns in its insistence that a Hindu—and, by extension, a desirable citizen of India—is one who considers India both his or her “father land” (concern with land) and “holy land” (concern with rules). And this, in turn, helps us understand why the Sangh’s concerns about Indian Christianity are expressed in terms of both. It also helps us understand why the most stark ideological contrast is not ultimately between Hindutva and Indian Christianity but rather between Hindutva and secular modernity as promoted in the West (particularly in its American version), which through its insistence on the privatization of religion denies to Hindutva the very right to combine t hese two concerns (for land and rules), an idea that I develop further in the conclusion of this chapter. At times, within the Sangh, both of t hese concerns are expressed and embodied by the same person, as in the BJP’s prime minister Modi, whose supporters conceive and construct as someone capable of preserving the “rules” (his “traditional” personal values and the concern he expresses about corrup-
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tion, as in Good Governance Day, which Modi provocatively inaugurated on Christmas Day in 2014) and the land/resources (as in his quasi-nationalistic focus on development, his emphasis on security, e tc.). At other times, however, the bidirectional focus of Hindutva enables the unexpected alliance of groups with different and otherwise conflicting economic interests, as in that described in chapters 4 and 5 between the tribal Kandhas of Kandhamal (whose conflict with the low-caste Christian Panas was primarily one of resources and land) and the upper-caste regional/national elites, with whom the Kandhas also competed materially but who successfully constructed and supported the conflict as one about the ostensibly incompatible rules of Hindus and Christians, particularly regarding the rules governing proselytization (keeping in mind, once again, that proselytization functions as a symbol for an entire way of life constructed as threatening to traditional Hinduism as constructed by the Sangh). Keeping the focus t here—that is, on the ostensibly incompatible rules of Hindus and Christians—furthers the master narrative of the Sangh and enables it to avoid the dissection of its political base into a thousand competing and potentially disunified lands defined by language, region, or caste/ tribal community. However, ultimately both the upper-caste leaders of the Sangh and the Kandhas got support from the other and got what they wanted according to their own priorities.
Question 3: Why Is Violence Appealing? Violence, religious or otherwise, is appealing for a number of reasons. Troublingly, there are certain ways in which violence is socially functional for those who engage in it, particularly in the short term. Engaging in violence has the potential to increase group solidarity, perpetuate or increase social control, or at the very least provide a sense of empowerment to t hose who initiate it. Vio lence can also function as a marketing ploy, as a show of force and effectiveness intended to attract o thers to one’s side. Each of t hese points requires elaboration. In India, as in other parts of the world, t here is a certain acceptance of vio lence as a regrettable necessity in war, while violence among communities within the nation is almost universally condemned, u nless it can be construed as self-defense or a response to violent provocation. This last point is an impor tant one and helps account, perhaps, for why critics of Christianity in India from independence onward have consistently portrayed Christian evangelism as a kind of provocation or violence. As discussed in the next chapter, in the 1950s, authors of the Niyogi committee report linked Christianity to the CIA
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and construed evangelism as a form of neocolonial invasion, one threat among many other threats to the nation. Meanwhile, the state anticonversion laws that emerged on the recommendation of the Niyogi committee outlawed conversion by “force, fraud, and inducement,” implying counterfactually that physical violence was a regular feature of Christian evangelism, a rhetorical slippage that the Sangh continues to exploit to this very day. Even more directly, the influential Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015) argued that the attempt to convert another person to one’s faith was itself a kind of violence.45 What Nick Cheesman has said of Myanmar’s violently antiminority Buddhist monks could be just as easily said of the Sangh: “Like aggressor communities elsewhere, they have positioned themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, as defenders of an embattled religion or culture u nder attack from others representing an implicitly or explicitly inferior tradition.”46 Similarly, Juergensmeyer argues that a common feature among those who act violently in the name of religion is the “perception that their communities are already under attack—are being v iolated—and their acts are therefore simply responses to the violence they have experienced.”47 Still, even where the rhetorical reconfiguration of antiminority violence as defensive is successful, social prohibitions against violence are not entirely removed. Why, then, would people engage in a kind of behavior that may have negative social consequences? The easy and somewhat disturbing answer is that violence works. Violence has certain psychological, social, and political advantages. Violence is socially functional, at least in the short term and at least for the actors who engage in it. The psychological benefits are related to the sense of violation that Juergensmeyer describes above. Violence provides the aggressor with a sense of power in the face of humiliation. Given the fact that most aggressors are male, it is perhaps not surprising that the sense of humiliation that fuels religious violence and religious nationalism more generally is often expressed or experienced in male terms: as emasculation or effeminization. Ashis Nandy, for example, has written of how the British colonial effeminization of Indian men continues to affect the articulation of Indian nationalism even to this day.48 Similarly, as Juergensmeyer has pointed out, when the BJP came to power in 1998, one of its first acts was to carry out nuclear weapons testing, provoking Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Sangh-affiliated Shiv Sena, to declare that they had thereby shown that Indians w ere “not eunuchs.”49 This oscillation between a tendency to fret about colonial and postcolonial humiliations and effeminizations, on the one hand, and violent demonstrations of power, on the other, is a regular feature not only of Hindu nationalism, as Banerjee has shown, but
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also of religious nationalism more generally.50 Friedland writes, “Religious nationalisms involve an outraged reaction to the effeminisation of the collective public body as a result of military, economic and cultural penetration of its boundaries,” an effeminization that provokes the body politic to engage in “purifying violence, to perform masculinity, to be—in the end—more than man, that is, to have more than human value and power.”51 Juergensmeyer refers to the empowerment that acts of violence provide as “symbolic empowerment,” b ecause the sense of empowerment experienced by aggressors is “disproportionately greater than what the violence actually achieved.”52 While Juergensmeyer’s work focuses primarily on religious terrorism, the point is pertinent to my analysis of anti-Christian conflict as well. If anti-Christian violence in India is, as I argue, fueled at least in part by Sanghi fears regarding the diffusion of modern Western secular ideals in India, attacks on India’s Christians will do l ittle to prevent that diffusion. The attacks do, however, provide a sense of symbolic empowerment, convincing those who engage in them that they are not passive or powerless. Moreover, to o thers who may feel humiliated and powerless in the face of global forces they cannot control, attacks on Christians identify a present, tangible threat and offer a model for how to c ounter it. If this symbolic empowerment represents one reason that violence remains appealing in the context of conflicts framed as religious, a second is the fact that violence often changes the intra-and interreligious landscape in ways that serve the interests of the aggressors. Internally, acts of violence are advertisements, or what Henne calls “rhetorical outbidding,” intended to convince the aggressors’ coreligionists of the strength, desirability, and relevance of their violent form of religion.53 Such violent acts are accordingly more likely in situations where violent forms of religion are vying for power and authority and particularly when they are marginalized and generally excluded from power.54 This view harmonizes with Walter Benjamin’s insistence that violence is not merely about achieving political ends but is also “expressive,” a “manifestation” of the “constitutive values of an agent.”55 The audience for religious violence, then, is not just the Other outside; it is also aimed at convincing the Other inside the aggressors’ religion to embrace the aggressors’ violent form of faith. Such violence makes statements, encourages the faithful, calls o thers 56 to arms, and gives p eople hope of eventual victory. Hindu nationalist sovereignty must be continually enacted and performed, Goldie Osuri asserts, while quoting T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat on the matter: “Sovereign power, whether exercised by a state, in the name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or community court, is always a tentative
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and unstable project whose efficacy and legitimacy depend on repeated per formances of violence and a ‘will to rule’ . . . These performances . . . can be spectacular and public [or] secret and menacing. . . . Although the meanings and performances of sovereignty are always historically specific, they are, however, constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting vio lence on h uman bodies.”57 In the context of India, more violent forms of Hindu nationalism and more aggressive organizations of the Sangh compete not only with the less violent forms of Sanghi nationalism but also with the softer forms of nationalism manifest at times even in the Congress Party. Which is the correct response to the modern Indian situation? Those who engage in violence against Christians and other religious minorities in India portray the choice as a stark one: the humiliated, emasculated forms of Hinduism associated with spirituality, self- defeating tolerance, effeminization, and nonviolence or the symbolic, empowered manliness of Sangh violence. The audience for religious violence is not merely internal, however. Religious violence communicates with its victims as well. Recent research on Soviet state violence has helpfully distinguished between violence as “terror” and violence as “purge.”58 With the exception of the riots in Kandhamal, anti- Christian violence in India has rarely ever approached the level of a purge. Rather, violence against Christians has been enacted primarily for the purpose of terror and intimidation, which is why its everyday victims have often been the most openly pious and assertively evangelistic. Violence in this context functions as a form of socialization intended to discourage forms of piety and religion considered by the Sangh both inappropriate and a threat to Hindu religious and cultural hegemony. In the Kandhamal riots, however, anti- Christian violence approached the level of purge. Entire Christian villages w ere destroyed, and thousands of Christian refugees were dispersed to other parts of India and the world. Religious violence in this context was not merely expressive or symbolic, then. It had a consequential demographic impact. Religious violence may be produced for a third reason, as well, and that is its potential to produce intragroup unity, as has been long recognized by theorists from Durkheim to Carl Schmitt, Lewis Coser, and René Girard.59 Religious violence draws on and often furthers the demonization and violent scapegoating of the interreligious Other, and this demonization can solidify in-g roup solidarity. Moreover, as Durkheim recognized but did not perhaps fully develop, the collective expression of anger or violence itself can create a kind of collective effervescence that may perhaps be unconsciously pursued for its own sake. In a discussion of the rite of sacrifice that could perhaps be applied just as well to collective violence, Durkheim wrote:
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Does a misfortune seem about to threaten the collectivity? P eople come together, as they do during mourning, and of course a feeling of worry and anguish prevails in the assembled group. . . . When p eople feel the life within them—whether in the form of painful irritation or joyous enthusiasm—they do not think of death; thus they are reassured, they take heart, and subjectively it is as though the rite r eally had repelled the dreaded danger. This is how p eople attribute curative or preventive virtues to the movements that constitute the [sacrificial] rite—the shrieks, the shedding of blood, the wounds inflicted on oneself or others.60 hether political entrepreneurs engaged in antiminority violence in India are W consciously aware of these more subtle matters or not, they are certainly aware of what Steven Wilkinson has persuasively argued: that antiminority violence does often (but not always) contribute to Hindu unity and increases the electoral prospects of majority-identified parties.61
Question 4: Why Is Religious Violence Increasing? It has been widely observed that religious violence has been on the rise for several decades. In the period a fter 1980, for example, the proportion of religiously inflected groups on terrorism watch lists increased dramatically, as did the number of civil wars involving religiously-defined rivals.62 In terms of global trends, this rise in religious violence represents a return to the era before the nineteenth c entury, when almost all terrorist groups w ere religious in terms of their identity. From that period u ntil the latter decades of the twentieth c entury, global trends in secularization had shifted the typical planes of conflict away from religion and toward political organizations.63 While many scholars have acknowledged the broader increase in religious violence, fewer have identified the more specific trend I noted in the introduction: a global increase in antiminority (particularly anti-Christian) sentiment and violence in the two decades since the late 1990s. What accounts for these trends? In this section, I argue that the answer is related in important ways to globalization and the lingering effects of colonialism. Most significant among the various effects of globalization are two. First, globalization contributed to the undermining of national sovereignty in postcolonial states through the expanding authority and power of foreign governments and multinational institutions and corporations. The diminishment of national sovereignty in such places proceeded hand in hand with a second important effect of globalization: its destabilization of nationalized markets, particularly after the 1990s,
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and the associated transformation of postcolonial societies from so-called welfare states to governance states, which produced a g reat deal of economic insecurity and resentment against t hose perceived to be benefitting from these changes. Together with the fact that globalization was associated, in the minds of many of those negatively affected by it, with the forceful diffusion of Western secular modernities, these two factors helped contribute to the rise of majoritarian religious nationalisms expressing anxie ties and resentment about the effects of globalization in both its material and cultural manifestations. In what follows, I expand on each of these effects of globalization. Scholars of religious conflict have tended to explain its recent rise with reference to some constellation of the following four processes (or the failure or crisis thereof ): colonization, modernization (including the growth of free- market capitalism), secularization, or globalization. Each of these processes certainly plays a role, either by producing historical grievances, threatening the hegemony of traditional ideologies and elites, or by creating economic in equality and resentment. Part of my intention in writing this volume is to highlight the processes of secularization and modernization—or secular modernity—that in my mind have been neglected (both in general and in terms of their applicability to the situation of anti-Christian violence in India). In my usage, the term secular mo dernity refers to a constellation of social, cultural, economic, political, and governmental patterns and norms that have been exported around the world, first in nascent form by European colonial regimes and now more widely (but also less unidirectionally) by globalization in such a way that these patterns and norms come to be imposed, willy-nilly, on p eople who do not necessarily welcome them (or who, at the very least, resent the fact that they are disadvantaged by the imposition of these patterns and norms). In addition to providing a vehicle for the exportation of these patterns and norms, colonization has also rightly been portrayed both as a source of ongoing resentment against Western powers and as the historical cauldron in which contemporary religious nationalisms w ere formed. In places like South Asia, the forms of nationalism that emerged alongside independence movements were naturally oppositional. As I articulate more fully in the next chapter, perceiving British power and governance (with some, if not complete, justification) to be allied with and informed by Christianity, such nationalisms developed religious inflections of their own (Hindu in India, for example, and Buddhist in Sri Lanka). While there is no doubt that colonization by European Christian countries contributed to the rise of non-Christian religious nationalisms around the world, those whose analyses focus solely on colonization cannot easily explain why the violence related to these religious nationalisms
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increased substantially only many decades after independence, during a period when colonial-era resentments should have been in decline. Modernization has been variously defined, but t hose for whom it helps explain the rise of religious violence usually associate it with three transformative and interrelated social processes: (1) a movement from traditional, agrarian society to urban, industrial society; (2) a shift from identities and politics oriented around the collective to identities and politics oriented around the individual and individual autonomy/agency; and (3) the devaluing of older forms of authority, privilege, and hierarchy in favor of the ostensibly equalizing influence of merit-based authority and reward.64 Once again, t here is no doubt that religious nationalisms in India and around the world tend to be traditional, if by traditional we mean opposed to t hese three processes, particularly the latter two, b ecause t hese processes undermine the historical power and authority of the traditional religious elites who tend to provide ideological support and leadership to religious nationalisms. For this reason, Rob Imre and Jim Jose persuasively argue that resistance to modernization emerges not from an a ctual ideological objection to its princi ples and processes but rather from a sense of being threatened or excluded by them. “Religious violence is a political movement which should be understood as not being outside modernisation in the sense of being opposed to it. . . . Resistance arises from the experience of being excluded from the fruits of modernity while at the same time being enmeshed within the multiple social relations underpinning the production and distribution of those ‘fruits.’ ”65 Those who relate the recent rise in religious violence to the ideology and process of secularization tend to either emphasize the way it competes with and undermines religion or to focus on its ostensible inadequacies (or both). It is certainly true that secular and religious nationalisms are rivals. Both are “ideologies of order” that arrogate to themselves the right to determine and impose ethical, moral, and religious orthodoxies.66 Both also claim exclusive jurisdiction over life and death, which is why they so often clash over such matters (e.g., abortion, sexuality, the legitimate use of violence).67 To establish its legitimacy and raison d’être, secularism must undermine religious authority, devaluing the “symbolic capital” of religion and causing religious people to experience what Jürgen Habermas has called a “crisis of legitimacy” or what Pierre Bourdieu has called a “general crisis of religious belief.”68 This crisis can contribute to the perception, among religious communities, that something is awry and that the secular state, or secularization more generally, is the reason. This perception is at least partly correct, since the secular state establishes its own authority by contesting and minimizing that of religion.
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One of the ways that it does this is by portraying religion as inherently prone toward violence and fanaticism.69 Secularism also proceeds based on the presumption that religion is and should be a private affair and that religious harmony is only possible when religion is privatized. But this minimalist understanding of religion is not at all a neutral one and explicitly excludes and delegitimizes maximalist forms of religion that promote theocracy or even aspire to imbue public life with religious language and morals.70 Daniel Philpott has suggested that religious vio lence is most likely in nations that impose secularism (i.e., religious minimalism) on religious communities that because of their maximalist tendencies oppose that very imposition. Conversely, as Alfred Stepan puts it, friction and violence is least likely where the “twin tolerations”—state tolerance of religion and the willingness of religious communities to relinquish their hegemony—can be found.71 Those who relate religious violence to the failures of secularism focus on what many perceive as its lack of morality. Regardless of one’s perspective on secularism, it is clear that the grounds for moral reasoning and ethical behav ior are harder to discern in secular societies than in those with norms derived from a particular religion. This moral and ethical complexity leads many religious critics to conclude that the secular state is in fact amoral or even immoral. Particularly when packaged with the bare-knuckled materialism of capitalism and shipped forcefully abroad, secularism can appear morally bankrupt and brutally profane.72 The Sangh’s rebranding of secularism and the secular press, respectively, as “sickularism” and the “sickular press”73 makes sense in this regard, though in this case what is being criticized is not so much secularism in its Indian manifestation as secularism in its most common Western manifestations (as well as the notion that Indian secularists might prefer the dominant Western to dominant Indian models, which focus on the equal treatment of all religions rather than on the separation of church and state). The perception that secularism is inadequate to the task of organizing human societies comes to the fore particularly when secular states experience financial or security crises, and all the more so when—as in many non-Western and/ or postcolonial states—secularism is perceived to be a foreign import imposed by more potent global powers (though the resistance of maximalist religious activists to secularism is certainly very much at home in Western societies like that of the United States as well).74 Religious nationalisms, then, can be seen at least in part as a reaction to the explicit challenge and putative failures of secularism and an expression of the desire to firmly reestablish moral norms on religious grounds, through a process that José Casanova has called the “deprivatization of religion.”75 In re-
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cent decades, religious actors have clawed themselves back into politics through the never completely closed door of secularism and have been aided, in doing so, by the advance of democratic politics giving new voice to religious majorities around the world.76 Those who attribute the recent rise in religious violence to globalization focus primarily either on its political effects or its perpetuation of processes already discussed: capitalism, modernization, and secularization. The most pertinent political effect of globalization in recent decades has been the denationalization of industries and economies, along with what Imre and Jose have called the post–World War II shift from “welfare states” to “governance states,” a shift that has been particularly dramatic (and traumatic) in postcolonial contexts like India. “For the past three decades,” they write, “the governance state, as it has developed abroad in postcolonial settings, and at home u nder the aegis of globalisation, has systematically withdrawn from the pastoral care of its populations.”77 Citizens of countries where this shift has occurred can no longer rely on the state to insulate them from global market forces at the very moment when t hose market forces have been granted greater access and power. The growing access and power of multinational corporations and organizations like the World Bank undermine the authority of the state, which is as a result left with only “contingent sovereignty.” The sense of vulnerability this contingent sovereignty induces, combined with the perceived humiliation and emasculation of increasing foreign intrusion and control, makes fertile ground for the emergence of resistant nationalisms. And because the forces of globalization also perpetuate secular modernity in its European and American variants, t hese resistant nationalisms, as in colonial times, often take on a religious complexion. The fact that both the denationalization of economies and the shift from welfare to governance states increased dramatically in the mid-to late 1990s helps explain why religious violence, and particularly violence against Christians—as proxies for the Western forces perceived to be driving t hese shifts—increased significantly (and not only in India) during that period.
Hindutva and the Conflation of Christianity and Western Secular Modernity In the introduction, I urged readers to listen to Sangh criticisms of Christian ity with Sangh ears and promised a fuller articulation of the way that the Sangh has thought of the two as inextricably linked right from the start. The time to provide that fuller explanation has come, and I provide it here with reference
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to the two most important early Sangh ideologues: V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar. It was Savarkar himself, of course, who coined the term Hindutva. For him, Hindutva named an ancient and proud civilization, or sanskriti, with an integrated system of politics, economics, culture, and religion. Accepting common Romantic notions of the time, Savarkar argued in his seminal Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923) that successful nations integrate a single religion, race, and nationality. “We are one,” he wrote, “because we are a nation, a race, and own a common Sanskriti (civilization).”78 The problem with Christians (like Muslims) was that since their adoption “of the new cult, they had ceased to own Hindu civilization (Sanskriti) as a whole.”79 The issue was both cultural and religious, for “though Hindusthan to them is Fatherland . . . yet it is not to them a Holyland [sic] too. Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. Their love is divided.”80 Christianity and Islam do not integrate a race, a religion, and a nationality. “Mohammedans are no race nor are the Christians,” he wrote. “They’re a religious unit, yet neither a racial nor a national one.”81 They were therefore a form of “pan-ism,” that is, among the ideologies—like Western-style secular modernities and forms of governance—that had pretensions of universal applicability. B ecause of this, they did not respect the distinctive nature of individual nations’ comprehensively integrated forms of religion-culture-politics-economics and represented a threat to them. Savarkar’s solution was to solidify the nation’s distinctive, foundational civilization, Hindutva, as a bulwark against “unprovoked attack by any of t hose ‘Pan-isms’ that are struggling forth from continent to continent.”82 While we can hear hints of the elision of Christianity and Western secular modernities in Savarkar—though he w ouldn’t have used that particular language—the portrayal of Christianity as inextricably linked with t hese modernities flowers fully in the work of M. S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak (Supreme Leader) of the RSS. The conflation of Christianity and Western secular modernity comes together in three steps. First, Golwalkar argues that true religion is all-encompassing and includes within it not only what Westerners, with their narrow, minimalist definition of religion consider as such, but all other aspects of life as well. In We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), which is largely an abridged translation of an e arlier work by Savarkar, Golwalkar explains: “In Hindusthan, Religion is an all- absorbing entity . . . eternally woven into the life of the Race, and forms, as it were, its very Soul. With us, e very action in life, individual, social or political, is a command of religion. We make war or peace, engage in arts and crafts,
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amass wealth and give it away, indeed we are born and we die—all in accord with religious injunctions.”83 This was not only the way it was in India but indeed the way true religion functioned everywhere. For this reason, secular politics were naïve and inappropriate. He wrote, At present, there is a general tendency to affirm that Religion is an individual question and should have no place in public and political life. This tendency is based upon a misconception of Religion, and has its origin in those, who have, as a people, no religion worth the name. . . . If religion concerns itself merely with m atters other-worldly . . . [then it surely would] be a question to be solved by each in his own individual way, in the privacy of his life. . . . With this view of Religion . . . it is natural to affirm that it should have no place in Politics. But then, this is but a fractional part of Religion.”84 In contrast, when understood in maximalist terms as Hindus like Golwalkar understand it, “Religion . . . cannot be ignored in individual or public life,” and those who “assign it an insignificant place” risk “degeneration on all hands.”85 Second, and following Savarkar and the Romantics who influenced him, the strength of a nation, for Golwalkar, lies in its distinctive integration of five features: “country, race, religion, culture, and language” (which he sometimes reduced to three: “religion, culture, and language”).86 Taking inspiration from the United States and Nazi Germany, which forced citizens to assimilate to their civilizations and (in the case of the latter) expelled or executed those who did or could not, Golwalkar argues that “all t hose, who fall outside the five- fold limits of that idea [of the nation], can have no place in the national life.”87 It is statements like this last, more radical one that have more recently led Sangh leaders to distance themselves from We, or Our Nationhood Defined, but not from the general argument that informs it or from Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts (1966), which remains a central and influential Sangh treatise. According to Golwalkar, India’s strength—past and f uture—relied on the integration of these five (or three) features in the sanskriti of Hindutva, but this cultural nationalism was threatened by “territorial nationalisms,” that is, Western secular forms of democratic governance built theoretically on the equal rights of all citizens, regardless of race, religion, culture, or language. Such nationalisms, Golwalkar argued in Bunch of Thoughts, were “reactionary and perverted” and, as implemented in India, constituted a monstrous, artificial, “unnatural” imposition, “like attempting to create a novel animal by joining the head of a monkey and the legs of a bullock to the main body of an elephant,” which could only result “in a hideous corpse.”88 The imposition of territorial nationalism in India resulted in partition, according to Golwalkar, and
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sowed the seeds of “corruption, disintegration and dissipation.”89 The solution, then, was to “revert to the truth of our nationalism as an ancient fact and the Hindus being the national society of Bharat.”90 Territorial nationalism was a particularly potent threat to Hindutva, for Golwalkar, because of its theoretical assertion that all citizens w ere equally deserving of rights. What this argument exposes is Golwalkar’s insistence that caste differentiation and inequality was an essential element of Hindu culture. The sanskriti that Golwalkar championed was “characterised by Varnas and Ashrams, that is, following the Hindu framework of society, obeying the Hindu codes.”91 Golwalkar criticized “Western thought” in both its democratic and communist varieties for having reduced humans to a “bundle of physical wants. Accordingly, the production and distribution of material objects which are believed to satisfy the material appetites of man become the one all-consuming passion of all their theories. Further, equality of man was propounded on the material plane because all men w ere equally in need of all these basic material needs. . . . But to identify man with a mere bundle of material desires is to equate him with an animal.”92 Moreover, “equality is applicable only on the plane of the Supreme Spirit. But on the physical plane the same Spirit manifests itself in a wondrous variety of diversities and disparities.”93 For this reason, “any arrangement that tries to remove the inherent disparities altogether on the basis of superficial equality is bound to fail.”94 The goal should therefore be “not equality but Harmony.”95 Third, even in societies like those in the West that naively attempted to limit the role of religion and restrict it from the political sphere, the mutual imbrication of religion and culture-politics-economics remained. In fact, in Golwalkar’s view, it was because Christianity’s “Semitic concept of religion bred intolerance and divided p eople in the name of religion” that “some countries in the West . . . got disgusted with feuds begotten by such religious fanaticism and took the extreme step of ousting religion itself.”96 Golwalkar frequently referred approvingly to the way that immigrants w ere expected to assimilate to the United States’ national culture, the Indian equivalent of which was, in his view, Hindutva. Tellingly, however, Golwalkar positioned religion as an inextricable aspect of national culture, such that religious minorities could never r eally fully assimilate to it. Notice how religious and political ideals (in the added italics) are presented as interchangeable and conflated in the following anecdote and analogy offered by Golwalkar. “An eminent American Professor once asked me the question, ‘[Indian] Muslims and Christians are of this land [itself]. Why d on’t you consider them as of your own?’ To that, I put him a counter-question: ‘Suppose one of our countrymen goes to America, settles there and wants to become
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an American citizen. However, he refuses to accept your Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and others as his national heroes. Would you then call him a national of America?’ ”97 Golwalkar’s analogy, h ere, suggests an exact and necessary equivalence of minority religious adherence and political dissidence. Christianity is therefore an inextricable part of Western civilization, part of a comprehensive religious-cultural-political-economic system I have suggested earlier we might call Christianness. Conversely, because Western civilization embodies and perpetuates political ideals (especially material equality and secularism) at odds with Hindutva, Christians in India cannot be fully Indian. Christianity is a “foreign poison” that needs to be rooted out.98 Those who convert to Christianity have “cut off all their ancestral national moorings in this land and mentally merged themselves with the aggressors.”99 What Western thinkers might be inclined to think of as separate—religion and politics—constitute, for Golwalkar, the warp and woof of a single, integrated fabric of national culture. Christianity is, for this reason, not merely a religious threat, for nothing religious was “merely” so. Rather, the advance of Chris tianity cannot be disentangled from the advance of Western secular modernities. They represent an amalgamated threat; resistance to one is tantamount to resistance to the other. The notion that Christianity and the forces of Western secular modernity present a nondifferentiable, integrated threat to India (and specifically to Hindutva) has consistently informed Sangh rhetoric from Golwalkar right down to contemporary Sangh-friendly critics of Christianity like Arun Shourie, Radha Rajan, and Rajiv Malhotra. Arun Shourie, former journalist and occasional BJP politician, describes the “joint endeavours . . . of the rulers [historically, the British, and t oday, Western powers], the missionaries and the scholars” the goal of which was not so much “to enlarge the flock of the Church” but to “lay waste” to India’s infrastructure, undermine Indian unity, and destroy Indians’ confidence in and respect for their own traditions, thus creating a cultural and political vacuum to be filled by foreigners.100 Similarly, for Rajan, a widely read blogger, Christian evangelism is but one arm of the Western neo colonial project carried out through military intervention, support for free- market capitalism, and multinational organizations like the World Bank. Rajan uses the word Church to refer to this multifaceted threat. The “Church,” for her, refers not only to Christianity but also to “Christian NGOs, Christian funding agencies, White Christian governments and countries which legitimize and use evangelization and militant Christian missionary objectives as instruments of foreign policy in countries of Asia. . . . The generic Church also includes the United Nations with a charter that enforces Christian ‘liberal’ po litical principles as the universal socio-political ideal which w ill be enforced
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coercively by any one of the arms of the generic Church, including military intervention.”101 In very much the same way, the American Rajiv Malhotra, whose views often align with t hose of the Sangh, describes a nexus of “Breaking India” forces that includes Western scholars who are hostile to India and Indian religion (and the Indian scholars they co-opt), Western governments, liberal NGOs, h uman rights organizations, religious freedom organizations, lower-caste-and dalit-rights organizations, Western funding agencies, and transnational Christian evangelistic institutions and intellectuals who control the “socio-political discourse on India” through their “superior funding- capacity [sic].”102 Earlier, I highlighted John McCauley’s argument that conflicts framed as ethnic may offer political entrepreneurs different kinds of resources than conflicts framed as religious. Ethnic conflicts tend to focus on land and resources, whereas religious conflicts tend to organize around rules. The context from which McCauley derived this argument was one dominated by two religions with universal pretensions: Islam and Christianity. As McCauley himself acknowledges, this m atters, inter alia, b ecause differentiating religious rules from ethnicity is more difficult in the context of religions, like Hinduism, that perceive themselves as particularly connected to a specific place and p eople. Hindus, after all, are oriented, qua Hindus, around both a particular land/people (at local, regional, and national levels) and a set of cultural and religious norms. And Hindutva, with its insistence that a Hindu is one who considers India both fatherland and holy land—evincing concern, respectively, for both land and rules—intensifies that dual concern. For this reason, it may be necessary to expand McCauley’s argument to make it applicable to the Indian context. In the graph below (see fig. 1.1), the vertical y-axis represents a continuum from “traditional” to “modern” rules, norms, and mores, while the horizontal x-axis represents a continuum from foreign loyalties or landlessness to attachment to the land and nation of India. This graph, it must be underscored, deals in generalities and takes its cue from the way that Sanghis perceive and perform/produce the world (rather than, for example, how more dispassionate parties attuned to social complexity might construct it). The ideology of Hindutva, because it rejects certain more tolerant trends within Hinduism and thereby intensifies its concern for both rules (of a generally traditional variety) and land, appears higher and farther to the right of Hinduism itself.103 Moving inward from Hinduism toward the origin of the graph is Syrian Chris tianity (or St. Thomas Christianity, on which, see the next chapter), which positions itself and is perceived as more upper caste and acculturated than other forms of Christianity (that is, more “Hindu” both in its norms and in its attachment to India and the Indian landscape). This perception and self-
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“TRADITIONAL” HINDU RULES Hindutva
Syrian Christianity
Non-Indian Islam
Indian Islam
INDIAN LAND / NATION
LANDLESSNESS / FOREIGN LAND
Hinduism
Indian Christianity
Indian Secularism
Western / Missionary Christinaity
Western Secular Modernities
“MODERN” RULES Figure 1.1. The Sangh’s construction of social and political space.
positioning of Syrian Christianity in India helps explain why alliances between Christians and members of the Sangh Parivar most often involve Syrian Christians (or other high-status Christians). At the origin itself, implying divided loyalties both b ecause of their tendency to emphasize the universality of Christianity and b ecause of their association with modern Western values/rules (e.g., dalit rights, human rights), are other Indian varieties of Christianity. At the far left and on the x-axis is non-Indian Islam, because Islam is associated in India with certain traditional values (but often, it is alleged, too much so or the wrong ones). Indian Islam is perceived to have at least a certain degree of history and rootedness in the South Asian environment, which is why it appears slightly to the right of non-Indian Islam. Nevertheless, it is at the same time perceived to produce troubling loyalties to foreign lands like Pakistan—the cause of partition, according to the partisan analysis of Sanghis—or the Middle East. India’s secularists appear in the bottom right quadrant. They have a certain degree of loyalty to India, though Sanghis suspect them of being inadequately
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patriotic. At the same time, the values they purvey, as the term secularist implies, are clearly inclined toward the modern end of the spectrum, or to Western rather than Indian forms of secularism. Western evangelical Christianity, particularly that presented by foreign missionaries, in this schema, appears in the bottom left quadrant, because of its presumed foreign attachments and its perceived perpetuation of somewhat more modern rules/values, as well as its alleged desire and ability to denationalize India’s Christians or even to undermine and destroy the Indian nation itself (an allegation that has been leveled against India’s Christians many times, as described in the next chapter). Western secular modernities, then, represent an intensification both of missionary Christianity’s landlessness (or universal pretensions) and its perpetuation of modern values. Together, in the perspective of many Sangh supporters, Western Christianity and secular modernity therefore go hand in hand as a total political-cultural-religious complex, which is why it is perceived as a threat to Hindutva, or Hinduness, itself a totalizing political-cultural-religious complex. Adopting a constructivist perspective, I recognize, with instrumentalists, the influential factor of material (and ideal) interests. However, visualizing the disposition of these various parties relative to one another (at least in the view of Sanghis) helps us understand both why resistance to the influence of Western-style secular modernities may be one important factor in antiminority violence in India and why Christians and Muslims bear the brunt of it. Secular modernity as imagined in Europe and the United States (and particularly the latter) is essentially the antithesis of Hindutva, in the view of Sanghis, and does in fact directly threaten the material interests of those associated with the Sangh, particularly those associated with the upper-caste Hindus who dominate the Sangh’s leadership cadres. It does so by undermining the traditional authority accorded to upper-caste Hindus (rules) and by threatening to divide and dilute the Hindu vote and therefore the political power of Hindus while undermining the authority, power, and wealth of traditional elites (land). It undermines traditional elite authority in a number of ways, for example, by introducing competitive modern economics that displace older patronage systems favoring upper-caste elites, by increasing class mobility through the greater democratization of education, and by perpetuating merit-based rather than traditional forms of authority. It threatens to divide and dilute the Hindu vote through processes of secularization that deny Hindus the full social and political hegemony many associated with the Sangh feel their numbers merit, as well as by undermining the assertion that religion is and should be about birth rather than choice and thereby raising the prospect of defection (through conversions, etc.) and the specter of declining Hindu numbers.
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It is for this reason, then, that Indian secularists are portrayed as “sickularists.” They are on the right side of the graph, in both senses of the term. But their loyalties are perceived to be divided, and their understanding of desirable secularism is perceived to resemble that of Europeans and Americans more than that preferred by the Sangh. Thus, they are incomplete, “sick” Indians—more traitors than opponents. Such figures are also often labeled Indian “sepoys” by their opponents, and this use of the name of Indians who worked in the British army likewise implies a kind of treason. In the face of the Sangh’s insistence that Hinduism deserves a privileged public voice and Hindutva’s elision of Hindu and Indian identity, Western forms of secularism insist that religion be private, chosen, and unmoored from geog raphical or cultural location. Why does the Sangh resent and resist the extension of secular modernity, particularly in its European and American forms? B ecause it represents a rejection of ethnic in favor of universal conceptions of religion, a rejection of maximalist in favor of minimalist religious formations, and therefore a rejection of all totalizing sociocultural systems (including Hindutva’s) in f avor of its own. More perniciously, as Gayatri Spivak has asserted, secular modernities reject all competing, totalizing schemes while their proponents fail or refuse to recognize that they are themselves totalizing schemes with religious implications and characteristics.104 It is important to note that the Sangh’s rejection of secularity and modernization is selective, incomplete. Sangh leaders like Modi are absolutely committed to the advance of modern technologies as part of a broader development scheme. Moreover, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, the Sangh’s tendency to label Indian secularists “pseudo-secularist” implicitly accepts secularism as the norm, and Sangh leaders are eager to use certain instruments of secular governance, such as the imposition of universally homogenous laws governing inheritance, marriage, divorce, and so forth (which currently differ by religious community in India) to obliterate religious difference.105 In fact, Savarkar himself worked with and for a thoroughly secularized conception of religion. Though willing to instrumentalize Hindu symbols and practices to support the development of a strong and independent Indian nation, Savarkar was himself personally atheist and despised Hinduism’s popular pieties, considering them thoroughly unmodern and responsible for Indians’ lack of political autonomy. For Savarkar, according to Aparna Devare, “the outer ideological shell of religion [was] maintained within a rational secular and political discourse, while religiosity itself as piety or faith [was] completely emptied out.”106 In other words, “Savarkar, considered perhaps one of the most important ideologues of contemporary Hindu nationalism, displays a complete dependence on modern secular-political categories for his vision of Hinduism.”107
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The point, then, is that the Sangh seeks to construct and implement forms of secularism and modernity that are consistent with and supportive of Hindutva in a way that Western secular modernities are not. One rarely finds them criticizing secularism or modernity, then, only varieties or definitions of it that they do not find conducive to the perpetuation of their own construction of the good society. Speaking in 2008 at an event celebrating the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Tamil magazine Thuglak, the future prime minister Narendra Modi said: I do not know the meaning of “secularism.” . . . There was a time when people were talking about the “secularism,” they w ere talking [simply about] religious harmony. Slowly, it changed the color. Then the “secularism” [came to mean] a lip sympathy to minorities. Then slowly the color changed. Then the “secularism” [came to mean] appeasement to the minorities. The “secularism” changed the color, focused only on the Muslim vote bank in the name of secularism. Then the “secularism” changed the color. Then hate Hindu means secularism. . . . So now I am thinking that I must come with a new meaning of . . . secularism. For me, development gives the strongest foundation to . . . secularism.108 Lending legitimacy to the Sangh critique of Western forms of secularism is the fact that a number of prominent, left-leaning Indian intellectuals like Ashis Nandy and T. N. Madan have, over the last few decades, also questioned the appropriateness of Western secular models in the Indian context.109 Why would Sanghi concerns about the intrusion of Western secular modernities contribute to anti-Christian violence? Because Christianity in general and Western Christianity in particular are construed by proponents of Hindutva as deeply implicated in the construction and propagation of these Western secular modernities. Indian Christians, for their part, are accordingly perceived or construed as the primary beneficiaries and purveyors of Western secular modernities in India. Moreover, it is certainly the case that the very possibility and promotion of conversion to Indian Christianity depends on a privatized, individualized conception of religion liberated from ethnic or other communal identity—in short, a secular conception of ideal religion (which is why proselytization represents such a flash point in Hindu-Christian conflict). Nevertheless, secular modernity and Western Christianity are abstract entities that do not present themselves directly for critique or confrontation in India (except in the form of foreign missionaries, who are themselves sometimes attacked or legally circumscribed). For this reason, resentment against the spread of Western secular modernities in India is at times directed toward a more convenient, available, and vulnerable scapegoat: India’s Christians.
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And not just Christians. Islam appears h ere t oward the chart’s “landlessness / foreign land” limits but halfway between the poles of “traditional” and “modern” rules. This placement emphasizes the fact that while Muslims in India are often faulted for being rather traditional (in terms of their views of gender and marriage, for example), their “traditional” rules are the wrong ones. Moreover, as minorities in India, Muslims, like Christians, are predisposed more than Hindus toward what minorities often perceive to be more favorable Western conceptions and practices of secularism. While the development of Hindu-Muslim tensions and conflict follows its own distinct historical trajectory, then, it can also be regarded at least in part as a manifestation of the Sangh’s rejection of Western secular modernities. Nevertheless, Islam is not as directly associated with secularism in the minds of Sangh supporters as is Christianity, and the factor of Sanghi resistance to the global expansion of secular modernity therefore, in my view, plays a somewhat more limited role in anti-Muslim violence than it does in anti-Christian violence. At first blush, it may seem odd that the dynamics of antiminority violence could be different depending on w hether it targets Christians or Muslims, and it is of course true that the Sangh’s anxieties about the presence and growth of minorities in India are a factor common to both. The existence of all minorities represents an implicit challenge to the Hindu hegemony proponents of Hindutva covet. T hose seeking the simplest explanation for antiminority violence in India would therefore reject the view that Sanghi opposition to secular modernity has any particular utility in explaining anti-Christian violence. If such a theory cannot also explain the much more serious problem of anti- Muslim violence in India, they might reason, why not retreat to the simpler, more general explanation of antiminority violence as an expression of majoritarian anxieties? Is it really so odd, however, that anti-Christian and anti-Muslim violence in India might differ in certain ways? They both have their own historical trajectory, to be sure, and as outlined in the next chapter, anti-Muslim violence is a much older and much more pervasive problem in India than anti-Christian vio lence. Moreover, the concerns expressed about Muslims by their critics differ as well. Proselytization, for example, is far less a feature of anti-Muslim rhe toric, in which concerns about Muslims’ reproductive rates, putative tendency toward theocracy, misogyny, violence, and supposed support for and from Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries is far more common. Similarly, in the United States, while there is no doubt that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are both commonly fueled, at least in part, by majoritarian anxieties about the presence, potential growth, and influence of minorities, the way that these anxieties are expressed differs depending on whether Jews or Muslims
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are the minority in the spotlight, as are the specific ways in which the two groups are imagined to be threatening. For these reasons, it is not only possi ble that at least somewhat different concerns and anxieties fuel antiminority activity directed at Muslims and Christians in India; it is to be expected. Social scientists should therefore be alive to the possibility of such differences. Nevertheless, it is absolutely the case that not all violence against Christians in India is motivated by so abstract a concern as secular modernity. As I argue with respect to the riots in Kandhamal, the initial source of Kandha-Pana tension appears to have been economic competition. Given the identities of the competing parties, however, it was possible to frame the competition as interreligious. D oing so served the interests of Kandha leaders (who thereby received support from outside the region), regional trading elites (who thereby could deal a blow to the Christians who w ere beginning to circumvent their trading hegemony), and national Sangh leaders (who could thereby unify Hindus under one political banner and reinforce their traditional authority and political clout). Note here how the alliance of these parties fused, using McCauley’s terminology again, concern for both rules and land. While the Sangh construed the conflict as the result of Christians’ embrace of distasteful proselytization (an abrogation of Hindu cultural rules), the Kandhas and regional trading elites appear to have been equally motivated by competition for the land and its resources. This multilevel complexity and collusion fits a broader pattern identified by Gorski and coauthors, who assert that religious nationalisms typically “involve an alliance connecting a religious master cleavage (i.e., religious/religious or religious/secular) to individual identities via intracommunity rivalries. Such alliances would be the result of a (partial) synchronization of individual interests and motives at various levels of social life along a religious fault line. One strength of this approach is that it allows considerable room for strategic deception, not only of the masses by the elites but also the reverse.”110 The constructivist approach I employ in this book is quite similar to that Juergensmeyer and Mona Kanwal Sheikh label “socio-theological.” The socio- theological interpretation of religious behavior, according to these authors, follows the cultural turn in the social sciences more generally and counts theorists like Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Geertz, Louis Dumont, Mary Douglas, Stanley Tambiah, Talal Asad, and Gananath Obeyesekere among its forbearers. Their approach takes religious ideas seriously but analyzes them in conversation with the religious person’s social, po litical, and economic position. Neither the theological nor the sociological is considered determinative in and of itself.111
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While my approach to the topic is similar to Juergensmeyer and Sheikh’s, I label it socio-cosmological rather than socio-theological. One advantage of the term cosmological over the term theological is that it more fully honors the fact that religions propose unique beliefs not merely about God or the gods but also about the cosmos more generally. And significantly, given the recent rediscovery of the importance of practice in religious studies, the term cosmo logical also conveys something more than mere belief. And h ere we must remember the roots of the term cosmos, in ancient Greek, where it referred both to the world (or universe) and to rule, or order. (It is this latter meaning of the term that informs the contrast between “chaos” and “cosmos” in Eliade’s religious theory.112) A socio-cosmological approach therefore pays attention not only to the explicit theologies perpetuated by particular religions but also to the more implicit and broader cultural world views that inform and are informed by them and the rules that structure and are structured by religious practice. For these reasons, the term cosmological helps us better accommodate religions where religion and culture are not so easily disentangled and where, using McCauley’s language again, concerns about land (resources, space) and rules go hand in hand. It is a term, therefore, that helps us take into account the assertion by those associated with maximalist religions that a theology cannot and should not be separated from a culture or a politic; for this reason, such a term helps us more easily make sense of the opposition of religious nationalists like those in India to the secularist reduction of religion to a private belief detached from cultural belonging.
An Indian Christian villager looks over her home on her return from nearby jungles following an attack, allegedly by a group of Hindu fundamentalists, at Fhirangia, a village in Orissa’s Kandhamal District. Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP via Getty Images.
Ch a p ter 2
A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict
The title of this chapter takes its inspiration from that of an article published by C. A. Bayly, “The Pre-History of ‘Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860.” Bayly’s article argues, among other t hings, that scholars have been too quick to locate the origins of Hindu-Muslim “communalism” at the end of the nineteenth c entury and have therefore missed evidence of it much e arlier.1 Bayly also argues against the inevitability implied by many histories of communalism, which frequently describe the nature and evolution of interreligious interactions in Indian history as if they could not but have led to violence.2 Without a doubt, social and political processes in the late nineteenth c entury contributed in significant ways to the production of hardened and antagonistic religious identities, not only regarding Muslims and Hindus but also Christians, Sikhs, and o thers. It is certainly also the case that the intellectual argument for communalism from the Hindu side, provided by the ideology of Hindutva, was never fully articulated u ntil the 1920s. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that these developments and the interreligious tensions to which they contributed did not emerge ex nihilo but w ere linked to social processes discernible during the preceding centuries. Over the course of this chapter, I sketch a narrative outline of the history of Hindu-Christian conflict. In the writing of this narrative, I have erred on the side of breadth over depth in order to give the reader some sense of the 65
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broad historical trends and transformations that have brought us to the pre sent historical moment. B ecause of this, the narrative is necessarily dense and more suggestive than demonstrative. To those seeking greater depth and demonstration, I recommend an exploration of the amply footnoted references. Because of the way my presentation of this historical narrative travels promiscuously across space and time, it may prove particularly bewildering for those unfamiliar with India’s precolonial and colonial history and geography. For this reason, while the narrative does not neglect chronology, it subordinates the chronological exposition of events to a thematic organization that highlights four absolutely critical movements in the history of Hindu-Christian relations: (1) from integration to disintegration, (2) from controversy to conflict, (3) from religious fluidity to ossification, and (4) from the local to the national. Although each of these movements will be described thoroughly, it may be useful to briefly introduce them h ere. The movement from integration to disintegration was provoked by the arrival and expansion of European trading communities and missionary activity after the end of the fifteenth century, which significantly altered the Indian political landscape. T hese economic and missionary activities contributed to processes already underway that undermined the high status of St. Thomas Christians, while beginning to disentangle their religious practice from that of local non-Christian communities. As a result, Christianity was forever a fter associated in the public mind with the threat of colonial (and l ater, neocolonial) expansionism and with the excesses, disruptions, and intrusiveness thereof. The second movement, from controversy to conflict, refers to what many Indians perceived to be the increased and increasingly inappropriate interventions in Indian social, cultural, and religious affairs of the British East India Company (BEIC) in the first half of the nineteenth c entury. These interventions provoked or at least coincided with a rise in Hindu-Christian controversy and eventually anti-Christian violence targeting missionaries and Indian Christians. While there had, in earlier eras, been incidents of violence between Hindus and Christians, and while even in t hese nineteenth-century incidents, social, economic, and political f actors mix with the religious, it is in this era, it seems to me, that Christians are first attacked qua Christians and not merely, as in earlier eras, in the context of status and economic competitions between two groups that happened to identify, respectively, as Hindu and Christian. Under the heading of the third movement, from religious fluidity to ossification, I analyze the tendency of British colonial officials to conceive of and organize India primarily along the lines of religion and then, beginning in the late nineteenth c entury, to enumerate religious identity in the censuses while
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providing proportional political representation according to the numerical strength of competing religious communities. Such policies both helped concretize e arlier, more fluid religious boundaries and politicized religious identity in novel ways, while providing incentives for protecting and expanding the number of adherents associated with one’s own religion. These processes fed into and provoked o thers I describe in the section on the fourth movement, from the local to the national. By politicizing religious identity, British political and legal policies ensured that many of the localized social, political, and religious associations coming into being in the late nineteenth c entury would be tinctured by a reactionary conservative protectionism and that t hose involved in them would reach out to religious compatriots elsewhere in India for support, which helped shift the context of interreligious conflict from the local to the national. This nationalization of Hindu-Christian conflict came to fruition with the development, in the 1920s, of the ideology of Hindutva and its embodiment in the various organizations associated with the Sangh Parivar, which provided ideological and institutional support for the defense of Hinduism and the vilification of non-Hindu minorities as threats to the integrity of the nation.
1. From Integration to Disintegration: The Elision of Colonial Authority and Christian Identity St. Thomas Christians and the Portuguese Arrival The roots of the contemporary conflict between Hindus and Christians are discernible even in the earliest centuries of Indian Christian history. Yet while it is important not to idealize or romanticize the past, it is equally important to note that there was a long period, from the emergence of Christianity in India u ntil at least the early nineteenth c entury, during which Indian Christian communities were relatively well integrated within Indian society and during which they do not appear to have been accused—as they are today—of adhering to a “foreign” faith. Though these early Indian Christian communities competed with other communities (sometimes violently) for status, honor, and privilege, their religious sensibilities fell (and were perceived by others to fall) well within the spectrum of local religiosity. As Susan Bayly has ably demonstrated, the Malayalam-speaking St. Thomas, or Syrian, Christian community was a relatively well-established community within southwestern Indian society even before the sixth c entury. The community derives its name from its claim to have been founded by the Apostle
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Thomas in 52 CE and from its ecclesiastical linkages to the West Asian Church of East (whose Syriac liturgy it employs).3 In the medieval period, these St. Thomas Christians, the earliest Christians in India, developed into a community respected for the military and trading service it provided to various petty kingdoms along the Malabar Coast (in what are now the states of Kerala and Karnataka). Within t hese kingdoms, they competed with other communities for local “honors” (mariyatai) and the patronage of rulers and local elites. Conforming to local expectations regarding status and honor, and d oing well by these norms, the St. Thomas Christians had, by the fifteenth century, become a high-ranking and numerically substantial group. During the eigh teenth c entury, the St. Thomas Christians expanded their status in Hindu society yet further, proving themselves useful, with their widely admired military skills and their management of trading monopolies, to the expansion-minded rajas of Travancore and Cochin. Given the pragmatics of war making and the widespread use of mercenary armies, warrior societies such as t hese tended in the direction of religious synthesis and symbiosis.4 Moreover, group and caste status in this period were fluid, established primarily through shifting relationships of alliance and patronage. The St. Thomas Christians did well by these rules, as did the powerf ul and high-status local Nayar community with which they interacted (and may have intermarried). Meanwhile, their religious practices were oriented around the worship at the shrines of thaumaturgic saints. Except for the fact that some of these saints were from Syria, the Syrian Christian religious cult resembled the worship of local saints, healers, and demon-fighting power divinities in the similarly focused “Hindu” and “Muslim” cults.5 They also, it appears, continued to participate in local Hindu religious festivals, where their high status would be marked and recognized with the granting of desirable rights and responsibilities (honors). Like group status, religious practice in this context was also malleable, based as it was on diffuse cults of hero worship and localized forms of pious bhakti. The religion of St. Thomas Christians, therefore, was one among many of these cults—similar to and in many ways intertwined with those of Hindus and Muslims. Others during this period perceived them to be a ritually pure community, and other high-status communities interacted and worshipped with them with no fear of ritual pollution.6 From the sixteenth to the nineteenth c entury, however, several social and historical processes began to undermine the status of the St. Thomas Christians in South Indian society. Vasco da Gama landed on the southwestern Indian coast (known as Malabar) in 1498 and, after returning to Portugal with hulls brimful of spices, was followed two years later by Pedro Alvarez Cabral.
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Among Cabral’s one thousand men w ere nineteen missionaries, the majority of them Franciscan. While the earliest Portuguese lacked the religious and cultural categories to fully understand Indian religion or even—comically—to properly distinguish Indian Christianity from Hinduism, later Portuguese visitors became more discerning.7 Already by 1503, the Portuguese and the St. Thomas Christians had established a formal alliance. The alliance helped the St. Thomas Christians deal with the “ever more predatory demands” of local rajas, while gaining the Portuguese a foothold in the spice trade, over which the St. Thomas Christians exercised substantial control.8 Portuguese power spread northward up the coastline to Goa, where, in 1510, after subduing local rulers (and later Venetian and Arab fleets), the Portuguese governor Afonso De Albuquerque (1453–1515) established the Estado da India. In the first years of Portuguese colonialism, the Catholicization of Indians in areas under Portuguese control progressed slowly and was, for most Portuguese, a lower priority than trade.9 Slowly, however, Catholic influence began to spread along the western Indian coastline, particularly in Goa and its surrounding areas. Missionary Catholicism received an injection of energy from the establishment of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), in 1540, and the arrival of its famous emissary Francis Xavier, in 1542. A decade before Xavier’s arrival, the low-caste fishing, pearling, and pirating community of Paravas on the southwestern coast had become nominally Catholic in a bid to secure protection from the Portuguese against the Arab sea traders and local Nayaka rulers with whom they competed. In the 1540s, Xavier worked among the Paravas, establishing orthodox Catholic faith and practice and baptizing converts from other communities in South India, including ten thousand neophytes from the similarly low-caste fishing and pearling community of Mukkuvars of the southeastern coast. The conversion of Paravas and Mukkuvars to Christianity initially had little effect on the high-status St. Thomas Christians but did instigate a rather lengthy process whereby Christianity came to be perceived by non-Christian Indians primarily as a lower-caste and lower-status religion.10 More ominous and threatening, in terms of the f uture of Christians’ relations with non-Christians in India, was the growing desire of European religious and temporal authorities to impose Roman Catholicism both on Christians who were not in their view properly Catholic and on non-Christians. Already in 1540, the Portuguese had begun destroying Hindu t emples in and around Goa, while exiling Hindu pandits, yogis, and sannyasis from their territory. And then, in 1560, the Inquisition arrived in Goa. Established in 1531,
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the Inquisition was an institution that both manifested and addressed Christian anxieties about the presence of Muslims and Jews in Iberia and about the sincerity of “New Christians” ( Jews who had been coerced to become Christian). Despite its emergence from specifically Iberian obsessions, the Inquisition’s institutionalized suspicion and paranoia could easily be used to express and manage Portuguese anxie ties about the piety of Portuguese sailors and the orthodoxy of India’s Christians (both the new converts and the St. Thomas Christians, of which t here w ere by this time between eighty and two hundred thousand). From 1560 until it was finally dismantled in 1812, the Goan Inquisition tried more than sixteen thousand cases and resulted in the imprisonment, torture, or death (by auto-da-fé) of thousands.11 In the years just before and after the establishment of the Inquisition, the Portuguese also promulgated a variety of laws that made it difficult to practice Hinduism without fear of punishment, while providing a range of incentives for Hindus to convert. Many did in fact convert, though a large number simply migrated to areas outside of Portuguese control. Traveling along with them, quite frequently, were St. Thomas Christians, who were also vulnerable to the Inquisition’s predations b ecause of what the Portuguese considered their heretical beliefs and suspect loyalties to the Christian patriarchs of Antioch and Babylon. Though most non-Christians converted, migrated, or accommodated themselves to Portuguese rule in other ways, others resisted. In at least one case in 1583, that resistance turned violent. In what some call the Cuncolim Revolt and o thers (primarily Catholics) call the Cuncolim Martyrdom, five Jesuits, another Portuguese Catholic, and fourteen native Christians were killed by a mob in the town of Cuncolim.12 After 1550, European Catholics in India attempted more aggressively to bring the St. Thomas Christians into line with Roman Catholic orthodoxy and eradicate their “heretical” tendencies. For decades, the St. Thomas Christians resisted, but their defense was undermined by internal schisms, leading to a mad scramble for positions of power within the community, during which rival metrans (bishops) sought confirmation and patronage from religious officials in Goa, Lisbon, Rome, Antioch, and Babylon, declaring their loyalty first to one and then the other. The metrans’ machinations exacerbated tensions within the St. Thomas community and invited outside interference. In 1599, at the Synod of Diamper, a large number of St. Thomas Christians assented to bring their faith, practice, and liturgy more in line with that of Roman Catholicism and placed themselves u nder the authority of the Portuguese 13 Padroado Real. Three elements of the Portuguese legacy in India are particularly significant in terms of the later development of conflict between Christians and Hin-
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dus. First, under the Portuguese, Christianity spread for the first time in substantial numbers to lower-caste communities. This shift not only slowly began to erode the status of St. Thomas Christians in Indian society but also, over time, encouraged the perception that Christianity was a religion of the lower castes and—later still—that foreign missionaries were intentionally targeting the lower castes both b ecause they w ere easy prey and for the purpose of undermining the authority of India’s elites. Second, the excesses of the Inquisition, its technologies of torture, its imposition of Catholicism, and its destruction of temples and the lives of Hindu pandits, swamis, and sannyasis have, like the excesses of early Muslim marauders in India, been adduced by critics of Christianity in India as evidence that Christianity is ultimately a predatory, imperialistic religion and that turning all of India into sixteenth-century Goa u nder the spell of the Inquisition is what Indian and foreign Christians truly desire.14 Finally, by intervening within the dynamics of the St. Thomas Christian community, the Portuguese exacerbated its internal antagonisms. The political pettiness and divisions that continued over the next several centuries further corroded the community’s respectable reputation in South Indian society. Each of the trends described in this paragraph continued and in many ways accelerated after the arrival of the British, whose influence was felt far more widely in India than that of the Portuguese.
South India and the BEIC During the nineteenth c entury, St. Thomas Christians fully (though mostly temporarily) lost their privileged place as a high-status warrior community in South Indian society. A number of f actors account for this loss, among them significant alterations of the political landscape. The Hindu states of Malabar (Travancore and Cochin) began to fall prey to outside invaders and became tributary client states, first of Tipu Sultan and then, in 1795, of the BEIC.15 As was their practice in other native states, the British took responsibility for security in their newly acquired client territories, while demanding, of course, that their clients foot the bill and demilitarize their populations. Not only did the arrangement reduce the tributary regimes to penury; it also stabilized the region significantly enough to put many members of the warrior communities out of work. At the same time, b ecause St. Thomas Christians w ere heavily invested in land and sea trade, disruptions in this trade affected them more negatively than most, and they began to lose the f avor, honors, and patronage of local rulers that they had once enjoyed.16 The British presence in Malabar affected Indian Christians in other ways as well. Evangelically minded BEIC officials in Travancore, like Residents Col.
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Figure 2.1. The British Empire in 1909.
C. Macauley and Col. John Munro (appointed 1810), took an active interest in the St. Thomas Christians. They, like many other European observers of the era, considered St. Thomas Christianity a degraded, fallen form of the faith. They w ere particularly scandalized by Indian Christian participation in local non-Christian religious festivals. Assuming that their participation was coerced (rather than a sign and performance of their rank) and that the Christian community was being oppressed by local Hindu rulers, Munro and his allies in the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and London Missionary Society (LMS) set out to “uplift” and “reform” the St. Thomas Christian community and bring its worship and faith in line with “orthodox” (read: nonsyncretistic, non- Catholic) Christianity. Macauley used BEIC troops to protect nascent missions, and Munro procured funds to support and purchase land for them to develop. Macauley and Munro supported the leading r ipple in what would become a powerf ul wave of missionaries in Travancore and Cochin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.17 The criticisms often leveled by these Protestant missionaries against Hinduism in the course of their street preaching, what roughly contemporary
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Jesuits considered the missionaries’ “irreverent gesture and vehement language,” provoked resentment.18 But so, too, did the work of reform-minded missionaries and colonial officials among existing Indian Christian communities. British attempts to rectify what they perceived as Hindu oppression of the St. Thomas Christian community created cleavages between the St. Thomas Christians and other local groups who considered the British interventions on their behalf a form of favoritism. Similarly, missionary efforts to reform St. Thomas Christianity by remaking it in the image of European Christian ity succeeded, in some cases, in discouraging the kinds of syncretic religious practices that had previously integrated the religious lives of St. Thomas Christians, Hindus, and Muslims, thereby resulting in the further alienation of Indian Christians from local society. Unlike their Catholic predecessors in the region, who largely left untouched and in some ways even encouraged the locally legible shrine culture in which Indian Christians participated, Protestant CMS and LMS missionaries and their colonial supporters considered the St. Thomas Christians’ cult shrines, legendary saints, “worship” of the Virgin Mary, and elaborate festivals (which resembled those of Hindus) l ittle more than “popish superstition” and denounced their participation in “heathenish ceremonies.” By the early nineteenth century, British missionaries had become so zealous in their desire to reform the St. Thomas Christians that some adopted a more confrontational approach. For example, missionaries occasionally visited Hindu religious festivals with the intention of disrupting St. Thomas Christian participation in them, sometimes by intentionally coming into contact with them (the touch of foreigners, like that of members of the lower castes, was highly polluting). What the British did not realize, of course, was that participation in such festivals was a mark and performance of the high status of St. Thomas Christians and safeguarded their integration within the local hierarchies of purity and pollution. Preventing them from participating in these rituals therefore prevented them from performing and reinforcing their status within those local hierarchies.19 At around the same time, evangelical missionaries began to claim publicly that all Christians, including those of low-caste origin, should be accepted as a high-status community like their St. Thomas coreligionists. Here, too, the evangelical missionaries differed from their Catholic predecessors, who had generally considered caste divisions a feature of Indian social, rather than religious, life, which meant that they could be left alone.20 Clashes ensued as lower-caste converts, with encouragement from missionaries, forcefully pressed for rights of access to upper-caste Hindu temple precincts and pro cession routes, while contesting signs of their lowly status, such as in the
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“breast cloth” controversies of the 1820s, in which low-caste women in Travancore protested the traditional requirement that they not cover the upper half of their body in front of members of the upper castes.21 Rather than elevate the social position of low-caste converts, the primary effect of this missionary strategy was to further erode the status of St. Thomas Christians. By the end of the nineteenth century, upper-caste Hindus in Travancore and Cochin had begun denying St. Thomas Christians ritual honors they had once enjoyed and came to consider interaction with them ritually polluting. Conflict between Hindu and Christian communities increased, occasionally resulting even in violent confrontation.22 As with Portuguese interventions, the controversial involvement of British missionaries also exacerbated fissiparous tendencies within the St. Thomas community, leading to the emergence of multiple and competing forms of the faith, which further embarrassed the community and weakened its already precarious social position. And yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, the St. Thomas community itself had assimilated the evangelical reformist tendencies in significant ways and had begun to think of itself, at least to some extent, as part of a larger Christian community that included lower-caste converts. An important unintended effect of this shift was that St. Thomas Christians began to act along with other Christians against the very Hindu and Muslim communities with which they had previously been so well (if not entirely unproblematically) integrated and among which they had once enjoyed a high social status.
Christian Communities on the Southeastern Coast It is important to note, of course, that the St. Thomas Christian community has more recently regained a good deal of its former status, in part by reversing the antisyncretistic reforms of the colonial period and in part by once again emphasizing the distinction between St. Thomas Christians, with their ancient Indian lineage, and the lower-caste Christian communities of more recent provenance.23 Nevertheless, the transformations experienced by St. Thomas Christians in the early colonial era were dramatic, more dramatic, perhaps, than t hose experienced by any other Christians, due in part to the high status that they had enjoyed, a status rarely equaled by other Christians in the precolonial period. Yet certain f actors in their colonial-era journey from relative integration to relative disintegration were replicated elsewhere, with local variations. In the hinterlands of the southeastern Indian coast, for example, devotional cults focused around the shrines of deceased, powerf ul “foreign” Christian
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saints and healers and wandering charismatic gurus (e.g., Francis Xavier, John de Britto, and the Vellala Christian Devasakayam Pillai) developed in the territories of Poligar military chieftains between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These shrine cults had, for the most part, only tenuous relations with established Christian communities and, in the early period of their development, almost none at all with European missionaries or ecclesiastical institutions. Most of the shrine and guru cults developed their own, idiosyncratic rituals and devotionalism, and devotees at these shrines would have resembled, in their worship and beliefs, those who frequented nearby Hindu and Muslim shrines. As in their interactions with St. Thomas Christians, Catholic missionaries, many of them Jesuit, very often supported and encouraged the shrine cults of Christian saints and martyrs, for they helped counterbalance forces that worked to marginalize Christians from local society.24 Other Christian groups converted en masse within shifting local schemes of alliance and patronage or as the result of honors disputes that left them searching for new patrons with whom they could ally (or threaten to ally). New converts often shifted back and forth among Christian and Hindu patrons and even among different Christian missionary patrons, in their attempts to secure for themselves better social status. Yet when sizeable Christian communities did begin to emerge in the region, particularly among Shanars and Vellalas, missionary attempts to institutionalize and control their convert communities contributed to the destruction of the less formalized shrine and guru cults that had earlier typified Christian piety in the Tamil hinterlands. As a result, Christian piety began to emerge as something distinct in significant ways from the piety of other local religious groups.25 While the experiences of t hese early southwestern and southeastern Christian communities cannot stand in for those of all Christians in the pre-and early colonial periods, they do highlight several important factors in the historical development of perceptions that Indian Christians occupied a distinct and alien social and religious space. First, these Christians converted following local models and within systems of patronage, alliance, and contested status and honors, not as a way of “opting out” of the system.26 Moreover, the Christianity to which they converted (or into which they w ere born) during this period was syncretic and focused on the worship and veneration of local heroes, saints, healers, and divinities, just as in the worship of local Hindus and Muslims. Nevertheless, missionary (particularly Protestant) attempts to bring these convert communities under control and within the broad realm of “orthodox” Christianity, while encouraging them to contest what missionaries deemed their social disabilities or low social status, began to effect changes that unraveled their social and religious ties to o thers in the region. At the same
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time, in addition to lending their support to the social projects of missionary workers, British colonial rulers disrupted the earlier political arrangements into which Christians had been integrated, positioning themselves as the sole legitimate providers of patronage and offering their patronage disproportionately to Christians, setting them against their non-Christian neighbors and thereby contributing (along with other factors having nothing to do with colonialism) to the hardening of caste and religious distinctions.
2. From Controversy to Conflict: Colonial Reform and the Emergence of “Hindu-Christian” Conflict In the early decades of the nineteenth c entury, BEIC officials and Christian missionaries became increasingly interested in provoking reforms, w hether through argumentation or legal means, within Indian society and even Hinduism itself. This increased interest was related, in no small measure, to the religious reform movement among Christians in Britain. In 1813, the com pany’s charter was altered to allow Christian missionaries easier access to areas u nder BEIC control, and in 1833 the charter was revised once again to allow such access without the need of licenses.27 These alterations have often been portrayed as the cause of the subsequent influx of missionaries. It is surely the case that easier access provided encouragement to t hose interested in becoming missionaries in India. However, the fact that the company’s charter was changed in the first place reflects a far more significant factor in the rising tide of missionary work in India, to wit, the growing power of evangelicalism, particularly that associated with William Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect. After the 1830s, the influence of evangelicalism was increasingly felt even within the ranks of British colonial officialdom. Moreover, evangelicalism itself was undergoing a number of significant transformations around the 1830s, becoming more confident, assertively missionary, and focused on the super natural.28 The growing and increasingly pervasive influence of evangelicalism in Britain and in British India therefore not only brought the goals of missionaries and colonial officials into closer alignment but also provided both with a powerf ul impulse to shore up Indian Christian communities and seek the salvation of India’s vast non-Christian population, not only through evangelization but also through legislation.29 Accordingly, a fter securing the entry of missionaries into BEIC territories in 1813, British popular opinion then prevailed on the BEIC to act increasingly like a Christian company should, as a result of which, for example, the company became more willing to favor Chris
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tianity, abandon its bureaucratic relationships with Hindu institutions, and prohibit social and religious practices the British deemed unwholesome.30 In the nineteenth c entury, then, and particularly a fter the 1830s, European and American Christians in India became increasingly hostile toward and critical of Hinduism.31 Negative missionary depictions of Hinduism prompted some Hindus to reconsider and reformulate their own religion in ways that have had an enduring effect to the present day. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) and organizations like the Brahmo Samaj (established 1830) were at the forefront of this reformulation as part of what has been termed the Bengal Re naissance, b ecause of its early roots in that region. At the same time, many more orthodox Hindus believed that reformers like Roy and religious organ izations like the Brahmo Samaj ceded too much religious territory to Christians. Roy, for example, spoke as negatively as missionaries about Hindu “idol-worship” and suttee. To defend Hinduism and prevent f uture intrusions, therefore, orthodox Hindus established more conservative groups, like the Dharma Sabha (1830).32 This period also witnessed a rapid expansion of Christian involvement in education, which many viewed as an indirect form of evangelism. The expansion enjoyed considerable company support. In the period between 1833 and 1857, the BEIC and missionaries cooperated extensively and increasingly in the establishment of government schools. At the same time, the company progressively relaxed its rules on schools within its territories, allowing Bibles in school libraries in the 1840s, for example, and then allowing teachers in government schools to offer after-hours instruction in Christianity to inquirers in 1854.33 Cooperation in the field of public education had major ramifications not only in terms of the relationship between missionaries and colonial officials but also in terms of how the Indian public perceived the colonial project. Public education forged what could for the first time be legitimately called a “formal collaboration” between evangelicals and the BEIC, a “substantial de facto subvention by the Company” of Protestant evangelizing.34 There is good reason, then, to accept the basic outline of Gauri Viswanathan’s rather famous argument that colonial education, in both its secular and religious forms, functioned as a “mask of conquest,” providing the appearance (one meaning of “mask”) of benign rule while at the same time facilitating the consent of the colonized by exposing Indian elites to the moral grammar in which the argument for colonization was made and thereby providing cover (another meaning of “mask”) for the BEIC’s more crassly mercantile and political interests.35 After 1835, a consensus emerged among colonial officials and missionaries like
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the famous Alexander Duff (1806–1878) that English education, and particularly exposure to a relatively stable canon of English literature, ought to be used for the “dissemination of moral and religious values” among Indians, as a kind of praeparatio evangelica.36 In the same period as the rise in English-language colonial education, the company had promulgated policies forbidding the practice of suttee (1829); excusing itself from the management of Hindu temples, ceremonies, and festivals (1838); abolishing the tax traditionally levied on pilgrims at the Puri temple complex (1840); creating the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (1850) to prevent the disinheritance of converts to Christianity; and passing the W idow Remarriage Act (1856), which made it illegal to prevent the remarriage of widows. T hese interventions into the social and religious lives of everyday Indians, along with the BEIC’s support for missionary education, “made the Company Raj look much more, in practice, like the Christian regime it had always been at heart,” provoking controversy and resistance, much of which took place or appeared in the meetings, papers, and other publications of groups like the Tattvabodhini Sabha (Truth-Propagating Society), which was established in 1839 and which was led, for a time, by Debendranath Tagore, from that most famous of Bengali high-society families.37 While the Tattvabodhini Sabha initially eschewed disputation with Christian missionaries, it appears to have been prompted to engage more apologetically and polemically with Christians by their increasingly aggressive, confident, and successful proselytizing, as well as by the policy interventions noted above.38 The society’s apologetic defense of Hinduism and their polemical critique of Christianity appeared primarily in its widely read newspaper, the Tattvabodhini Patrika.39 Along with other similar papers, the Tattvabodhini Patrika succeeded in putting evangelistically minded Christians on the defensive by countering missionary arguments with its own.40 In addition to t hese controversies in popular newspapers, t here were also occasional debates in a more scholarly vein. The best known of t hese was provoked by the publication, in 1839, of the Sanskrit Matapariksha (An Examina tion of Religions) by John Muir, a Scottish orientalist and company official, which provoked no fewer than three serious, thoughtful, and similarly polemical published responses from Hindu pandits. Hindu resistance to Christian criticism and evangelizing of course had precedent—there was a series of very public debates between Christians and Hindus in Bombay in the 1830s, and already in the early eighteenth c entury, the pioneering Protestant missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719) had published for European consumption several collections of objections to Christianity raised by the South Indian Tamil-speaking “Malabarian priests” with whom he interacted. The increas-
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ing frequency of such debates in the nineteenth c entury, however, reflects both Hindus’ growing awareness of Christianity and its claims (the result in no small measure of evangelistic Christian attempts to engage Hindus in their own sacred and vernacular languages) and their rising concerns about the steadily spreading influence of missionary Christianity and evangelistically minded colonial officials.41
From Conflict to Violence The m iddle third of the nineteenth c entury represents a turning point in the nature of Hindu-Christian controversy and conflict, for it is in this period that we can begin to note a faint but discernible rise in what might be called anti- Christian violence. This violence was, for the first decades of the century, rare and diffuse but also present in various locations, as the paragraphs below demonstrate. Then, in the Indian Rebellion (discussed in the next section), the violence became suddenly, though briefly, more acute and severe. In Bengal, as elsewhere, Hindu-Christian controversies and confrontations became particularly heated following news or rumors of conversions to Chris tianity from prominent high-caste and elite families. In at least two cases in the 1940s, foreign missionaries w ere attacked by t hose unhappy with their evangelistic work in Bengal.42 However, native Christians, particularly those in the rural areas outside of Calcutta, were far more vulnerable than the missionaries themselves. In these rural areas, Christian converts generally came from uneducated and lower-caste, petty laboring communities firmly under the control of local landlords known as zamindars or talukdars. Because of their social and geographic location, they lacked easy access to police and the courts. In rural contexts such as these, conversions to Christianity threatened not only the general social order but also—more specifically—the power and wealth of landlords, since Christians w ere more likely than adherents of other religions to resist what they considered the oppressive and anti-Christian demands of zamindars and talukdars and did so occasionally with missionary support. In areas where sizeable numbers of conversions took place, the harassment, kidnapping, and assault of converts was relatively common. Well- attested incidents of violence took place, for example, in the district of Nadia in 1839, the district of Jessore in 1844, and in the same region once again in 1847.43 Such responses to conversion were not unique to Bengal. Robert Frykenberg claims, for example, that in the Madras Presidency (fig. 2.1 and 2.2), in the opening decades of the nineteenth c entury, conversions “aroused the wrath of local landlords and warlords (‘Poligars’: palaiyakarrars).” Many new Christians
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BENGAL PRESIDENCY CENTRAL PROVINCES
Other states
GANJAM Chatrapur
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Jeypore
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VIZAGAPATAM Vizagapatam GODAVARI
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TIRUCHIRAPPALLI COIMBATORE Coimbatore Tanjore Tiruchirappalli TANJORE COCHIN MADURA Cochin Madura
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Figure 2.2. The Madras Presidency in 1859.
suffered violence, chapel schools w ere destroyed, and books w ere burned. “Thousands . . . lost their homes, and were stripped and sent into the jungle to die.”44 In fact, Frykenberg argues, in the 1840s, after decades of sporadic mass conversions of lower-caste Nadars (formerly Shanars) around Tirunelveli, “what developed, almost unique in India, was Hindu-Christian communalism, with sporadic violence against Nadars.”45 Tirunelveli was not the only hot spot in the Madras Presidency. T here were issues around Cuddapah (although in this case involving Muslim miscreants), Nellore, and Mysore, and even as far away as Bombay.46
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Between 1833 and 1859, the increasingly discernible presence of missionaries, their success in lobbying the BEIC to institute social reforms, and the ever more evangelical predilections of colonial officials themselves served to promote the perception, among Indians, that missionaries and colonial officials constituted a single more-or-less homogenous community, united in their desire to Christianize all of India. At the same time, missionary interventions on behalf of native Christians served both to disrupt extant social arrangements and to locate the Indian Christian community, in the minds of non- Christian observers, within the missionary-colonial nexus. As intimated in the introduction, this volume argues that contemporary Indian Christians are perceived (and at times harassed or attacked) as proxies for what in the context of globalization are considered the intrusive interventions of Western Christians, governments, and multinational corporations. For this reason, it is impor tant to note that h ere already in the nineteenth century the process by which Indian Christians came to be seen as intimately related to foreign Christians and foreign “Christian” governments was well underway. Then, as now, Indian Christians were more vulnerable to attack than the foreign Christians with whom they w ere, in the minds of their critics, illegitimately associated.
The Indian Rebellion, 1857–1858 The merging of Indian Christians, British colonial figures, and evangelical missionaries in Indian popular opinion was nowhere more evident than during the abortive Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858.47 The immediate cause for the revolt of Indian sepoys employed by the British army was the rumored introduction of Enfield rifle cartridges greased with animal fat. (Because standard loading procedure involved ripping open the cartridge with one’s teeth, the use of pig or cow fat would have forced a breach, respectively, of Muslim and upper-caste Hindu dietary restrictions, requiring penitentiary expiation in the case of the former and risking social and religious ostracism in the case of the latter.) Though they had indeed been manufactured, no cartridges greased with pig or cow fat, it appears, ever made their way into a ctual use. But the greased cartridges served as a potent emblem of British intervention in Indian social and religious life and w ere therefore able to symbolize a range of concerns about British rule in India and catalyze a rash of noncompliance and insubordination that led, eventually, to open revolt.48 In the violence that ensued, the homes and families of British officials were attacked more regularly than those of missionaries, and governmental buildings were vandalized more often than churches. Missionaries, churches, and Indian Christians themselves, however, were attacked, often savagely, suggesting
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that while it was British rule that was the primary target, no clear distinction was made between British rule and British religion. (Indeed, native Christians did rally to the defense of the British during the rebellion.) In Indian public opinion, it seems, British colonial officials, foreign missionaries, and native Christians formed a concatenation of communities with a shared politi cal and religious agenda.49 Nevertheless, by midway through the nineteenth c entury, only around ninety thousand Christians still remained in British territory, though the effect of missionaries on colonial policy and thereby on Indian social and religious life was clearly much more significant and profound than this number would suggest.50 As the next section demonstrates, however, in the period after the Indian Rebellion, the rate of Christian conversions did begin to increase dramatically. These conversions and certain significant shifts in both British colonial policy and Indian society (e.g., urbanization and the development of associational life) continued to pit Hindus against India’s various minorities and exacerbate existing tensions among them.
3. From Religious Fluidity to Ossification: British Political and Legal Policy Natural Leaders, Enumerative Policies, and Economic Interventions By midway through the nineteenth century, as a result of various developments described in the previous sections, Christians across British India were beginning to understand themselves as a distinct religious community, one in many cases with more natural connections to their colonial rulers than to their colonized brethren. Similarly, Indian Christians had come to be perceived by others as a distinct religious community with clear and somewhat suspect connections to colonial rule. A number of significant late nineteenth-century social trends that we consider in this and the following section accelerated t hese changes. In the nineteenth century, British officials attempted to simplify the management of India’s bewilderingly diverse communities by focusing on religious difference. And despite the messiness, the blurriness, and the syncretic tendencies of Indian religious practice at the time, colonial officials persisted in thinking of those religious communities in broad, categorical terms—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians. For example, from at least 1810 until the 1860s, co-
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lonial officials in Banaras carefully balanced the proportion of Hindus and Muslims in the city’s police force. As Sandria Freitag points out, in so doing, “they used the labels ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ in their institutional structures in ways that belied the Indian reality behind the terminology, and they created by administrative fiat a set of circumstances that encouraged for state purposes the establishment of identity by religion.”51 In the 1870s, they began employing similar criteria for the appointment of revenue and judiciary administrators. As Freitag demonstrates with reference to the United Provinces, British officials also attempted, from the late nineteenth c entury onward, to rule India by co-opting, consulting, and deputing its “natural leaders” to take responsibility for certain elements of colonial administration among their constituencies. Though these leaders were initially chosen for their influence in society, without regard for w hether they operated through networks organized around residence, occupation, caste, ritual, or kinship, officials came, by the beginning of the twentieth c entury, to focus increasingly on caste and religious leadership. By the 1930s, they w ere in fact intentionally using representatives of one caste or religion to undermine the power and influence of others or even to undermine Indian resistance to British rule itself (by, for example, stoking fears, among Muslims, that the Indian National Congress was an overtly and overly Hindu organization).52 Similar practices around Bombay, Prashant Kidambi contends, “frequently buttressed the supposedly primordial corporate identity and structures of leadership of castes and religious sects within the city, thereby rendering rigid what had hitherto been more negotiable entities.”53 Colonial law also contributed to this process. As Chandra Mallampalli has demonstrated with reference to the Madras Presidency, decisions of the Indian judiciary in this era imposed European (Protestant) notions of Christian ity on South India’s Catholic communities, refusing to recognize caste divisions among them, for example, and generally rejecting their various accommodations to Indian culture. “Indigenous Catholicism,” he argues, “stood in constant tension . . . with taxonomies the Raj imposed from above. The story that emerged, ironically, is that of the Raj de-Indianizing an Indianized Catholicism.”54 Far from stifling intercaste and interreligious conflict, the British attempt to manage India through its “natural” religious and caste leadership coincided with an increase in violence, particularly among Hindus and Muslims, among whom, in late nineteenth-century North India, riots w ere a regular affair. Yet this did not cause the British to reconsider their administrative policies but rather confirmed their belief that Indians were inherently and irreparably
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divided into warring religious communities and therefore unfit for rule. By the last decades of colonial rule in India, this belief had become, for all intents and purposes, the primary rationalization for colonial rule.55 Such administrative policies therefore contributed to the ossification of caste and religious division, but only indirectly. The statistical and “enumerative” policies of the British administration and the development, towards the end of the nineteenth century, of political institutions that included Indians chosen or elected as representatives of specific religious communities w ere much more significant in the development of what by the 1920s and 1930s was full-blown communalism of the more modern variety.56 A necessary but not sufficient condition for communal violence is the fixing and firming up of religious boundaries, the “crystallization” of religious identities, such that religious communities come to see shifting demographics as a “zero-sum game” where the “gain of one community is thought to invariably involve the loss of the other.”57 The decennial colonial censuses, beginning in 1871, provided this condition by forcing Indians to identify and think of themselves in simplistic terms, that is, as adherents of major religious traditions, rather than on the more complicated, blurry, and syncretistic terms that prevailed locally at the time. The censuses also began by default to explore the boundaries of religious traditions, sometimes to the chagrin of outside observers. For example, many Hindus became particularly enraged when the leaked Gait Circular, distributed by the census commissioner E. A. Gait to provincial census supervisors, suggested that for the 1911 census low-caste and tribal communities should be listed separately from Hindus.58 As was obvious to many Hindus, d oing so would diminish the official size of the Hindu community considerably, and such a diminution would surely have negative po litical repercussions for that community.59 A number of colonial-era electoral reforms also contributed to the reification of religious identities. The Government of India Act of 1909 designated India a nation of diverse and competing interest groups, each of which needed to be consulted by colonial authorities. As Indians w ere brought progressively into the colonial government in the decade that followed, they did so as members of these interest groups. Then, in 1919, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms directed that Indian seats in the colony’s governing bodies be distributed according to the principle of “separate electorates,” which meant that the Muslim and Sikh communities voted separately for seats reserved for their communities in these bodies. In 1932, Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award expanded the practice of separate electorates to Indian Christians, Anglo- Indians, Europeans, and the “depressed classes.”60 As the number of groups
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for which seats w ere reserved grew larger, the political power of the Hindu majority declined, and many Hindus were particularly offended by the proposal to provide members of the “depressed classes” (i.e., the lower castes) with a separate electorate. The justification, of course, was that t hese groups had been historically oppressed by upper-caste Hindus and their interests would therefore not be served by inclusion in a larger Hindu electorate. Fearing further diffusion of the Hindu vote, however, Gandhi initiated a fast unto death against the proposed separation of depressed classes and managed thereby to preserve the place of t hose depressed classes within the Hindu electorate in what was called the Poona Pact (discussed below).61 British policies also influenced those in the princely states they indirectly ruled. For example, a fter the arrival of Protestant CMS and LMS missionaries, some of the Mukkuvar Catholic Christian communities mentioned e arlier became Protestant. Over time, and reflecting different Protestant and Catholic emphases and modes of operating, the inland Protestant Christian communities developed somewhat differently from t hose of Catholics on the coast. By the nineteenth c entury, in what had become the state of Travancore (now under indirect British control) Protestants were contrasting “the enlightened, entrepreneurial convert to Protestantism with the ignorant, submissive, and heathen native Catholic; in the process, they put in circulation notions of Christian progressivism and primitivism that privileged their own converts over those of the Catholic Church.”62 After the rebellion, when Travancore began conducting its own censuses, state officials became somewhat discomfited by what appeared to be declining Hindu numbers, authority, and power. Desiring to undertake reforms in their own way, at their own pace, and with the overriding goal of preserving and defending Hinduism, Travancore’s officials began to grant rights and benefits to lower-caste Hindus but not lower-caste Christians (a policy that continued well into the twentieth c entury) while criticizing the assertions and rights talk of these lower-caste Protestants as un-Indian. In official state documents of the time, Ajantha Subramanian asserts, “Protestants are placed outside the native fold primarily because of their claims to rights, making low caste rights politics itself inconsistent with cultural belonging. By contrast, Roman Catholics are situated within the native fold, but their aspirations to higher caste status are disparaged and belittled as the irrelevancies of low caste posturing.”63 Two aspects of this history are worth highlighting. The first is that the growth of the Christian community, evidence for which was provided by the decennial censuses, caused consternation among the rulers of the state in ways
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that caused them to promulgate policies aimed at preserving both the numerical and cultural hegemony of Hinduism. The second aspect worth noting is the way in which rights-and reform-minded Christians were perceived to threaten the Hindu social order and w ere therefore declared antinational. The tendency both to imagine the nation in exclusively Hindu terms and to see Christian human-rights talk and support for marginalized communities as a threat to the nation later have become common elements of the rhetoric of those who opposed Christianity in India. While British representational politics and census practices w ere coming into being and hardening religious identities, other colonial policies disrupted traditional arrangements of power and wealth, thereby creating among the higher castes and classes a sense of political, economic, and social insecurity. In Bengal, for example, British interference in landlord-tenant arrangements increasingly favored tenants a fter the Rent Act in 1859, while missionary advocacy for tenants had the effect of producing mass movements to Christian ity that further enraged local landlords and other traditional elites.64 The mass movements in Chotanagpur are typical in this regard and occurred under the auspices of the Lutheran Gossner Mission in the 1870s and later with the encouragement of the Jesuits in the 1880s and 1890s. In the case of the latter, seventy thousand tribals converted to Christianity in a span of around five years, and this mass defection may have contributed to the audacity of tenants in the region, who later rebelled against their landlords. The landlords occasionally responded by venting their frustration on missionaries and native Christians, as in 1857 when they used the chaos and lawlessness of the rebellion as cover to attack native Christians and the Gossner Mission station at Ranchi. The cumulative effect of t hese disruptions on regional structures of authority was to produce among the m iddle class a sense of acute apprehension and insecurity. In Bengal, for example, introspection, self-criticism, and self-satire, which had previously thrived, now came to be replaced (though not entirely) with a defensive conservatism. T hose who dared criticize Bengali “custom” were often deemed disloyal, perceived to be patsies of colonial and orientalist regimes of knowledge. Antireformist and antimissionary rhetoric typified the revivalism that resulted. Scattered attacks on missionaries continued (e.g., in Tarakeswar, Calcutta, and Bankura in 1891). Still, however, the Hindu revivalism of this era was largely defensive and did not coalesce into an exclusively antiminority politics u ntil the 1920s.65
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4. From the Local to the National: Associational Life and the Communalization of Hindu-Christian Conflict Urbanization and Associational Life Dramatic processes of urbanization began to take hold in late nineteenth- century India. These processes, in turn, encouraged the development of associational life. In the very same era, for reasons described below, the British were beginning to abandon their formerly more interventionist approach to the Indian social and public sphere. In the political vacuum their abandonment created, Indian communities vied for power, making the public sphere one of contestation and politicization where social divisions were increasingly contoured along religious lines. In the BEIC period, India’s rulers had allowed a significant degree of self-rule at the local level but had participated actively in public life to enact and reinforce their sovereignty. Early on, after BEIC rule was transferred to the British Crown, establishing the British Raj (in 1858) in the wake of the rebellion, the Crown had followed this model, at least to some extent. However, b ecause of the violence of the rebellion (and prevalent interpretations of its c auses), colonial officials became somewhat more hesitant to intervene in public affairs and worked primarily through natural native intermediaries, as described above. The resulting division of colonial life into institutional policy and governance, where the British reigned supreme, and collective action in the public arena, which progressed with minimal colonial interference, turned previous political arrangements on their head, forced the reconfiguration of relationships between power and religion, and provoked the development of new religious identities and a more politicized public arena, which “resulted in the dramatic development of a new vocabulary for expressing the ties felt among members of particular groups,” centering especially on “proper behavior (particularly related to religious ritual).”66 In turn, this “imbued with new importance personal acts that constitute statements of identity” such that “the style of an individual’s personal practice took on a political significance it had never had before.”67 Contestations for power in late nineteenth-century urban India not only solidified local political constituencies; they also encouraged and facilitated the regionalization and even nationalization of those constituencies. These emergent regional and national constituencies naturally came to link local conflicts—say, between Hindus and Muslims in a particular urban space—to interreligious issues at the regional and national level. In the process, religious identity itself came to be nationalized.68 The number of Hindu-Muslim riots
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increased, and they came increasingly to be linked to conflicts between Hindus and Muslims elsewhere rather than constituting more isolated affairs. Hindu-Christian relations also soured, though not yet with the violent results that would follow. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the British managed to keep these ideologically oriented identities from dominating the representational politics it sought to create. But by the 1920s and 1930s it could no longer do so, and religious divisions came to be a defining feature of late colonial politics and the independence movement. As those seeking independence optimistically deployed religious symbols of the Hindu majority in their anti-imperial pursuits, religious minorities—fearing their possible exclusion from the politics of an independent India—began to take up more defensive and pessimistic postures, with increasingly fractious results.69 While the linking of local and national religious identities was key to the production of communalism in the early twentieth c entury, it remains an important element—now as a conscious strategy—of what some contemporary Sangh Parivar politicians do to produce and maintain antiminority (including anti-Christian) sentiment. The urbanization of North India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also bolstered the size and political strength of the m iddle classes. These m iddle classes exhibited what Sanjay Joshi has called a “fractured modernity,” by which he means that their own collective self-interest prevented them from consistently espousing liberal and modern notions (on issues like social equality). Embracing movements to eradicate caste prejudice, for example, could have undermined their own social position (since the m iddle classes emerged primarily from middling-and upper-caste communities). Middle-class Hindus could also be provoked to respond atavistically to the appearance of competition from religious minorities, as a result of which middle-class Hindus in Lucknow began to more forcefully, narrowly, and homogenously define “Hindu.”70 This process was, of course, encouraged and made somewhat easier by European orientalist scholarship that focused simplistically on the “high” Hindu textual tradition, but what made middle-class reimaginings of Hinduism in Lucknow ultimately so influential was the power ful hold of the m iddle class on institutions of the public sphere.71 As Kidambi has shown, similar processes to those in Lucknow were underway elsewhere in urban India, such as in Bombay.72 There, some religious groups, like the Prarthana Samaj, were relatively introverted and worked quietly for religious and social reform. Others, like the Arya Samaj, were more publicly active. Founded in Bombay in 1875 by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83) as a religious reform organization, the Arya Samaj was among the first to openly and assertively attempt to c ounter the challenge of Christian
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proselytization. In his Satyarsh Prakash (1875), for example, Dayananda spoke derisively of Jesus as “a mere carpenter’s son, living in a ‘junglee desh,’ a wild and poor country.”73 In order to c ounter what the decennial censuses suggested was a significant demographic increase in the proportion of India’s Christians and Muslims, the Samaj instrumentalized a ritual of purification called shuddhi, which they used both to convert Christians and Muslims to Hinduism and to “purify” the lower, polluting castes in hopes of integrating them more fully and equally into Hindu society and thereby preventing them from considering conversion as a way of achieving improved social status. Shuddhi campaigns continued until around 1926, after which they faded, for the most part, until they reemerged a fter independence both u nder that name and o thers, like ghar wapsi (homecoming) and paravartan (returning / turning back).74 Associational life in Bombay, as in Lucknow, could also be put to use in the construction of regional and national Hindu unity. Similarly, Bengali middle- class revivalists responded to colonial, reformist, and missionary intrusions by mounting a defense of the “Hindu way of life.” Their defense coalesced around resistance to colonial policies introduced in the late nineteenth century that were perceived to threaten Hindu domestic tradition (e.g., the Brahmo Marriage Act of 1873, a move toward allowing divorce in the 1880s, and the Age of Consent Act in 1891). However, the defense also required the intelligentsia to mold divergent groups together with a common sense of Hindu identity. They did so by focusing on common texts, prescriptions, and customs, while slowly and somewhat more quietly reforming religious practice to make space for lower castes and atypical, divergent Hindu sects.75 Because of this, the revivalism of this period in Bengal remained primarily focused inward and did not consistently display the antiminority tendencies that would develop after the 1920s. What we now call communalism resulted in part, according to Sarkar, from a working out of the “tensions between Arya Samaj reformist chauvinism and Sanatani conservatism. . . . The Samaj and the Sanatanis eventually converged on a shared anti-Muslim politics and sought to short-circuit internal fault lines within the Hindu community via the image of the threatening Muslim.”76 This, then, brings us back around to the “enumerative” colonial policies discussed in the previous section. The energetic associational life of urban North India in the late nineteenth century contributed to the formation of societies of all kinds, including those oriented around protecting and strengthening Hinduism. But while defensive, perhaps, these societies rarely aggressively pursued an anti-Muslim (or anti-Christian) agenda. When British electoral policies began to allot representation based on religion, however, these societies (and new ones formed in their image) frequently took on a more competitive,
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nativist character, especially as Muslim groups gained seats in legislative assemblies and gained power within the independence movement (through the work of the Muslim League). The communal tendencies of some Hindu po litical associations in the 1920s and beyond (e.g., the Hindu Sabhas) are thus both continuous and discontinuous with the ideologies and activities of revivalist Hindu societies of the late nineteenth century.77 Though they were not as numerous as Hindu-Muslim clashes, t here w ere occasionally, in the late nineteenth century, violent encounters between Hindus and Christians. In April 1895, for example, Shanar Christians in the town of Kalugumalai (contemporary Tamil Nadu) came into conflict with Hindus celebrating Subrahmanya utsavam (the annual procession of Lord Subrahmanya) when an enclosed, canopied structure, or pantal (in Tamil, pandal in Hindi), they had erected in front of their church blocked the festival’s customary processional route. In the riots that ensued, ten people died, and the Shanar quarter was attacked and burned. (Pandals are a visib le, public demonstration of presence and, as such, often precipitate contestation over space, as one did at the beginning of the 2007 riots in Kandhamal, as discussed in chapter 4.) It is tempting to project current events back in time and interpret this conflict anachronistically as a Hindu-Christian riot. But closer attention to historical detail suggests an alternative interpretation. The Shanars in Kalugumalai had been Christians for only nine months at the time of the riots. Before that, they had been Hindu. T here had, however, been tensions between the Shanars and Maravas over the Shanars’ demands to be given honors and the right to take their marriage ceremonies through the streets of the Subrahmanya temple’s procession route, which the Maravas controlled. In August 1894, when the Shanars lost the legal suit they had brought to press their demands, more than two hundred of them promptly presented themselves before the Jesuit on location, proclaimed themselves Christians, and began building the chapel from which the pandal protruded.78 Clearly, then, the Kalugumalai conflict is not an instance of Hindu-Christian rioting. Nor can the conversion of Kalugumalai’s Shanars be understood as one prompted by any thoroughgoing rupture in the Shanars’ religious or cultural world view. Rather, their conversion was a tactical one, a strategy they adopted in the pursuit of local honors and higher social status. In shifting their religious loyalties in the pursuit of such honors, the Shanars w ere following a well-worn and time-honored blueprint. More often than not up u ntil the late nineteenth century, clashes between Hindus and Christians, like those at Kalugumalai, emerged primarily from the constant and often strained negotiations of local precedence, rank, and honor. Violent clashes were a common
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result of t hese negotiations. Christian involvement in t hese clashes was therefore at least somewhat indicative of Christian integration—that is, of a social situation in which Christians acted and were treated more or less like members of other religious communities—rather than their social disintegration or marginalization. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the political processes described above produced a different kind of context, one in which the divisions between religions w ere understood to be solid and clear and in which even relatively minor, local incidents like those at Kalugumalai took on a broader, all-Indian significance.79
Mass Movements, Hindutva, and the RSS In many ways, then, and through many routes, social and political pressures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundation for the emergence of a more aggressively antiminority and pan-Indian Hindu nationalism. It is important to keep in mind, however, that during this same period there was a g reat deal of cooperation among Muslim, Hindu, and Christian communities and associations. Additionally, it is important to note that the developments just described w ere primarily urban and had a far less significant effect on India’s vast rural hinterlands.80 The development of communalism among certain Hindu associations formed during the late nineteenth century was therefore not an inexorable fate; nor was it the only turn that historical events could have taken. What we would now call communalism was a product of the late nineteenth century, but other, more cooperative and inclusive ideologies vied with communalism for power and influence then as now, a continuing testament to the “fractured” nature of Indian modernity.81 Another f actor in the development of Hindu-Christian tension at the end of the nineteenth c entury was the fact that Christianity was gaining converts in significant numbers. One major reason for the large number of converts to Christianity in this era was a series of catastrophic famines that affected large swaths of Indian territory. The famines encouraged conversions among those grateful to have been fed by missionaries (often with colonial financial support) and created a large cohort of famine orphans, many of whom had been born non-Christian but who were nevertheless raised Christian in Christian orphanages.82 Mass conversions to Christianity and the publicity they received increased Hindu concerns about their declining numbers and political clout. Some, like U. N. Mukherji, even began to predict the extinction of the Hindu “race.”83 Ideological support for what we now call communalism, however, arrived only later, in the 1920s and 1930s; more common in the first decades of the
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twentieth c entury were self-critical responses like that of the early indepen dence fighter Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), who encouraged Hindus to treat members of the lower classes with more respect. “We do not mind those cases of apostacy [sic] from Hinduism where the change of religion results from a change of religious convictions, but we have e very reason to be ashamed of those conversions that are the direct result of our insolence and inhumanities [sic] t oward the so-called lower classes,” he said.84 Nevertheless, the promise of separate electorates and other intrusive colonial policies did lead to the establishment of Hindu Sabhas (societies), first in the Punjab (beginning in 1907) and then later in the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal, the Central Provinces and Berar, and the Bombay Presidency. Eventually, many of these regional Hindu Sabhas joined together to inaugurate the All-India Hindu Sabha (better known as the Hindu Mahasabha) in 1915. Racked by internal tensions between reform-minded Arya Samajis and a more conservative orthodox Hindu faction, the Hindu Sabha movement initially proved rather ineffectual. In the 1920s, however, the Mahasabha would reemerge as a powerful political force. The immediate cause for the organization’s reinvigoration was a series of Hindu-Muslim riots that had resulted from Muslim protests in the context of the Khilafat movement in the 1920s. These riots, which affected even southern India, revitalized the Hindu Mahasabha movement and made members willing to overcome their internal differences to more effectively confront what they perceived to be the Muslim menace, particularly after Swami Shraddhananda, a popular leader within the movement, was assassinated by a Muslim in 1923.85 Though the Mahasabhites remained largely focused on Muslims throughout the 1920s, many continued to harbor misgivings about the work of Christian missionaries. A few years after his assassination, Shraddhananda’s Hindu Sangathan: The Saviour of the Dying Race was published. The text harkened back to Mukherji’s assertion (in Hindus—a Dying Race) that Hinduism was under siege and identified Christians and Muslims as the primary threat.86 In a particularly direct response to that threat, Shraddhananda advocated a revitalization of the Arya Samaj campaign of shuddhi to purify the untouchables, integrating them more fully into Hindu society, while reconverting apostate Hindus.87 Meanwhile, the assertiveness of Christian missionaries only increased. Impressed and inspired by the late nineteenth-century mass movements, missionaries like Donald McGavran and J. Waskom Pickett developed evangelistic strategies formulated to provoke them. Among their primary strategies was to concentrate work within the confines of what have come to be known as “people groups,” which would encourage castes and subcastes to convert en masse.88
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McGavran eventually returned to the United States and siphoned a c areer as a seminary professor from the development of this strategy, which would come to be known as the Church Growth Movement. The Church Growth model remains an influential one even today, and not only in the United States but also among Indians engaged in missionary work. However, by openly privileging numbers and the production of mass conversion movements, Church Growth enthusiasts have since the 1930s contributed substantially to Hindu concerns about the decline of Hinduism, while providing evidence to support the allegations of those who contend that Christian evangelism merely masks more sinister political aspirations. (If they did not, critics ask, why would Christians focus on quantity over quality?) Spurred on by such concerns, Indian intellectual leaders sought to articulate a unifying identity that could galvanize Indians and motivate them to put aside their differences and fight for independence from their colonial overlords. V. D. Savarkar’s 1923 tract, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, did so by identifying the essential core of Indian identity as its Hindutva, or Hinduness.89 Savarkar defined a Hindu as one who declared India both fatherland (pitribhumi) and holy land (punyabhumi). No Christian or Muslim, of course, could do the latter. Moreover, Savarkar equates Hindutva with the triad of Hindu, Hindi, and Hindustan. Through Savarkar’s work, according to Christophe Jaffrelot, “Hindu nationalism appears for the first time as resulting from the superimposition of a religion, a culture, a language, and a sacred territory.”90 In 1937, Savarkar became president of the Hindu Mahasabha, a sign that his more radical views had prevailed within that body. By the 1930s, the Mahasabha had become a lobby within the Indian National Congress (INC), oscillating periodically between the Congress’s Gandhi-inspired territorial nationalism and Savarkar’s Hindutva.91 But as Savarkar’s views were coming to predominate within the Mahasabha, Gandhi’s were prevailing within the Congress. Accordingly, the two groups grew apart, and the Mahasabha severed its ties with the Congress to become an independent political party.92 Meanwhile, the foundations of what has come to be known as the Sangh Parivar were being laid in Central India. In 1925, desiring to imbue the Hindu community with a “new physical strength” and promote Savarkar’s notion of Hindutva, Maharashtrian Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940) established the RSS.93 The organization did this largely through the establishment of local branches where young men came to be drilled and instructed and through an army of pracharaks (preachers) of which there were by independence already six hundred thousand. U ntil independence, the influence of the RSS was relatively limited because it had chosen an apolitical stance u nder both Hedgewar and his successor, M. S. Golwalkar (1906–1973). Yet the RSS did
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contribute to the diffusion of Savarkar’s ideology of Hindutva. In 1939, for example, Golwalkar asserted in We or Our Nation Defined that minorities, including Christians, should be asked to declare and in effect prove their loyalty to India through certain symbolic acts of allegiance.94 Outside of India, Gandhi was always better known and more popular as a leader of the independence movement than Savarkar, Shraddhananda, or Golwalkar, in part because of his more gentle and irenic nature. However, Gandhi himself became increasingly hostile to Christian missionizing in the 1930s and 1940s, in part because he recognized that large-scale conversions of low- caste Hindus to Christianity would diminish Hindu unity and political power.95 Though, like Rammohun Roy, Gandhi admired Christ and Christian scriptures, he regularly and forcefully asserted that conversion to Christianity provoked processes of denationalization. He also particularly assailed the evangelistic targeting of lower-caste and tribal communities, though his reasons for d oing so were somewhat controversial.96 “The poor Harijans,” he wrote in Harijan (November 18, 1936), “have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of difference between God and no-God.”97 Gandhi is central to the history of Hindu-Christian conflict for at least three significant reasons. First, as Cassie Adcock has demonstrated in g reat detail, in the 1920s and 1930s, Gandhi and his supporters within the INC crafted their approach to India’s religious minorities in conversation with and in contradistinction to the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi campaign and identified interreligious proselytization (in the category of which they somewhat simplistically included shuddhi) as the source of communal strife. That shuddhi could be portrayed as primarily religious was at least partly due to the way that colonial policies already described (the censuses, the utilization of natur al leaders, etc.) demanded that Indians come to think and make their political claims in terms of religion, as understood by Europeans, a demand that certainly contributed to Hindus and India’s religious minorities conceiving of their conflicts in religious, communal terms. However, portraying shuddhi as a problematic form of religious proselytization also had two additional, desirable effects for the INC. First, by calling into question the desirability of proselytization, Gandhi and the INC laid claim to a form of secular politics and a form of “tolerance” that did not require that proselytism be considered a religious freedom and right. This encouraged opposition to proselytization, which helped protect Hindus themselves from the possibility that their numbers might be diminished through the proselytizing efforts of Christians. Second, while focusing critically only on what they deemed the religious aspects of shuddhi, Gandhi and his supporters accepted as legitimate and implicitly endorsed the other side of shuddhi, that is, the attempt to purify mem-
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bers of the lowest castes and integrate them into the wider Hindu fold. The religious identity of members of India’s lowest castes remained unsettled into the 1920s. Were the untouchables Hindus or something else? Gandhi asserted his view that the untouchables were indeed Hindu most dramatically (and ultimately victoriously) in what has come to be known as the Pune (or Poona) Pact of 1932. The pact was the result of a controversy that began when British prime minister Ramsay Macdonald granted untouchables (what the British Raj called the depressed classes) electorates separate from that of Hindus in the British Indian provincial legislatures. To protest the decision, Gandhi, who was serving time at a Pune jail, initiated a fast unto death. The fast compelled the British and depressed class leaders, such as the powerful B. R. Ambedkar, to capitulate to a compromise position in which the depressed classes would remain within the provincial Hindu electoral blocs but would receive a certain number of reserved seats within them. The pact cemented a shifting understanding of the relationship of the untouchables to Hinduism more generally, one eventually enshrined in the Indian Constitution itself. Together, these two achievements—(1) articulating forms of secularism and tolerance that do not require that religious minorities be granted to the right to proselytize and (2) ensuring the inclusion of low-caste communities within what, only with them included, is a clear Hindu majority—considerably strengthened the hand of Hindu nationalists of both Gandhi’s soft and Golwalkar’s harder variety. The need to defend those achievements animates and guides the activity of Hindu nationalists even t oday, and anti-Christian vio lence, for the Sangh, remains part of that defense. As Adcock puts it, Gandhi’s notion of “tolerance supported a ‘secular majoritarianism’ that served to disempower and minoritize non-caste Hindus by a combined strategy of encompassment and exclusion.”98 Though both the Arya Samaj and con temporary Hindu nationalists deployed (and deploy) reconversion campaigns, then, their aims are quite different: “Contemporary Hindu Nationalists’ claim that their practice is entirely defensive is crucial for their argument that Hinduism requires legal protection from the so-called proselytizing religions. Whereas contemporary Hindu Nationalists steadfastly opposed freedom to proselytize, Arya Samajists in the 1920s vigorously defended shuddhi in the name of religious freedom.”99 Third, Gandhi is also important for mainstreaming criticism of Christian evangelistic efforts. He was in many ways responsible for raising and popularizing the issue of “allurement,” that is, what he considered the illegitimate use of medical and educational services to attract Hindus to Christianity.100 He also called conversion itself into question. For Gandhi, there was plenty of space within Hinduism for a religious person to pursue the path of religious truth
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wherever it might lead. “My humble intelligence refuses to believe,” he confessed, “that a man becomes good when he renounces one religion and embraces another.”101 Gandhi’s views on the topic w ere typical of Hindus at the time and remain so t oday. Under British colonial authority, those who shared Gandhi’s concerns had no opportunity to draft legislation against conversion. In fact, through the passage of such laws as the 1850 Caste Disabilities Removal Act, the British had attempted to remove obstacles in the way of Christian conversion.102 Nevertheless, within the princely states, where British rule was more oblique, a number of laws inhibiting conversion and proselytization w ere passed in the 1930s and 1940s, among them the Raigarh State Conversion Act of 1936, the Patna State Freedom of Religion Act of 1942, the Surguja State Apostasy Act of 1945, and the Udaipur State Anti-Conversion Act of 1946.103 These acts provided models for similar laws proposed at both the state and national level after independence.
Independence, Partition, and the Constituent Assembly Debates By the beginning of the 1940s, as India moved toward independence and the All- India Muslim League began to press for a separate Muslim homeland, the attention of antiminority activists in India shifted dramatically toward Muslims.104 When, at independence in 1947, British India was partitioned into predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan (comprising modern Pakistan and Bangladesh), several months of Hindu/Sikh-versus-Muslim bloodletting ensued as Hindus and Sikhs who suddenly found themselves in a Muslim- majority country migrated to India and Muslims in India made the journey in reverse. The violence led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and, on the Indian side, to widespread anxiety about the Muslim remainder.105 In addition to its immediate and specific effects, the partition also had a more generally deleterious influence on interreligious interactions in India. In the aftermath of partition, sorting out who precisely was and was not an Indian citizen required the development of a range of bureaucratic standards and tests. As these standards and tests were developed and applied, the nation and its limits took ever more concrete shape. As Vazira Zamindar argues in The Long Partition, the standards and tests applied frequently revolved around religion, which perpetuated and exacerbated the colonial processes described above, through which religious identities became less syncretic and blurry, and by which, in the case of the partition, the nation came to be understood, increasingly, as essentially Hindu (or perhaps even more saliently, as essentially
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not Muslim).106 The partition was therefore “long,” to borrow from Zamindar’s title, both b ecause it continues to function as a grievance against Muslims (responsible, from a certain perspective, for the dissection of undivided India) and because it continues to effect Indian conceptions of the nation and its relationship to Hinduism (and other religions).107 As the previous paragraph suggests, Hindu nationalists in independent India have always considered Muslims a potential threat to the Indian nation. However, even right from the start, Indians also considered Christians, and especially their evangelistic work among lower-caste and tribal communities, a matter of grave concern. In the Constituent Assembly debates of 1946–1950, some delegates even proposed a constitutional ban on conversion, confirming the suspicions of Christians, who had worried in the period before inde pendence that conversion would be outlawed in an India ruled by Hindus.108 Nevertheless, over the objections of those who proposed and supported the ban on conversion, the framers of India’s constitution guaranteed all Indians “liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship” and “freedom of conscience, of free profession, practice and propagation of religion.” The wording of the articles, which had resulted from prolonged debate and represented an uneasy compromise, left a bad taste in the mouth of many Hindus in the assembly, who felt they had acquiesced to much of what Christians in the assembly demanded without receiving from them any concessions. Given that the Constituent Assembly debates took place in the context of lingering postpartition communal violence, attempts to restrict conversion may have been hobbled by the need to appease and reassure minority constituencies. In any case, afterward, many grumbled privately and even publicly that Christians had taken undue advantage of their generosity.109 Critics of conversion in the Constituent Assembly had received support from RSS activists, but when a former RSS volunteer assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the organization was banned until July 1949. The experience convinced many within the RSS that it needed a political voice, and in 1951, with collaboration from the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS established the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (forerunner of the BJP). Eventually, Hindu Mahasabhites in the Jana Sangh w ere pushed out of positions of leadership, and the RSS established its control over and its ideology within the fledgling political party.110
Tribal Conversions, the Niyogi Report, and Anti-Conversion Legislation While members of the Constituent Assembly contested conversion in the comfortable environs of the capital, o thers did so through grassroots movements in
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the interior. When the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Ravi Shankar Shukla, visited the tribal-dominated district of Jashpur in the Chhattisgarh region of his state, audiences returned his greetings of “Jai Hind” (Victory to India) with “Jai Jesus” and chanted slogans in favor of “Jharkhand” (land of forests). The tribals on the Chotanagpur plateau (comprising what is now much of the states of Jharkhand and parts of Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh) had been agitating for their own, tribal-dominated state for several decades. Due to support for the movement from Christian missionaries, the Christian affiliation of many of its earliest and most prominent leaders, and the ongoing conversion of tribals to Christianity, many perceived the Jharkhand movement to be a thoroughly Christian project and interpreted its demand for an independent state of Jharkhand as little more than a thinly veiled demand for the establishment of a distinct Christian country in the bowels of India.111 Shukla was predictably dismayed by his reception, and despite being a member of the Congress Party, arranged for the RSS-affiliated lawyer Ramakant Keshav Deshpande to establish social work among tribals in the region to stem the tide of Christian conversions.112 Though the government ended its support for Deshpande within a few years, he continued to be concerned about tribal conversions to Christianity and cooperated with the RSS to establish the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (Forest Dwellers’ Welfare Center), now known as the Akhil Bharatiya (All-India) Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (ABVKA), in 1952, for the purpose of countering missionary activity and inspiring tribal p eoples to think of themselves as Hindu.113 The ABVKA joined other organizations that had already been spawned by the RSS, such as the Jana Sangh and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All-India Students’ Association [ABVP]), which had been formed in 1948. Within a few years, RSS volunteers created several more social, religious, and political organizations. A u nion, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (Indian Worker’s Association), was inaugurated in 1955. In 1964, RSS workers and Hindu clerics cooperated in the formation of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Council of Hindus [VHP]). An educational organization, Vidya Bharati (Indian Knowledge), was established in 1977, and a social organization focused on India’s slums, Seva Bharati (Indian Service), was formed in 1979. Together, these organizations constitute the core of the Sangh Parivar (Family of the Sangh), or, in common parlance, the Sangh.114 Less widely known and less frequently analyzed than organizations like the VHP, RSS, or BJP, the ABVKA is nevertheless one of the most important organ izations of the Sangh Parivar in the story of Hindu-Christian conflict because it was founded and still operates for the primary purpose of countering the influence of Christian missionaries among tribal p eoples. (Swami Lakshman-
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ananda Saraswati, who was assassinated during the second round of anti- Christian riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008, was a prominent regional ABVKA leader.) The ABVKA began by establishing schools and health centers in an attempt to render those run by missionaries superfluous. Moreover, at ABVKA schools, it was and still remains the practice to complement regular education with lessons on the beliefs and practices of Hinduism. T hese lessons, critics say, are designed to “Hinduize” the tribal p eoples and encourage their loyalty to the ideology of Hindutva. The ABVKA also counteracted the diffusion of Christianity more directly; according to one of Deshpande’s biographers, the founder of ABVKA encouraged the use of physical intimidation and violence to cow local Christians and potential converts. Though contemporary critics have accused its schools of doing little more than working to bring tribal religion more in line with upper-caste Hindu norms while promoting the Sangh Parivar’s political agenda (sometimes violently), the ABVKA has had some success in its stated aim of neutralizing missionary influence in tribal regions, sometimes with the unexpected support of European critics of missionaries, like Verrier Elwin, who was also active (as an anthropologist) in tribal areas from the 1930s to the 1960s.115 Christian missionary work remained a concern for certain Hindus, and in the 1950s, the work of Christian missionaries, particularly foreign missionaries, came under greater scrutiny. In 1952, the government of India, concerned about the rapidly expanding number of foreign missionaries and the rising tide of tribal and lower-caste conversions, began limiting the number of visas granted to missionaries involved primarily in evangelism.116 In addition, Hindu advocacy groups secured changes to laws governing Hindu inheritance, divorce, and adoption, which reinstated obstacles to conversion that had been removed u nder the British.117 Concerns about conversions within his state and the reception he received in Jashpur may have motivated Shukla’s support for the Christian Missionary Activities Inquiry Committee Report (1956), which was initiated by the Madhya Pradesh state government a fter the state’s Jana Sangh organized an Anti– Foreign Missionary Week. The investigation is commonly known as the Niyogi report, after the name of the committee’s chair, the retired Nagpur High Court justice Dr. Bhawani Shankar Niyogi, who reportedly accepted the post only a fter Golwalkar assured him that members of the ABVKA and RSS would support him and appear as witnesses (as Deshpande himself did).118 The Niyogi report was initiated by the Madhya Pradesh government as a response to a dramatic rise in the number of complaints received about Christian missionaries there, particularly in the areas that had been princely states
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nder the British.119 These complaints generally involved the allegation, variu ously articulated, that Christian missionaries in the state utilized “force, fraud, or inducement,” to lure converts from among the “illiterate aboriginals and other backward people,” though it must be kept in mind that the increasing number of complaints was likely related as much if not more to increased Sangh activism as to dramatic changes in Christians’ activity in the region.120 Christians contested the claims leveled against them and asserted instead that it was in fact the Christian community that was being persecuted and harassed by Hindus. Concerned about the reports of Christian missionary methods and growth and probably also sensing an opportunity to undermine the authority of the more secular Congressites who controlled Madhya Pradesh, the Jana Sangh in Madhya Pradesh launched their aforementioned Anti–Foreign Missionary Week in protest but called it off when the government announced its planned inquiry on April 14, 1954.121 The committee produced its report two years l ater (1956), a fter making two extensive tours of the state, taking the formal and public testimony of several hundred people in seventy-seven locations while receiving 375 written testimonies and 385 responses to a survey full of leading and partisan questions.122 The report is a fascinating archive. I have dealt more fully with its context and content elsewhere, but the easiest way to summarize the report’s findings is to borrow words from a group of non-Christians from Mahasamund, who testified that the primary issue was “inducements shown. Hinduism abused and talk of anti-national things.”123 Confirming the partisan assertions of Indian Christianity’s critics, the report concluded that the local Christian population was growing at a disproportionately high rate, that the Hindu population was declining to an equally disproportionate extent, and that the ultimate goal of Christian missionaries and their native Christian allies was the establishment of an independent Christian nation (just as some Muslims had only recently successfully advocated for the establishment of Pakistan for Muslims). The committee did not merely analyze the issue but made several practical recommendations to the Madhya Pradesh government. Among them were (1) that missionaries who focused primarily on proselytism should be asked to withdraw, (2) that evangelistic societies should be registered with the government, (3) that the government should control, through licensing regulations, the publication of religious “propaganda,” (4) that those wishing to convert to another faith should obtain the approval of a statewide board constituted for this purpose, and (5) that a law should be passed that would prohibit the use of medical or “other professional services” to lure p eople to one’s faith.124 Supporters of the Jana Sangh proclaimed the report had “exposed” or “disrobed” (nanga kar diya hai) the missionaries and the missionary enterprise more
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generally.125 The report also contributed to Hindu-Christian tensions in the region. A year after the publication of the report, a Christian hostel and social service institution founded by American missionaries was vandalized, looted, and then set on fire. There w ere specific local tensions, but these seem to have been exaggerated by strained intercommunal relations and broader anti- Christian sentiment related to the Niyogi committee’s report.126 Nationally, the report reignited debates about the constitutional legality of conversion. Hindus who still objected to the Indian Constitution’s protection of the right of religious propagation, for example, enthusiastically supported the report’s recommendation that the right to convert o thers be limited to Indian citizens (i.e., not extended to foreigners). Moreover, the report’s language and recommendations clearly informed the drafting of a series of state “Freedom of Religion” laws restricting conversion in Odisha (1967), Madhya Pradesh (1968), Arunachal Pradesh (1978), and elsewhere.127 Similar “Freedom of Religion” laws have been formally proposed three times at the national level (in 1954, 1960, and 1978) and have been informally recommended by Hindutva- inspired politicians many additional times. But no such law has ever been passed for all of India.128 The “Freedom of Religion” acts legislated in Odisha (1967) and Madhya Pradesh (1968) establish “suitable control on conversions brought about through illegal means,” such as “force, fraud, and inducement,” and the Arunachal Pradesh “Freedom of Religion” Act, passed in 1978, similarly forbids conversion “by the use of force or by inducement or by any fraudulent means.”129 Eventually, both Odisha’s and Madhya Pradesh’s acts w ere contested in their respective state’s high courts. Odisha’s was struck down; Madhya Pradesh’s, upheld. A reconciliation of the contradictory rulings was therefore sought in the Indian Supreme Court, which ruled, in 1977, that the laws w ere both constitutional. In a verdict that Viswanathan argues was influenced by the rhe toric of the Niyogi report, the court commented on the phrase “propagation of religion,” which is ensured as a fundamental freedom in the constitution, interpreting it not as “the right to convert another person to one’s own religion” but rather to “transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets.”130 Moreover, the court ruled, “there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one’s own religion b ecause if a person purposely undertakes the conversion of another person to his religion . . . that would impinge on the ‘freedom of conscience’ guaranteed to all the citizens of the country alike.”131 Sarah Claerhout and Jakob de Roover have argued convincingly that from the Constituent Assembly debates until the present day, the constitutional guarantee of freedom to propagate one’s religion has been plagued by disparate
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understandings of the term propagate itself. For those who understand religion as many Indian Hindus (and Buddhists, Sikhs, etc.) do, that is, as a tradition upheld by a particular community, spiritually efficacious depending on one’s effort and abilities (but not because of any sort of exclusive truth that attaches only to one), it is not illogical to place certain kinds of restrictions on the propagation of religion (here understood as transmitting knowledge). On the other hand, for those, like many Christians, who believe that only one religion can be “true,” in an absolute sense, that only true religion can be spiritually efficacious, that God seeks the conversion of all to that religion, and that one is led to it by attending carefully to one’s God-g iven conscience, any restrictions placed e ither on proselytization or conversion would appear an infringement on religious freedom. The tension between these two disparate conceptions of propagation helps account both for the Supreme Court’s decision and critics’ vociferous denunciation of it.132 Moreover, because of this tension, the meaning and extent of the right to propagate religion in India today remains legally unsettled, a fact that is in and of itself unsettling both for Christians engaged in evangelism and for their opponents. And beyond this, of course, the ruling paved the way for the establishment of similar laws in other states.133 In this and other ways, the report became and remains a touchstone of debates about conversion in India. Its data are frequently adduced by critics of Christianity as evidence that conversions to Christianity are still t oday (despite the intervening sixty years) primarily the result of “force, fraud, and inducement.” Speaking in support of a “Freedom of Religion Bill” proposed in Rajasthan in 2008, a BJP state parliamentarian “quoted the 1954 [sic] report of the Niyogi Commission and said that the population of Christians in India was increasing.”134 Similarly, Arun Shourie’s description and criticism of missionary methods in his popular Missionaries in India (1994) is based almost entirely on the Niyogi Committee Report.135 The concerns that informed and motivated the Niyogi report w ere partially local, then, but these local concerns arose in the context of and were amplified by broader, more national anxieties that manifest themselves in a variety of forms of nationalism and xenophobia. These broader, more national anxi eties may have had their source in a ctual political and military threats (both external and internal), at least to some extent. However, as Goldie Osuri has pointed out, the more locally stated concern that Christians could in a short period grow adequately large and powerful enough in Central India to demand an independent nation along the lines of Pakistan was so implausible in the 1950s that its origins as a rhetorical production of Sangh activists becomes apparent.136 The possibility that Christianity might grow so numerically large
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within a limited region that it would demand the creation of a new Christian- dominated state within India was only slightly less implausible. Moreover, such a demand could only be of concern to parties for whom the Hindu character of the nation was more important than the democratic character of the nation. The concerns and anxieties expressed to and amplified by the Niyogi report therefore expose themselves to be both a production by the Sangh, for political purposes, and, in turn, the manifestation of concerns and anxieties exhibited by those influenced by that production or willing to perpetuate it to further their own interests. The Sangh and its allies continued to perpetuate Savarkar’s brand of ethnic nationalism in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and continued to raise concerns about Christian missionaries. For example, in 1966, Golwalkar, who had remained an important ideologue in the Sangh, published another widely distributed book titled Bunch of Thoughts. In it, Christians were discussed, along with Muslims and communists, in a section labeled “Internal Threats.” In that section, Golwalkar outlined a number of criticisms of Christianity that have since become rather quotidian. He insisted, for example, that Christians provided social service only to increase their numbers and that they would employ any tactic, fair or foul, to that end. In addition, drawing on the conclusions of the Niyogi report, Golwalkar proclaimed, “The way they are behaving towards other p eople forces us to conclude that the modern proselytising religions have very little of true religion in them. In the name of God, Prophet and religion, they are only trying to further their political ambitions.”137 Christian activities were therefore “not merely irreligious” but “also anti-national.”138
Conversions, Reconversions, and the Broadening of Hindu Nationalism In 1981, a well-publicized and widely discussed series of mass conversions to Islam in and around Meenakshipuram, in Tirunelveli District, Tamil Nadu, brought to the fore, once again, the specter of diminished Hindu political power if lower-caste and tribal peoples were to abandon Hinduism in large numbers. Nationalist responses were initially somewhat sympathetic, and among other effects, the conversions reinvigorated the VHP’s campaign to integrate lower-caste communities more equally and fully into Hindu society, in hopes of discouraging their conversion to Christianity or Islam.139 Subsequent published analyses suggested that the primary motivation for conversion was political, however, and as the wave of conversions continued over several months, some Hindu groups waxed critical. Accusations of bribery,
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foreign funding, and external interference replaced the self-criticism that had characterized many of the earliest Hindu responses. Lower-caste converts were accused, once again, of demeaning religion. Devendra Swarup, author of an edited volume on the conversions, asserted that low-caste Indians had been lured to convert “not through an appeal to their religious consciousness, but to their social and economic needs. . . . Religion seems to have lost its grip over the self-appointed leaders of these backward sections and for them the so-called religious conversion means, perhaps, nothing more than a change of clothes.”140 Later, Sita Ram Goel, a popular author with nationalist inclinations, would credit the conversions at Meenakshipuram with initiating a “Hindu awakening” and shaking “Hindu society out of its sloganized slumber.”141 Meenakshipuram has therefore become a symbol of what the Sangh Parivar considers illegitimate and cynically political conversions to both Islam and Christianity.142 The mass conversions at Meenakshipuram also revived the Sangh’s use (or attempted use) of reconversion to reclaim Hindus who had defected to other faiths. For these purposes, the VHP conducted paravartan ceremonies. The ABVKA had earlier engaged in occasional programs of reclamation, and paravartan rituals had already been developed by the VHP in the 1960s. But the frequency of paravartan ceremonies increased substantially after the 1980s, both under that name and under another: ghar wapsi. Whereas the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi campaigns had been directed primarily at lower-caste Hindus, paravartan and ghar wapsi rituals have been used primarily to Hinduize or “reconvert” tribals to Hinduism and to convert recently converted Christians or Muslims back to Hinduism.143 Reconversion ceremonies have been performed not only by the RSS and VHP but also by many of their smaller and regional affiliates, such as the Dharma Raksha Samiti (Committee for the Preservation of Dharma), the Hindu Jagran Manch (Forum for Hindu Awakening), the Dharma Jagran Vibhag (Department of Dharma Awareness), and the Bajrang Dal (Army of Hanuman). In the 1990s, ghar wapsi received significant support from a powerf ul patron: Dilip Singh Judeo (1949–2013). Son of the former Maharaja of Jashpur (who had provided support to Deshpande at the establishment of the ABVKA), prominent BJP Member of Parliament, and former minister of state for environment and forests, Judeo boasted of having conducted thousands of ghar wapsi ceremonies.144 Reconversion efforts such as these are fueled not only by the conviction that declining Hindu numbers w ill lead to declining Hindu power or even further dissection of India but also by a number of other controversial assumptions, for example, that the ancestors of Muslims and Christians in India w ere nearly all Hindus and that tribals are in fact Hindu (and
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therefore can and should be brought “back” to Hinduism if they convert to Christianity or Islam), an assumption asserted regularly by the VHP leader Praveen Togadia in the context of the 2014–2015 reconversion controversies described in the introduction.145 Though in these and other ways the Sangh had remained influential at the grassroots level in the first few decades of Indian independence, its political arm failed to achieve any substantial success until the 1980s. One obstacle was the Jana Sangh itself, which vacillated indecisively between its internally competing moderate and militant impulses. In 1980, however, when Jana Sangh leaders transformed the Jana Sangh into the BJP, they a dopted a more consistently moderate course (for example, by engaging in at least relatively less provocative rhe toric regarding India’s religious minorities). Their relative moderation alienated the rest of the Sangh Parivar but secured for the party broader respect and legitimacy. As a result, the RSS distanced itself from the BJP and collaborated more closely with the VHP to reinvigorate its particular brand of ethnoreligious activism at the grassroots level.146 One result of the BJP-VHP collaboration was the Ayodhya movement of the mid-1980s. In 1984, the VHP called on the government to return the site of a disputed mosque in Ayodhya to Hindus (who would, presumably, tear it down and build a t emple). The VHP alleged that the mosque had been built by Muslim invaders on the site of a temple they had destroyed that marked the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The movement gained popular momentum, and the BJP glommed on to it opportunistically. The decision reaped substantial political reward for the BJP, catapulting it from a few seats in the Lok Sabha (the lower h ouse of Parliament) and less than 10 percent of the vote beforehand to over 20 percent of the vote and 120 seats in the Lok Sabha by 1991. Impatient with the rate of prog ress on the Ayodhya issue, however, Sangh militants rioted and tore down the mosque with their own hands and hand tools in 1992. Twelve thousand people died in the Hindu-Muslim riots that followed. Afterward, the RSS and the VHP w ere again temporarily banned, and the central government dissolved the legislative assemblies of states the BJP ruled. As a consequence, the BJP reverted once again to a more moderate line, made itself more amenable to compromise, and built a g rand coalition (the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA) with which they managed to win control at the center from 1998 to 2004 and decisive majorities in both the 2014 and 2019 elections.147 In November 2019, the Indian Supreme Court shocked the nation and pleased Hindu nationalists by declaring the site of the destroyed mosque the rightful possession of Hindus, paving the way for construction of a Hindu t emple t here (while offering Muslims compensation in the form of land to build a mosque elsewhere in the city).
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While there had been protests and violence surrounding attempts to dismantle the mosque before, many historians credit the strength of this partic ular movement to the increasing extent to which Hindu nationalists had successfully mainstreamed their distinct conception of Hinduism as a relatively unified religion, following upper-caste Brahmanical norms, focused on gods appreciated all over India (like Krishna and Rama), and threatened by external enemies (particularly Muslims). Their success derived from long-term grassroots educational and social work aimed at bringing lower-caste and tribal peoples more clearly into the fold of this upper-caste-inflected Hinduism. (In many cases, t hese groups had historically been considered outside of that fold by all parties.) But such nationalists also received a boon in the form of serialized versions of the g reat Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, that appeared on Indian state television (Doordarshan) in the 1980s. While the serials aired at a time when the Congress Party ruled India (and therefore theoretically controlled Doordarshan), the popular Bollywood director who oversaw the project, Ramanand Sagar, and his supervisor at Doordarshan, S. S. Gill, both appear to have shared the conviction that Indian culture was essentially Hindu and an unselfconscious presumption that Indian cultural unity could be promoted through the telling of distinctly Hindu stories.148 They therefore both ascribed, then, at the very least, to what we might call a soft form of the ideology of Hindutva. Intentionally or not, the Ramayana, which appeared on Sunday mornings from January 1987 to July 1988, not only constructed non-Hindu others as demonic but also prominently featured Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama, asserting, in a way, the historical accuracy of the myth’s narrative assertions and those of nationalists calling for the dismantling of the Ayodhya mosque.149 The series was a smashing success. Eighty to one hundred million Indians watched it each week, and acts of piety associated with the viewing of the series—the garlanding of televisions, for example—demonstrate a blurring of the lines, in popular conception, between the characters, the actors who played them, and deities like Sita and Rama. The Mahabharata, serialized from 1988 to 1990, had a similar effect. The popularity of these series and the fact that they presented their respective myths and Hinduism from a particularly nationalist and upper-caste, Sanskritic perspective (including by using highly Sanskritized Hindi) provided a fillip to Hindu nationalism in its attempt to construct what the eminent historian Romila Thapar has called “syndicated Hinduism.” According to Thapar, the homogenized version of Hinduism perpetuated by Hindu nationalists has its roots in Hindus’ new and uncomfortable experience of being considered the religious Other during the period of Muslim rule
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in India (from the thirteenth to the early eighteenth century and with partic ular strength a fter the sixteenth). While what we now call Hinduism—the term did not exist at that time—comprised (and still comprises) myriad differing and often contradictory religious sects, including t hose, like many among lower- caste and tribal communities, that do not consider eating meat or drinking alcohol polluting (as many upper-caste Hindus do), the experience of rule by non-Hindus encouraged efforts toward unification. While the form of Hinduism that typified upper-caste Hinduism (often called Brahmanical Hinduism) was at that time only one among many competing visions of Hinduism, upper-caste Hindus and their allies have since then more and more successfully constructed their brand of Hinduism as the universally valid one, seeking in various ways to unify all different forms of Indian religion within the taxonomical palimpsest of Hinduism u nder the authority of this form. This homogenizing process continued in response to Christian colonial rule and has gained particular purchase since the late 1980s. However, Thapar argues, it requires “an attempt to restructure the indigenous [Indian] religions into a monolithic, uniform religion, paralleling some of the features of Semitic religions[, which] seems to be a fundamental departure from the essentials of what may be called the indigenous Hindu religions.”150 If it was formed in response to Muslim and then Christian rule, this reformulated religion now serves to address the disorienting experience of modernity in a globalizing world, with what is perceived to be its ongoing threats from Muslim and Christian others, and—by drawing more and more Hindus into its orbit—to support majoritarian political ambitions of Hindu nationalists, particularly upper-caste Hindus and the middle classes, whose interests it protects.151 While there are many factors that contributed to the decisive parliamentary victories of the BJP in 2014 and then again in 2019 (despite the widespread perception that antiminority harassment and violence had increased u nder the party’s rule), one was a broadening acceptance of Hindu nationalists’ vision of Brahmanical religion as the authoritative form of Hinduism, or at least a broadening tolerance of that vision so long as it came along with what many perceived to be the political benefits of BJP rule vis-à-vis rule by the Congress Party (e.g., less corruption, more prodevelopment economic policies, a more aggressive foreign policy). The 1990s, then, mark an important transition from relatively low-level to more consistently open and hostile Hindu-Christian conflict in India.152 Several factors appear to have contributed to this transition, though it is impor tant to keep in mind that the distinction between the causes and manifestations of social change is often hard to discern. The most obvious factor is the one just described: the BJP’s rise to national power, in 1998, from relative political
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obscurity in the mid-1980s. The correlation between BJP political control and violence against Christians is often overstated, though my own statistical analyses, provided in the next chapter, do provide support for the thesis that anti- Christian violence is more likely under BJP governance, and there has been a discernible increase in anti-Christian violence since the BJP’s most recent national electoral victory. In any case, BJP control of the central government did provide space on the dais and a megaphone for expressions of anti-Christian sentiment. Moreover, after the Ayodhya affair, there was a strong public backlash against anti-Muslim activities and rhetoric and some expressions of sympathy for India’s Muslim minority. The backlash may have therefore prompted BJP politicians to shift the focus of their antiminority rhetoric in the direction of Christians, who they may have considered a safer and more broadly resonant target.153 A second contributing factor is related to the first: Sonia Gandhi’s rise to power within the Congress Party. Widow of an assassinated former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi (himself the son of another prime minster, Indira Gandhi, and grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister), Sonia’s Italian and Catholic birth had made her an easy and regular target of nationalist denigration. The fact that she became president of the party in 1998 may help explain why anti-Christian criticism gained broader political traction at that time. She is a potent symbol, and by attacking her, Sangh politicians (and their supporters) could score points against their primary political competitor (the Congress) while giving expression to concerns of their constituents about the influence of foreigners and Christians in India. The Congress Party’s candidate for prime minister in the 2019 elections, Rahul Gandhi (son of Sonia), did not successfully shake the baggage associated with his family’s political past (including Indira’s infamous Emergency), which contributed to his failure to compete effectively with Narendra Modi. For a third contributing f actor, we must look back to the end of the 1980s, when a number of global Christian organizations began to develop mission plans to evangelize the world by the year 2000, such as in the Joshua Project (formerly AD 2000 and Beyond) and Evangelization 2000 movements. Throughout the 1990s, and particularly as the year 2000 approached, the date grew in symbolic importance among evangelistically minded Christians and their critics. Sangh activists began to take note not only of the heightened rhetoric but also of the increased evangelistic activity and highly systematized and strategic planning that supported it. That planning was nowhere more evident than in the Joshua Project, which maintained a massive database including information on thousands of “unreached” people groups. (Here again, the continuing influence of Donald McGavran’s Church Growth Movement is palpable.)
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Critics of Christian missionary activities in India began to write about t hese evangelistic projects, using their language and systematic strategizing as evidence of what the critics considered a sinister, cynical, and altogether unreligious but rather purely political, neocolonial plot.154 The assertion that systematic proselytization is unreligious derives from an assumption that religion is and should be primarily ethnic, a matter of birth. It is worth underscoring this point: a significant point of contention between proponents of Hindutva and their Christian opponents is what religion is and should be. A fifth factor, one that I will delineate more fully in the conclusion, is the accelerating pace and impact of globalization, the effects of which became more tangible in India a fter the early 1990s. Just as Indian Christians came to be associated with British governance in the colonial period, contemporary Christians in India are often linked rhetorically to the neocolonial (Euro- American) powers of globalization because of their Western connections and their introduction of modern ideals, technologies, education, commerce, and medicine. As such, Christians are perceived both as globalization’s primary purveyors and its cardinal beneficiaries. India’s Christians therefore also come to be seen as proxies for what many consider the negative effects of globalization, exacerbating feelings of ill will t oward Christians among other communities, particularly t hose dislodged or disadvantaged by its forces.155 Whatever the contributing factors in the expansion of anti-Christian rhe toric, one manifestation of the shift in public perceptions regarding the Indian Christian community (and Christianity itself ) was the emergence and increasing prominence, verve, and moxie of anti-Christian critics. As is clear from the historical overview provided here, rhetorical, even captious resistance to Christianity has a long history in India.156 Nevertheless, in the late 1980s and 1990s, critical voices gained a wider hearing, primarily through publication in popular books, magazines, and journals. In the early 1980s, Ram Swarup, founder of the important publishing house Voice of India, engineered the revitalization of this genre of literature. The late Sita Ram Goel is perhaps the most important of its early contemporary authors, and his History of Hindu- Christian Encounters (1986), Catholic Ashrams: Sannyasins or Swindlers? (1988), and Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (1994) were influential publications. Of all such works, the newspaper editor and former BJP minister Arun Shourie’s censorious Missionaries in India (1994) received, perhaps, the most attention (particularly from Christians). Ashok Chowgule’s Christianity in India: The Hindutva Perspective (1999) openly claimed an anti-Christian critique, as the title implies. In the pages of these and other publications, well-established criticisms of underhanded or overly aggressive evangelizing appear alongside more novel
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criticisms of Christianity itself as an inherently and inescapably imperialistic and expansionistic religion. While Gandhi’s was always a more irenic and respectful critique of Christians and Christian evangelizing, t here is a relatively clear genealogical line that runs from Gandhi through Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel to such contemporary figures as Arun Shourie, Ashok Chowgule (who is now all-India vice president of the VHP), Swami Dayananda Saraswati (convener of the influential Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha until his death in 2015), Radha Rajan, and Sandhya Jain, as well as to such diasporic writers as Rajiv Malhotra and Suhag Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation.157 Most of t hese latter writers draw implicitly or explicitly on Gandhi’s critique. And if they criticize him at all, it is for being too irenic and conciliatory. While each of these authors has his or her own style and distinctive focus, there are also many points about which they are often in agreement. Most of them understand the purpose of religion to be personal transformation with the end goal of full spiritual enlightenment over the course of many lives, a course that can begin anywhere and is therefore something equally possible within any tradition. Moreover, religions are ethnic (not universal), that is, particularly suited to the people among whom they emerged, such that conversion from one religion to another is neither desirable nor spiritually efficacious. For this reason, attempts to convert another must be seen not as religiously but as politically motivated acts, more about strengthening one’s community than about promoting spiritual growth. Proselytization, therefore, is at best spiritually naïve and at worst a kind of aggression or imperialism. Religions that claim exclusive access to a universally salvific revelation are particularly prone to this spiritual naïveté and to the blurring of spiritual and political goals in the context of evangelism. Nevertheless, their assertiveness and putative intolerance of other faiths allows them to grow at the expense of more tolerant religions. Because of this and b ecause proselytization is socially disruptive, it is worthy of approbation or even legal prohibition. While most Hindus understand their religion in ethnic terms, the notion that proselytization and conversion should be prohibited legally (or, worse, met with violence) is the special preserve of Hindu nationalists. Such a view, if accepted, would ossify the social and religious status quo in ways that would favor upper-caste Hindus and other elites. Not surprisingly, many among the lower castes and religious minorities deride these more extreme views as cynically self-serving. The more assertive critique of Christianity and Christian evangelizing articulated by t hese authors, along with their calls for a ban on proselytization and conversion, correspond with a rise in anti-Christian violence that began in the 1980s. As described more fully in the next chapter, a series of riots be-
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tween Hindus and Christians took place in Tamil Nadu in 1982, though it was not u ntil the late 1990s that anti-Christian violence became a regular occurrence, as it is today. It is not my intention to suggest that there is a clear and direct line from critique to conflict and violence. Nevertheless, arguments such as t hose given by these authors are often proffered by those who have engaged in or are defending acts of violence against Christians, not only as explanation but also as justification for t hose acts, which they frame as the only recourse available to Hindus whose government fails to protect them from the spiritually naïve, proselytizing predations of Christian missionaries. From this historical overview, it should be clear that although the ostensible Islamic threat often overshadowed Hindu nationalist concerns about Christian ity from partition until the present day, Christianity and particularly Christian missionizing remained very much on the minds of Sangh Parivar activists and their predecessors throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods. In fact, despite its current reputation for anti-Islamic rhetoric and behavior, the activities of the VHP were at its founding in 1964 directed primarily against Christian missionary work in the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, the Northeast, and elsewhere.158 For reasons articulated above, by the end of the twentieth c entury, Christians came forcefully to the attention of Sangh partisans, so much so that VHP general secretary Giriraj Kishore asserted that Christians presented “a greater threat [to India] than the collective threat from separatist Muslim elements.”159 In 1998, B. L. Sharma, a prominent VHP leader, described the rape of several Christian nuns in the state of Madhya Pradesh as “an expression of patriotic Hindu youth against anti-national forces.”160 Rhe toric such as this reflects a somewhat dramatic shift in public opinion about the magnitude of the threat posed by Christianity (relative to that posed by Islam). The fact that such a dramatic shift could occur is the result of a variety of different f actors operative over a span of several centuries, factors that resulted in changes to the very nature of Hindu-Christian conflict. For the most part, conflict between Christians and Hindus up until around 1800 appears to have been primarily the result of contestations over ceremonial rank, participation, and prestige. Such conflict could be serious and violent, of course, but required (and demonstrated) that the various groups involved in the conflict viewed Christians as arrayed within an integrated religious arena including Hindus, Muslims, and devotees of other faiths. There were exceptions to this general rule, such as the violence against Jesuit missionaries and their converts in Portuguese Goa. But the general pattern remains discernible. After 1800, which brought accelerated British expansion and an influx of missionaries, new forms of conflict emerged. The old pattern of ceremonial
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contestations survived, particularly in the interaction of long-established communities of coastal South Indian Catholics with their non-Catholic neighbors. After 1800, however, attacks on missionaries and their new convert communities also became somewhat more common. Rather than involving contestations about ceremonial rank and privilege within an integrated religious community, these conflicts entailed the targeting of groups who were perceived to have opted out of that community and to have thereby threatened not only the traditional social order but also the power of t hose who traditionally controlled it. In most of these cases and even right up until the 1920s and 1930s, the conflict between Hindus and Christians tended to involve context-specific grievances and remained for the most part local, episodic, and short-lived. Already in this period, however, a more general critique of Christianity and of Christian missionizing was emerging, particularly among the intelligentsia in the colonial power centers of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, in revivalist organ izations like the Arya Samaj, and especially a fter the imposition of British census and electoral policies based on the enumeration of competing religious communities. These more general critiques gained momentum as Indians began to think of themselves in progressively more national terms. During this process and as some Indians began to define their nationhood culturally and religiously, as happened especially after the 1920s, Christianity (like Islam) could and was increasingly framed as a threat to the entire nation. At the same time, Gandhi’s mainstreaming of the critique of conversion provided support for the anti-Christian rhetoric of the Sangh Parivar.161 Contestations over religious space, rank, and privilege continue t oday, just as in the period before 1830. The difference, however, is that now context- specific and local grievances between Hindus and Christians are increasingly embroidered onto the broader cloth of Christianity as a threat to the nation. For example, contestations over the use of religious space, as in the dispute over a Christian pandal in Brahmanigaon, Odisha, which provoked the first round of violence in Kandhamal (as described in chapter 4), are no longer merely local contestations but are rather tied synecdochically to concerns about the nature and survival of the nation itself. The Christian pandal is to the village as Christianity is to the nation. Competition over religious space is still involved, only now in contemporary conflict the religious “space” in question is all of India itself. The historical developments described in this chapter need not have led inexorably to the contemporary situation in which violence against Christians is, as I argue in the next chapter, an everyday affair. Moreover, it is important
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to acknowledge that making an argument about “how we got h ere” is not the same as making the argument that “we could not but have arrived here.” Nevertheless, attention to the history of Hindu-Christian conflict in India does aid us in the attempt to interpret Hindu-Christian conflict in contemporary times. For example, the power and resonance, for many, of the rhetoric that Sangh leaders often use to justify or even provoke anti-Christian attacks cannot be understood without reference to these developments. The accusation that Christianity is a foreign religion with imperialistic tendencies draws strength from the colonized history of India, as does the more basic assumption that foreign religions represent a threat to Indian culture and national sovereignty. The politicization of religious identity is of course common, and one would expect it in contemporary India even if it had not been colonized. After all, religious identity quite frequently gets politicized even in countries without a history of colonization. However, the developments described in this chapter help explain why Indians think of religious identity and their government’s obligations regarding religious identity and religious freedom in the way that they now do. They also help explain why the politics of numbers—or to be more specific, why the regular but not overwhelmingly common conversion of a relatively small number of Hindus to a religion with a relatively small and inconsequential population in India—matters so much to a certain segment of the population. In addition to this, the developments described in t hese pages help account for the way in which local squabbles between Christians and their non-Christian neighbors in various parts of India often become quickly nationalized in the contemporary period in a way they did not prior to roughly a century ago. Likewise, knowing the contours of the most common criticisms of Christians and Christian missionaries in India, criticisms that connect contemporary public figures like Arun Shourie and Praveen Togadia to the intellectual heritage of Gandhi, helps explain why large numbers of otherwise irenic Hindus feel ambivalent about the existence and activity of Christians in India today and therefore fail to forcefully speak out against their marginalization or the acts of violence committed against them. This chapter has cast a wide net, focusing on the development and increasing severity of Hindu-Christian conflict in Indian history and considering within the definition of conflict everything from rhetorical criticism to a ctual violence. The remaining chapters focus more intently on the latter end of that continuum, that is, on acts of violence committed against Christians, whether in isolated incidents or in the context of more widespread riots. It is my hope, of course, that the reader finds the nature and causes of this violence somewhat easier to comprehend in light of the foregoing historical overview.
A damaged mural of Jesus Christ on the outside of a home near the village of Mondesore. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images News via Getty Images.
Ch a p ter 3
“Everyday” Anti-Christian Violence
The first serious incident of violence between Hindus and Christians in the modern period occurred in 1982, in Mandaikadu village, in Tamil Nadu’s southernmost coastal district of Kanyakumari. The vio lence took place at the time of a popular local Hindu temple festival, during which rumors spread that Christians were molesting Hindu women. As a result, Hindus and Christians clashed physically, and the police who intervened in an attempt to subdue the rioters fired into a crowd and killed at least six Christians. Over subsequent weeks, the violence spread to surrounding villages. At least three more p eople w ere killed in clashes (two of them by police), and hundreds were injured. Rioters destroyed Christian churches, Hindu temples, schools, and convents, while poisoning wells. In one village alone, the homes of more than six hundred Catholic fisher folk w ere utterly destroyed, along with their fishing equipment. Officially, nine Christians and no Hindus died in the attacks, though Christians allege that the number of Christians killed was much higher, and some Hindu witnesses claimed that rioting Christians also killed several Hindus.1 At the time, the Mandaikadu riots seemed an aberration, and indeed, they were followed by a relatively long period in which no similarly significant incidents occurred. Moreover, in more recent incidents of anti-Christian violence, deaths related to police fire are not at all a common feature. The transition to more consistently and publicly hostile Hindu-Christian interactions that began in the late 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s 115
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came to fruition in the years 1998 and 1999. The United Christian Forum for Human Rights registered only thirty-two cases of communal violence against Christians between 1964 and 1996. In 1997 alone, however, they recorded fifteen. And then, in 1998, the number of incidents increased concerningly to ninety.2 Also in 1998, at Christmas, a large-scale anti-Christian riot took place in the Dangs, a tribal-dominated region of Gujarat. In the years preceding the riots, there had been many tribal conversions to Christianity. While there w ere no deaths reported in the Dangs riots, over the course of several days, rioters vandalized or destroyed dozens of Christian h ouses and places of worship. Days later, after surveying the damage, BJP prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called for a “national debate on conversion,” implying that the violence was motivated (and justified?) by Christian evangelistic activities in the region. Just twelve days later, in Odisha, the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young boys w ere immolated in their jeep by antimissionary activists in an incident that received considerable international attention and further inflamed the emotions associated with the debate for which Vajpayee had called.3 These debates were still alive and very much on the public mind when Pope John Paul II visited India in November 1999. The VHP and RSS took his visit as an opportunity to press for an apology regarding the atrocities and coerced conversions of the Goa Inquisition and also urged the pope to disavow evangelism aimed at conversion, as well as the dogma of salvation only through Christ. The pope’s previous writings suggested that he would never do the latter; his Redemptoris Missio (1990) promoted a rather traditional Catholic understanding of salvation and underlined the importance of missions to people of other faiths. However, not only did the pope not apologize for the Inquisition; he also chose his visit to India as the occasion to release what, in context, was an inflammatory document: Ecclesia in Asia. The document had been drafted during the earlier All Asia Bishops synod (1998), and in it, the pope reviewed the expansion of Christianity in the first and second millennia and hoped, rather indelicately, for a “great harvest of faith” in Asia during the third.4 Critics of Christian missionizing were predictably incensed, and even many secularists joined in the criticism of what seemed to them an obdurate, insensitive, and conservative performance by the pope. The traditional understanding of salvation and evangelism expounded in Ecclesia in Asia allowed critics of Christianity to make the claim that since the Inquisition, the Catholic Church had made only superficial strategic (and no substantive theological) changes to its stance on the status of non-Christian religions. Ultimately, then
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as now, the critics asserted, the central and acknowledged goal of the Catholic Church was the conversion of all to Christianity. The VHP leader Acharya Giriraj Kishore declared, “It’s official. We now know what we are up against. They say that conversions will go on. We say it will not. We have vowed to finish it.”5 The pope’s refusal to apologize for the excesses of the Inquisition also allowed his opponents to continue rhetorically linking the violence of the Inquisition with contemporary evangelistic activities, as had already been done a month before the pope’s arrival in an “open letter” to the pope written by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, then head of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. In the letter, the swami provocatively asserted that conversion was tantamount to violence.6 The pope’s visit therefore undermined both secularist pleas for tolerance on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and the ongoing efforts of Indian Catholic leaders, many of whom had been attempting to distance themselves from exclusivist and quasi- exclusivist theologies in order to achieve rapprochement with India’s Hindu community.7 While the dramatic anti-Christian riots in Tamil Nadu (1982), Gujarat (1998), and Odisha (2007–2008) discussed in later chapters were widely covered both in India and abroad, the attention attracted by acute and dramatic riots like these obscures the fact that the frequency of more chronic and what I in this chapter call everyday acts of anti-Christian violence has increased dramatically since the end of the 1990s. In this context, I use the term everyday intentionally, not to downplay the severity or significance of these acts but rather to convey several important points about their nature. First, they are everyday in a literal sense. In the years for which I have the most extensive data, 2007 and 2008, t here were around 250 attacks reported each year. (For more on the database on which this chapter draws, see the second part of this chapter.) Since then, the number of annual attacks appears to have held steady, in approximate terms. In 2018, for example, the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) cataloged 325 incidents of anti-Christian violence, intimidation, or harassment and alleged that t here were in fact quite a few more.8 The number for 2007 and 2008—250 attacks per year—includes only those that w ere reported in media outlets and captured by my searches. Moreover, in the interviews I conducted for this project, I uncovered several additional incidents of violence in 2007 and 2008 that did not appear in the database (because they were not covered by the news sources I surveyed). For these reasons, I estimate that today there are around 350 acts of violence each year, a number that falls roughly halfway between the low estimates of those that focus only on incidents officially reported to the police or in the news media,9
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on the one hand, and the estimates of those associated with large Indian Christian or international missionary organizations, on the other, which are often quite a bit higher.10 In any case, if there are roughly 350 incidents of violence against Christians each year, they are in a very literal sense nearly an everyday occurrence. The attacks are everyday in a second sense—that is, they do not generally garner much attention. Aside from coverage of the most dramatic and significant of the incidents, in local or regional vernacular-language media outlets, the everyday acts of violence against Christians go largely unnoticed in national and international newspapers and magazines. They are everyday, then, in the sense that they seem, to many, unremarkable, and the very fact that they are considered by many to be unremarkable suggests a climate in which they are expected, accepted, and perceived as normal. Third, the attacks are everyday in the sense that they have become routine. The media’s relatively substantial coverage of riots like those in Kandhamal and relative neglect of everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence sometimes gives the impression that anti-Christian violence is an aberration, has clear limits, is bounded, and begins and ends at specific times and in specific places. But the regularity of these smaller-scale incidents of anti-Christian violence suggests that violence is always a possibility, always lurking just beneath the surface of otherwise normal relationships. As Gyan Pandey has written, “if we are to appreciate violence as a social fact . . . we must recognize violence not only in its most spectacular, explosive, visible moments, but also in its more disguised forms.”11 If anti-Christian attacks have become routine, they have also become rou tinized and follow, for the most part, a limited number of discrete scripts. T here are patterns both in the nature of the violence perpetrated in these incidents and in its location and targets. T hese patterns are the topic of this chapter, in which I detail the most common kinds of attacks Christians experience and briefly discuss the most regular targets of violence. While attacks on Christians take place all over India, they tend to fairly regularly follow certain patterns, and in what follows I w ill focus on three: (1) attacks on Christian evangelists, pastors, or other leaders; (2) attacks on churches or entire congregations; (3) domestic violence targeting recent converts and those considering converting. While the statistical analyses in the second part of this chapter derive from my database of incidents in 2007 and 2008, to illustrate these three primary patterns of violence, I draw on both historical and contemporary data and from media reports, social media sites like YouTube (where videos of anti-Christian attacks increasingly appear), and my own interviews with Indian Christians.12
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Pattern 1: Attacks on Christian Evangelists, Pastors, or Other Leaders In this, the most common pattern of violence, Christian evangelists, pastors, or other leaders are attacked, usually on the pretense of their proselytizing activities and e ither while engaged in some form of evangelism or afterward (for example, in their homes or in the street). Most of the victims in these attacks are men, in part because men are more likely to inhabit these roles of Christian leadership and in part because of cultural norms protecting women more than men from harassment and violence.13 For example, I interviewed a pastor in a village outside of Hyderabad who regularly used to go with his father and evangelize at Yadagirigutta Temple, an important Hindu site in Andhra Pradesh to which thousands of pilgrims flock each day. At certain auspicious times, the pastor said, hundreds of thousands would come in a single day, and during those times, he and his father would evangelize to the Hindu pilgrims. When they did, they w ere frequently beaten up. T hose who assaulted them also sometimes stole their possessions or destroyed the evangelistic literature they were distributing. Evangelism at or near Hindu temples and pilgrimage sites is particularly provocative and more frequently leads to violence than evangelism elsewhere.14 Nevertheless, many Christians intentionally choose these sites both for their concentration of Hindus and presumably (in at least some cases) because they consider the choice to evangelize in the midst of Hindu expressions of piety a productive and admirably bold choice. Gospel for Asia, for example, once boasted of having handed out six million evangelistic tracts during the Kumbh Mela, the largest and most famous of all Hindu pilgrimages.15 Similarly, the widely distributed American evangelistic data resource book, Operation World: The Definitive Prayer Guide to Every Nation, notes that the millions of pilgrims who each year visit Tirupati, another popular and important Hindu pilgrimage spot, present “an opportunity to reach out to many.”16 An evangelist I interviewed in Dehradun told me that he had been twice accosted while preaching at Rishikesh during the Kumbh Mela with several students from a Pentecostal Bible college.17 In the first incident, he and one of the students became separated from the group, and as they w ere walking on a bridge across the Ganges River, some people he identified as belonging to the RSS saw them and their bags of evangelistic materials. When they grabbed him, he said, he considered fighting back but did not b ecause he was a “servant of God.” Then, according to the pastor, those who accosted him pulled out one evangelistic tract at a time and threw it into the river, saying, “Hara, hara Ganga,” as they did. Hara, hara Ganga is an invocation of the goddess
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Ganga, or the river Ganges, over which the altercation was taking place, and the act of jettisoning the gospels one by one while repeating this mantra mimics a central and widespread element of Hindu worship, that is, the throwing of offerings (e.g., flowers) on or t oward an image or symbol of the divine while intoning mantras of praise. Whatever the intended meaning of this symbolic action, the pastor and the student perceived in it a threat to their health and well-being. The student wrestled f ree and ran for help, and soon a number of police officers arrived. Most of the assailants escaped, but the police managed to catch the leader of the gang. The police did not arrest him b ecause the pastor refused to press charges (as he told the police, “I am a servant of Jesus Christ. He did not take any revenge from his enemies, [so] how can I?”). Nevertheless, the police warned the miscreant that they would arrest him if it happened a second time. The next day, the pastor and the Pentecostal students again went out distributing evangelistic tracts. Again, the pastor reports, he was assailed on one of the bridges crossing the Ganges. This time the assailants were two young boys, who stole his evangelistic tracts and aggressively asked him, “What are you doing?” Defiantly, the pastor replied, “I am standing here in my country that allows me to proclaim the word of God anywhere.” This time, also, the pastor was able to escape harm, and he attributes his safety to divine intervention. While some Christians continue to focus their evangelistic energies on Hindu temples and pilgrimages, many Indian Christians themselves object to this kind of confrontational evangelism and condemn the Christians who engage in it. A CNI Christian leader who had arranged this particular interview and accompanied me there, for example, challenged the evangelist about what he considered his double standard: that Christians expected to be able to evangelize freely at large Hindu events but would not willingly or happily allow Hindus to preach at Christian services or conferences. If there are divisions within the Christian community, t here are equally seismic fault lines within the Hindu community about the use of violence against Christians. While many Hindus find Christianity’s propensity for expansion through evangelism troubling or even uncouth, only a minority would use legal maneuvers to restrict that expansion, and even a smaller minority would engage in the kinds of violent attacks described in this and subsequent chapters. In fact, stories abound of Hindus protecting their Christian neighbors and friends in the face of attack. One Assemblies of God pastor in Bangalore told me of a time when, because of what he perceived to be a menacing procession of young men associated with Sangh organizations parading through his church’s neighborhood, he locked the gates of his church. But then, Hindus
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from the slums where his church did service work jumped the front gate and came to tell him they would protect him, his congregants, and the church. A few minutes later, a group of Muslims came to the back gate promising the same protection. While attacks on Christian evangelists often occur where they are engaged in their evangelism, sometimes, and particularly when the evangelists work where they live, violence follows them home. On January 16, 2009, Pastor Jacob was assaulted in his home in the village of Gumpala, Andhra Pradesh. The pastor had been working in the village for more than a decade, and had grown a church t here from three to fifty Christian families, largely, he reports, through a ministry of healings and exorcisms. In the m iddle of the night, six people came to his home, forcefully tonsured him, shaved half of his moustache, and slashed his head, leaving a serious-looking gash along his crown. In the midst of the attack, Jacob managed to scream for help, and the attackers fled. According to Jacob, whom I interviewed in Hyderabad, the attackers were hooded and told him they w ere assaulting him because he was converting Hindus. They also accused him of using foreign funds for proselytization. They demanded that he end his work in the village, saying, “No pastor should be here; no construction should be seen here.” The attack was reported widely in local, Telugu-language newspapers and television stations, and many of the reports included photos or videos of Jacob’s injured head. The All-India Christian Council (AICC) organized a protest in which Christian leaders showed their solidarity with Jacob by shaving half of their respective heads and moustaches. Jacob and o thers pointed the finger at local Sangh Parivar activists, and eventually police arrested several members of the RSS and the ABVP, which is associated with the RSS. The arrests touched off counterprotests organized by Sangh organizations, which claimed that t hose who had been arrested w ere innocent. Several local BJP leaders were arrested for their part in the protests. Such attacks are increasingly common and very occasionally end even in murder. In January 2014, for example, several days after he had been publicly accused of organizing “forcible conversions,” four p eople knocked on the door of Pastor Sanjeev, who lived in Vikarabad, Andhra Pradesh. They asked if he would come with them to pray for a d ying man. When he agreed and stepped out of his home, he was stabbed eight times and died from his wounds three days later. Members of the Hindu Vahini (Hindu Brigade) were arrested in the attack, which prompted the Andhra Pradesh Federation of Churches to lodge a complaint with the state’s chief minister.18 In addition to individual evangelists, evangelistic programs are also frequently flash points for anti-Christian violence. Many churches and mission
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agencies working in India t oday host vacation Bible school (VBS) programs, in the hopes of reaching not only Christian c hildren but also non-Christian children whose parents might be willing to expose them to Christian teaching in exchange for free or affordable childcare. Such programs appear to have risen in popularity among Christian mission organizations along with the popularity of targeting the “4/14 window,” that is, children between the ages of four and fourteen, in evangelistic efforts. (The 4/14 window and the “10/40 window”—i.e., the area of the world between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator that many evangelistically minded Christians consider to be the least evangelized and least Christian part of the world—were both concepts that emerged in evangelical Christian circles in the 1990s.) Given the fact that VBS programs are often successful in reaching non-Christian c hildren and given the impressionability of those children, it is perhaps not surprising that some Hindus might find them objectionable. In many cases, it is the petty gifts that are distributed to VBS children that provoke protests, out of concern that they might represent a kind of allurement to Christianity. In 2007, for example, according to Worthy News, RSS and Bajrang Dal activists attacked a pastor for distributing gifts at a VBS. “The extremists stated that by giving t hese gifts to the c hildren they w ere converting them to Christianity,” the newspaper reported. Then, the activists “destroyed the gifts and beat up the pastor.” The pastor and an elder in the sponsoring church were subsequently arrested a fter their assailants filed a complaint against them, but they were eventually released.19 A Pentecostal evangelist who ran VBS programs around Dehradun recounted a similar story. In the late 1990s, he was running a VBS program that enrolled around 350 c hildren, all of them Hindu. On a day soon a fter the VBS program began, he told me: “Some anti elements, they came, got together in a mob. They had chains in their hands, iron rods in their hands, and . . . all sorts of [weapons] in their hands. [They had] one three-wheeler with a microphone and loudspeaker. About two [or] three thousand p eople got together in a mob, and they attacked the VBS. There were twenty Sunday school teachers. They started beating kids, beating schoolteachers. They asked, ‘Who organized this?’ ” My interviewee acknowledged that he had organized the event and asked that the “anti elements” leave the c hildren alone. Then, t hose who had attacked the group called two of the VBS children forward and asked them whether the VBS teachers had pressured them to convert to Christianity. The two c hildren, whom the organizer of the VBS believes had been coached to do so, indicated that the teachers had indeed pressured them to convert. Eventually, the police arrived and took the organizer into custody, holding him at the police station. When local newspapers reported on the story, they often
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did so with a clear anti-Christian bias. A week later, a fter the evangelist had been released, the very same thing happened again. Similarly, a pastor who worked in a village near Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) organized a VBS program in March 2010 in a poor section of town. On the very first day of the VBS, p eople came and accused him of luring c hildren to Christianity with toys, gifts, and chocolates; they then accused him of being obsessed with converting c hildren and physically abused him and his associate pastor. Christian evangelists in India frequently show films about Jesus to inspire devotion to Christ (something that the serialized versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata managed to do for their protagonists when they w ere televised in the 1980s). Often, they show Karunamayudu, an originally Telugu film that was produced in India in 1978, which has been dubbed into many other languages (e.g., in English as Ocean of Mercy, Tamil as Karunamoorthy, and Hindi as Daya Sagar). Many Christian evangelists consider the film and its moving portrayal of Christ an incredibly effective evangelistic instrument. Opponents of Christianity have noticed and, for this reason, frequently attempt to disrupt screenings of the film. In 2010, I interviewed a pastor in his village church. The environs w ere picturesque, but my initial impression of the village as a peaceful idyll was spoiled when the pastor lowered his voice to a whisper—fearing his neighbors might overhear—as he told me how BJP party loyalists once came to the government hostel where he was screening Karunamayudu, beat him up, threatened his life, and destroyed his projector. His colleague related a similar story about his mother, who worked as a lay evangelist in another village and whose story illustrates resistance to both VBS programs and screenings of the Jesus film. A few minutes later, an associate of the pastor I was interviewing, who worked in another village, told me about an attack on his m other. Again, in hushed tones, the pastor told me that the attack occurred while his m other was transporting some VBS children to another town, where their plan was to watch a film about Jesus. In this case, according to my interlocutor, it was members of the Bajrang Dal who intervened. Having caught wind of her plans, they s topped the vehicle in which his mother and the students were traveling on the village’s main road, partially disrobed her, and then proceeded to assault her in full view of a crowd of villagers. The villagers did nothing to help her. In the attack, she suffered injuries that required a month in the hospital and 40,000 rupees (about $800 at the time) to mend. As the story of the evangelist attacked in Rishikesh suggests, sometimes the police intervene positively in t hese incidents to protect the victims. In many
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other cases, however, the police are in collusion with or intimidated by the attackers and extend the trauma experienced by the victims by booking them under dubious charges or holding them on the pretense of or out of sincere concern for protecting them from their attackers.20 At times the victims are booked under the various state “Freedom of Religion” laws, which prohibit conversion by force, fraud, or inducement, even if the victims have not engaged in any behavior that could be reasonably considered as such. In other cases, they are charged under Sections 295A or 153A of the Indian Penal Code, which respectively forbid “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs” and indulging in “wanton vilification or attacks upon the religion . . . of any par ticular group or class or upon the founders and prophets of a religion,” raising vexing questions about whether it is possible to proselytize at all without risking running afoul of the law. For example, according to their account, several pastors and Christians in Karnataka were attacked by a mob at the Hanumanthappa temple near Mundargi, in February 2013. Their attackers accused them of forceful conversion and then began beating them, threatening to set them on fire and rape their wives (who were not present), and pressuring them to worship the gods and goddesses housed in the temple. One of the pastors reported being told to praise India and the gods Rama and Krishna. He willingly did the former but refused to do the latter, which further infuriated the attackers. Debates then ensued among the attackers about what to do next. T hose advocating that the Christians be doused in kerosene and burned eventually lost out. Instead, the attackers took the Christians to the local police station and filed a complaint of forcible conversion against them. After several hours, the Christians w ere released and headed to the hospital for treatment. As ordered, they returned to the police station the next day, where they w ere charged u nder Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code and required to return periodically to the police station u ntil the charges were dropped.21 Both the “Freedom of Religion” laws and Sections 295A and 153A of the Indian Penal Code have been interpreted so variously that they remain available for this kind of misuse. And of course the purpose of charging Christians under such laws is not (generally) to actually prosecute them—nearly all of those arrested u nder these laws are released within a few hours or days—but rather to harass, intimidate, discomfit, and annoy them. Similarly, in other cases, Christian victims of violence who go to the police station to register a complaint find the police unwilling to register it or even find that complaints have already been registered against them.22
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Pattern 2: Attacks on Churches or Entire Congregations If most of the attacks on Christians affect individual Christian leaders or small groups of Christian leaders, t hose opposed to the growth of Christianity sometimes target entire churches or congregations. T here may, of course, be some overlap between this pattern and the first, since a congregation may be targeted as a result of animosity toward its pastor or pastors. At times, the opposition is expressed through threats or legal harassment, as in the experience of a pastor who worked in a village outside of Hyderabad and who was running ah ouse church in a residential area. Neighbors he identified, yet again with lowered voice, as belonging to the RSS and BJP filed a frivolous lawsuit against him in court, forcing him to sell his car to pay for legal expenses. Others who owned property adjacent to his church dug a hole next to its foundation to undermine the integrity of the church building’s structure. Similarly, a Pentecostal pastor from North India told me about a church he had established that was renting a private hall on Sunday mornings. The hall was in a residential area, next to the home of a retired army colonel who complained about the noise. The pastor agreed to turn down the volume. Nevertheless, one Sunday, the colonel sent for the police and asked them to do something about the noise. The police arrived during worship. Youth from the church told the pastor that the police were waiting for him outside. He said to the police, “I am with the Lord; I’ll not come out u ntil a fter the service.” The police d idn’t want to disturb the service, so they told him to come to the station afterward. He did and found that there was a report lodged against him there for disturbing the peace. He made excuses, saying that they w ere only temporarily worshipping in that hall and that they were looking for a permanent place. He assured them that they would shut the windows and not use microphones and reminded them that their worship happened only once a week, and the singing lasted only half an hour. The police let the pastor go, which did nothing to mollify the colonel, who believed the Pentecostal worship was still too loud, even without amplification. So he told the pastor, “Now you w ill see what I can do.” The next Sunday, the colon el erected his own, massive sound system. As the Pentecostals began to sing, he started blasting Bollywood film songs toward the church. But less than half a minute passed before the electricity in the entire neighborhood went off. The congregation kept singing; the film songs fell silent. The Pentecostals, of course, interpreted it as an act of God.23 These two incidents were relatively mild and involved only legal harassment. And one issue in both cases appears to be the fact that churches were
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worshipping or had grown up in residential areas where local residents objected to their presence. Sometimes, however, the incidents involve vandalism or even become more violent. In August 2011, for example, just a few weeks before my arrival, a mob vandalized a Catholic church in Pune where, in addition to Catholics, a substantial number of non-Christians regularly worshipped. The priest who presided over the parish showed me around the church, pointing out the damage that had been done, and then opened his laptop to reveal pictures of damage that had already been cleaned up or repaired. The vandals had set fire to the tabernacle (the ornate box in which the Eucharist is stored), used candles to deface a mural of Jesus, bent a large cross that decorated the altar, burned liturgical books and other decorations around the altar, ripped pages out of the common Bible, destroyed paintings of Mary and Saint Joseph, and stole money out of the offering box. Church members have no particular idea who the vandals w ere, though they assume that the vandalism was carried out by parties opposed to the growth of Christianity. At times, churches or congregations are attacked while engaged in worship. For example, a congregation worshipping outdoors, under a pandal near Durg, Chhattisgarh, was attacked in January 2008 by about fifty men, many of them wielding lathis and improvised clubs of various kinds. The men pulled down the pandal, destroyed the congregation’s amplification system and other property, and then chased down Christians, striking and kicking them along the road as they fled or walked away. About a dozen Christians w ere injured in the attacks. Video of the incident, which was broadcast on India’s IBN7, shows distraught women hurrying from the scene as their male associates are beaten.24 Members of the congregation and the Chhattisgarh Christian Forum accused the local, Sangh-affiliated Dharma Sena (Army of Dharma) of being behind the attack, but the organization denied involvement.25
Pattern 3: Domestic Violence Targeting Recent Converts or Those Considering Converting Many convert Christian women I interviewed told stories of being scolded, mocked, or beaten when they associated with Christians, invited Christian evangelists or pastors into their homes, or started attending Christian ser vices. Many also experienced violence at the hands of their male relatives (fathers, brothers, husbands, and brothers-in-law in extended family compounds) if they did eventually convert. Sometimes, married w omen who converted to Christianity w ere abused by their husbands as a result, but stories
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abound of women who endured their abuse long enough that their husbands also converted. The story of Nandini, a single, middle-aged woman from a village outside of Chennai, was typical, if perhaps a bit more dramatic than most of the stories I heard about domestic violence perpetrated against converts or t hose considering conversion.26 Nandini had grown up Hindu but went to a Church of South India (CSI) school where she learned a bit about Christianity. She was attracted to the Christian message of love and adopted certain Christian rituals, like crossing herself. Nevertheless, she continued to consider herself a Hindu. After she graduated from school and started working, Nandini began attending a Christian Church of Christ church at the invitation of a workmate who noticed her crossing herself. Because the church objected to adornment, and because of the dot’s religious connotations, the pastor there asked her to remove her bindi.27 She did so, and her brother and mother noticed and came to be suspicious about her regular Sunday morning absences. Nandini asked for a secret baptism, but the church wouldn’t allow it. Meanwhile, she began attending a different, Pentecostal church that did allow her to be baptized secretly. But a workmate, who was Catholic, objected to her attending a Pentecostal church and told her family that she had “joined a cult.” (Notice h ere the intra-Christian rivalries that exacerbate the tensions between Hindus and Christians and direct the violence more toward certain Christians than o thers, as discussed below.) On hearing of Nandini’s churchgoing activities, her mother went straight to the Pentecostal church, where she found the pastor standing outside. She abused him with foul language, took dust from the ground and threw it at him (a common expression of disdain), and accused him of being a drunkard and running a brothel. The mother was drawing on several popular stereotypes about Christians, that is, that they love to drink (because they lack the teetotalling restrictions of upper-caste Hindus), that their women interact too freely with men and have loose morals, and so on. Despite her mother’s objections, Nandini continued going to church. When her m other found this out also, she threatened to disinherit her and take her off the family’s ration card. Then, Nandini’s brother began beating her and preventing her from leaving the h ouse on Sunday mornings. Sometimes he would hit her in her sleep, at one point even knocking her unconscious and sending her to the hospital. Another time he tried to stab her with a kitchen knife, but it got lodged in the kitchen table. Eventually, her brother stopped beating her. And then, something unexpected happened: Nandini’s m other got into trouble at work and perceived her d aughter’s prayers to have gotten her out of the sticky situation. As a result, she came to tolerate Nandini’s Christian faith, though she continues to
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disallow her daughter (now a grown woman nearly fifty years old) to marry a Christian. While female converts are the most vulnerable to domestic harassment and violence, men experience it also. One Assemblies of God evangelist from Chennai told me his m other wouldn’t talk to him for two years a fter he converted. Another young Pentecostal man from Bangalore, who now works as an Assemblies of God youth pastor, told me that his conversion to Christianity strained his relationship with his Hindu parents. The tension came to a head at one point when the young man was engaged in a fast. His father told him to move out and beat him. The young man turned on God TV, where he heard the pastor say, “If your parents are telling you to get out of the h ouse, move out.” The young man took the words and followed them as a directive from God. Yet another man, who lived in a village outside of Hyderabad, decided to get baptized as a Christian, but someone found out about it and told his father that he was converting to the “SC faith.”28 Interrupting the baptism ceremony, the boy’s father dragged him home, tied him up in the sun, beat him and whipped him repeatedly, and rubbed hot pepper in his eyes for the rest of the day. Eventually the boy passed out, had a vision of Jesus that confirmed him in his faith, and was untied by his sister. He moved out immediately and became an evangelist.
Favored Targets Domestic violence against Christians is quite common in India, but it rarely gets reported, except in individual testimonies. So incidents like those just related only very rarely appear in my database, where incidents following pattern 1 (against individual or small groups of Christian evangelists and pastors) are by far the most common. Of the 223 incidents recorded in the database for 2007, 166 (or 74 percent) were of this variety. Attacks on congregations or groups of Christians in worship or meeting together for various reasons (pattern 2) were the second most common form of attack, involving 36 (16 percent) of the attacks in 2007. The buildings or property of Christian churches, schools, missions, or social service agencies w ere vandalized, stolen, or destroyed in 12 (5 percent) incidents in 2007. Recent converts w ere attacked in 8 (4 percent). An entire Christian neighborhood was razed in 1 (0.4 percent). Before proceeding, however, it may be useful to provide some information about how I gathered my data for 2007 and 2008.29 The database, which I compiled in 2009, contains 223 incidents from 2007 and 279 incidents from 2008 (502 total incidents). Using the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s definition of “violence” as a guide, I included within the database (1) any form of
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physical violence or coercion (e.g., murder, beatings, kidnapping) and any threat of violence that resulted in an individual doing something he or she would not have otherwise done (e.g., convert, engage in worship of another’s gods or goddesses, go to a police station, etc.) and (2) any act intended to intimidate or that could have intentionally or inadvertently harmed an individual or group (e.g., vandalism, arson, throwing rocks through windows, etc.). I included incidents of violence in the database only if their reports contained specific information on date, location, and the identity of victims (often not available in reports on riot violence), and I included the incident only once, no matter how many victims t here were. B ecause of this, incidents that took place in riot contexts—in which many (sometimes dozens) of the victims were involved in a single incident—were not weighted more heavily than everyday incidents of violence, as they might have been if I had emphasized the number of victims rather than the number of incidents or if I had been willing to include incidents about which there was less specific information. My choice in this matter helps explain why Odisha, where severe anti-Christian riots took place in both 2007 and 2008, was only fourth (with 48 incidents) in terms of total incidents in 2007 and 2008, after Karnataka (167), Andhra Pradesh (61), and Madhya Pradesh (58).30 To populate the data, I relied primarily on secular Indian media and Christian advocacy sources (e.g., the now defunct Compass Direct News, the Global Council of Indian Christians, and Christian Solidarity Worldwide). It would have been preferable to pair or cross-check these data with government statistics, and relying on these sources may have introduced certain biases into the investigation. For example, as indicated e arlier, Christian media narrations of anti-Christian violence tend to conform to a well-honed framework of “persecution” of Christians by Hindu “fanatics,” “extremists,” or “nationalists,” and one wonders whether the perpetrators of some of t hese crimes may have had somewhat more complicated motives. I am also suspicious that a few of the incidents recorded may have been fabricated, though I am confident, because of the number of incidents I have subsequently become aware of that were not reported in these sources, that the number of fabricated cases is considerably lower than the number of unreported incidents. In any case, and unfortunately, the government of India does not publish statistics on violence against Christians as such (and, of course, relying on governmental reports on ethnic violence also has its own problems).31 Parsing the data according to severity is difficult b ecause many incidents involve multiple forms of violence. One common pattern, for example, involves vandalism combined with physical abuse and ending with the forcible removal of the victim(s) to a police station where spurious complaints are
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lodged against them so that the victim(s) can be held u nder arrest for a few hours or days. In 171 (77 percent) of the 223 incidents from 2007, the victims were burned, shot, or otherwise physically abused, sometimes mildly but often seriously enough to require hospitalization. Many of these incidents also involved vandalism and arrest under tendentious pretenses. Five of them resulted in the death of a victim. If t hese were the most severe, perhaps the mildest of the incidents in 2007 w ere the 7 (3 percent) that involved only threats or intimidation resulting in the victims agreeing to close down their place of work, worship Hindu gods or goddesses, or reconvert. In 24 (11 percent) of the incidents, Christians were kidnapped, falsely accused and arrested, or forcibly removed to a police station (but not otherwise physically abused). And in 21 (9 percent) of the attacks, the violence did not extend beyond the vandalism of Christian homes, property, and churches. The data do also point to at least one clear trend in the identity of those targeted in anti-Christian violence: members of the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox churches, the older European and North American Protestant denominations, and the CNI and CSI are rarely among the list of victims, despite constituting around 50 percent of Indian Christians.32 However, Pentecostal, charismatic, and independent evangelical Christians are disproportionately targeted to a substantial degree. More mainstream denominational Christians in India often blame the ostensibly more offensive evangelizing methods of Pentecostals, charismatics, and independent evangelical Christians for anti-Christian violence, and indeed, as I have suggested above, the everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence do often seem to be provoked by more assertive acts of evangelism.33 Yet in my previous book, I argued for the significance of several additional factors, among which two are particularly salient: (1) the evangelical (and particularly Pentecostal) “rhetoric of rupture” (the tendency of these groups to critique local cultures as demonic and advocate the development of a distinct, putatively Christian culture) and (2) the greater inclusion and participation, within t hese disproportionately targeted groups, of women and members of the lower castes and tribes, particularly in positions of leadership.34 While the first of these factors leads the message of t hese groups to be perceived as more thoroughly opposed and destructive to traditional Indian/Hindu culture than that of the more assimilated mainstream Christian communities—that is, less bound to traditional Indian rules and land, to refer back to McCauley’s terms— the latter leads to their greater marginalization, both by Hindus and mainstream Christians. This isolation makes them more vulnerable to attack, and their vulnerability is exacerbated by their more schismatic and sectarian nature, which prevents them from being able to call effectively on broader net-
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works of Christians, like those on which the larger denominations can rely in the face of attack. Attacks against Christians are also more common in suburban and rural situations. While anti-Muslim violence appears to be a relatively more urban affair, anti-Christian violence of the everyday variety more regularly happens in smaller towns and villages. It is difficult to discern whether the rural location of most anti-Christian attacks is the cause or effect of a second typical characteristic of the churches targeted, that is, that they are more assertively evangelistic or on the growing edge of Christianity. The fact that social control is weaker in India’s rural locations, as indicated below, may be another important f actor. In summary, then, the most typical target of anti-Christian violence in 2007 and 2008 was an individual or small group of Indian pastors or evangelists known for being openly evangelistic or associated with a rapidly growing church in a rural area. Comparing my data to that gathered by the EFI for 2018, one can see that the targets and nature of the violence have remained relatively similar, taking into consideration the minor differences one would expect from year to year. That said, some of the patterns discernible in my database of incidents recorded for 2007 and 2008 no longer obtain. For example, while evangelists and pastors remain a prominent target of contemporary anti-Christian vio lence, in the EFI’s database for 2018 the most common type of incident (81 of 325 incidents, or 25 percent, an increase from 16 percent in 2007) involved police officers or mobs disrupting Christian worship or preventing Christians from worshipping altogether through acts of intimidation and violence. The increase could merely manifest a statistical blip, but it may also signal a mild shift from the targeting of individuals and groups clearly associated with proselytization to the targeting of Christians more generally, along with a shift from attacks in public spaces to attacks on Christian grounds.35
Favored Locations If there are some discernible patterns in the kinds of violence Christians experience and which Christians experience it the most, there are also several patterns discernible in the location of such violence. In this regard, it may be useful to compare my 2007–2008 database with the EFI’s for 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018 (the EFI published no report in 2016) in terms of the state-by-state location of anti-Christian violence. Table 3.1 compares the ten most dangerous states for Christians, according to raw number of incidents, as derived from my data for 2007–2008 and from the EFI’s data for 2014–2018 (again, excluding
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Table 3.1. Top ten states by number of incidents, 2007–2008 versus 2014–2018 RANK
2007–2008
2014–2018 (EXCL. 2016)
1
Karnataka
Uttar Pradesh
2
Andhra Pradesh (incl. Telangana)
Tamil Nadu
3
Madhya Pradesh
Chhattisgarh
4
Odisha
Madhya Pradesh
5
Chhattisgarh
Maharashtra
6
Maharashtra
Telangana
7
Uttar Pradesh
Jharkhand
8
Rajashtan
Bihar
9
Delhi
Karnataka
Himachal Pradesh
Uttarakhand
10
2016, when the EFI did not generate such a report).36 The comparison reveals some shifts in the overall state-by-state distribution of anti-Christian incidents. Rajasthan, Odisha, Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh dropped off the list, for example, while Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Uttarakhand entered it. Nevertheless, there remains considerable consistency in the location of anti-Christian violence, particularly in data sets like those shown in table 3.1, which average the number of incidents over two or more years. In particular, while their rankings have shifted somewhat, six of the states appearing on the list in 2007–2008 appear again on the list for 2014–2018: Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh (of which, in 2007–2008, Telangana was a part), Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. According to the EFI’s data for 2018, Uttar Pradesh was by far the most dangerous state for Christians and accounted for 132 of the 325 (or more than 40 percent) of the incidents they recorded. The rise of Uttar Pradesh as a hotspot for anti-Christian violence is particularly striking. Given the fact that it is India’s most populous state, with 17 percent of India’s population, the fact that it would be among the states with the highest number of incidents is not terribly surprising. What is surprising, however, is the fact that it r ose from seventh to first place in just ten years, in this regard, and that it so far outpaced the state in second place (Tamil Nadu), which accounted for only 12 percent of the incidents.37 That said, the rise of Tamil Nadu is also rather remarkable since it did not even appear on the list of top-ten most dangerous states for Christians in 2007 and 2008 (whether one looked at the raw number of incidents, the number of incidents per million residents, or the number of incidents per Christian resident). T here, local Sangh-affiliated organizations like the Hindu Munnai appear to be successfully promoting Hindu nationalism
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within the political vacuum that resulted from the recent deaths of powerf ul state leaders like Muthuvel Karunanidhi (1924–2018) and Jayaram Jayalalithaa (1948–2016), who b ecause of their connections with various Dravidian movements, had for the most part successfully held the most aggressive forms of Hindu nationalism at bay (despite, at times, supporting the BJP).38 The significant increase in violence against Christians in Uttar Pradesh has been especially concerning for Christians, so much so that the EFI’s report for 2018 dedicated nearly its entire analytical section to the issue. The increase coincides with rise of Yogi Adityanath in state politics and with his appointment as the state’s chief minister by the BJP in 2017. As a student in the 1990s, Adityanath earned his nationalist stripes volunteering in the Ayodhya Rama temple movement (described in chapter 2; Ayodhya is located in Uttar Pradesh). Afterward, he renounced worldly life and became a monk, eventually rising to become head of the Gorakhnath Math and its famous t emple. In the late 1990s, Adityanath became a member of the Lok Sabha (representing the Math’s district of Gorakhpur) and also started a Sangh-affiliated youth movement, the Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Army/Brigade). Though he no longer runs the organization, the Hindu Yuva Vahini has been active in anti-Muslim and anti-Christian activities since its founding. Adityanath is known for his fiery anti-Muslim and anti-Christian positions and speeches. During campaigning for the 2019 elections, for example, he accused the Congress Party of having been infected by a “green virus” in a tweet that Twitter eventually removed. He has led ghar wapasi and shuddhi campaigns targeting Christians (quite successfully, according to his estimates). He has also railed against “love jihad” (the imagined crisis involving Indian Muslim men luring Hindu w omen to Islam through romantic involvement and marriage) and has used his authority as a politician to encourage more aggressive action against those consuming or processing beef (both of which are illegal in his state). Such actions have made him the darling of many Hindu nationalists, and many consider him a possible successor to Narendra Modi, in whose cauldron he has clearly been forged.39 While there is no real way to determine whether Adityanath’s rise to power in the state was the cause or manifestation of rising antiminority sentiment (or both or neither), it is certainly the case that Sangh groups in Uttar Pradesh appear to feel emboldened by his appointment of chief minister. The raw number of incidents per state only tells part of the story, however, because raw numbers do not account for the significant variation in India’s state populations. While Christians in Uttar Pradesh experienced far more incidents of anti-Christian harassment and violence than Christians in any other state in 2018, Uttar Pradesh’s two hundred million residents (according
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to the 2011 census) outpace the number of residents in India’s second-most populous state, Maharashtra, by nearly ninety million p eople. (If it were a country, Uttar Pradesh would be the fifth largest, at roughly the size of Brazil.) For this reason, statistics on the number of incidents per million residents may perhaps be more telling. Tables 3.2 and 3.3 provide state-based rankings on the number of incidents per million residents, both from my data for 2007 and from the EFI data for 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018. Considering incidents per million residents rather than merely the raw number of incidents leads to somewhat different conclusions about the location of anti-Christian violence. Uttar Pradesh, a state of particular concern to t hose focused on raw numbers, does not appear among the ten states with the most anti-Christian incidents per million residents either in my data for 2007 or in the EFI data for total incidents, 2014–2018. The states that do appear to have been particularly violence-prone and consistently so for the last decade are the three that appear on both lists in table 3.3 (in gray): Chhattisgarh, Goa, and Telangana (included in the Andhra Pradesh data in 2007). In addition, Madhya Pradesh, which was on the list for 2007, appeared just below the top ten, in twelfth place, in the period between 2014 and 2018. Over the last decade, then, we can say that these four states have been among the most consistently dangerous for Christians. Leaving aside the data from 2007 and looking only at the more recent years of the EFI data (for 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018) shows that four states or u nion territories—Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand, and Telangana—appeared on the top-ten list of states with the most anti-Christian incidents per million residents Table 3.2. Ranking of states, incidents per million residents, 2014–2018 (excl. 2016) RANK
2014
2015
2017
2018
1
Uttarakhand
Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh
Andaman and Nicobar Islands
2
Arunachal Pradesh
Goa
Goa
Chandigarh
3
Chhattisgarh
Madhya Pradesh
Puducherry
Puducherry
4
Telangana
Delhi
Tamil Nadu
Uttarakhand
5
Delhi
Telangana
Jharkhand
Telangana
6
Maharashtra
Jharkhand
Madhya Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh
7
Karnataka
Haryana
Telangana
Tamil Nadu
8
Kerala
Himachal Pradesh
Delhi
Jharkhand
9
Odisha
Punjab
Haryana
Chhattisgarh
10
Assam
Kerala
Maharashtra
Manipur
*States appearing in at least three of the four years are in gray.
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Table 3.3. Ranking of states, incidents per million residents, 2007 versus 2014–2018 RANK
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
2007
Goa Himachal Pradesh Karnataka Chhattisgarh Manipur Madhya Pradesh Odisha Andhra Pradesh (incl. Telangana) Maharashtra Jammu & Kashmir
2014–2018 (EXCL. 2016)
Chhattisgarh Andaman and Nicobar Islands Uttarakhand Goa Chandigarh Telangana Puducherry Tamil Nadu Jharkhand Arunachal Pradesh
*States appearing on both lists are in gray.
in at least three of the four years. While a variety of other states appear on one or another of these lists, none of them has had as consistently frequent incidents of anti-Christian violence as these four. If we were to make a complete list of states of concern, taking into consideration both incidents per million, raw number of incidents, consistent issues over the last decade, and states with a troubling significant recent increase in incidents, we would arrive at a list of eight states of particular concern at this particular historical moment: Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana (for persistent problems over the last five years or more), plus Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh for their more recent, rapid upsurge in violence. It is difficult to know what to make of Goa’s appearance on this list, however. While Christians have a long and proud history in Goa, their historical association with Portuguese colonialism, the sometimes coercive spread of Christianity, and the Inquisition have made them something of a target in recent years, and the recently deceased former chief minister of Goa, Manohar Parikkar, was known to have broadened his power base in part by supporting Sangh groups. Though his was a particularly Christian-friendly brand of Hindu nationalism that respected the traditional power of Goa’s Christian elites, the same cannot be said for the now-strengthened Sangh organizations he left behind.40 That said, Goa may appear on these lists largely b ecause its population is small enough that one or two incidents a year propel it into the ranks of states with the most violence per million residents. Such is also the case for other states appearing periodically on these lists, for example, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Manipur, and Puducherry (all of which have fewer than three million residents). Using the EFI data for 2014–2018, we can also arrive at a list of the ten safest states for Christians in the years between 2014 and 2018 (see t able 3.4).
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Table 3.4. Indian states and union territories with the fewest number of anti-Christian incidents, per million residents, 2014–2018 (excl. 2016) STATE RANK (FROM FEWEST TO MOST INCIDENTS)
Tripura Sikkim Nagaland Mizoram Meghalaya Lakshadweep Daman and Diu Dadra and Nagar Haveli Rajasthan Gujarat
Most of the states and union territories that appear on this list make sense. The states of Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya are all situated in the heavily Christianized Northeast, while Lakshadweep, Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli are relatively small union territories with around 350,000 or fewer residents. The EFI reports no anti-Christian incidents in these northeastern states or small union territories. The only real surprises on the list are Rajasthan and Gujarat. While the EFI recorded incidents in both states in the period between 2014 and 2018, the frequency of violence there appears to have declined in the past decade. Both states w ere areas of concern in the first decade of anti-Christian violence a fter 1998, when the number of incidents began to rise dramatically. It was in that very year, remember, that anti-Christian riots took place in the Dangs, Gujarat. Likewise, as shown in table 3.1, Rajasthan ranked eighth in the raw number of incidents recorded in my database for 2007 and 2008. In the EFI data from 2014–2018, however, neither of these two states appears among the top ten states by total incidents or incidents per million residents. Does this signal some improvement of Hindu-Christian relations in those states? Does it result from the development of more stable and effective systems of law and order? Or does it suggest, rather, that Hindu nationalism is so entrenched in these states—this certainly could be the case in Gujarat— that Sangh activists do not feel the need to stir up communal enmity or demonstrate their power. The Sangh Parivar has traditionally been strongest in India’s north and particularly in the states and union territories of the “Hindi belt”: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand,
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and Uttar Pradesh. Accordingly, the conventional wisdom, among many Christians, has been that incidents of anti-Christian violence are more likely to occur in such states. The foregoing discussion provides evidence in support of this conventional wisdom, insofar as t hese states appear frequently among the worst states in terms of anti-Christian violence. Even though states like Bihar and Himachal Pradesh rarely appeared among the top-ten worst states in the data provided above, they were almost always in the very next tier. That said, consistent issues in southern states such as Telangana, the small but consistent number of incidents in Goa, and the recent increase in violence in Tamil Nadu suggest that there are other, mediating factors at play. In the next section, we explore some of these potential factors.
Sociological Factors in the Location of Anti-Christian Violence here have been no large-scale statistical analyses of Hindu-Christian violence T like those that have been conducted for Hindu-Muslim Violence in India by Henrik Urdal, Ashutosh Varshney, and Steven Wilkinson (among others).41 Moreover, unfortunately, analyses comparable to t hese in scope and detail would be impossible based on my data set alone. Nevertheless, in 2010, the sociologist Tamara Leech and I used the data I had collected to conduct a state- by-state analysis of anti-Christian violence in the years 2007 and 2008. The analysis was published by Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2011 and raised as many questions as it settled. Nevertheless, in what follows, I highlight some of the most striking results of our investigation.42 Our analysis focused on the links between political, ethnic, or religious vio lence and four categories of f actors that have been explored in previous studies of the topic. The first category was demographic. Impoverished countries have been shown to be more vulnerable to internal political violence, and theorists have also posited (contested) correlations between violence and (1) population growth/density, (2) higher sex ratios (i.e., a surplus of males), (3) youth bulges, and (4) social control (which we approximated with reference to data on police presence).43 The second category included the relative size and growth of conflicting groups, which various theorists have argued are important factors in ethnic and religious violence.44 As part of our investigation into t hese topics, we analyzed the relative size and growth of Hindus, Christians, and SC/ST communities (because of the way SC/ST identities interweave with and inform the conflict between Hindus and Christians).
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The third category of factors we investigated included political power and political competition. In various contexts, scholars have demonstrated a correlation between violence and the rule of particular parties or between violence and close political competition.45 In the context of India, for example, Wilkinson found a correlation between close political races and Hindu-Muslim riots.46 Those opposed to the BJP in India frequently allege that violence spikes in states under its control or that of its National Democratic Alliance, while others have alleged a correlation between violence and close political competition between the Congress and the BJP, in the context of which the latter is accused of intentionally exacerbating majority-minority conflict in hopes of producing a strong pro-Hindu nationalist response and thereby consolidating the Hindu vote in its favor.47 The fourth and final category we investigated pertained to measures of human capital and the relative deprivation of Hindus and Christians. Scholars have, for example, posited a link between social unrest and low levels of employment and education, which have been shown to correlate with terrorist violence in Algeria and ethnonationalist violence in Ireland.48 Likewise, low levels of literacy and education have been shown to correlate with criminal violence and domestic violence in India.49 Asghar Ali Engineer argues that economic competition fuels Hindu-Muslim violence in India, and it is often alleged by t hose opposed to Christianity in India that violence against Christians is a response to the perception that Christians benefit unfairly from their ostensibly greater access to Western education and wealth, that they are thereby economically competitive to a degree not warranted by their sheer numbers, and (probably most importantly) that they use their wealth to lure the impecunious toward the Christian fold.50 In our analyses of the first category, demographic factors, the only significant and consistent correlation was between incidents of violence and police presence. This fact may provide some hope that greater attention to law and order in general could provide at least a partial solution to the problem of anti- Christian violence. That said, other factors may complicate or drive this correlation, such as the fact that anti-Christian violence tends to occur more frequently in rural areas (which generally have less of a police presence). In terms of the second category, relative size and growth of the Hindu and Christian communities, our analyses demonstrated significant correlation between incidents of anti-Christian violence and the growth of the Christian community. The likelihood of violence against Christians r ose along with the growth of the Christian community, peaked when its decadal growth rate reached 45–50 percent, and declined significantly a fter that. T hese findings would seem to provide at least a modicum of support to those who suggest
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that anti-Christian violence results from the perception (and reality, in some states) that Christianity in India is growing at the expense of Hinduism. We also found a statistically significant correlation between the p ercent size of the SC population and incidents of anti-Christian violence. Since the SCs have historically been less likely than upper-caste Hindus to support nationalist c auses and Sangh-affiliated political parties, a correlation between incidents of anti- Christian violence and the p ercent SC population could be interpreted as a result of the Sangh or the political parties it supports feeling less politically secure (and therefore more prone to Hindu-consolidating acts of antiminority violence) in regions with a higher population of SCs. Nevertheless, only further investigation could lead one to offer this interpretation with any degree of confidence. Our investigation of factors having to do with the third category, political power and competition, provided what are perhaps the most fascinating results. The data show a significant correlation between both the number of Lok Sabha (lower h ouse) seats held by the NDA (the BJP’s political alliance) and the percentage of votes received by the NDA in states in which there had been violence against Christians in 2007 or 2008 (5.78/37 percent) versus states in which there had not (0.42/26 percent). These findings could be used to support the assertion that such violence is produced by or at least tolerated by the BJP and its NDA allies in the states they govern. Counterintuitively, however, the data also suggest that the strategy—if it is, in fact, a conscious strategy—may not work. Of the states in which the NDA lost at least ten Lok Sabha seats in the 2009 elections (i.e., the elections immediately following the years from which our data were culled), e very single one of them had experienced anti-Christian violence, whereas only 41 percent of the states in which the NDA lost no seats had experienced such an incident. However, it is important not to run ahead of the data and argue, in absolute terms, that anti-Christian violence backfires against the parties that are perceived to support or condone it, because an alternative and perfectly plausible explanation is that the declining number of Lok Sabha seats is the cause rather than the effect of the incidents of anti-Christian violence, that is, that anti- Christian violence is a strategy employed by the NDA in states where it feels its power declining and eschewed in states where it feels its power is secure. And, of course, nothing about this correlation precludes the possibility of it being produced by yet other factors not yet identified. Our investigations into the fourth category of h uman capital indicated that anti-Christian violence was generally more likely in states with lower levels of human capital, and t here was a particularly robust inverse correlation between Hindu male work participation and incidents of anti-Christian violence. There was also a statistically significant link between violence and the relative
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Hindu-Christian rates of male employment. Of the states where Christian male work participation rivaled or outpaced that of Hindus, 86 percent experienced an incident of anti-Christian violence, whereas an incident of anti- Christian violence occurred in only 30 percent of those states where Hindu male work participation outpaced that of Christian males. The results for literacy rates trended in the same direction but w ere less statistically significant. In general, then, t hese data could provide support to t hose who argue that anti- Christian violence is a result of perceived economic competition between Hindus and Christians or those who deem it the frustrated activity of unemployed and underemployed Hindus (i.e., the “lumpen masses” argument). In addition to national-level analyses, we performed a number of subnational, regional investigations, and our results varied considerably from region to region. In general, however, our investigations at both the national and subnational levels would support greater exploration of hypotheses focusing on politi cal/economic competition and perceived demographic threat (“perceived,” because, with roughly 80 percent of the population, Hindus need not at the national level have any fear of being overtaken by Christians). Nevertheless, due to the diverse and contentious character of the Hindu population in India, the large number of more secular-minded Hindus who reject the Sangh and its political parties, and the fact that many SC Hindus vote against Sangh-affiliated parties and policies due to the perceived upper-caste Hindu bias of those parties, it perhaps becomes easier to understand why those who support the BJP and the NDA may consider themselves a minority under threat. And it becomes particularly easy in contexts where there are in fact real threats to Hindu power, such as (1) Hindu growth rates that are low relative to that of other communities, (2) the presence of large SC communities that may ally with religious minorities against upper-caste Hindus, and (3) economic indicators suggesting that the Christian minority can now or will soon be able to outcompete the Hindu majority in the job market. In such contexts, and particularly when political competition is fierce and the competing parties at near parity, when employment and educational achievements are low, and when the police have a lower presence, Sangh activists and their political supporters may be expected to respond to their real or perceived declining social and political power by instrumentally producing or condoning violence against Christians (even though our data call into question whether this instrumentalization has the intended result). A note of caution is necessary here, however. The analysis above rests primarily on a comparison of state-by-state statistics. As this analysis has shown, there are indeed some significant differences from state to state, and these differences may be at least partially explained by statewide political, cultural, and caste/tribe dynamics. However, such dynamics often diverge from one dis-
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trict or even one block to another within states, such that a much more telling (but much more daunting) investigation would involve the mapping of incidents of violence at the block level, with an accompanying analysis of the political, cultural, and caste/tribe dynamics that reaches in detail down to that very local level.51 Such a study would likely result in more statistically significant correlations than those we discovered in our state-by-state analysis. We must return, briefly, to the argument I have made elsewhere in this volume, that is, that one additional factor in anti-Christian violence is resistance to the Western secular modernities of which Christianity is perceived to be a significant part. This more cultural argument resists statistical investigation for two reasons. First, as I have indicated e arlier, it would be nearly impossible to disentangle this factor from others like political and economic competition. More importantly, however, since it involves resistance to a certain diffuse set of politi cal, economic, and cultural ideals and practices, there would be no s imple way to quantify the degree to which such ideals and practices had made their inroads into a particular area in order to investigate whether a statistical correlation between them and incidents of violence can be demonstrated. From the data discussed in this chapter, then, the only significant evidence that emerges in favor of such an argument is that attacks on Christian service institutions and NGOs remain common. For a discussion of why attacks on such institutions is significant in terms of my thesis that anti-Christian violence stems at least in small part from resistance to Western secular modernities, see chapter 5. Talk of targeting, correlations, and patterns suggests that there is in anti- Christian violence a kind of rationality, and indeed, the everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence do make a certain kind of “sense”—which is not the same as saying they are justified—in that they seem most regularly to affect those most visibly responsible for the growth of Christianity and to take place in areas of greatest economic and political competition between Christians and Hindus. That said, it is nearly universally acknowledged that anti-Christian attacks, even t hose of the everyday variety, are sometimes provoked or used by parties with no particular animosity t oward Christians as a way of dealing a psychological, legal, or economic blow to or carrying out a vendetta against rivals who just happen to be Christian. And if the suggestion that t here is reason or rationality in the context of everyday anti-Christian attacks is dangerous, it is even more so in the context of riot violence, where precise targeting appears to break down to a considerable degree. The next two chapters therefore look closely at the riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, where the appearance of pattern and rationality seemingly discernible in the everyday acts of anti- Christian violence are replaced by a violence far more indiscriminate.
Indian Christian villagers wait for a space to be allotted as they return to a relief camp from nearby jungles following an attack, allegedly by Hindu fundamentalists, at Raikia, a village in Orissa’s Kandhamal District. Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP via Getty Images.
Ch a p ter 4
“Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men” The Riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, 2007–2008
It is not easy to describe the Kandhamal riots in a straightforward manner. Despite the intervening years, t here remain a frustratingly large number of questions about what actually happened, and in addition to the simple lack of information available to all but those directly involved, there is the additional problem of propaganda. From the very beginning, victims, perpetrators, and other political actors in India attempted to frame the narrative of the riots in ways that supported their respective agendas. These framing narratives influenced public media in significant ways, contributing to the emergence of a significant divide between the way the story of Kandhamal was told by national, English-language media (newspapers, journals, television stations), on the one hand, and local, vernacular-language media sources, on the other. This divide developed in the way it often does in India. The English-language media told a somewhat more secular story, with concern for the victims of violence prominently featured, along with condemnations of the involvement of Sangh activists. Local, vernacular-language media sources, in comparison, frequently focused on what they deemed the provocations of Christians, which in their view explained or even justified the violence. They also spent relatively more time covering the attack (in the first round of riots) and assassination (in the second round) of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, as well as the failure of the police to find and prosecute his assailants. The differences w ere not merely in the framing of the story but also 143
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in the presentation of “facts.” In developing a narrative of events in Kandhamal, therefore, one must make choices about which sources of information to follow and why, and the sources of information one chooses to follow have a significant impact on who ends up appearing to be the victims, the perpetrators, and the enablers. It is important, therefore, to be open about what kinds of choices one makes in developing one’s own narrative. My narrative derives in part from the testimony of witnesses I interviewed in 2010 and 2011 (and occasionally thereafter).1 I have relied, in particular, on witnesses whose stories w ere complicated, that is, on witnesses who revealed information that did not serve their purposes or that of their community along with information that did. In addition to witness testimonies, I have chosen to rely primarily (but not exclusively) on national English-language newspaper reports and the inquiry commission reports produced afterward by various human rights organizations and government commissions. The choice is partly one of convenience; English-language sources are more accessible on the web and are easier for me to read. More importantly, however, I have chosen to follow these sources because they seem to me relatively more forthcoming about their sources and evidence (though not always as much as one might hope). Reports in newspapers like the Times of India, The Hindu, and the Dec can Herald, particularly t hose written a fter the dust of Kandhamal had settled to some degree, correspond closely with accounts provided by victims, victim-and minority-rights advocacy groups (such as the Indian government- sponsored National Commission for Minorities [NCM]), and Christians involved in and investigating the conflict. The narratives t hese sources present also tend to be more complicated, acknowledging both attacks by Hindus on Christians and the infrequent but still substantial attacks on Hindus by Christians and implying the culpability of many different parties. I therefore find them more reliable and believable than the many patently one-sided accounts found in media outlets controlled by or friendly to the Sangh. It should be noted, however, that Sangh Parivar politicians and sympathizers frequently allege that the broad correspondence in the narratives of victims, minority-rights activists, and government commissions derives not from a mutual reliance on fact but rather from the Western, liberal, anti-Hindu, minority-oriented bias of the national, English-language press that reports them. I will therefore draw attention to contested interpretations and clashing perspectives when relevant. There is no doubt an element of propaganda involved in how both Christians and their critics tell the story of what happened in Kandhamal. Both seek to persuade others to view the conflict as they do and to draw from it the same conclusions about what should be done in response. Nevertheless, I must ad-
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mit that I find more reason to be skeptical of Sangh and Sangh-friendly sources, largely due to the fact that they more frequently than other sources seem to forthrightly deny certain basic facts about which there is wide consensus among victims, perpetrators, law officers, government officials, and reporters (e.g., that non-Christians actually did in many cases attack Christians, that Christians did not burn down their own homes to elicit sympathy, and that Christians were in many cases injured, sometimes fatally). Proceeding in this way, then, I have constructed a narrative of the events in two primary rounds of violence beginning, respectively, in December 2007 and August 2008. First, however, some contextual background. Kandhamal (see figures 4.1 and 4.2) is largely a rural, hilly, forested district and is one of the poorest districts in one of the poorest states of India. Of the district’s residents, 75 percent live below the poverty line.2 Existence is tenuous t here. Rates of malaria infection are unusually high, even for India, as are infant mortality rates. Demographically, Kandhamal is dominated by tribals (mostly Kandha), who comprise slightly over half the population and own more than three-quarters of the cultivatable land. The low-caste Panas, most of whom have become Christian, constitute 17 percent of the population. The majority of the workforce is engaged in agriculture, and the region draws a considerable proportion of its
Figure 4.1. Map of India showing Kandhamal.
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Figure 4.2. Map of contemporary Kandhamal.
income from minor forest and agricultural products (e.g., tamarind and siali leaf, turmeric, hill brooms, pulses, niger seeds, and mustard) that it sells to the outside world through intermediaries, who are mostly Oriyas, that is, caste Hindus from other regions of Odisha who have, over time, immigrated to the interior regions for trade.3 As we will see in the more analytical chapter that follows this more descriptive one, the interactions, alliances, and tensions among these three groups—K andhas, Panas, and Oriyas—account in significant ways for the dynamics of the Kandhamal violence.
A Violent Past: Incidents of Anti-Christian Violence before 2007 While the scale of the two rounds of rioting in Kandhamal in 2007–2008 surpasses that of any other Hindu-Christian riots in independent India, there were precursors and signs of trouble, even in Odisha itself. The late Biswamoy Pati writes, “When slogans (in Oriya) like ‘bideshi padre hatao—desha banchao’ (remove the foreign padre—save the nation) appeared on the walls of a few buildings of western Orissa in the 1980s they were not taken seriously.” Since
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then, Pati continues, there has developed “a level of unprecedented homogenisation and religious polarization leading many to believe that their very survival is threatened by the presence of the Christians and the Muslims.”4 Even before 1980, there were incidents of anti-Christian violence in Odisha. Motilal Pradhan, whose disabled younger brother Rasanand died in the second (2008) round of Kandhamal riots, reported, “Every year, we have to live in fear when [Hindu] rath yatras or conventions are held in our area.”5 According to the Catholic archbishop of Bhubaneswar (the capital of Odisha), Raphael Cheenath, during one particular rath yatra led by the regionally famous Hindu activist Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati in 1990, seventeen churches were destroyed.6 As described below, Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati would play an important role in the 2007–2008 riots, as both protagonist and victim. Violence does not only occur during rath yatras, however. During a few months in 1986–1987, for example, nineteen churches w ere allegedly destroyed 7 by mobs in Kandhamal District. Then, in 1994, anti-Christian elements attacked eleven families associated with a Christian congregation in the eastern coastal district of Jagatshingpur, stripping and molesting seven Christian women and then removing them and others to a different village where they were forcibly tonsured and given cow dung to eat as part of their “reconversion” ceremony. Afterward, the families were socially and economically boycotted by other villagers. The victims’ pastor, Subhas Samal, reported that he was tortured by the police to whom he tried to report the attack.8 In December 1998, an anti-Christian mob allegedly set fire to ninety-two homes, a church, a police station, and a government vehicle after earlier breaking into the local jail and killing two Christian prisoners. A month later, the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons were burned to death in the jeep where they were sleeping in Odisha. The incident made international news, in part no doubt because they were foreigners but also because two of the victims were children. U.S. president Bill Clinton dispatched Robert Seiple from the State Department’s international religious freedom department to investigate. However, less recognized both by foreign politicians and in international press coverage was that Staines’s death came just a fter anti- Christian riots in the Dangs, Gujarat, and in the midst of a period of heightened violence against Odisha’s and India’s Christians more generally. In March 1999, a fter a visiting BJP politician inflamed interreligious tensions in Odisha by encouraging local Hindus to paint a trishul over a cross the Christians had erected on a hill nearby, rioters there set 157 Christian homes ablaze and attacked twelve Christians, leaving three of them with gunshot wounds. Afterward, in what would become a recurring and particularly
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cynical accusation during the Kandhamal riots, a BJP official asserted that the Christians had burned down their own homes.9 In September 1999, Father Arul Doss was attacked in his rural Odisha church, not far from where Staines and his two sons had been immolated. As Doss tried to flee, his attackers shot him in the chest with arrows and then beat him to death.10 Several years later, in 2004, the Lady of Charity Catholic Church in the middle of Raikia, a small town in Kandhamal, was attacked and vandalized by a large mob. F ather Alphonse Boliarsingh, who was vicar of the church at the time, alleges that local police were leading the rioters and even opened the church gates for them.11 Smaller-scale, everyday incidents of violence have been occurring regularly in Odisha from the 1970s onward. For example, a Catholic priest from Kandhamal told me about an attack he survived that took place on October 18, 2000. On the day of the attack, the priest was with another priest, at work in a rural parish of Kandhamal. Suddenly p eople came and began attacking the two priests and the seven students who w ere with them. The students fled, but the priests were surrounded such that they could not escape. The assailants beat the priests on the head with sticks and knocked them to the ground. After some time, a woman with a child about one year old came and said, “Don’t kill my f ather; if you must kill someone, kill this child.” The clever and daring gambit worked, and the mob, chastened, let the priests escape. Another woman came, led the pastors away, and gave them drink. After they had revived somewhat, they went to a hospital in the town of Raikia for treatment. T here, anti-Christian doctors w ouldn’t serve them, so they moved on to the district hospital, where they finally received treatment for their wounds. Such incidents make it clear that the 2007–2008 Kandhamal riots w ere not without precedent, and the reality of regular, smaller-scale incidents of anti- Christian violence in Odisha makes it difficult to determine whether the 2007– 2008 riots w ere different in kind from what had come before or only in degree.12 The regularity of such incidents also makes it difficult to determine when exactly the 2007–2008 riots began, since the Hindu-Christian scuffles in Brahmanigaon to which we now turn, and which observers generally identify as the beginning of the first round of riots, look, in many ways, little different from the kinds of routine violence that Christians had been experiencing in the region for decades.
Part 1: The Christmas Violence of 2007 In the last days of December 2007, lower-caste Christians in Brahmanigaon, Kandhamal District, Odisha, w ere constructing a Christmas pandal (or torana),
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a long, cloth-draped scaffolding adjacent to a main street in town. The construction of the pandal was sponsored by the Dr. Ambedkar Banika Sangh (ABS, elsewhere reported as Ambedkar Vanijya Sangho) of Brahmanigaon, a low-caste Christian organization. As incorporating the name of the low-caste rights activist and India’s first law minister B. R. Ambedkar might suggest, the ABS had been involved in agitating against the exploitation of low-caste Panas in the local economy by helping them gain direct access to the trade market. The fact that shops owned by members of the ABS were targeted in the ensuing violence, then, lends some support to t hose who would interpret the riots as a response to lower-caste (and only secondarily Christian) assertion.13 The ABS had also sponsored the erection of a Christmas pandal in the previous year, though in 2007 it was reportedly done with more pomp and grandeur. And though ABS leaders asserted that they had sought and received permission from the authorities for the construction of the pandal in 2007, some allege that they had received permission only to use loudspeakers during the celebrations there.14 In any case, in the days leading up to the riots, there were signs of potential trouble. The Kui Samaj, a Kandha ST organ ization that had strained relations with the SC and largely Christian Pana community in Kandhamal, had called for a statewide bandh, or strike, on December 24 and 25 to press a variety of its political demands, including (1) that SC Panas not be reclassified as an ST community (a reclassification sought by some Panas, for reasons explained below), (2) that the government do more to prosecute those, including some Pana Christians, who had gotten fake ST caste certificates to take advantage of ST reservations and other benefits, and (3) that the government take proactive steps to prevent encroachment on tribal land by nontribal p eoples (including, again, Panas).15 On December 23, Christian w omen and youth in Brahmanigaon w ere warned by some Hindus not to put up their Christmas decorations. Though the pandal had been constructed in the same public space as the previous year, this year some local Hindus demanded it be removed because Hindus had recently celebrated Durga Puja there.16 It is clear, then, that contestations over religious space, which are common in South Asia, w ere a prominent f actor in the eventual conflict. Disagreements between Hindus and Christians regarding the pandal resulted in some minor altercations on the evening of the twenty-third, according to Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, prompting him to plan a trip t here on the twenty-fourth.17 In response to t hese developments, several delegations of Christians visited police officers in the days before the violence began, requesting extra protection for their Christmas festivities. Christmas celebrations had in previous years been monitored and protected by police, but this year local forces were strained
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b ecause a significant number of rural police officers had been called away to Bhubaneswar, the state capital, in preparation for tenth-anniversary cele brations of the Biju Janata Dal Party (which ruled the state in a coalition with the BJP). The celebrations were scheduled for December 26. On the morning of December 24, a Christian delegation asked police to officially open the local haat, or market, in Brahmanigaon, despite the Kui Samaj’s call for a bandh. (Christians needed the market to make last-minute Christmas preparations.) The assistant subinspector of police arrived and opened the market at seven a.m. An hour or two later, a large group of Hindus arrived, conducted (Christian eyewitnesses assert) by Bikram Raut, a local RSS leader. The Hindu group attempted to forcefully close the market.18 Police intervened and kept it open. L ater, Raut’s group began to rough up Christians in the market, and according to one Christian eyewitness who spoke to Tehelka magazine’s reporters, Christians responded by looting Hindu shops.19 Scuffles broke out between Hindu and Christian merchants, effectively closing the marketplace. Then, around ten a.m., a crowd of perhaps five hundred people, directed again by Bikram Raut, eyewitnesses say, returned and ransacked the Christmas pandal, setting it ablaze in the presence of the police, who intentionally or out of helplessness did not intervene. The crowd then attacked Christians and destroyed their shops. Shots were fired, and at least one young Christian was seriously wounded. The youth, Avinash Nayak, later posed for Tehelka photojournalists, exposing his bandaged wound and standing in front of the destroyed pandal.20 In fear, Christians fled to the jungle, abandoning their plans for Christmas Eve services. One Christian who lived through the attack told me, “When we heard that they w ere coming to attack us[, we ran to the jungle]. We stayed t here u ntil four o ’clock in the morning, and then we came back.” Then, at around ten forty-five a.m., while traveling to Brahmanigaon, where he was reportedly planning to conduct a yagna (a Hindu fire ritual), perhaps in front of the disputed pandal itself, the car of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati was forced to stop in Daringbadi by a bus blocking the narrow road. Several competing explanations have emerged for why the bus was blocking the road and what happened next. Some say the bus had mechanical problems and had stalled or was otherwise disabled. According to such p eople, the arrival of Lakshmanananda’s car was not expected but rather came to the attention of local Christians when Lakshmanananda or other passengers in the car got into a heated argument with the bus operators. According to others, the argument was not between Lakshmanananda’s entourage and the bus operators but rather between Lakshmanananda’s bodyguards and a group of
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Christians along the road, who were playing loud Christmas music to which the swami’s entourage voiced objection. As they tell the story, Lakshmanananda’s bodyguards roughed up some Christians and vandalized church equipment.21 Both of t hese narratives assume that the altercation at Daringbadi was merely coincidental, the result of the swami having gotten unexpectedly stopped on the road. According to a third version of events, however, Christians at Daringbadi had heard that Lakshmanananda was en route to Brahmanigaon and wanted to prevent him from reaching the village, so they intentionally parked a bus across the road and filled it with Christians spoiling for a fight.22 All versions of the story agree, more or less, on what happened next. Christians surrounded and began attacking the swami’s car. Lakshmanananda’s own account agrees, in detail, with those given by others, except in its implication that the attack was entirely unprovoked (i.e., not relating to any previous arguments or the actions of Lakshmanananda’s bodyguards): As soon as my vehicle stopped, [a] number of persons having arms in their hands started attacking my vehicle. I was sitting inside the vehicle and my driver locked the doors. Miscreants wanted to drag me out of the vehicle but [the] driver, security man and others sitting in my vehicle resisted tooth and nail. As a result of which miscreants could not do much harm to me except a few injuries through broken glass pieces but my fellowmen were injured. Driver whisked away the vehicle to save our life but one person remained outside the vehicle who has been brutally beaten by the miscreants. L ater he was admitted to the M.K.C.G. Medical College Hospital, Berhampur in a critical condition.23 According to a Christian resident of Daringbadi interviewed by James Ponniah, the man beaten up by Christians was also stripped naked and paraded around the village.24 Lakshmanananda and his entourage then traveled to the nearby Daringbadi Community Health Center and remained there for around a day. Some of those who saw him there, including a delegation of Christians, say there was no evidence that he had been hurt at all and certainly none that he had been hurt seriously.25 Yet pictures of him lying on a hospital cot looking somewhat u nder the weather circulated widely in news reports and through the internet. And a video was broadcast by local and national television stations of him in the clinic saying, “When people become Christians, they become enemies . . . of the nation. I w ill not tolerate this.”26 Television reports also showed Lakshmanananda’s men pointing to a car with a cracked windshield and a small dent on the front fender. Some Sangh Parivar sources initially (and
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erroneously) alleged that Lakshmanananda’s injuries were “serious” and that one of his men had been killed, though it is possible that in the early stages, Lakshmanananda did not yet know the fate of the man they had left b ehind. The story of the attack on Lakshmanananda dominated press coverage for the first days of the conflict, and many media outlets identified the altercation between Lakshmanananda and Christians as the first incident in and cause of the ensuing violence. ABC News, BBC News, the Times of India, and such news agencies as the AP (Associated Press), IANS (Indo-Asian News Service), and PTI (Press Trust of India) all portrayed the story in this way until December 26 and beyond, many of them carrying the picture of Lakshmanananda on his hospital bed without any explanation as to the severity (or lack thereof ) of his injuries. Even as late as December 27, for example, the Economic Times, relying on a PTI story, reported, “The attack is said to be triggered by an assault on VHP leader Laxamanananda [sic] who led an anti-conversion movement.”27 Yet while it is clear that news of the incident involving Lakshmanananda exacerbated the tensions and might well have been the main cause for their dissemination beyond Brahmanigaon and Daringbadi, it is also equally clear that the events in Brahmanigaon preceded it. L ater news reports in major news outlets eventually recognized this fact, though those with sympathy for the Sangh Parivar cause continued to portray the violence as a simple (and justifiable) response to what was portrayed by them as an unprovoked attack on Lakshmanananda. Reports of the incident in Daringbadi reached Brahmanigaon around two p.m. on December 24 (long a fter the morning clashes there), and when they became more widely known, the RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal, with the support of the BJP and the Kui Samaj, in protest called for a four-hour bandh on the following day (Christmas). Even before Christmas day, however, the vio lence began to spread. At around four p.m. on the twenty-fourth, as Christians in Barakhama village were preparing for Christmas Eve services, a mob estimated at two thousand destroyed a Pentecostal church and then began burning Christian homes. Then, during the bandh on Christmas Day itself, an anti-Christian protest organized by the Kui Samaj processed through the village at around ten a.m. Sangh sources suggest that the protesters w ere all tribals, while local Christian victims assert that nontribal members of Sangh outfits w ere among them, and the names of those leading the protests, as recorded in the affidavits of Christians affected by the subsequent attacks, indicate a mixture of both tribal Kandha and caste Hindu (Oriya) participants. The affidavit of one Pana Christian villager, Prakash Kumar Nayak, describes the scene: “A mob of about 300 persons shouting slogans such as ‘Jai Bajrang Bali Ki, Jai Shri Ram . . . etc.’ [‘victory,’ respectively, to Rama and Ba-
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jrang Bali, or Hanuman] walked through main road of Barakhama. It was intended to disturb the Church services on Christmas day and provoke us Christians. The mob was led by leaders of the Bajrang Dal.”28 According to Christian sources, the protesters began vandalizing churches. Feeling threatened, the Christians started pelting the protesters with stones. The protesters assert that the Christians appeared to have stockpiled large rocks for this very purpose. In the altercation, a Kandha tribal protester, Khageswar Mallick, died.29 Christians on the scene claim he fell from a church he was scaling in order to vandalize it. Hindus on the scene claim he was struck by a stone and killed. Several Christians were arrested in the case, and the trial remained ongoing as this volume went to press. Then, around three p.m., according to victims’ affidavits, anti-Christian groups returned with larger numbers of people, perhaps as many as three thousand. Participants in the mob wore saffron headbands, and some carried weapons. The mob began destroying Christian houses. Two Christians were killed, while most of the rest fled to the jungles and eventually to relief camps.30 On the next day (the twenty-sixth), an even bigger mob attacked Christians in Barakhama again, sending the Christians who had returned to their homes back into the jungles. By the end of the conflict several days later, 415 of 450 Christian homes and several churches in Barakhama had been burned to rubble, according to an All-India Christian Council fact-finding report. During the violence, the Christian Bhogra Naik was murdered and gruesomely dismembered after his home had been destroyed.31 Nearby Baliguda was also affected on Christmas Day, when a mob attacked a Catholic church along with its associated convent and seminary. Furniture was pulled out into the street and burned; buildings were lit aflame. Religious objects and images w ere destroyed or defaced. Catholic workers fled to the forests. The convent’s cow died in the conflagration. Some reports suggested that rioters had deemed it a Christian cow and therefore, despite widespread veneration for cows in India, burned it to death. According to Christian eyewitnesses, the mob was chanting “Salle Christian manonku jeevan re mari diyo, girja dhansa koro” (Kill the Christians, destroy the church).32 Firefighters at the fire station across the road reportedly did nothing. Some days later, according to Tehelka magazine, the convent’s s isters recalled “disbelievingly that several local non-Christians, who had been beneficiaries at [the convent’s] vocational courses, had been part of the 1,000-strong mob that attacked them.”33 Similarly, in Pobingia, vandals entered and ransacked St. Peter’s Church on Christmas morning. Police guarding the church fled when they heard hundreds of Hindus approaching and chanting anti-Christian slogans.34
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Around ten a.m., Brahmanigaon Christians began returning to their homes, having spent the night in the jungle. At around the same time, however, a group of several hundred Hindus, many from nearby villages, marched t oward the Christian street, ransacking homes and setting them ablaze as they proceeded toward the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, whose parishioners had built the controversial pandal. According to F ather Rabi Sabhasundar, the rioters entered the church compound with weapons of various kinds and destroyed musical instruments, as well as light and sound equipment. Then they burned the father’s residence, two motorbikes owned by the church, a generator, and other property. Church workers, their support staff, and Christians whose homes had been attacked were forced to flee again into the jungle.35 Later, other Christians and churches were attacked in half a dozen surrounding villages. The state government ordered one thousand officers to the affected areas, but their prog ress was impeded by the trunks of trees that had been intentionally downed across roads, e ither for the purpose of enforcing the Kui Samaj or Sangh bandhs or to intentionally prevent law enforcement officers from gaining access to violence-affected areas (or, conveniently, both). Late on Christmas Day, the government imposed a nighttime curfew on Brahmanigaon, Baliguda, Daringbadi, and the district capital, Phulbani. On the twenty-sixth, at least two more churches were burned, along with forty-one Christian houses in Brahmanigaon. Also in Brahmanigaon, several hundred people attacked a police station. Police repelled the attack, though several police officers were injured, and at least one person appears to have died as a result of police gunfire. Reports disagree on the composition of the mob. Reports from the BBC and other media suggest that the mob was led by Hindus, fearing retaliatory violence from Christians and demanding more protection from police or trying to get access to Christians who had taken shelter in the station. District Police Chief Narasimha Bhol, however, told the Times of India’s Sandeep Mishra that police forces suspected that Maoist Naxalites were “trying to take advantage of the situation and were involved in the attack on the police station.”36 Others, like the VHP, dispensed with the claim that Hindus or Maoists w ere involved and simply claimed t hose who attacked the police station w ere Christians who had chased their intended Hindu victims there.37 To help direct a police response to the clashes, the government dispatched two former Kandhamal District collectors to the scene and reassigned several hundred members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Despite continued problems in Brahmanigaon, incidents of violence began to decline. When the chief minister of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik, traveled to the region on the morning of December 27, he declared that the situation was improving.
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Throughout the day, however, rioters reportedly torched eleven more churches.38 Then, presumably in retaliation for anti-Christian attacks, a Christian mob of several thousand in Brahmanigaon entered the Oriya quarter of the city and began setting Hindu homes alight. The VHP asserted that the number of rioters was around three thousand and that they had counted a few Naxalites among the number.39 The significance of the fact that Christians targeted the Oriya (as opposed to the Kandha) quarter will become clear in the next chapter. Many self-consciously Christian media outlets buried this part of the story. At the very end of an article reviewing the anti-Christian violence in Odisha by Compass Direct News—the media outlet that perhaps more thoroughly than any other at that time covered violence against Christians in India and elsewhere and had as its tagline “News from the front lines of persecution”— came this short sentence: “Some Christians retaliated by torching Hindu homes.”40 However, a report by the general secretary of the All-India Christian Council, John Dayal, who had been part of a fact-finding team that traveled to Odisha in the early days of January, recorded the destruction of Hindu homes along with those of Christians. In the end, according to AICC data, around ninety-seven Hindu homes w ere burned in the Oriya part of Brahmanigaon. Another source puts the number at 120 of the 200 homes in the Oriya quarter of town.41 Similarly, in nearby Gadapur, Christians set fire to around 20 Hindu homes.42 As told by one of the Hindu victims to the Justice on Trial fact-finding team, “[The] Christian community from adjacent areas came out in large numbers (about 300 to 400) having pistols, guns, sticks, weapons e tc. in their hands and shouting anti-Hindu slogans. They made some blank fires [from guns] and threatened Gadapur’s Hindu p eople to flee from the village. . . . Fearing for their life, villagers went to the nearby jungles in the eve ning and miscreant Christians came with fire and torched the Hindus’ h ouses.”43 BBC News’s Dan Isaacs also covered the story, reporting that “in the village of Gadapur, Hindu families, standing amid the charred rubble of their homes, told me how a mob of tribal Christians had descended on them, forcing them to flee into the forest, before destroying e very shop and dwelling in the village.”44 By the end of the twenty-seventh, the fourth day of communal rioting, the clashes finally subsided. No new clashes were reported on the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, but local officials w ere taking no chances. On the twenty- ninth, police officials turned back a fact-finding team sponsored by the AICC, as well as a delegation of opposition politicians (Congress, NCP, and the Left), anxious that they might stir up trouble. The AP reported that a steady stream of Christians, numbering in the hundreds, along with some Hindus, w ere
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heading to government relief camps out of fear or b ecause of financial deprivation or ruin related to the strife.45 Assessing the effects of the first round of violence in Kandhamal District is difficult, given the inaccessibility of the terrain and the widely varying reports of damage to institutions, homes, and bodies. The riots took place over four days and roughly six hundred square miles and affected at least six district blocks (district subdivisions). According to AICC reports, corroborated by those of the NCM, rioters destroyed 95 churches and 730 houses (around 120 of them Hindu) in the clashes. In addition, rioters destroyed or looted several convents, mission schools, and parish h ouses in the district and vandalized or desecrated a g reat deal of Christian property.46 There were six p eople seriously wounded, multiple reports of w omen molested or raped, and five p eople confirmed dead, with rumors of other deaths and murders. Of them, at least three, including Bhogra Naik (mentioned above), w ere Christian. The religion of a fourth, killed in the firefight at the Brahmanigaon police station, remains uncertain. The fifth victim was the Kandha non-Christian Khageswar Mallick, who died either from a fall or from stoning (as described above). In addition to the damage to property and body, the violent clashes provoked a refugee crisis. By December 30, there were around 500 refugees in four major camps. In the Brahmanigaon camp alone were 400.47 A day later, on the thirty-first, the Associated Press reported that around 700 Christians were in the camps.48 By the end of February, the assistant district magistrate of Kandhamal, Arunachal Das, told Compass Direct News that 3,091 refugees, Christian and Hindu, were living in five relief camps: two in Baliguda block and three in the Daringbadi area, which includes Brahmanigaon.49 That number would have been much higher if more men had entered the refugee camps, but many of them reportedly remained in the forests, fearing that they would be harassed or arrested (falsely or otherwise) for their involvement in the altercations if they returned. Life within the camps was not easy, particularly for the pregnant or elderly, a few of whom died there. The government reportedly provided very little food, clothing, or shelter, and evening temperatures occasionally dropped into the low fifties. Adding to the problems of victims was the fact that the reconstruction efforts became politicized in a number of ways. U ntil the Supreme Court of India reversed the decision in May 2008, for example, the Odisha state government prohibited NGOs from providing relief in the region.50 In addition, the Odisha state government’s promised compensation—40,000 rupees (approximately $1,000 at the time) for homes (which was eventually raised to 50,000 rupees, or around $1,250) and 200,000 rupees for institutions—was not
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only lower than expected and less than that given in similar circumstances in other states but also initially failed to provide reconstruction compensation for destroyed places of worship, which had been repeatedly targeted by vandals.
Part 2: The Region Fully Engulfed (2008 Riots) The 2007 Hindu-Christian riots in Odisha were, at the time, the most damaging and widespread in India’s independent history, but they pale in comparison to the violence unleashed on the same region just eight months later. Once again, the “triggering event” involved Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, who this time became a fatal victim of violence.51 On Saturday, August 23, 2008, as Lakshmanananda and a crowd of his followers were celebrating the birth of Krishna (Krishna Jayanti) at his ashram and girls’ school in Jalespata, a gang of several dozen well-armed and masked vigilantes broke through the gates, forced their way into Lakshmanananda’s room and gunned him down along with four of his followers (Mata Bhaktimayee, Krutanananda Baba, and Kishore Baba, who were inmates of the ashram, as well as a male relative of one of the girls in residence). Many of the victims’ corpses, including Lakshmanananda’s, also bore cut wounds, suggesting that they had been hacked or stabbed during the attack or a fter being killed. Lakshmanananda had periodically requested an increased security presence at the ashram after receiving repeated death threats, but at the time of the assassination, the government had posted only four lathi-wielding guards there, and two of them were absent, having gone home for dinner. Police investigators announced relatively early in their investigation that a note found at the scene suggested the involvement of Naxalites, who continued publicly over the next days and weeks to claim responsibility for the murder, which they portrayed as punishment for Lakshmanananda’s “persecution” of minorities. Nevertheless, most of Lakshmanananda’s supporters and nearly all regional and national leaders of Sangh Parivar organizations rejected the claim as a ruse, asserted the attackers were Christians, and began venting their anger on the Christian community. For example, Odisha state secretary of the VHP Gouri Prasad Rath said, “Christians have killed Swamiji. We w ill give a befitting reply.”52 Several local-language newspapers also ran editorials or stories implying Christian culpability, and Christian victims of the ensuing violence reported that rumors of Christians in their villages having participated in the assassination often preceded the attacks on them. Later, a local Sangh-affiliated
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organization, the Hindu Jagaran Samukhya (HJK), even produced “proof ” of Christian involvement from what they insisted were the minutes of meetings that took place in a church in Beticola to support their claim that Christians had planned and carried out the assassination of Lakshmanananda. On inspection, however, the minutes appear to have been rather clumsily forged, and Beticola church leaders quickly threatened to submit a 500-million-r upee (around $7 million) defamation suit against the HJK, a fter which HJK leaders began to distance themselves from it.53 Nevertheless, members of the Sangh Parivar, like the Bajrang Dal head Prakash Sharma, continued to refer to this forged proof of Christian involvement in their defense of what happened afterward, and seven Christians were convicted of the assassination after a trial in which the prosecution produced little other than suspicious witnesses and circumstantial evidence.54 In explaining his decision, the judge relied heavily on the minutes. (See below for more on the case.) Instead of burying the murdered swami in Jalespata, where he had lived for many years, Lakshmanananda’s disciples planned a funeral procession for the next day to transport the body to the first ashram he had established in Odisha, at Chakkapad. In what the swami’s disciples would have known would be a provocative act, the funeral procession did not take the direct route along the most developed roads from Jalespata to Chakkapad but rather traced a meandering, slow-moving, circuitous, 170-k ilometer route that was twice as long as necessary and required two days of travel with the swami’s body, over undeveloped roads and through many small villages that w ere still tense from 55 the December violence. The route chosen was a completely illogical one, unless the very purpose of the procession was to provoke conflict and inflict damage as widely as possible. The government of Odisha was criticized by nearly all non-Sangh observers for authorizing the procession to happen at all. Worse still, government officials allowed Praveen Togadia, the national general secretary of the VHP known for his fiery antiminority rhetoric—so well known in Odisha, in fact, that he had been banned from entering the state during at least one previous period of communal tension and would be banned again later—to travel to Kandhamal to join the procession for its entire two days. True to form, Togadia used his first remarks uttered on Odisha soil, just after landing at the Bhubaneshwar airport, to claim with no evidence that Christians w ere behind the killing: “A conspiracy has been hatched since long to kill [Swami Lakshmanananda] . . . and the entire Christian community has a hand in it.”56 While traveling along with the funeral procession, Togadia would go on to offer speeches that rhetorically fanned the communal flames, reportedly suggest-
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ing that t here was no place for Christians in Odisha and recommending that they be treated like the cows they ate.57 Afterward, he would demand an apology for the swami’s killing from the pope because one of the accused was a “priest.” As it turns out, the “priest,” Bijay Kumar Sanseth, was a Baptist leader (neither a Catholic nor a priest), but Togadia was merely following a long- established Sangh pattern of homogenizing Christians, denying differences among them, and proceeding as if they were all loyal to the pope.58 Officials representing the state’s law-and-order machinery did nothing to stop the proceedings, even though, fearing violence in the wake of the swami’s murder, they had imposed a curfew on sensitive areas. Not surprisingly, as the procession passed slowly through village a fter village, mourners vented their anger by attacking Christian homes and institutions, sometimes in the presence of police and state government officials.59 When the procession paused in the evening of the twenty-fourth in the district capital, Phulbani, for example, a Baptist church, the Catholic Christ the King Church, and several houses and vehicles owned by Christians were vandalized or destroyed by some of the p eople accompanying Lakshmanananda’s body through town. By the end of the procession’s first day, more widespread anti-Christian attacks had begun. The first known fatal victim was Rasanand Pradhan, a para lyzed man, who, being helpless and unable to flee, was burned alive in his own home in Gadragaon. “It was around 8 p.m.,” reported one of Rasanand’s older brothers, Ravindranath, a retired Indian soldier. “A mob of some 500 p eople attacked the village. They targeted Christian homes. The church was demolished. My house was destroyed. Within moments they flung petrol on my wheelchair-bound younger brother and torched him. We fled for our lives.”60 Standing in the jungle with his other brothers, Ravindranath watched helplessly while his brother died. Meanwhile, the attackers stood guard by the burning house, taunting and challenging Ravindranath and his brothers to come forward and save their brother’s life.61 When a mob attacked the Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre near Baliguda late in the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, staff members escaped out a back entrance and into the jungle, from where they saw their buildings burning. Among the staff members were a Christian nun, Meena Barwa, and a priest, Father Thomas Chellan, who returned to town around eight thirty in the evening, sheltering in the home of a Hindu man who had been friendly toward them. The next afternoon, the twenty-fifth, according to S ister Meena, anti-Christian assailants entered the room where she was staying and dragged her out of the house by her hair. In a statement she later released, Sister Meena recounted what happened next:
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I saw Fr. Thomas Chellan also being taken out and being beaten. The mob consisting of 40–50 men was armed with lathis, axes, spades, crowbars, iron rods, sickles etc. They took both of us to the main road. Then they led us to the burnt down [Catholic] Jan Vikas building saying that they w ere going to throw us into the smoldering fire. When we reached the Jan Vikas building, they threw us to the verandah on the way to the dining room, which was full of ashes and broken glass pieces. One of them tore my blouse and others my undergarments. Father Thomas Chellan protested but they beat him and pulled him out from t here. They pulled out my saree and one of them stepped on my right hand and another on my left hand and then a third person raped me. . . . When it was over, I managed to get up and put my petticoat and saree [on]. Then another young man whom I can identify caught me and took me to a room near the staircase. He opened his pants and was attempting to rape me when the crowd reached there. One man in the crowd told him not to do any further harm and so he left me. . . . I hid myself under the staircase. The crowd was shouting, [“W]here is that s ister, come let us rape her[!”] . . . They found me u nder the staircase and took me out to the road. There I saw Fr. Chellan was kneeling down and the crowd was beating him with hands and sticks. They were searching for a rope to tie both of us together to burn us in fire. Someone suggested to make us parade naked. They made us to walk on the road till Nuagaon market which was half a kilometre from there. They made us to fold our hands and walk. I was with petticoat and saree as they had already torn away my blouse and undergarments. They tried to strip even there but I resisted and they went on beating me with hands on my cheeks and head and with sticks on my back several times. When we reached the market place a dozen [Odisha State Armed Police men] w ere there. I went to them asking to protect me and I sat in between two policemen but they did not move.62 According to S ister Meena’s account, the assailants then pulled her away from the negligent police officers and harassed her further. Even when she did eventually end up in police custody, some of the police officers continued to chitchat cordially with her attackers and did nothing to arrest them. And then later, she says, while still in police custody, S ister Meena was cajoled into writing a sanitized and shortened first information report (FIR) and was cautioned not to implicate the police. The image of these police officers refusing to come to Sister Meena’s aid, as she desperately positioned herself between them, and
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continuing instead to talk casually with her attackers is, in my view, one of the most troubling and telling of all. Sister Meena’s traumatic experiences were eventually reported by The Hindu, a national newspaper, and began to receive international attention but not before local, pro-Sangh newspapers and organizations responded by accusing her of lying, or (in classic victim-blaming fashion) having a licentious character. Nevertheless, around a dozen suspects were eventually accused in her case. Eleven stood for trial. (The other absconded.) Three w ere convicted, and the rest w ere acquitted. There are, however, around seven different cases and appeals related to Sister Meena’s abduction and kidnapping working their way through various courts in the region, and her lawyers have petitioned the Odisha High Court to have them clubbed together for final consideration.63 Several police officers involved in the affair w ere at least temporarily suspended 64 for misconduct. Though justice in Sister Meena’s case remains incomplete, her case is an exception to the general rule that t hose accused of violence in the riots have been acquitted more often than convicted. Late on the evening of the twenty-sixth, as the violence continued, anti- Christian elements attacked Panchayati Sahi village, near Raikia. Ten-year-old Namrata Nayak and two of her siblings w ere sleeping t here, at a relative’s home, when an exploding bomb planted outside the home by rioters startled them awake. As a result of the blast, Namrata suffered severe burns on her face, neck, and back, but she could not seek immediate treatment because the rioters were still in the area. Her older sister and grandmother could only carry her into the bush, where they hid for some time. After the riots were over, Namrata’s m other came to the h ouse where her c hildren had been sleeping, saw it ablaze, and feared her children and relatives were all dead. But then they came out of the jungle. They called the police and fire department, but no one came. The next morning, the family took Namrata to the closest hospital, but it was already overcrowded, so they sold the family’s gold jewelry to pay for transportation to and treatment at a medical college 180 kilometers away. Photos of Namrata became the charred face of the conflict, but if her badly burned face represented the horror of the violence in Kandhamal, it also came, after her full recovery, to represent hope for normalcy and recovery.65 After weeks of treatment, Namrata recovered fully, returned with her family to Raikia, and was able to continue her studies in school.66 Over the next few days, media outlets began reporting widespread looting, murders, rapes, beatings, kidnappings, and the destruction of Christian homes, social service organizations, and churches across the region. Those killed were burned, bludgeoned, and hacked to death. Hundreds of Christians and some
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Hindus were already on the move, making their way surreptitiously through the forests to Bhubaneswar, relief camps, or other havens of safety. By the end of the twenty-seventh, The Hindu was reporting at least ten dead in dozens of incidents of violence across the region.67 Christian groups put the number much higher. The demise of Parikhita (or Parikit) Nayak, a Pana Christian, was particularly brutal. His ordeal began on August 25, when anti-Christian rioters attacked his village of Budedipada. According to the affidavit of one of the survivors and Parikhita’s wife, Kanaka Rekha (or Kanakrekha) Nayak, the rioters came with weapons and kerosene and started burning the homes of Christians. Fearing for their safety, the Christians ran away to the jungle. In the evening, they returned to find several homes destroyed and several Christians killed. The assailants returned, too, coming to Kanaka’s house in search of her husband, but he was not t here. Kanaka escaped again to the jungle, spending two days there with her husband and two young girls. Later, on the twenty-seventh, as the Christians made their way by bicycle to the nearest town, seeking shelter, they were s topped on the road by a group of Hindus who asked them their religion. Their assailants began taunting Kanaka’s husband, Parakhita, telling him to convert to Hinduism and beating him when he refused. Kanaka’s six-year-old daughter, Lipsarani, started pleading with the men not to kill her father, touching their feet in a desperate gesture of humility and respect, while Kanaka held their one-year-old daughter in her arms. In the meantime, the assailants had called people in Budedipada, who soon arrived at the scene. Once they did, a crowd of men gathered around Parakhita. One hit him on the neck with an ax. Another stabbed him in the abdomen. Then they killed him, cutting his body in three. Kanaka and her children had run away and witnessed the entire incident from some distance. After Parakhita’s death, the mob tied a rope around the corpse, dragged it to another spot, made a fire, and burned it.68 Afterward, Kanaka submitted a complaint, and police opened an investigation. During the t rials, Kanaka lived in hiding with her c hildren, having regularly received threats as a result of her providing testimony in the case (as did little Lipsarani).69 One of the men accused in the killing of Parakhita was Manoj Pradhan, a sitting BJP member of the state legislative assembly, who represented Kandhamal’s G. Udayagiri constituency. Pradhan was named in multiple FIRs during the Kandhamal riots, including several cases of murder, and was described by police as the “field commander” of the anti-Christian attacks.70 In the t rials that ensued, he was acquitted of several of the accusations against him but was found guilty of involvement in the events that led
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to the death of Parakhita (though not, significantly, of murder itself ). As a result, after his legal maneuvers failed, Pradhan was sentenced to jail and disbarred from the state legislative assembly (though not before first winning another term from jail). Like Parakhita, many of the victims w ere harried, harassed, and attacked over a span of several days. Bernard Digal, a Catholic priest who ultimately died from wounds he received in Kandhamal, suffered similarly. According to an affidavit of Sisir Pradhan, he and F ather Bernard Digal w ere residing in the Sankrakhole church on the evening of the twenty-fifth when they heard and saw a mob begin destroying the nuns’ quarters not far away. The rioters w ere carrying weapons and kerosene and chanting phrases like “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Bajrang Bali ki” (again, “victory,” respectively, to Rama and Bajrang Bali, or Hanuman). Pradhan and Digal fled to the jungle, from where they saw the miscreants destroy their vehicle, church, residence house, and servants’ quarters, kill a dog that lived at the church, and cut down its trees. Pradhan and Digal then walked through the forest in the dark and arrived at the home of a Christian in Katimaha, at around four a.m. on the twenty- sixth. That afternoon, the Christian who was sheltering them reported that the villagers were expecting an attack that night from people associated with Sangh Parivar groups. Pradhan and Digal moved to Dudukangia, a village several miles away, but w ere met there with the same story. During the evening of the twenty-sixth, they then fled to the forest. Since it was raining heavily, they took shelter in the remains of a church that rioters had destroyed on the previous day. Near midnight, according to Pradhan, thirty to forty armed p eople came to the church. Pradhan, who was sleeping more lightly, managed to escape into the bush, but the rioters caught Digal. From his jungle vantage point, Pradhan heard the priest’s assailants chanting “Maro F ather ke” (Kill the priest). Then he saw them begin to beat Digal. At five thirty in the morning, a fter the rioters had left, Pradhan returned to the church and found Digal naked, bleeding, badly bruised, and semiconscious. Pradhan called the police, but they came only at nine. The police took Digal to the Tikabali government hospital. From there he was moved to the Phulbani government hospital, then a hospital in Bhubaneswar, and finally to a hospital in Mumbai, but he never fully recovered from his internal injuries and died two months later, during an operation to remove a blood clot from his brain.71 His body was flown to Bhubaneswar, where more than three thousand people attended his funeral. On the day that Digal was attacked, August 26, police imposed a curfew on violence-affected villages and again called for help from the CRPF. On the twenty-seventh, local police threatened rioters with a shoot-on-sight order. But
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law and order had already effectively broken down in the region, and this time the violence was more widespread, more systematic, more long lasting, and more gruesomely effective. Copycat riots erupted even in other states, most notably in Karnataka and Kerala. Also on the twenty-sixth and despite the curfew, Barakhama, which had been the scene of violence at Christmas in 2007, was attacked again. According to multiple victims’ affidavits, the rioters attacked wielding guns, killing two Christians and wounding seven others with their fire. Then, as Christians fled for the forests, the assailants caught hold of a teenage girl, Manini Digal. They stripped and tried to rape her. She resisted, angering her attackers, who then poured kerosene over her body and set her on fire. She received burns over 60 percent of her body but managed to survive the attack.72 As in the ordeal of Parakhita, narrated above, Christians were occasionally given the choice of converting to Hinduism to avoid the violence. Some refused to convert and paid the price, but o thers did decide to convert to Hinduism. Suresh Nayak fled to the jungle with his family a fter they were attacked near their village of Pirigada on the twenty-fifth. But then, on the twenty- seventh, they w ere tricked into returning home for a “peace meeting.” Once there, Suresh and his family members w ere threatened by armed men. In an affidavit, he describes what then happened to him and Christians from a dozen other families: They forced me to accept Hinduism renouncing Christianity in order to stay in the village. . . . Out of fear with much reluctance in order [to] save my [family’s] life I agreed with them. They gave me a piece of paper where in Oriya it was written that “I am accepting Hinduism on my own renouncing foreign religion” and directed me to copy it in another paper and to put my signature. Out of fear I did the same. Then they tonsured me and forced me to take bath. . . . Then they brought cow dung and mixed some w ater with that and forced us to eat telling that this is [panchamrita73]. With lot of hesitation and fear I swallowed the same. Then they directed me to make slogan “Jay Sriram, Jay Bajrang Bali” in loud voice. . . . Then they told me that “since today you have became [sic] Hindu” and told me to go. As we had to take shelter, I came to the relief camp Nuagaon same day with my family with me.74 The conflict continued to spread, and on the twenty-eighth, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh called it a “national shame.”75 For the next three weeks, state authorities repeatedly claimed that the conflict was over, only to be proven wrong by subsequent events. Then, on September 19, Congress Party officials ruling the national government threatened
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to dissolve the BJP-BJD government in Odisha, invoking a little known article (355) of the constitution that gives the national government power to impose direct rule in states incapable of maintaining law and order. Opposition parties quickly claimed, however, that the threat was merely a political move intended to embarrass the BJP and its BJD allies, and the article was never invoked. Reports of vandalism, mutilation, murder, and gang rape continued to emerge from the region periodically, well into February and March 2010, a year and a half a fter the second round of riots began, though here again, the real ity of regular anti-Christian violence in India makes it difficult to determine whether t hese were linked to the Kandhamal riots or merely a continuation of the kinds of everyday violence Christians had been experiencing for years. Naxalites continued to get involved in the violence, repeatedly claiming responsibility for Lakshmanananda’s murder (as indicated above) and then publicizing a hit list of local Sangh leaders they deemed responsible for the riots. In at least two cases, the Naxalites appear to have followed through on their threats, assassinating Dhanu Pradhan and Prabhat Panigrahi, local RSS leaders, in November 2008 and March 2009, respectively.76 By May 2009, government officials w ere reporting 42 confirmed dead in the second round of violence, including the Hindus allegedly killed by Naxalites after the main riots.77 Human rights organizations put the number closer to 100. The widespread burning and disposal of corpses may help account for some of this discrepancy. In addition, government statistics suggest that rioters attacked six hundred villages and looted or destroyed around 200 churches and prayer halls, 13 Christian educational institutions, 5 offices of NGOs, and 5,600 homes (leaving 54,000 people homeless); 30,000 were eventually in relief camps.
Patterns in the Violence As these statistics suggest, certain patterns emerged in the violence. In the attacks, Christian bodies, homes, and churches were the primary targets. NGO facilities and workers w ere also often attacked, particularly if they w ere Christian but also if they worked on behalf of the Panas and other SC communities or had supported the victims of the riots at Christmas 2007.78 Even Christian NGOs that employed Hindu employees and benefitted Christians and Hindus equally were targeted. Rioters also targeted Christian schools and hostels, even ones where the majority of students, residents, and faculty were Hindu. The targeting of Christian institutions that benefitted both Hindus and
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Christians suggests, again, that the Christian association with and introduction of elements of secularization and modernization was one of the reasons they were targeted. The significant but far less widespread attacks on Hindus primarily affected Hindu homes, though on several occasions rioters vandalized or destroyed Hindu shrines and t emples, and at least a few Hindus in addition to t hose at the Jalespata ashram w ere murdered. Hindus who came to the aid of Christians or protested their treatment w ere also regularly attacked. Most of the violence took place in blocks across the waistline of Kandhamal: Baliguda, Chakapad, Daringabadi, G. Udayagiri, Nuagaon, Raikia, Tikabali, and Tumidibandha.79 Unlike in the routine incidents of violence against Christians described in previous chapters, where Pentecostals and Pentecostal-like groups w ere disproportionately targeted, in the Kandhamal riots, the violence was more proportionally distributed across denominational lines. This points, perhaps, to an important difference between everyday incidents of violence against Christians and violence in the riot context. Whereas the former are frequently responses to specific provocations embodied by specific p eople, the latter are more indiscriminate, reflecting the working out of more generalized grievances (i.e., against Christians in general). Not surprisingly, given the involvement of out-of-towners, the violence in Kandhamal and particularly the vandalism (as opposed to the violence against humans) tended to target larger, more obvious, public Christian institutions. In Kandhamal, such institutions are run primarily by Catholics, and so, superficially, it might appear that the rioters targeted Catholics. In my view, however, the significant damage done to Catholic churches, NGOs, and educational facilities is merely a reflection of their obviousness and availability and of the fact that Catholics’ well- developed buildings are perceived as a sign of Christian wealth, educational advance, modernization, and (to some) foreign support. In the aftermath of the violence, Christians from the less evangelistic mainline denominations (like Catholicism) often expressed dismay with their more evangelistic coreligionists, believing themselves to have become targets of vio lence because of the provocative nature of sectarian Pentecostal and other evangelical Christians. One Catholic from Tiangia I interviewed, for example, insisted that Catholics and Hindus in his village had historically enjoyed quite cordial relationships u ntil the arrival of a Pentecostal congregation. The Pentecostals quickly came into conflict with the Hindus, he reported, and the Hindus then slowly became suspicious of all Christians, even the Catholics with whom they had previously gotten along well. When Lakshmanananda was murdered, local Hindus took the opportunity to attack Pentecostals. But some Catholics and Catholic institutions were also caught up in the violence.
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“The Sound of a Leaf Falling to the Ground” While men were most regularly targeted in the violence, women were frequently victimized as well. One survey of 355 w omen across Kandhamal District found that an astonishing 34 percent of them had been threatened with violence in the conflict, and nearly 3 percent had been physically assaulted. In this same study, 1.4 percent of w omen reported having been sexually as80 saulted. Another study, however, put the figure at 4 percent of Christian women in the region.81 Uma Saumya’s Breaking the Shackled Silence contains the testimony of several victims of sexual assault, who narrate harrowing tales of rape, gang rape, sexual assault, threatened sexual assault, and narrow escapes. The book also provides a catalog of several dozen incidents of sexual violence or attempted sexual violence.82 In the aftermath of the violence, many Christians experienced ongoing emotional trauma. For example, the title of this chapter comes from a rape survivor, who testified, “I cannot forget the incident no m atter how hard I try. I feel ashamed. I continue to be fearful of darkness, loneliness, loud noises, and men.”83 The testimony of another survivor of sexual assault provides the heading of this section. Describing the effects of PTSD in the years a fter the riots, she said, “Seeing men and crowds would frighten me. . . . Even the sound of a leaf falling to the ground would frighten me.” In addition to incidents of sexual violence, in several documented cases, young girls became victims of sex trafficking, as miscreants took advantage of the chaotic situation for their nefarious purposes.84 Given the shame involved in sexual assault, and social strictures that discourage reporting, the true extant of sexual violence in the riots is likely to be much higher than suggested in the reports referenced above. After the violence was over, many w omen also saw their families torn apart. Adult men migrated elsewhere for work. Concerned parents sent both male and female c hildren to boarding schools outside of the region, when possible. The story of Priyatma Nayak, while more tragic than most, gives some sense of the challenges faced by w omen living apart from men in their f amily after the riots. Priyatma’s husband, Abhimanyu, had been badly burned by his attackers and within a few hours succumbed to his injuries. She then needed to guard the corpse from dogs for the next four days, until the police finally arrived to help her. Afterward, unable to go back home, she reported: I live in a rented house in Udaygiri and pay rent of Rs 1200 while I have my own house in the village [but cannot return to it]. I find it hard to support my 4 children. Till today the accused are roaming free. They make fun of me and mock me and say that I c an’t do anything. Despite
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witness depositions from us, nothing has been done. They are threatening my family to withdraw the case or they will kill us. They do not allow us to get our land back and return to the village. I want justice so that we can live in peace. I want them to be hanged.85 Women were involved in the riots not only as victims but also as participants. In the second round of violence, in particular, women whom victims often identified as members of Durga Vahini were also conspicuously present among the perpetrators of violence. (The Durga Vahini, or “Army of the goddess Durga,” is a women’s group with ties to the VHP and Bajrang Dal, and which, like them, has been often accused of stirring up antiminority sentiment or provoking violence.)
Hindu Victims of Riot Violence While most of the victims w ere Christian, Hindus also suffered in the violence. Some Hindus w ere attacked and killed by Christian mobs. Other Hindus appear to have been killed accidentally by indiscriminate Hindu rioters or to punish their association with Christians. For example, a young Hindu girl from Bapalomonti village testified before the National People’s Tribunal on Kandhamal that on September 21, 2008, twenty-five RSS activists came to her home, abused her grandfather, and said to her, “We have given several deadlines but your uncle has not converted [to Hinduism]. So we are going to take revenge on you. . . . Even if you are a Hindu, your u ncle is a Christian and he has not 86 converted. So we cannot leave you.” According to her testimony, the RSS activists, wearing vermillion tilaks and saffron headbands, then dragged her two kilometers from the village into the jungle where, while the group chanted “Jai Sri Ram” and “Jai Bajrang Bali,” four or five of the men raped her until she lost consciousness.87 Even though the girl recognized several of her attackers, all those accused w ere acquitted. Similarly, according to the testimony of F ather Edward Sequeira, who ran an orphanage that was attacked in Padampur on August 25, 2008, [the rioters] caught hold of Rajani Majhi (age 21) a Hindu Adivasi girl, who was . . . an orphan herself, and residing at the orphanage and taking care of the children. As they were binding her hands with wire I heard her crying “Father, they are going to burn me alive”. Since I was already thoroughly beaten up, having deep head injury, continuous bleeding, . . . her cry was the last thing I could remember before I fell unconscious. . . . Twice the hapless girl tried to escape [from the fire]. Third time when
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she tried to come out, someone picked up a log and hit her mercilessly on the head, as someone would kill a snake. How cruel people can be and the entire mob watching! They saw to it that the lower part of her body is completely burnt so as to destroy all evidence.88 Competing versions of what happened to Majhi before she was burned to death have emerged, and while others dispute it, Father Sequeira is among those who claim she was stripped naked and gang-raped before meeting her tragic end. Majhi’s charred corpse was photographed and appeared widely in media coverage of the incident. Other Hindus, like Sidheswar Pradhan, a man in his sixties (who by some accounts was an RSS leader), w ere killed by Hindu rioters for trying to protect Christians and stifle or discourage the violence. As a mob approached Pradhan’s village of Sulesaru, he stood in the m iddle of the road and attempted to stop them. According to his niece, who lodged a complaint with police, Pradhan said, “Christians of this village are good p eople. We have been living here peacefully together. You should not attack them.”89 “ ‘You are supporting the Christians because you are their agent,’ the mob leaders retorted. Soon after one of them chopped off his right hand with a sword. Bleeding Sidheswar ran to the backyard of his house where he collapsed. The furious mob gave vent to their fury beating him with logs and iron bars before hacking his body into pieces.”90 Yet another young Hindu man met a similar fate, according to his mother’s testimony. When he heard a mob was approaching his village to attack Christians, he gathered male neighbors and confronted them. In retaliation, his mother testified, “they cut his legs, hands and penis, and left him in a pool of blood. I was with him at that time. Can you imagine how a mother would have felt when her son repeatedly told her that he was g oing to die? I was totally helpless. I banged on the door of my Hindu neighbours and pleaded with them to help me, but out of fear that they too would be attacked, no one opened their doors.” Eventually, her son died of his wounds, and she sat with his body for three days, keeping the dogs at bay, until police arrived.91 Still other Hindus w ere attacked by rampaging Christian mobs, as was the case in Gadapur during the first round of violence. Making matters worse, for Hindu victims, was that the refugee camps quickly came to be dominated by Christians, and some Hindus did not feel safe t here. One Hindu w oman who survived an attack by Christians in the second round of violence said, “The Christians are eating happily in the relief camps. We Hindus do not get anything to eat. We end up wandering the jungles.” Another, interviewed at night in the jungle itself, said: “The Christians have broken down the doors of our
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homes and beaten us up. They threaten to beat us up and kill us in the same way they killed Swamiji. Due to this fear, we come to the jungles to sleep. We are not scared of tigers and bears but of getting killed by the Christians. . . . The Christians eat rice and curry well in the relief camps in Udayagiri and Rakia. We get nothing to feed ourselves in these jungles.”92 Though human rights organizations have frequently accused the Sangh Parivar of planning the violence against Christians, there is little evidence of long-term planning. That said, the fact that secretive meetings were held in many villages before the onset of attacks on Christians underscores the point that these w ere not “spontaneous” or “natural” reactions to provocative events. Rather, in most cases, the anti-Christian violence was organized and orchestrated at least minimally. And in at least one case, Hindu victims suggest that Christians met surreptitiously before attacking Hindus as well. Nearly universally, Christian victims report that their attackers chanted slogans as they approached. Some w ere slogans of in-g roup identity and belonging, like “Hindu, Hindu, bhai, bhai” (All Hindus are brothers). As mentioned above, o thers were religious, like “Jai Bajrang Bali ki” and “Jai Sri Ram,” chants of praise to Hanuman and Rama, respectively (both gods associated, though not exclusively so, with militant Hindu groups). O thers were threatening or abusive, as in “Christian rakhiba nahim, Swami Lakshmanananda amar rahe” (loosely, “We will not countenance Christians, long live Swami Lakshmanananda”); “Bideshi dharma hatao, Hindu rashtra badhao” (Get rid of the foreign religion, create a Hindu nation); “London jao Christian” (Go to London, Christians); and “Christian mananku maro” (Kill the Christians).93 Though some of the attacks took place under the cover of darkness and quickly, many others were drawn-out daylight affairs. Videos that have appeared in news stories, documentaries, and in such online forums as YouTube often show large crowds of young men standing around in small groups— some enjoying themselves, o thers looking nervous—while a small number vandalize or destroy Christian homes and churches. In one video, the crowd of bystanders cheers as a vandal carefully mounts a tall church steeple, takes a few hacks with a machete at a stone cross at the top, and then plants a saffron flag above it.94 Likewise, the attacks on individuals (as opposed to on institutions) also often took place over long periods—sometimes even several days. And the beatings, rapes, killings, dismemberments, and vandalism often, according to victims’ testimonies, occurred in an atmosphere of carnival and revelry. Attacks on h ouses were often patient and plodding in the same way, suggesting that many of the perpetrators did not fear getting caught. In the most common pattern, the rioters would come; loot all the victims’ valuable possessions,
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furniture, and vehicles; and then burn everything e lse, either in the street in front of the house or in the house itself. In addition to losing valued possessions, jewelry, and money, many victims also lost important property and financial documents. In most cases, there wasn’t much property to steal or destroy, of course, since most of the victims were already lacking in any but the most basic possessions. Rioters sometimes also desecrated the land of their victims as well, cutting down trees and uprooting crops; poisoning, contaminating, or defiling w ater sources; and killing, setting loose, or stealing the victims’ livestock and pets. In testimonies, affidavits, and conversations with me, victims frequently noted two harrowing and crucial differences between the first and second round of riots. First, the rioters carried and used more deadly weapons (guns, swords, trishuls, axes, and daggers) in the second round of attacks.95 Second, whereas in the first round of violence rioters generally approached from only one side of town and in small numbers, allowing their victims to more easily escape, in the second round of violence many of the attacks involved much, much larger mobs that approached from multiple sides, encircling and trapping their hapless victims.96 The shifting strategy of the rioters suggests, once again, a higher degree of orchestration in the second round of violence and shows that t hose responsible had made adjustments between the first and second rounds, grimly calculated to exact a greater human toll. The larger number of rioters, the greater presence of deadly weapons, and the encircling strategies surely help account for the higher casualty rates evident in the second round of riots.
Aftermath At the height of the violence, there w ere around 30,000 refugees, mostly Christian, in relief camps. There were, additionally, many people living in the forests to escape attacks. These numbers are particularly striking if one keeps in mind that the latest census data put the Christian population of the entire district at around 117,000. One survey of 23,000 families in the region estimated that 93 percent of those affected by the violence were low-caste and tribal Christians, while 6 percent of the victims w ere Hindus. In addition, research on the violence suggests that the vast majority of the victims were landless, daily wage laborers and cultivators.97 Conditions at the refugee camps were poor. Many of the tents provided had no sides, which made it difficult for residents to maintain their privacy and stay dry in the rain. Refugees complained that individuals with anti-Christian
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prejudices were often hired to cook the food or manage other aspects of the camps. T here were shortages of food, w ater, bathrooms, health (including mental health) care, and feminine hygiene products. Students could not effectively continue their studies. Female refugees complained of being harassed and sexually assaulted by the police and CRPF officers charged with guarding them. One former refugee whom I interviewed expressed a kind of exasperation that was likely quite widespread: “To whom could we complain? They came for our safety and they were d oing t hese t hings [i.e., harassing and sexually assaulting refugees].” Many women w ere in the camps unaccompanied by male members of their families, who w ere away working or, in at least a few cases, absconding from the law. The Nirmala Niketan survey of Christian w omen in the region cited above suggests, shockingly, that 85 percent of the women surveyed had spent time in the relief camps.98 Despite the fact that Christian religious leaders w ere not allowed to conduct religious services, Christian refugees complained that they were harried by members of Sangh groups, like the Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini, who roamed freely around some of the camps.99 The safety of Christians in the camps was also threatened occasionally by the actions of outsiders. For example, the Global Council of Indian Christians reported that ill-intentioned individuals had attempted to poison the water sources in at least two of the camps.100 One of the refugees I interviewed had lived in the G. Udayagiri camp and witnessed an attempted poisoning. According to his account, a w oman standing near him saw another woman climbing up to the top of the water tank. The woman who saw it turned to him and said, “Brother, she is climbing up. . . . Can we help her?” Thinking that they w ere being helpful, they approached the water tank. But the woman on the tank, who was about to pour the contents of a bucket into it, began acting nervous and dropped the bucket to the ground. A calf was standing nearby, the former refugee said, and it “dipped its mouth in the bucket and dropped down dead.” No h umans w ere poisoned in G. Udayagiri, but in Raikia relief camp, at least six Christians had to be treated for poisoning in a hospital before the problem was discovered and new w ater sources were found. Some outside support and resources did come from NGOs, but refugees complained that very l ittle reached them, since corrupt political and Christian religious leaders were siphoning funds off the top. Despite all these problems, however, the camps emptied out only very slowly, in large part b ecause Christians continued to receive threats even in the camps, and many were told by their neighbors that conversion (or reconversion) to Hinduism was a precondition for their being allowed to peacefully resettle their homes.101
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Many, in fact, did reconvert. “In some cases, the terror works,” wrote Te helka’s Vijay Simha, describing the scene of a conversion ceremony: “In the jungles of Sankarakhol village, one of the first targeted by the militant Hindus, a group of RSS whole-timers are reconverting 18 Christians to Hinduism. It’s a daytime ceremony. The RSS Mandal Mukhiya (head of the Mandal unit) Sudhir Pradhan, a slim bearded man, is in charge. There are 30 Hindus to make sure that the 18 Christians d on’t change their mind.” Each of the Christians is asked to burn a Bible and then swear, “I have become a Hindu today. After today, if I ever become a Christian again, may my dynasty perish.” Then, Simha continues, “A Hindu priest begins to apply vermillion on the foreheads of the Christians-turned-Hindus. One of them protests, but it is too late. There’s a red streak on his forehead as well.”102 According to one estimate, around two thousand Christians reconverted to Hinduism to save themselves, avoid violence, or reclaim their homes and possessions.103 Ironically, Odisha’s freedom-of-religion law, which outlaws forcible conversion and which has periodically been used to harass Christians, has not in a single case been used to prosecute those engaged in these quite obvious and literal instances of forcible conversion to Hinduism.104 Those who refused to reconvert often suffered serious consequences when they tried to return. For example, Savitri Nayak, whose husband, a pastor, was killed in the violence, returned to her village from the G. Udayagiri refugee camp in January 2009. On her arrival, anti-Christian toughs poured kerosene on her and threatened to set her ablaze. A Hindu village elder intervened, and the men let her go, but not before warning her to never set foot in the village again unless she converted to Hinduism.105 Many of those who were able to safely return home now suffer u nder dispiriting and crippling social and economic boycotts. Victims’ affidavits suggest that in many cases their former neighbors continue to refuse to talk to them, and they are denied access to main roads, provisions shops, sources of w ater, grazing lands, and firewood in the forest. Small Christian shantytowns have grown up on the outskirts of several affected villages (see figure at the beginning of chapter 5). And t hose who have resettled in their own homes and villages frequently worry that they will again become victims of violence, particularly since in many cases t hose who had previously attacked and threatened them remain free. To avoid attack, many of t hose who did return have followed a growing trend in the region by placing a saffron flag on their homes.106 On at least several occasions, refugees w ere forcefully removed from the camps and resettled in their villages. “That was a g reat tragedy,” said one of the former refugees I interviewed. “The place where we have been betrayed, the place where we have been dragged out into the street, to this place only
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they made us return.” Seventeen families from Gunjibadi, for example, report having been removed by government officials from the Nuagaon relief camp and abandoned in front of their charred homes. Forced by their former neighbors from there to the margins of the village, they then began living out in the open, in makeshift shelters.107 The last of the refugee camps were closed in September 2009, more than a year after the original violence. The lives of t hose who did return were affected in ways that will have consequences for generations. P eople in the region with anti-Christian biases seemed to act on them more brazenly than they did before the violence, and a significant percentage of children could not continue their schooling after the riots, both for financial reasons and because their teachers or schoolmates taunted and harassed them. Some victims believe that they were denied admission or scholarships due to their Christian religion a fter the riots, as well.108 One study suggests that around 60 percent of Christian victims lost their jobs or sources of livelihood in the violence or because they could not safely return to their homes and offices afterward. Many o thers, particularly impecunious women who had lost their husbands or other sources of income in the attacks, reported that biased officials denied them work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which was created to guarantee rural families at least one hundred days of wage employment per year as unskilled manual laborers. Victims who had previously held government jobs but who were forced to relocate found it difficult to gain work transfer orders.109 Because of t hese challenges and threats, large numbers of Christians simply resettled elsewhere. Many of them landed in the state capital of Bhubaneswar, particularly in the slum of Salia Sahi (where perhaps as many as 12,000 families relocated), but many also left the state altogether in search of work in urban centers like Bangalore or in states, like Kerala, more friendly to Christians.110 “The very young and very old remained in Kandhamal,” one Christian riot survivor told me. “Everyone else left.” Many youth migrated because l ittle work could be found for Christians in Kandhamal after the riots and because Christian youth were more likely than the very old or very young to be harassed.111 As many as twenty-five thousand Christians may have been permanently displaced from the region, and because of these patterns of outmigration, family members w ere missing from nearly e very Christian home.112 The riots have therefore significantly altered the religious demographics of the region. The riots w ere deadly and destructive in and of themselves, but they continued to indirectly wreak death and destruction long a fter they ended. One of the reasons why is related to the demographic shifts noted in the previous
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paragraph. Given that the overwhelming majority of elderly people in India are cared for by their children and grandchildren, the outmigration of Kandhamal’s young and middle-aged Christians had a hazardous effect on the health of the region’s elderly Christians, who were often left to fend for themselves, leading, no doubt, to more than a few cases of premature death. Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the violence, rates of malaria infection shot up dramatically due to the fact that Christians were living in relief camps and tent villages or returning home to find partially destroyed homes and mosquito nets stolen or destroyed.113 As mentioned earlier, social researchers surveying the population found widespread instances of PTSD among survivors.114 The region’s stillbirth, miscarriage, and infant mortality rates also increased significantly in 2009. For example, whereas t here w ere 603 infant deaths in Kandhamal District in 2007–2008, t here were 837 in 2008–2009 (and 750 in 2009–2010). In one particularly hard-hit block of the district, the infant mortality rate increased from 37 in 2007 (already above the national average) all the way to 88 in 2008, dropping down only as far as 61 in 2009.115 Partially as a result of these deaths, no doubt, Kandhamal District had the highest under-five child mortality rate in the nation (14.5 percent), according to a government report released in 2011.116 All of t hese factors suggest that the riots continued killing long a fter mobs had ceased roaming the streets.
A Miscarriage of Justice Christian victims frequently report that in the early days of the violence police officers refused to register their FIRs, despite it being their legal duty to do so. Some even report having been thrashed, detained, or harassed by the police when they persisted. In other cases, FIRs were registered without any ensuing investigation.117 Nevertheless, by February 2010, six months a fter the worst of the violence, victims had managed to file 3,232 complaints, of which only 827 had been officially registered by police. In those cases, 11,000 culprits had been named.118 By February 2019, 6,495 of the accused had been arrested.119 To h andle the load, the government of Odisha set up two fast-track courts in early 2009. The courts were dedicated exclusively to hearing cases related to the violence. The g reat advantage of this arrangement was that the courts could process riot-related trials far more rapidly than would have been possi ble otherwise in India’s notoriously languid court system. In the four years before they w ere shut down in March 2013, the fast-track courts processed over 250 of the 327 cases that had been brought before them.120 However, the
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pressure to process criminal riot cases expediently led, in the view of many legal experts, to shoddy investigations and faulty hearings. T hese problems contributed to a shocking number of acquittals. In the fast-track court trials, only 477 (15 percent) of those accused were convicted while 2,704 (85 percent) were acquitted. Likewise, only two of the twenty-seven murder trials ended in convictions.121 As this volume went to press a decade after the violence, final police reports had been submitted in only 315 of 827 total cases. Taking into consideration all courts (including the fast-track courts), only 362 court cases had been completed, and only 78 (22 percent) of them ended in convictions. Moreover, many of the 493 p eople convicted w ere convicted only of lesser crimes (e.g., tampering with evidence by removing a corpse rather than murder). The vast majority of the convicted have appealed their cases and remain out on bail.122 The large number of acquittals is related to many f actors. One is the difficulty of accumulating evidence other than the testimony of victims in riot vio lence, particularly when those engaged in the violence are systematically obscuring or disposing of evidence, as was the case in many of the murders. Another is that at least some of those named in the FIRs were no doubt innocent and deserved to be acquitted. However, witnesses have also complained about widespread and ongoing threats to and tampering with witnesses, and in a number of documented cases, witnesses changed their story or decided not to testify in trials a fter being threatened by the accused or their agents. Witnesses in cases against Manoj Pradhan, the sitting BJP Member of the Legislative Assembly, regularly complained that on trial days, he would position himself prominently at the entrance to the court, surrounded by supporters and lawyers. In other cases, witnesses who came forward to testify against neighbors in their own village report needing to go into hiding after their arrests and during the trial. Some remain in hiding today or have simply moved away, living lives of loneliness separated from friends, f amily, and all t hings familiar.123 The requirement that testimonies be given in Oriya was an additional hurdle for victims and witnesses who w ere comfortable only in Kui.124 There have also been accusations of police negligence in the registering of cases and gathering of evidence, which some suspect of having been intentional. Some police officers involved in criminal investigations also delayed their appearances before the court or refused altogether to appear.125 The high rate of acquittals in cases involving Hindus accused of crimes against Christians stands in stark contrast to the convictions of the seven Christians accused of murdering Swami Lakshmanananda. The deplorably flimsy evidence on which t hose Christians were convicted will be described below. Casting yet more suspicion over the arrest and conviction of this group of
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seven Christians, however, was the fact that they were not the first. The first seven Christians arrested in the murder were a motley assortment of villagers from around the region. One was a thirteen-year-old boy who, along with his pastor cousin, found himself caught by an anti-Christian mob in the aftermath of the swami’s assassination and then turned over to the police for no apparent reason. Another reports having been beaten by the police u ntil he confessed and implicated others. Yet another was a locally prominent Christian lawyer and activist, Manas Rajan Singh, who was accosted by a mob and then handed over to the police, while yet another found himself arrested a fter brandishing a gun and threatening a mob accusing him of murdering the swami while attempting to enter his h ouse. The seven w ere held for forty days, despite e very one of them having passed a polygraph test administered three weeks into their detention in which they denied involvement in the assassination plot.126 Mercifully, these first seven were released abruptly, without charges, on October 3, 2008. Then, a day later, police began making new arrests in the case. Munda Badamajhi, Duryodan Sunamajhi, and Sanatan Badamajhi w ere arrested on the fourth. Bijay Kumar Sanseth was picked up on December 12, and then Bhaskar Sunamajhi, Budhadeb Nayak, and Gornath Challenseth were taken into custody on December 13. Five years l ater, on September 30, 2013, a fter a long trial, the additional sessions judge of the Phulbani fast-track court R. K. Tosh declared the new seven Christians arrested guilty of murder. The text of the judge’s vexing judgment begins by waxing partisan about Swami Lakshmanananda, a “highly revered spiritual leader whose life was dedicated to tribal welfare” and who “combatted fraudulent conversion by Christian missionaries” while “working for socioeconomic well being of marginalized and indigent in Kandhamal.”127 Similarly, the judgment also oddly notes that “it is alleged that the Missionaries, those who used charity as a façade for converting people away from their native faith with alliance of Maoists are the perpetrators and conspirators of the assassination of Swamiji.”128 No doubt this preamble did not reassure the accused that they had, as Christians, gained a fair hearing. The guilty verdict rested primarily on three supports: the establishment of motive, the testimony of witnesses to the crime, and physical evidence putatively tying the accused to the ashram attack. In terms of motive, the judge asserted that the accused Christians had motive to assassinate Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati because “the work of Swamiji for upliftment of the tribal community of Phulbani beside preventing conversion has definitely created bad blood among the Christian community.”129 While it was certainly true that t here w ere tensions between the swami and Christians, no evidence was produced (with the exception of the suspicious evidence discussed below)
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to demonstrate even that Christians in general desired to kill the swami, let alone that these particular Christians desired to do so. In explaining his view that the accused had motive to kill the swami, the judge referred repeatedly to the alleged minutes from a meeting at Beticola (Catholic) Parish Counsel Church on March 25, 2008, in which it was allegedly determined, in the presence of named individuals who (quite implausibly) signed their names, to murder the swami on August 23 (i.e., to “offer sacrifice at the altar of the Lord, for His pleasure . . . the Satanic activities [activists] that stand opposed to the expansion of the Word in all the abbey circles of our Parish”).130 That this document, which was “discovered” and publicized by the Sangh-affiliated Hindu Jagran Samukhya on October 6 of that year, was a crude forgery seems to me (and various local law enforcement officers) patently obvious. The language strikes the ear as that of someone trying to sound like Christians. Moreover, to believe the document is genuine one would have to believe that the eighteen Christians named as participants in the meeting w ere obtuse enough to state their intentions clearly in writing, sign their names, and resolve “to conduct Christian victory celebrations . . . after the successful completion of the said task.”131 And then, of course, there is the important fact that none of the accused were among those named as pre sent at the meeting; nor are any of them even Catholic.132 The second form of evidence on which Judge Tosh relied was the testimony of several key witnesses. Witness 17, for example, testified that before the assassination he had come on five of the accused talking together and managed to successfully hide himself and eavesdrop on the conversation long enough to hear they were planning the assassination. He further testified that two of the accused, Bijay and Gornath, had distributed sweets at Kotgarh Church to celebrate the assassination of the swami afterward. Witness 18 similarly testified that while in the jungle looking for his buffalos, he had come upon and (also) successfully eavesdropped on a conversation between the seven accused and others (including some whose dress suggested they were Naxalites) about a plan to murder the swami. In the original trial, both witnesses refused to confirm t hese statements and only agreed to do so sometime l ater when reinterviewed on the o rders of the Odisha High Court. The judge also relied strongly on the testimony of two girls living at the ashram. One (witness 32), examined only long after the initial investigation, testified that she saw several of the gunmen and that one of them was “black and tall.”133 At trial, she identified Duryodan as the black and tall assailant. Another girl (witness 33), who may have been at the ashram during the assassination—even this has not been conclusively established—claims that two of the gun-wielding assailants were not wearing masks, enabling her to iden-
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tify them. No identity parade was ever conducted, but in the courtroom she identified two of the accused (Duryodan and Bijay) as the men she saw. The testimony of these two girls is in fact the only evidence produced that—if believed—could directly link any of the accused to the scene of the crime (and only two of them at that). All of t hese accusations, however, beggar belief, as they w ere produced only after the trial began, a year to several years after the events in question. Witnesses 17 and 18 w ere introduced only during the trial itself and never presented their testimony to investigators u ntil more than a year a fter the murder.134 Even then, when put on the witness stand, they initially denied and refused to give the very testimony they eventually did give when re-questioned. Dismissing the defense’s assertion that this delay and inconsistency suggested the witnesses had been coerced, tutored, or hired, the judge accepted the prosecution’s clearly self-interested justification that “whenever this type of offence has been committed in a highly planned manner, it is difficult to expect a witness to speak the truth.”135 The two girls at the ashram w ere only deposed in January 2012, more than three years a fter the murder and long after the trial began, an “error” the judge excused in this peculiar way: “A student of Sanskrit requires high memory power to get the Sanskrit verses . . . in mind. Therefore even if investigating officers have committed an error by not examining them at an appropriate time, this Court cannot refuse to accept their credibility.”136 And then t here is the fact that to believe the testimony of t hese witnesses to be true, one would have to believe the accused w ere so audacious and careless as to meet in public to discuss their plans without paying attention to eavesdroppers, so brazen as to publicly distribute sweets in celebration afterward, and so reckless as to not wear masks during the operation, despite the fact that the investigators and the judge repeatedly described the attack as highly professional in nature. In addition to the evidence discussed above, the judge based his judgment on several rather paltry pieces of physical evidence. Two of the accused (Duryodan and Munda) had country-style, muzzle-loading guns in their homes when arrested. Forensic experts concluded that guns like these could have been responsible for the wounds suffered by one of the four victims. Despite this tenuous relationship, the judge declared that the discovery of these guns “clearly” implicated the two and “connected the presence of the accused persons at the site.”137 However, no evidence was provided to link these par ticular guns to the scene of the crime, not to mention the fact that witnesses to the ashram attack nearly universally asserted that the assailants had wielded automatic weaponry. (Again, the second girl described above was a notable exception in her assertion that some of them had ordinary guns.) Another of
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the accused owned an ax, but not one that was linked to the scene of the crime through physical evidence. Bizarrely, much was made of a shirt with holes in it found at the home of Sanatan, which the prosecution and judge asserted could be used as a mask.138 To explain the paucity of physical evidence, the judge once again cited, as explanation, the “highly professional manner” in which the crime was committed. In highly professional hits, the judge averred, “it is not normally expected that there will be direct evidence to connect all the perpetrators with the crime.”139 In various ways, then, and illogically, the highly professional nature of the crime is repeatedly invoked to explain the lack of evidence, while at the same time one could only believe the testimony of witnesses (regarding written statements of intent to kill the swami, overheard planning meetings, the distribution of sweets afterward, e tc.) if one accepted that the murderers were among the most amateurish in recorded history. The judge’s decision spends an inordinate amount of time arguing for the merits of the prosecution’s weak case, sometimes in a circuitous and self- contradictory fashion. For example, the judge asserts that establishing motive is particularly important “in cases where the prosecution rests on circumstantial evidence or on witnesses who have inimical background,”140 which any neutral observer would say was true of this case. Then, perhaps sensing the fact that the prosecution failed to demonstrate criminal motive for these par ticular seven Christians accused (as opposed to providing reasons why there might be general Christian annoyance at the swami’s work and competition or—if one believes the minutes to be genuine—proving the more murderous motives of those who attended the Beticola Parish meeting), the judge quickly adds that “absence of motive does not corrode the credibility of prosecution case.”141 The judge also spends nearly five pages in the thirty-five-page decision explaining why he did not discount the changing testimony of witnesses 17 and 18 and another four pages trying to explain away issues involving the testimony of the two girls at the ashram (e.g., why they were interviewed only considerably after the event and why an identification parade had never been conducted). Despite the lack of sound evidence, all seven of the accused w ere convicted in the case and remain in jail (though several have been granted brief periods of release on bail for various reasons). They have appealed their case to the Odisha High Court, which in the view of at least one of the lawyers involved has slow walked the case because of its controversial nature. As this volume went to print, however, preliminaries were underway, and the convicted Christians were hopeful for a more fair hearing. Among other reasons for hope is that the high court has declared the Beticola Parish meeting minutes
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i nadmissible on the testimony of several forensics experts who had declared it a forgery.142
Compensation Many victims did receive compensation from the government. As indicated earlier, those whose h ouses w ere fully destroyed received 50,000 rupees (around $1,250 at the time), and t hose whose h ouses w ere partially damaged received 20,000 rupees ($400). By March 2009, district government officials said they had distributed a first installment of 10,000 rupees to twenty-eight hundred Christian families. But the government set as a stipulation for receiving the full amount of compensation that victims leave the relief camps, return to their villages, and complete construction to at least the plinth (foundation) level of their home. For reasons the foregoing discussion has made clear, many would not or could not return home. And a good number of those receiving 10,000 rupees were forced to use it to support their daily needs (e.g., to cover loss of income or ongoing medical care related to injuries sustained in the riots) and were therefore not able even to begin construction on their homes. Complicating matters additionally was the fact that many of the damaged and destroyed houses, perhaps as many as 37 percent of them, were not included in the official government list. Not surprisingly, several years a fter the violence the majority of damaged or destroyed houses had still not been reconstructed.143 After initially resisting, the Odisha government also granted compensation for damaged and destroyed places of worship, setting aside 200,000 rupees ($4,000) for those fully destroyed and 100,000 rupees ($2,000) for those partially damaged. But t here was a catch: to be eligible for funds to rebuild in their original location, owners of the damaged places of worship were required to document that they had l egal ownership of the land. Given various complications in documentation of ownership and the fact that buildings in the region are frequently constructed on land for which the owners do not hold proper title, only 60 of the 195 damaged churches w ere eligible for funds to rebuild on-site. The rest could only receive compensation if they took the far more expensive route of purchasing land and building from scratch in some other location.144 The Odisha government compensated families of those who had been killed in the violence with 200,000 rupees ($4,000), to which the central government added 300,000 rupees ($6,000). But here, too, there w ere complications. In cases where the murderers had destroyed or disposed of the corpses,
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victims’ families were very often unable to convince the government of their eligibility. Moreover, no compensation was given for the loss of movable property or to t hose who had experienced sexual assault. All told, the government of India has set aside nearly 432 million rupees (about $6 million, as of 2019) for victim compensation, but F ather Dibyasingh Pariccha, a lawyer and advocate for Christian victims of the violence, estimates that only around 300 million rupees ($4.2 million) have reached victims’ accounts.145 As the preceding discussion suggests, the violence in Kandhamal has had significant physical, psychological, educational, economic, vocational, and demographic effects, effects that will continue to alter social life in the region for generations. There are some hopeful signs, however. Residents have witnessed the slow return of interreligious harmony in some parts of the region, and some victims report Hindu neighbors expressing regret at having been involved in the violence or standing by as it proceeded against their Christian neighbors. Many also report a weakening of anti-Christian forces in the region, and it is certainly the case that the BJP and Sangh-affiliated politicians have fared poorly in the region ever since, despite their improving fortunes on the national stage.146 Before looking forward, however, we must look back to the factors involved in producing the violence in Kandhamal. It is to that, in the next chapter, that we now turn.
Ch a p ter 5
The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence
A Christian victim of the Kandhamal riots at a temporary settlement. Photo by Harry Sanna.
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In The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (2003), Paul Brass has argued against the academic inclination to seek the “causes” of riots. Causal explanations of riots are always overly simplistic, Brass argues, and also do not take into account the fact that all kinds of violent actions take place “under the cover of the discourse of communalism, actions that cannot be explained or justified in terms of that discourse, but can easily be fit into more parsimonious explanations of individual pursuit of political advantage, profit, and vendetta.”1 Even more problematically, Brass argues, the search for causes often exonerates those bearing some responsibility by placing the blame on o thers; all those not explicitly named can consider themselves innocent, and the “principal perpetrators go scot-free.”2 Because of this, rather than search for causes, Brass suggests, analysts should focus instead on the forms of violence and on the specific question of who is served by communal conflict. I am in general agreement with Brass on this matter, though I consider it rather difficult to disentangle interests, c auses, and contextual f actors, even at the group level (let alone the individual). There is no doubt that the groups that benefitted most obviously from the riots in Kandhamal w ere those that supported the Sangh Parivar’s project of religious homogenization. The riots had real and significant effects on the religious landscape of Kandhamal. Due to the number of Christians killed, converted, or displaced by the riots and the continuing threat of violence, Kandhamal became, afterward, a drastically more Hindu space, and the Christians who remained were significantly weakened in terms of their social and political clout, their economic stability, and their ability to earn a livelihood. The electoral results w ere more mixed than the demographic and economic ones. The BJP lost ground nationally and in the state during the 2009 elections and continued to lose power regionally and in Odisha even a fter its national fortunes revived in 2014. A fter the riots, the BJP’s ally in the state, the Biju Janata Dal, dissolved its formal relationship with the BJP. The BJP failed to win any seats from Odisha in the national Parliament in the year after the violence, and the BJP’s power also declined considerably in the state’s legislative assembly, from the thirty-three seats it held in the thirteenth assembly, which ended in May 2009, to only six seats in the next assembly. Despite the fact that the political returns were mixed, those who intentionally stoked and spread the violence may have been satisfied enough with the blows struck to the numbers, economic advance, development, and social assertion of Pana Christians, what Tambiah calls the “leveling” of perceived disparities that are a common goal and function of riots.3 Yet questions remain about how local anxie ties, jealousies, and frustrations about the strengthen-
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ing Christian community could have been transformed into such devastating and widespread violence. To answer those questions, we must refer again to contextual factors. In this section, then, I attempt to enumerate the most significant of these factors in the Kandhamal violence: (1) Kandha-Pana tensions, (2) Oriya interventions, (3) the Sangh Parivar’s communalization of the conflict, and (4) the “calculus of conversion.” A fter discussing these issues in detail, the chapter concludes with somewhat briefer inquiries into the role played by actors resistant to modernization—the “proxy war” argument alluded to in early chapters of the book—and the Maoist Naxalites.
Kandha-Pana Tensions Though not responsible for igniting the Kandhamal riots, tensions between two local groups, the Kandhas (or Kondhs) and Panas (or Panos), clearly provided fuel for the fire. The Kandhas and Panas have a long history of living together in the Kandhamal region. Traditionally, the Kandhas were cultivators, and the Panas, artisans (particularly weavers) and laborers. In the past, to most Kandha villages w ere attached smaller, generally poorer settlements of Panas, and that pattern still endures in many places t oday.4 In the last c entury, however, the fact that the Kandhas, not the Panas, generally controlled the land encouraged the latter to play the roles of intermediaries and petty traders, giving them contacts in the outside world that served them well during the colonial period, as transportation and communication networks expanded.5 The Kandhas have often resented the mediating role played by Panas and have suspected them of using their advantage to trick and exploit their Kandha neighbors. Today, the Kandhas constitute roughly 52 percent of the population in Kandhamal district, and the Panas, 17 percent. Both communities speak Kui, but in the official parlance of the Indian government, the Kandhas are ST and the Panas are SC. The reason this m atters is that whereas ST converts to Christianity retain their benefits under India’s system of reservations (in universities, government posts, the legislatures, e tc.), SC converts to Christianity do not. Though Christian communities had been forming in the region since the late colonial period, beginning in the 1950s, large numbers of both Panas and Kandhas (but particularly the former) began converting to Christianity. Though critics of Christianity in the region suggest that Christian growth is largely the result of educational and financial inducement, convert stories suggest that health and healing have been the more critical f actors.6 The story of a middle-aged convert is typical: “I was ill. I was vomiting blood. I was with my brother. Doctors tried hard, but my
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vomiting did not stop. It was early in the morning. I dreamt of a bearded old man with a stick standing beside me. A fter that I recovered. I remember having seen a similar dream during my school days. I believed Jesus has cured me. And I became a Christian.”7 There is no doubt, of course, that improved health often leads to an improved financial state as well. And it is also the case that the institutional strength (in cooperatives, schools, e tc.) of the Christian church in rural places like Kandhamal can be leveraged, by many Christians, for their economic gain. Nevertheless, while financial improvement followed on the heels of conversion in many cases, it does not appear to have been as important a motivating factor as critics of Christianity like to imply. Today around 70 percent of Panas are Christian. The proportion is much lower for Kandhas. In 1991, Christians comprised 8.77 percent of the district population. By 2001, the figure was 18.2 percent. Aside from being well over the national and state average (of about 2.4 percent Christians), this figure represents a significant increase over that given in 1991, an increase that anti-Christian organizations have publicized widely. Yet at least some of the apparent growth was related to district reorganizing that happened in the intervening years. Many observers, both Hindu and Christian, suggest that over the few de cades prior to the riots, the Pana Christian community had advanced in tangible and discernible ways relative to the Kandha community. Their advance had given them a degree of independence from the Kandhas, on whom they used to more thoroughly depend. It had also resulted in the construction of buildings and institutions that represent a conspicuous challenge to more traditional elites in the region. A church steeple, for example, is often the tallest structure around. With the economic and educational advance of the Christian community had also come more social confidence and assertion. Untouchability was still quite widely practiced in Kandhamal, and so the assertion of low-caste Pana Christians disrupted and challenged traditional hierarchies.8 Both economically, then, and through their role in the introduction of modernization, Christians and their schools, hospitals, and development-oriented organizations had challenged traditional social arrangements and sites of power. In the same period that the Pana community was undergoing Christianization, sections of the Kandha community became increasingly Hinduized, largely through the efforts of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and those affiliated with him.9 As the Kandhas became more Hinduized, they more and more enthusiastically embraced an all-Indian Hindu religious identity. Due to the parallel processes of Christianization and Hinduization at work in the Pana and Kandha communities, conflicts between the communities increasingly took on a communal, religious tinge.
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In the decades leading up to the 2007 riots, the advance of the Pana Christian community bred resentment, particularly among the Kandhas, who alleged that the Panas were taking advantage of Kandha illiteracy and impoverishment to exploit the Kandhas and appropriate their lands. The expropriation of tribal lands by nontribal peoples has been a problem in Kandhamal, as elsewhere in India, for centuries. Because of this, the British passed laws protecting tribal lands and limiting their transfer to nontribal peoples; in dependent India’s government did the same. Nevertheless, encroachment on and illegal transfers of tribal land remain a problem right up to the present day. Such activities are common and widespread, and there is no doubt that some Pana Christians have been involved in them. Since the 1970s, the Kandhas have periodically engaged in agitations aimed at getting the government to intervene. Some of those agitations appear to have directly targeted Panas.10 Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence and more formal research into the matter suggests that caste Hindu Oriyas are just as (if not more) regularly the culprits.11 While issues of exploitation and land grabbing could certainly help explain Kandha tensions with Panas, then, they cannot account for why Panas (and not all land grabbers) would be targeted in the riot violence, except that the targeting of Panas serves the interests of upper-caste Oriya land grabbers and t hose (like some Kandhas) who find it in their interest to ally with them rather than with other impoverished Kandhamalis. Pana Christian attempts to claim ST status through subterfuge and politi cal agitation do, however, constitute a Kandha grievance specifically against the Panas. As mentioned above, SC converts to Christianity lose access to reservations, while ST converts do not. For this reason, some Pana Christians continue to register themselves as Hindu even after their conversion. Others try to obtain fake ST certificates and pass themselves off as Kandha. In the midst of the Kandhamal violence, Kui Samaj Coordination Committee’s (KSCC) Lambodar Kanhar submitted a list of 503 p eople allegedly holding fake caste certificates, and soon after the 2008 round of violence began, the government appointed ten police inspectors to look into the issue.12 Christians complained that while caste certificate forgers should be prosecuted, the timing of the government’s special investigation implied, indirectly at least, that the violent attacks on Christians were justified by the presence, among them, of a few with fake caste certificates. Panas w ere also attempting through legal wrangling to obtain recognition as an ST community, and at the time of the violence, a significant proportion of the Pana community supported a petition organized by the Phulbani Kui Jankalyan Sangh (PKJS) to have the SC Pana community officially reclassified
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as an ST community. The petition, if successful, would have allowed the Pana Christian community to claim eligibility for educational, vocational, and po litical reservations even after conversion. The PKJS argued in a petition to the Odisha High Court that the Pana community deserved ST status because a 2002 presidential order had said that the Kui community should be considered ST, and therefore the Panas, as a Kui-speaking community, were historically undifferentiated from the Kandhas. The high court issued an order on July 12, 2007, directing the government of India to investigate the m atter, but the issue remained unresolved when the violence began. There being no other significant reason why the Panas would press for SC status than to gain access to reservations after conversion, many in the Kandha community perceived the PKJS petition as a cynical effort to increase the Pana community’s economic position at the expense of the opportunities of the “real” STs, and they therefore resisted it. In September 2007, the secretary of the pro-K andha KSCC said that the Kandha community was “vehemently opposed to” the petition and insisted, somewhat presciently, that if the “Government accepted Pana harijans as tribals then it would lead to violent clashes between the two communities in Kandhamal district.”13 To protest the Pana petition, the KSCC organized the aforementioned bandh for December 24–25, 2007. The KSCC chairman, Kanhar, claimed that the bandh was not intended to interfere with Christmas celebrations but rather to correspond with a planned tenth-anniversary celebration of the BJD Party’s founding being held on the twenty-sixth in Bhubaneswar. Whatever the KSCC’s intention, the hundreds of trees they felled on roads in and out of Kandhamal not only obstructed traffic toward the anniversary celebration in Bhubaneswar but also prevented government security forces from gaining access to the riot-stricken areas after the first round of violence began. Paul Brass argues that communal violence in India generally involves “conversion specialists” who “convert” otherwise insignificant, local, or limited conflicts into larger communal ones.14 As will be discussed in the next section, Sangh Parivar leaders played this role conspicuously in the Kandhamal riots. The Kandhas, however, appear to have gone along with this conversion to achieve their own ends. In the midst of the violence, Kanhar, the KSCC chairman, asserted that he desired to protect the Kandhas from both “Christianity and the Sangh outfits.” Yet in the same interview, he exposed the extent to which he had allowed his community’s ethnic conflict with the Panas to become a communal one: “How can we get along with Christians? It’s like cat and mouse. We don’t like the ways of even those who are Christians among the Kandhas.”15 As Kanhar’s views demonstrate, the Kandhamal violence was
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premised on the illusion of stable, definite identities—Hindu versus Christian, ST Kandha versus SC Pana—and yet one of the truly striking features of the Kandhamal violence is that t hese supposedly stable identities w ere in fact very much in flux. Christian Panas, for example, w ere agitating for recognition as an ST community. At the same time, t here w ere, according to Biswamoy Pati, some Panas who went to church and followed Christian precepts but who refused baptism and suppressed their Christian identity in order to preserve their reservation privileges.16 Pana Christian identity was, therefore, quite unstable; in certain circumstances and for specific reasons, Pana Christians might be compelled to declare themselves ST or SC, Hindu or Christian. Likewise with Kandha identity: The Kandhas had become thoroughly Hinduized in the previous fifty years. T here were moments when they emphasized this Hindu identity as if they had always been Hindu, such as when they refused to let the low-caste Panas enter a local Shiva t emple.17 At other times, however, when seeking concessions from the dominant-caste Hindu community, the Kandhas would emphasize their tribal identity and religious traditions or at least threaten to do so. Kandha ethnic and religious identity was therefore in flux as was that of the Panas, and it must also be kept in mind that a significant portion of the Kandha community was Christian. And yet, the Kandhamal riots pitted a supposedly monolithic Hindu ST Kandha bloc against a supposedly homogenous Christian SC Pana bloc, as if these identities were inescapable, essential, and timeless. It is the “illusion” of fixed and singular identities, Amartya Sen argues in Identity and Violence, that leads to a sense of the inevitability of conflict between diff erent communities.18 The assumption of fixed and singular identities plays into the hands of those who espouse an ideology of Hindutva and seek to divide and exclude. For them, the accusation that Christianity is a foreign religion (and therefore inherently subversive) is linked to the assertion that the Hindu religion is indigenously and eternally Indian, that it is static and unified, despite the fact that any careful historiography suggests that this assertion is also problematic.19 There is always, Sen asserts, some element of choice involved in individual and communal identity.20 The choices are not limitless, of course, but choice remains, particularly in the relative weight that a person or a community gives to various elements of its identity.21 At any given point, a person or a community can choose to emphasize its religious, ethnic, political, linguistic, or economic identity. Yet in the Odisha riots, both the Kandhas and the Panas emphasized a single element of their identities (religion) to the exclusion of
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thers (e.g., mutual exploitation at the hands of the Oriyas) that may have o drawn attention to their commonalities rather than their difference. Nevertheless, their inability to find common ground may be in part the fault of Sangh Parivar organizations, whose involvement in this conflict contributed to the conversion of ethnic tensions into communal violence, as will be discussed in the next section. Many politicians, including Odisha’s chief minister Naveen Patnaik, interpreted the violence as ethnic Kandha-Pana conflict and denied that t here was any communal (i.e., religious) element to it, although he did eventually acknowledge the role of Sanghis in the violence.22 Similarly denying the role of communal forces in the violence, the home minister of Odisha submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court during the conflict, asserting that it was related to the “age-old ethnic divide and discord” between the Kandhas and Panas.23 Sangh affiliates did likewise, even though many of them were themselves actively involved in communalizing the conflict, as I describe below. What is clear from the evidence, however, is that the violence in Kandhamal was not merely ethnic nor merely between Kandha Hindus and Pana Christians. As noted above, Kanhar, the KSCC chairman, had made his disdain for Kandha Christians clear, and in the violence, Kandha Christians were also commonly attacked by anti-Christian rioters.24 This targeting of some Kandha Christians of course begs the question, which a Kandha Christian woman interviewed for a documentary on the violence explicitly raises: If the violence was only about Panas grabbing Kandha land, she asks, then why was her home burned down in the violence?25 Similarly, if the violence was merely about age-old Kandha-Pana tensions, why was it that in the first round of violence in Brahmanigaon, the sahi in which wealthier, shop- owning Pana Christians lived bore the brunt of the attacks while a sahi of poorer Christians remained largely untouched? Similarly, why did Christian Panas in Brahmanigaon retaliate by burning only Oriya (not Kandha) homes? More was clearly g oing on in the riots than the working out of interethnic tension. Ethnicity and religion played obvious and important roles in the vio lence. But so, too, did social and economic competition and, as I have alluded to at various places, the introduction of development and modernization by Christians and their educational, medical, and economic institutions. The complicated nature of the violence therefore requires a somewhat more textured interpretation than t hose that focus on Kandha-Pana relations imply. It is for this reason, then, that we turn now to an analysis of the interrelated involvement of Oriyas and the Sangh Parivar.
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Oriya Interventions Over the last few centuries, caste Hindus from other regions of Odisha— known as Kumuti, Sundhis, Patros, or Oriyas (the term I prefer h ere)—slowly began settling in Kandhamal for trade and became relatively wealthy as a community by shipping and selling local raw materials and goods to distant markets from the major trading centers of Tikabali, Raikia, and Baliguda, which they eventually came to dominate economically.26 With increasing Oriya wealth also came increasing political power. Yet the more recent advance of Pana Christians in wealth and education threatened both the economic and political power of Oriyas. And there was, of course, the additional religious divide. Not surprisingly, then, the Oriyas began allying themselves with the Kandhas, when it suited their purposes, and supported efforts like Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati’s to Hinduize the Kandha tribals, thinking that they would thereby increase the Kandha feelings of affinity toward them. Panas recognized the growing political affiliation of Kandhas and Oriyas and worried that the Kandhas seemed to have become in recent years, as one interviewee put it, “like a rubber stamp for the [Oriya] Hindus.” Though Kandhas w ere the primary culprits in the violence, according to victim affidavits, Oriyas were also regularly and actively engaged in attacks against Christians. Often, the victims claim, it was the Oriyas who provided direction, transportation, fuel, and other supplies to the anti-Christian rioters. When asked why the Oriyas might get involved in the violence, one Pana Christian riot victim from Baliguda said, “I opened a provision store in our lane. Previously, people used to go to the shop of the [Oriya]. Now they are coming to mine. So there is a drop in his sales and profit. The grudge is due to that only.”27 Like the Kandhas, therefore, Oriyas also perceived a threat to their social status and economic prosperity in the advance of Panas generally and particularly Pana Christians. Allying with the Kandhas against the Christians therefore had much to recommend it, including the fact that keeping Kandhas focused on their exploitation at the hands of Panas would divert their attention from the exploitative and land-g rabbing tendencies of the Oriyas themselves. The Sangh Parivar’s antiminority rhetoric conveniently facilitated this mutually beneficial alliance, so it is not surprising that the Oriyas found it appealing, but in fact, from the very moment that Sangh groups began to enter Odisha (in the 1940s), they had been supported by and collaborated with prominent Oriya traders and leaders.28 This dynamic—of upper-caste traders and businesspeople resisting the advance of those they formerly exploited—appears to have influenced the
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nature of the violence in both rounds of riots. The targeting of a World Vision office in Daringabadi during the first round of violence is a case in point. Among other projects, World Vision employees had established a village empowerment program that encouraged farmers to form cooperatives marketing their farm produce directly to buyers (rather than through the elite and largely upper-caste traders who had previously exploited them). This threatened to reduce the profits of those elite traders, who were, according to observers, prominent among members of the mob that destroyed the contents of World Vision’s office, along with a van and several motorbikes owned by the charity, on Christmas Day 2007.29
The Sangh Parivar The allegations of Sangh responsibility for the Kandhamal riots arise primarily from the conviction, widely held but not convincingly proven, that both rounds of riots w ere planned, perfectly timed, and meticulously organized. In a press conference a fter the December riots, NCM fact-finding team members pointed to the large number of felled trees and said, “This is an indication of organization on a massive scale. Besides, how could there be simultaneous attacks across the districts soon a fter [Lakshmanananda] of the VHP was attacked?”30 Many Christians and opposition political leaders also suspected the BJD Party of complicity in the Sangh’s alleged plans, and the NCM called for scrutiny of possible Sangh-BJD collusion. In addition, a thorough fact-finding report drafted by the AICC a week after the end of the first conflict found “that the VHP . . . instigated the attacks and carefully targeted Christians” throughout the district. It specifically mentioned Bikram Raut, the RSS leader from Brahmanigaon mentioned earlier, and named Chitta Bindhani and Bhagaban Panda (both Odisha VHP leaders) as co-masterminds of the “operation.” It also accused the KSCC of making an alliance with the VHP to achieve their common anti-Christian agenda. Finally, the report asserted that the rioters wore saffron ribbons on their heads and vermilion on their foreheads, marks of identity associated with the RSS and VHP.31 The saffron ribbons, the common Sangh slogans, and the presence of Sangh activists among the rioting crowds surely suggest, at the very least, a kind of elective affinity between the agenda of the rioters and that of the Sangh. Victim testimonies accused members of Sangh organizations of having communalized local conflict in the months and years before the violence and frequently identified the accused as members of the Bajrang Dal, RSS, VHP, or Durga
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Vahini.32 Yet the imprecision of the accusations sometimes suggests that the victims might not have known precisely with which of the organizations their attackers w ere formally affiliated. Even the government, however, acknowledged the widespread involvement of Sangh-affiliated activists in the rioting. In response to a question from the state legislative assembly on November 23, 2009, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said that 85 members of the RSS, 321 members of the VHP, and 118 members of the Bajrang Dal had been arrested for involvement in the violence.33 Many of them would eventually be exonerated. And none of this, of course, is damning evidence of Sangh responsibility for instigating the riots. Proof of planning and organization, itself conjectural, would, if true, not necessarily point to planning and organization by the Sangh. No clear, incontrovertible evidence of long-term planning and organization exists, and the AICC report, while careful and thorough, does not give evidence or justification for its claim that Panda and Bindhani masterminded the riots. Moreover, the fact that Sangh leaders, such as Bikram Raut, w ere present or even in some cases leading groups of rioters does not, again, necessarily implicate the Sangh, at an institutional level, in the organization of the violence (though it does indicate that Sangh leaders were often among the attackers, often appeared to be directing them, and at the very least did not uniformly remain aloof from the attacks or attempt to quell them). Similarly, the incompetent government response does not implicate the BJD Party in being anything other than incompetent and in responding insufficiently, which while unfortunate is not at all surprising given the challenges of resources, communication, and transportation in Kandhamal and Odisha more generally. The point of this discussion is not to exonerate the Sangh or even to suggest that its partisans were not involved in significant ways both before and during the Kandhamal attacks. They were. Rather, the point is to make it clear that the evidence of systematic involvement in its planning and instigation at the institutional (as opposed to individual) level is, at this point, largely circumstantial. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Sangh response to the attack on Lakshmanananda, particularly that of the VHP, contributed to the production and spread of violence by drawing on and fueling a sense of indignation among Lakshmanananda’s followers and supporters. Sangh sources insisted that the December attack on Lakshmanananda had provoked the anti-Christian riots, which were therefore justified as retaliatory, and many news sources perpetuated this genealogy of the clashes. Sangh sources also exaggerated the nature of that December attack, asserting, for example, that a member of Lakshmanananda’s entourage or even Lakshmanananda himself had been killed.34
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Even Lakshmanananda, who had long established ties to the Sangh, and particularly the VHP, participated in this exaggeration. In an interview with the RSS’s Organiser after the Daringbadi attack, he said: “They attacked us suddenly, abused us for our Paravartan [home-coming, reconversion] mission and dragged us out to kill. Our driver and angrakshak [bodyguard] were roughly beaten up. It was a pre-meditated plan to kill us. The area is dominated by converted Christians and minority Hindus suffer a lot. We were going to perform a religious satsang there. The attackers told us that their government is ruling at Delhi and they can do everything.”35 Similarly, calling on the putatively affronted honor of Hindus nationwide (and thereby widening the call for a response), the prominent Shankaracharya of Puri, Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati, to whom Christians had appealed fruitlessly for help in quelling the violence, said, “This pre-planned and well organized attack on Swami Laxmanananda was a gruesome attempt to murder him in cold blood. It is a shame for us.”36 Sangh groups also mounted a counterpropaganda campaign against what they viewed as the anti-Sangh bias of the independent, English-language press, what a writer in the BJP journal, Kamal Sandesh, called the “24 × 7 secular media.”37 A VHP press release went even further, deliberately, it seems, promulgating misinformation. The press release claimed that during the riots “not a single Christian was attacked.” Moreover, the press release alleged that “Christians themselves burnt” their own houses, knowing the national government would give them relief funds and hoping by provoking sympathy to get “foreign aid” from Christian organizations. Turning the allegation of Sangh planning on its head, the report alleged that “the poor innocent Christians of such remote areas could not have done such things in a planned way without the support of [some] big foreign funding organization. There is hidden hand of World Vision, YMCA, NISWASS [National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences,] etc and Church organization b ehind such incidents.”38 When they did acknowledge the involvement of non-Christians in the attacks on Christians, they followed the script they had written in other antiminority riots in which they had been involved, portraying the attacks on Christians as a “natural” (if officially regrettable) response to Christian aggression.39 Sangh groups and even many independent observers and media p eople also deployed ethnic stereotypes in emphasizing the “simple” nature of Kandhamal’s tribals, who could not be blamed for reacting negatively or, as one report put it, going “berserk” in response to Christian provocations.40 Of course, explanations such as t hese also implicitly deny the involvement of Oriyas and other nontribal individuals in the violence.
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These same sources frequently accounted for the spread and scope of the violence by depicting it as the result of years of offensive evangelistic efforts by Christian “missionaries.” The BJP’s Kamal Sandesh, for example, suggested: “Communal tension in Kandhamal district had nothing to do with Christmas celebrations. A conversion convention was organized by the missionaries and it was opposed by the local p eople. Ignoring the warnings, missionaries and their supporters erected boards and arches in front of Hindu houses. P eople removed boards and banners in front of their h ouses and protested to the people who erected it. This action of the tribal Hindus infuriated the Christians and first of all the Christians attacked Hindus and stoned their houses.”41 Though claims of a “conversion convention” are a rhetorical exaggeration, conversions and rumors of conversions certainly were involved in the clashes or at least in the underlying grievances that fueled them. One of the Sangh’s more curious efforts to control the Kandhamal narrative involved the enlistment of the American author Michael Parker (a.k.a. Brannon Parker, Michael Brannon Parker, Vrin Parker, Vrn Parker, Vrindavan Parker, Vrindavan Brannon Parker, Brannon Vrin Daavin Parker), who has been variously presented as an American “anthropologist” and “social researcher” but who does not appear to practice in t hese fields as an academic profession. In 2009, barely a year a fter the riots, he published Harvest of Hate— Kandhamal in Crossfire as Michael Parker. Then, in 2011, he published more or less the same book as Orissa in the Crossfire—K andhamal Burning, this time as Brannon Parker. The Indian author Anto Akkara has gone so far as to suggest that no such author exists and has implied that Sangh supporters authored the book u nder these pseudonyms, perhaps presenting the author as American to make the book appear less partisan.42 It is certainly the case that the India Foundation, the acknowledged publisher of Harvest of Hate, has strong ties to the Sangh. The foundation has inhabited addresses owned by Ajit Kumar Doval, the national security advisor to the prime minister of India.43 Nirmala Sitharaman, who wrote the publisher’s note for Harvest of Hate, is currently the BJP’s minister of defense. Ram Madhav, a member of the foundation’s board of governors, was at the time of the Kandhamal riots the national spokesperson for the RSS and currently serves as the national general secretary of the BJP. Madhav actively distributed copies of the books, even to Christian leaders, in the aftermath of the riots.44 It is also true that the speed with which the book was produced and the consistency with which it hews to the Sangh political line suggests, at the very least, that it was researched and written with significant Sangh support. And finally, it is also the case that Parker has not left the kind
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of online footprint one would expect of a person promoted as an “American social researcher.” Considering all this and the sheer number of Parker’s aliases, Akkara can be forgiven, perhaps, for suspecting he does not exist. He does, however, exist. He has been interviewed by the Mythicist Milwau kee Show (as Brannon Vrin Daavin Parker), where he acknowledged that he “has done a lot of work with . . . the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.”45 He is listed as a Vedic scholar (as Vrin Parker) at the Vedic Friends Association, which is chaired by David Frawley, an American Hindu whose scholarship and Hindu apologetics are often promoted by the Sangh.46 Of course none of this proves that he wrote the books associated with his name(s) entirely alone (that is, without help from Sangh supporters), but it seems likely enough that he had a significant role in their production. Nevertheless, as indicated e arlier, the books do also bear the strong imprint of Sangh sources. At more than 450 pages, Orissa in Crossfire presents the Sangh narrative on Kandhamal in circuitous, stream-of-consciousness fashion, quoting frequently and at great length from other sources (sometimes inaccurately)47 and interspersing numerous, barely relevant tangents on, for example, French religious intolerance, the merits of cow protection, thoroughly debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the sexual lives of Catholic priests and nuns. He repeats the Sangh assertion that Kandhamal Christians attacked and burned down their own homes and institutions and even goes a step further to suggest that Kandhas comprised the majority of the victims and refugees of the riot violence.48 He uses sources selectively and in a self-serving manner, such as when on one page he refers approvingly to a report by the Catholic leader and activist John Dayal, which acknowledges Christian violence against Hindus took place in the context of the riots, and then on the very next accuses him (among o thers) of being at the “forefront of the Christian Pana aggressions,” never mind that Dayal lives in Delhi, is not Pana, and was not present in the region during the earliest, most severe days of either the 2007 or 2008 riots (though he did arrive soon after, in both cases, to carry out fact-finding missions and advocate for victims).49 The book is full of double standards. For example, after supporting the plausibility of accusations that Sister Meena had been sexually active (and therefore presumably not a believable witness or honorable victim of rape) with ten pages documenting the sexual activity and sexual impropriety of Catholic priests and nuns worldwide, Parker criticizes her for expressing a lack of faith that the Indian judicial system could bring her justice, suggesting that in d oing so she was acting as if she was above the law.50 Contradicting his own point, however, he at the same time portrays Kandha attacks on Christians as a natu
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ral response to their inability to use the courts to achieve justice in their disputes with Christians.51 Elsewhere, he criticizes the “separatist mentality” of some Kandhamali Christians who petitioned the government for a separate district to live f ree of threats like t hose they experienced in the riots, while nonchalantly describing as “not particularly blood thirsty yet practical in their approach” a “Kandha tribal war party” of fifteen that met to work out “plans to attack Christians” armed with “axes, swords, machetes and torches,” for the purposes of what sounds distinctly like ethnic cleansing (i.e., to “scare them into leaving Kandhamal”).52 It is not for no reason, then, that Christians were disturbed and incensed by the publication of t hese books and other Sangh efforts to deny the reality of anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal. The Sangh Parivar is surely not solely responsible for the existence of Kandha-Pana tensions. Nor are they entirely to blame for the communalization of t hese tensions. The ease with which the Sangh could construe Odisha as Hindu may in fact have colonial roots, in the sense that in 1936 the British may have constructed the province of Orissa, a Hindu-dominated province (given here in its older spelling), at least in part to appease Hindus upset at the administration’s creation of the Muslim-majority province of Sindh.53 This gesture and colonial censuses that calculated the province’s population as nearly universally Hindu certainly provided assistance to those who wished to portray it as essentially and eternally so. Moreover, the Hindu Mahasabha has been strong in the region since its local launch in Puri in 1940.54 Similarly, the far more recent fact that Pana Christians attacked Lakshmanananda’s (very symbolically Hindu) entourage at the beginning of the December riots, for example, gave Sangh leaders a convenient excuse to paint the ensuing violence in the broad strokes of communalism. But Sangh leaders did play the role of “conversion specialists” in two significant ways. First, as elsewhere in India, in Odisha Sangh leaders had long attempted, through a large network of rural schools, to Hinduize and Sanskritize the tribal Kandhas and thereby to win them to the Hindutva cause by distributing images of Hindu gods and goddesses for worship; encouraging nonviolence toward animals, particularly the cow; organizing bhajans, kirtans, festivals, rath yatras, and yajnas in the style of Hindus from coastal Odisha; and sponsoring discourses on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita to educate tribals on the classical Sanskrit Hindu texts.55 (Rath yatras are literally “chariot journeys,” that is, processions as part of which the images of gods and goddesses are carried on a chariot; bhajans and kirtans are devotional songs; yajnas are sacrifices.) Sangh leaders also tried to eradicate tribal customs they considered un-Hindu, such as those deriving from the tribals’ significantly more permissive (than traditional upper-caste Hindu) attitude toward alcohol and premarital sex.56
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For many years, Lakshmanananda had been at the forefront of these efforts and, as such, was both a popular and controversial figure. Arriving in the region midway through the 1960s, Lakshmanananda set up the Chakkapad ashram in 1969. Originally managed u nder VHP auspices, it came in 1979 to be overseen by the ABVKA. The Chakkapad ashram runs a Sanskrit school for men that is attended primarily by local tribals who, like their teachers, are considered RSS swayamsevaks and expected to attend local shakha activities. In 1989, Lakshmanananda established a second ashram for the education of girls at Jalespata, the one in which he would eventually be assassinated. The Jalespata ashram also runs an educational institution. As in Chakkapad, most of the students are tribals whose education is subsidized by the government and who are expected to be members of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (National Women Volunteers’ Committee), a group similar in perspective and practice to the male-dominated RSS. In addition to promoting Sanskritic Hindu texts, ideas, and practices among the tribals, these educational facilities also inculcate Hindutva ideals and nurture, among students, a sense of ownership of the all- Indian Hindu tradition and a disdain for Christian and Muslim minorities. The ashrams additionally promote agricultural planning and innovation among local farmers.57 Through these educational facilities, some dispensaries, and hostels, Sangh organizations have attempted since the 1960s to establish a “welfare system” to compete with that of Christian missionaries and to thereby neutralize their effect.58 Lakshmanananda and his Sangh associates also periodically organized paravartan ceremonies to reconvert Christians to Hinduism, but over time, they became somewhat cautious of these ceremonies, fearing that SC Christians not sincerely interested in Hinduism were using the ritual to gain access to SC Hindu reservations.59 Nevertheless, these various efforts slowly began to have some effect in developing among the tribals greater support for the Sangh’s Hindu and Hindutva ideals and in countering the influence of Christians in the region. As they did, Christians and non-Christians in the region came increasingly into conflict. As Lakshmanananda himself put it: [The spread] of Hinduism through “bhagbat path”, “naam Sankirtan”, “Gyana Yagna” and the like activities are the irritants to [the] Christian community. Earlier missionaries w ere converting the poor, innocent scheduled caste p eople to their religion, but my efforts have put a grinding halt to their conversion. . . . The Missionaries were initially giving money for the conversion but thereafter poor Hindus are exploited like anything and stated that each converted Christian has to give muthi rice
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(a handful of rice) everyday [sic] for the Church, first calf of the cow has to be donated to the Church. Missionaries have vowed to make this place a Christian land but I have pledged to convert this scenic spot to be an united Hindu Rashtra.60 Local opinion diverged on the value of Lakshmanananda’s work. Some saw him as the savior of the tribals and appreciated his educational, agricultural, and pro-Hindu efforts in the region. Others admired his social service activities on behalf of tribal peoples but were ambivalent about his anti-Christian rhetoric. One Hindu who was a follower of Lakshmanananda’s, for example, said, “Most of the time, he was speaking against Christians, but we w ere not opposed to them. Two of my b rothers are Christian, and [I and my other brother are] Hindu.”61 Not surprisingly, Christian opinion about Lakshmanananda was often quite negative. Most believed that he and his followers had poisoned the relationship of Christians and non-Christians in the region. One Catholic priest I interviewed, for example, accused the swami of caring only about what he perceived to be the exploitation of tribals by Christians and papering over the manipulation of tribal peoples by Oriya businessmen and politicians, who, according to the priest, were profiting from development funds that were supposed to go to tribals. The priest also echoed the sentiments of many Kandhamali Christians, accusing Lakshmanananda of having put “venom in the minds of the simple tribal people . . . for the last 30 years, so the people were completely against the Christians.”62 Similarly, the Catholic archbishop of Bhubaneswar, Raphael Cheenath, holds Lakshmanananda directly responsible for the riots and has been quoted calling him the “Bal Thackeray of Odisha.”63 The second way that Sangh activists played the role of conversion specialists in the Kandhamal riots was through a process Tambiah has called “transvaluation.”64 Sangh leaders exacerbated the violence, once it began, by exaggerating the aggression of Christians and by rhetorically linking the Kandhamal vio lence, through insinuation and sometimes outright fabrication, to broader Hindu nationalist anxieties about minorities and the integrity of the nation. The most important of t hose anxieties, perhaps, has to do with conversion and the growth of Christianity. It is to that issue, therefore, that we now turn.
The Calculus of Conversion As indicated above, many in the region explained the anti-Christian attacks as a natural response to the conversion activities of missionaries. This explanation
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(and implicit justification) is a common one in India and is regularly applied to incidents of anti-Christian violence. Three interrelated claims generally accompany such an explanation and did so in the context of the Kandhamal riots as well: (1) that the Christian community is growing at an unusually high rate, (2) that conversion activities are funded primarily by foreigners (i.e., Eu ropeans and Americans), and (3) that these foreign funds are used directly (e.g., through bribes) and indirectly (e.g., through the provision of social services) to lure naïve and impoverished non-Christians to Christianity. The first of these claims, that the Christian community is growing at an unusually high rate in Kandhamal, is supported to some degree by the Indian government’s census figures. The Christian community in Kandhamal grew nearly 56 percent in the decade between 1991 and 2001, according to 2001 census data. This is a significant increase, given that the Indian population only grew at a rate of around 22 percent in the same period, though as indicated above, part of the increase stems from district reorganizing that happened in the intervening years. Nevertheless, Christianity was growing rapidly, and Kandhamal Christian informants repeatedly suggested to me that missionary work was going very well in the region. It is therefore not at all surprising that conversion became such a significant issue in the context of the Kandhamal conflict, especially since sociologists have shown that violence against minorities correlates more strongly with the growth of a community than with its actual numbers. The 2001 census reported that Christians constituted 18.2 percent of Kandhamal’s population, while Hindus constituted 81.4 percent. In the wake of the first round of Kandhamal clashes, Ram Madhav, the national spokesperson of the RSS, exaggerated the size of the Christian community, alleging that Christians made up 27 percent of the district’s population.65 By exaggerating the size of this Christian community and the speed of its growth, Madhav and other Sangh leaders turned conversion into an effective “conflict symbol” and thereby portrayed the violence in Kandhamal as the work of a dominant Christian community that preyed on a helpless Hindu minority.66 In so d oing, they also exploited and perpetuated long-standing Hindu anxieties (produced by the Sangh and perpetuated by those influenced by their rhetoric) about the survival of Hinduism itself.67 “We are very much worried about the life and property of the minority Hindu community of Daringibadi block of Kandhamal district,” a VHP press released reported.68 The second and third claims, that conversion activities are funded primarily by foreigners and that these foreign funds are used to lure naive and impoverished Hindus to Christianity, are so closely related that they must be discussed together. Sangh groups have repeatedly called on the government
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to document and publicize the amount and specific use of foreign money received annually by Christian NGOs. In the wake of the 1998 anti-Christian vio lence in the Dangs, Gujarat, for example, BJP prime minister L. K. Advani called for a “public debate” on conversion and controversially released information about the foreign funding of Christian institutions.69 Similarly, in response to the Kandhamal clashes, a VHP press release called on the Indian government to “check foreign funding to the NGOs and Church establishments and frame laws to scrutinize the activities of these organizations.”70 Since 1976, foreign contributions to all NGOs in India (including religious organizations) have been regulated under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which requires regular reporting from NGOs on the amount and sources of foreign funding received. For decades, the FCRA had been used merely to regulate and make more transparent the funding of NGOs. When the BJP won elections and took power at the center in 2014, however, it began canceling NGO licenses to accept foreign funding under the act. Many Christian organizations w ere among the reportedly 20,000 NGOs that lost their license, allegedly for violating provisions of the FCRA, but so too w ere many minority-rights organizations and Indian chapters of organizations based in the West, like Greenpeace and the Ford Foundation. Critics complained, with justification, that the BJP government was squelching the funding of organ izations it found a nuisance or a threat to its electoral base. Clearly, complaints about and the throttling of the foreign funding of Christian organizations are partisan, but some Christians have also called for greater transparency in the funding of Indian organizations, believing that if such information included more detail regarding the uses to which the funds were put, and if information on Christian institutions w ere accompanied by information on funding for such Hindu organizations as the VHP or RSS, which they believe may now equal that given to Christian organizations, a more balanced and fruitful public debate on the issue might ensue.71 In a televised debate aired on CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation after the first round of riots in Kandhamal, Ram Madhav said, “There is absolute freedom for Christians to propagate their religion. But when you indulge in fraudulent conversions, there is a localized reaction.”72 In the same debate, Madhav referred to a Christian Science Monitor (CSM) article, which, he said, “argued that . . . Christian missionaries’ conversion zeal is responsible for all the violence” against Christians in India. The article, by Scott Baldauf, describes a “new breed” of independent missionaries in India that puts “an emphasis on speed,” and which is “returning to practices of proselytizing that were long ago abandoned by the mainline missionaries b ecause they w ere seen as offensive.”73 Baldauf ’s assertions appear to be corroborated by the evidence; even a cursory review of
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isolated incidents of violence against Christians indicates that “independent” pastors and nondenominational organizations bear the brunt of everyday incidents of anti-Christian attacks, in part because their greater aggressiveness and criticism of Hindu beliefs and practices offends Hindu sensibilities and in part because they are more publicly seeking converts.74 And yet in the context of anti-Christian riots, the distinction between more culturally sensitive, introverted, mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian organizations and this “new breed” of aggressively evangelistic organizations breaks down, largely because the well-established Protestant and Catholic organizations have easily identifiable and targetable institutional centers. But it may also be that whereas the everyday, more isolated incidents of anti-Christian violence respond to more specific perceived threats (e.g., evangelization and the possibility of conversion), anti-Christian riots like those in Kandhamal have a more generalized target: Christians, their economic advance, and the modernization they are presumed to perpetuate through their development schemes, their trade cooperatives, their academic institutions, and their allegedly Westernized religion itself. The CSM article indicates that most of the well-established denominations in India, as well as most Western groups that support missionaries in India, object to the methods of this “new breed” of missionary. For example, in a different article, Reverend Enos das Pradhan, the general secretary of the Church of North India, said that “an upsurge in evangelization by missionaries from overseas and from southern India” had “further inflamed tensions” in Odisha.75 Not surprisingly, Madhav ignored this part of the story, because it undermines his depiction of Christians in India as uniformly dedicated to aggressively tearing down the edifice of Hinduism. The rhetoric of “fraudulent conversion,” as Madhav and o thers use it, implies not merely that evangelists are being offensive but that they are physically or through financial inducement or promise forcing Hindus to convert. Few would go as far as Rama Tripathy, who alleges that “conversions of poor tribal villagers are being conducted at gunpoint.”76 However, many Hindus believe a Sangh leader like Madhav when he writes, “90 per cent of conversions [in] India are through fraud means or allurement.”77 And, of course, if fear of divine retribution can be construed as allurement, as it is in several of the state laws proscribing conversion, then a pale of suspicion is cast on all conversions as potentially illegitimate. Even before independence, it was common for opponents of Christianity in India to claim that converts to the faith had been lured away, e ither by the possibility of association (through religion) with the aphrodisiacal power of the colonizer or by the promise of economic benefit. In the postindependence
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period, that claim crystallized in the 1956 Niyogi Committee report. As mentioned earlier, the Niyogi report led indirectly to the creation of acts regulating conversion in Madhya Pradesh (1968) and Odisha (1967) that established the grounds on which to prosecute those who would use underhanded methods or bribes to lure someone to convert.78 Despite the existence of this freedom-of-religion act in Odisha, however, inquirers from the NCM found after the first round of riots in Kandhamal that no officials in the region w ere aware of cases in which it had been used to prosecute missionaries. There is therefore little evidence that missionaries of any stripe, even the new missionaries, w ere employing obvious, direct, and explicit means of inducement as a regular part of their evangelistic strategy (which is not the same as saying that no one ever does). That said, when Madhav and o thers speak of fraudulent conversion, they often refer to more subtle forms of allurement, such as the hope (even if ill founded) that conversion to Christianity will lead to better economic and employment prospects, better educational prospects for one’s c hildren, or easier and cheaper access to health care. Nevertheless, the Niyogi report’s language, which repeatedly invokes the variously articulated t riple specter of conversion by “force, fraud, and inducement,” has had a significant influence on the way the issue of Christian conversion in India has been framed ever since. In a substantial number of the incidents of anti-Christian violence in 2007 and certainly during and after the Kandhamal riots, the alleged involvement of Christians in “forcible” and “fraudulent” conversions was provided as both explanation and justification for violence. The rhetoric of fraudulent conversion or conversion through allurement involves several assumptions. The first assumption is that conversion to Chris tianity brings with it economic benefits. It cannot be denied that many, perhaps even a majority of, Indian converts to Christianity in the last two centuries have experienced some material benefit from their movement into the Christian community. There are the obvious examples: the impoverished famine victim offered food by Christians with an implicit expectation of conversion, the mission hospital that dispensed medicines to Christians only or at a reduced rate, the outlaw who received l egal help from missionaries in exchange for his conversion.79 For the sake of balance, however, it is equally important to make it clear that such practices were rejected long ago by nearly all Christian missionaries, foreign and domestic, and that the vast majority of India’s Christians t oday find such obvious allurements to the faith repulsive and illegitimate. Despite this, Arun Shourie and other opponents of Christianity in India cite the Niyogi report, published in 1956, as if it contained an accurate description of
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Christian evangelistic methods today. It simply does not. The Niyogi report was inaccurate and outdated even in 1956, and the use of it to describe con temporary Christian activities in India is therefore doubly anachronistic. But what about more subtle forms of allurement? Is it allurement if a sick woman is cured by Christian doctors who also pray over her and thereby suggest that it was the power of Christ that cured her rather than sound scientific medical methods? Is it allurement if an impoverished farmer notices that his Christian neighbors have formed economic cooperatives and are prospering more than he and his Hindu neighbors are and he for this reason decides to convert? Is it allurement if, as David Martin and Peter Berger have suggested is the case with Pentecostalism around the world, converts to Christianity are instilled with a modernized form of the “Protestant ethic” and through “hard work, soberness, frugality, and a generally disciplined lifestyle [can] over a generation or so . . . escape from grinding poverty”?80 Is it allurement if conversion to Christianity frees former Hindus from traditional prohibitions on certain kinds of work and thereby allows them to find more lucrative employment?81 The second assumption implied in the rhetoric of “force, fraud, and inducement” is that there are never advantages in remaining or becoming Hindu. In fact, t here are a good number of advantages for Hindus who remain Hindu. It is difficult psychologically, for example, to break with one’s family, particularly with one’s parents, and doing so in India often incurs a kind of debilitating social ostracism. There are also the less obvious but no less real advantages of remaining part of the numerically, politically, and economically dominant community of the land. In addition, there is also the fact that for many centuries tribal groups that have become Sanskritized or—to state it more provocatively—converted to Hinduism through a slow process of assimilation have by that method become integrated into the more economically developed and powerf ul Hindu community and thereby gained access to its wealth and social power.82 And finally, of course, there is the reservation system, which as Mukul Kesavan argues, induces members of the lower castes to remain Hindu because their conversion to Christianity would entail the loss of access to reserved seats in political, educational, and vocational bodies.83 The third assumption implied by the rhetoric of “force, fraud, and inducement” is that people choose their religion based on material calculations alone. The assumption is particularly prominent, as Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, when the p eople in question are poor members of SC and ST communities, who are presumed to be crass, gullible, and unintelligent.84 There are many theories of conversion, but various forms of the “interest” theory still dominate sociological analysis of religious change. Developed by Marxist theorists,
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the interest theory suggests that people’s material interests influence their religious behavior (and therefore their religious affiliation). In my view, the interest theory is flawed for two reasons: (1) it implies, problematically, that human behavior is determined at all times by a rational calculation of ends and means, and (2) it suffers from a too narrow conception of interest (i.e., as material concern). My own view, as I have indicated elsewhere, is that while conversion may often be prompted by the pursuit of interests, such interests are more often intuited than rationally articulated, felt more than consciously considered.85 Moreover, I agree with Max Weber’s critique of Marx’s conception of interest. While Weber accepted the notion that rational action (which, for him, constituted only one kind of action) was guided by interests, he argued that ideals and values could also be interests and could therefore sometimes influence human behavior. The current debate on allurement in India therefore essentially misses the point. All conversions involve self-interest, as do all nonconversions. The Hindu who remains Hindu is acting in her or his own perceived best interest just as much as the one who converts to Christianity, whether her or his self-interest is of a material or ideal kind and w hether she or he can clearly articulate t hose interests or not. So t here is inducement and allurement in every direction and of e very kind. A more fruitful debate, therefore, would revolve around what kind of inducement is acceptable and what kind is not. It is important to underline the fact that many factors contributed to and exacerbated the violence in Kandhamal. The anti-Christian rhetoric that I have analyzed and criticized here is but one part of the story. Moreover, it must be recognized that this rhetoric is very often perpetuated for cynical and ideological reasons, not merely out of ignorance. Further research is necessary to analyze the continued viability of this ideology, that is, the reasons why it remains palatable and appealing to a sizeable (and arguably growing) population of Hindus in India and abroad.
The Involvement of Naxalites One question that remains unanswered is the extent to which Maoist Naxalites were involved in or manipulated the riot discord and confusion for their own purposes. The Naxalites are a revolutionary Indian group that traces its roots to the founding of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (Maoist), which was established in 1967. Over time and through multiple schisms, the communist movement in India developed divergent pathways. Legitimate, above-g round communist parties continue to function and win elections in
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India, but the Naxalites trace their heritage to an underg round insurgency associated with the CPI (Maoist). Naxalites are active in rural areas stretching down the eastern coastline from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Chennai, in what some have called the “Red Corridor.” At their height, around the time of the riots, they controlled a sizeable portion of the eastern third of the country and were pushing into but not yet in control of any major territory in Odisha. Over the decade since the riots, however, Naxalite power has declined significantly. Naxalites remain a presence but cease to represent an existential threat to the government of India in the way they once did. State police officials and Sangh leaders alleged a Naxalite hand in the first round of violence in Kandhamal. The BJP’s Kamal Sandesh urged, “It is incumbent upon the central government and 24 × 7 channels to open their eyes and ears towards the nexus between the anti-nationals [the Naxalites], the missionaries and their activities in this part of India,” and other Sangh sources suggested that Christian missionaries had invited the Naxalites into the region.86 Even Judge Tosh, who presided over the trial of the seven Christians accused in the killing of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, wrote in his decision (without providing any evidence) that the Crime Branch investigating officer had “found a well organized conspiracy of the missionaries and Maoists to eliminate Swamiji.”87 Some Christian leaders also publicly alleged that the Christian retaliation (in Brahmanigaon and elsewhere) was instigated by Naxalites, implying thereby that it was therefore not entirely the fault of Christians. They rejected the notion, however, that there was any stable or organized Naxalite-Christian cooperation. It is difficult to determine whether Naxalite involvement in the first round of Kandhamal riots was real and significant or w hether Hindu, Christian, and state government leaders wishing to deflect blame simply scapegoated the Maoist insurgents. The strength of the Naxalite insurgency, which at the time of the Kandhamal riots controlled a significant proportion of Indian territory outside of the state, was an embarrassment to many of India’s politicians, and portraying the violence as a result of Naxalite manipulations would have had the benefit of bringing Odisha’s politicians some sympathy. That said, though it would surprise no one if the Naxalites w ere found to have exploited the unrest of the first round of violence to further their own agenda, it should be stressed that before the riots they had not been as active in Kandhamal as they had in other parts of the state. The role of the Naxalites in the second round of violence is of course somewhat more obvious, though no less complicated or curious. The Naxalites themselves claimed responsibility for the killing of Lakshmanananda and framed it as punishment for his Hinduizing and anti-Christian activities. As
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Sabyasachi Panda, allegedly the leader of Naxalites in Odisha at the time, put it, “Laxmanananda was encouraging Brahmanism and simple tribals were being converted to Hinduism. Tribals are not Hindus as they have their own culture and God. They practice animal sacrifice. They have separate religion. He was attacking people who ate beef and converting Christians into Hindus. That’s why we killed him.”88 Naxalites also published a “hit list” of Sangh activists, several of whom they assassinated in the months after the riots. As noted e arlier, however, Sangh leaders uniformly rejected Naxalite claims of involvement as a ruse meant to protect Christians. Panda’s comments fueled suspicion that the Naxalites were in league with Christians in the plot to kill Lakshmanananda, and t here w ere other, more general reasons to suspect a possible alliance. Naxalites found their strength among the poor and disaffected in underdeveloped, rural districts of eastern India. In t hose districts, they recruited heavily among the lower-class, lower- caste, and (especially) tribal communities that had reason to be disgruntled with elite, often upper-caste Hindu politicians. That these communities are also the most likely to convert to Christianity is well known, and so in many areas of strong Naxalite presence, t here was also a strong Christian presence, and vice versa. The Naxalites, for their part, have tended to portray themselves as the champions of marginal lower-caste and minority communities, as Panda did in his comments a fter the murder of Lakshmanananda. And Panda himself was seen by some as a kind of revolutionary Robin Hood, like Che Guevara or Paulo Escobar.89 Nevertheless, the fact that Naxalites and Christian evangelists both worked and recruited (so to speak) among the same communities generally made them competitors rather than allies, and Christian evangelists were among the Naxalites’ regular targets.90 After a manhunt that spanned years, during many of which he was India’s most wanted, Panda was arrested in 2014 on charges related to the killing of Lakshmanananda, among many, many others. By then, Panda had been expelled from the CPI (Maoist) Party, and schisms and factional Naxalite infighting had diminished his power and the number of those loyal to him to the point that his arrest likely had little effect on the overall strength of the broader Naxalite movement. Some have even suggested that it was the killing of Lakshmanananda, about which there was internal Naxalite disagreement, which first opened up a significant fissure between Panda and other Naxalites leaders.91 But at the time of the Kandhamal riots, Panda was in many ways the “public face of the movement.”92 It is widely acknowledged that there are some Christian Naxalites. However, there is no real evidence of the alleged “nexus” between Christians and Naxalites, at least not in terms of any formal alliance. And indeed, large
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numbers of the Maoist guerrillas in Odisha are non-Christian. Yet the first round of violence, according to Kandhamal Christian interviewees, led devastated Christians to sympathize somewhat more with the Naxalite’s pro- minority and antielitist stance, and to see in them ideological allies and perhaps even a source of protection. It is plausible that this, in turn, may have even led some disaffected Christian youth to join the movement. As one interviewee said to me, explaining the actions of those hypothetical youth, “When you don’t get justice in the usual way, you get it in another way.” (Paradoxically, when I interviewed R. Venkatanarayanan, who was at the time advisor to the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, and a public figure very much on the opposite side of this issue, he used almost the same argument to explain why poor, rural Hindus frustrated that their government could not or would not prevent what they considered conversions to Christianity due to allurement might resort to violence.) Among Christians, who mostly believe the Naxalite claim that Naxalites assassinated Lakshmanananda, there is some suspicion that they did it explicitly to gain the admiration and support of SC communities in the region, and it may have been the case that the Naxalites were shifting their focus from the tribal communities from which they had traditionally—but in recent years increasingly less successfully—recruited to marginalized and threatened SC communities. Jed Lea-Henry puts it more forcefully: “Panda had hoped that Saraswati’s death would precipitate a wave of communal violence against the local Christian population . . . and that in turn . . . would help to swell the Maoist ranks. He was right on the first count . . . [but the] subsequent mass recruitment into the Maoist ranks did not materialise.”93
A Proxy War on Western Secular Modernities? As is clear from this chapter so far, the violence in Kandhamal can be relatively adequately explained with reference to economic and political competition alone, particularly as that competition and the inevitable tensions it creates are exploited by Sanghi political elites, who connect it—as they did in Kandhamal—to their broader narrative of an India that is and must remain Hindu and that remains under constant threat from the growth of “foreign” religions like Islam and Christianity. Political and economic competition also helps explain as well as predict the targeting of religious workers (particularly those perceived to engage in proselytization) and, more generally, Christian bodies, property, institutions, and businesses. All along, however, I have also urged
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readers to train their ears to hear evidence of an additional factor (resistance to Western secular modernities) in Kandhamal’s violence. I must stress again that I consider this factor merely—to borrow the previous sentence’s language—an “additional” one. Accordingly, the explanatory value of the factor of resistance to at least certain aspects of Western secular modernities does not displace or supplant that of o thers. Yet it remains my contention that part of what fuels distaste for Christians, particularly among upper-caste and other traditional Indian elites, is that Christians are justifiably associated with the introduction and promotion of Western secular modernities. More so than in the case of other religions, India’s Christians encourage various forms of modernization through their many and successful educational facilities, as well as through their support for various economic development schemes and trade cooperatives built on modern forms of economic behavior that disregard (and frequently circumvent) older hierarchies, patronage systems, and the elites who traditionally controlled economic activity within their sphere of influence. More specifically, t hese educational facilities and development projects promote values frequently associated with the modern: individuality, equality (particularly gender equality), rationality (particularly in the pursuit of profit), and achieved rather than ascriptive status. The contention that anti-Christian violence is fueled in part by a distaste for these values (or a concern that their introduction might undermine the power of traditional elites) cannot be proven apodictically b ecause one driven by such distaste to act violently against Christians would do so in very much the same way one would if driven by the dictates of economic or political competition. T hese factors can therefore not be disentangled or investigated in isolation. Targeting the bodies of Christians to cower, distract, or diminish their numbers not only diminishes their economic and political threat; it also diminishes the influence they can have within society and the extent to which they can promote their modern values. Targeting their institutions likewise not only deals an economic and political blow but also decreases the ability of those institutions to run the very programs that inculcate the values of individuality, rationality, and equality. Theoretically, we can predict that there would be one difference, however. Those driven by the desire to undermine the economic and political competition of Christians, if acting rationally—an important caveat, given the discussion with which this chapter began—would stop short of targeting Christian educational facilities with Hindu student populations, as well as NGOs known locally to serve both Christians and non-Christians equally. They would also avoid attacking Hindu employees at such NGOs, unless of course the true
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target were not Christians themselves (and only them) but also the symbols of the values of modernity associated with them. In the context of the Kandhamal riots, however, there were several instances of Christian schools being attacked and shut down, despite primarily teaching Hindu students, as well as NGOs known to benefit both Christians and Hindus being attacked, along with Hindu employees of the same. One Hindu w oman, for example, had worked for fifteen years at a Christian- run NGO before becoming a victim of the attacks. “The nature of my work,” she reported, “was social empowerment, working with Hindus and Christians on malaria, HIV/AIDS awareness, self-help group formation, [and so on].” She and her son, who also worked for the organization, lived within its compound. When a mob attacked in the second round of violence, they not only destroyed her h ouse (which could have been construed as property of the NGO) but also returned later to loot a small electronics shop her son had recently opened. Another of her sons (or the same—it is unclear in her testimony) was severely beaten and disappeared from Kandhamal for several months. When he returned home, he was suffering from severe mental health issues. The attack on this Christian NGO directly undermined the financial fortunes even of Hindus in the surrounding areas, which suggests it was targeted not merely because it was Christian but b ecause of the elements of modernization it introduced. As the Hindu w oman put it, “I had helped form at least 200 [self- help groups]. I taught them how to go to the bank and how to manage their finances. Now when they see me, they ask me to return to the village. But how can I return when I know that t hese women were also part of the mob?”94 The social empowerment for which this social worker labored would have been threatening to traditional elites in the region. She and her NGO promoted the economic equality of w omen, encouraged modern banking practices that would have cut into the profits of traditional moneylenders (who generally lent at exorbitant interest rates), and promoted modern development in a variety of other ways. An attack such as this, on a Hindu worker at a Christian NGO that offered considerable help to Hindus, cannot be explained with reference merely to economic interest. In fact, eliminating this NGO and destroying the livelihood of this woman ran directly counter to local Hindus’ economic self-interest. However, the NGO did promote elements of modernization that would have been threatening to traditional hierarchies and elites, and it is for this symbolic reason that it was likely attacked. That said, in at least one instance, a Christian organization appears to have been spared when a local participant in the violence spoke of the work it did for Hindus and told the rioters to move on, and, of course, t here are also other possible explanations for why t hese organ
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izations were targeted.95 If the riots were indeed directed and carried out primarily by Sangh workers from out of town, t hose involved in the violence may have been unaware of the economic benefits offered to Hindus by the NGO. Similarly, one could construe the attack on this Hindu and her son(s) as an attack on perceived collaborators, on a family that had benefitted from the Christian NGO’s largesse in the form of salaries and accommodations. It is also possible to interpret such an attack as that by upper-and other dominant- caste Hindu agents resisting the NGO’s support for lower-caste and tribal communities rather than working against Hindu interest more generally. Still, the nature of the attack on this NGO suggests the possibility of a motive more subtle and more difficult to trace. There are other hints, as well, that a distaste for the implementation of modern social and economic practices, particularly work on the behalf of women’s empowerment, may have motivated at least some of the perpetrators of violence in Kandhamal. For example, women who worked in NGOs focused on providing aid to women appear to have been disproportionately targeted in the violence. One Christian w oman, who was specifically pursued and targeted even while hiding in a Hindu family’s home, was, according to her testimony, gang-raped by an anti-Christian mob. “I feel betrayed by the people that I served through my social work,” she reported.96 The violent mobs regularly specifically sought out and targeted women like this one who worked in NGOs focused on the development and empowerment of local p eople, both Christian and Hindu.97 Even t hose who helped rehabilitate female survivors of the riot violence report being threatened with sexual violence.98 Paradoxically, the experiences of w omen like these in many cases appears to have entrenched their desire to work for w omen’s empowerment. One concluded testimony about her victimization in this way: “My aim in life is to help women. I am focusing my attention on studies, as I want to equip myself with knowledge to reach out to and help w omen. I want to study law.”99 Another concluded hers similarly: “I work on promoting w omen’s rights now.”100 If targeting in the violence suggests a possible role for resistance to Western secular modernities, so too does the Sangh’s decades-long investment in the region. As described above, Lakshmanananda’s efforts in Kandhamal amounted to a “welfare system” that paralleled that established by Christians in the region. Educational and medical institutions were among those established by the swami and his supporters. A comparison of the swami’s institutions with their Christian equivalents, however, demonstrates a telling difference. The swami’s educational institutions, for example, focused on Sanskrit and the diffusion of upper-caste-inflected, all-India forms of Hinduism. This focus was intended to inculcate in the schools’ primarily tribal students
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a sense of common identity with Hindus around the nation and in particular a deferential respect for upper-caste forms of the faith. This element would have obviously been lacking in schools established by Christians. Similarly, education in the swami’s Sangh-affiliated educational institutions subtracted an element more prominent in those established by Christians, that is, the inculcation of secular values, respect of minority religions, and so on. Relatedly, while the swami’s educational institutions did encourage agricultural planning and other developmental schemes, they w ere conspicuously not associated in the minds of locals with modern values of equality (particularly gender equality), rational financial decision making, and individuality. The introduction of such values, which w ere associated instead with Christian-run NGOs, had the power to disrupt traditional economic arrangements and patronage systems that historically advantaged dominant castes. However, avoiding such disruption is one of the primary aims of the Sangh, given its predominant upper-caste orientation. Several decades of Sangh involvement in the region, therefore, w ere focused on providing a form of uplift and development that avoided introducing forms of Western secular modernity that threatened upper-caste Hindus generally and particularly the locally dominant-caste Oriyas. The Sangh’s institutions surely desired to provide an alternative to t hose of Christians and to help Hindus compete with Christians economically, but not at the cost of traditional values, social arrangements, and hierarchies. The swami therefore symbolized development plus the promotion of Hindu unity but minus the inculcation of ideals like religious freedom, harmony, and equality (as understood from the perspective of Western secular modernities). He also symbolized economic prog ress by means other than modern economic rationality, equality, and individuality. In short, he symbolized the Sangh’s alternative to the economic, social, cultural, and political vision Sanghis associate with Western/Christian secular modernity. It is for this reason that he was so important both to local supporters and to the Sangh beyond Kandhamal. And it is for this reason, among o thers, that his death had the potential to unleash the violence it did. Yes, certainly the national Sangh exploited the swami’s death to further their national political interests. But the fact that they could do so, and so easily, is related at least in part, in my view, to the fact that the swami and his institutions represented much more broadly resonant resistance to forms of secular modernity that threatened traditional economic, social, and political arrangements favoring upper-caste Hindus. It should be clear from the foregoing discussion that no single, simple explanation for the anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal will suffice, and the narrative
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provided here should be taken as a denunciation, in particular, of the Sangh’s assertion that the violence was entirely a justifiable, natural, unplanned, and unavoidable response to the 2007 attack on and 2008 assassination of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati. As indicated in this and the previous chapter, the violence in Kandhamal began long before the swami was directly affected by it. Moreover, while it is true that when combined with widespread suspicion that Christians w ere involved in both incidents, the assault on and eventual assassination of the swami can account for tensions and conflict between Christians and non-Christians in the area, t hese incidents do not explain why that tension became so violent and why the violence became so widespread. To account for the depth and breadth of the violence requires attention to the activity of actors whose economic or political fortunes stood to gain from it. Preexisting economic and political competition between the Panas and the Kandhas was certainly a f actor in the violence, as was the social and religious competition of Christian evangelists and Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati. But so too was the involvement of the Oriya traders, who also competed with the at least somewhat rising class of Pana merchants and who stood to lose from the economic education of both Kandhas and Panas at the hands of Christian educational facilities, NGOs, and so on. Oriyas also stood to gain by keeping Kandhas focused on Pana attempts to procure and accumulate Kandha land, thereby obscuring the just as widespread (if not more so) attempts by Oriyas to do the same. Similarly, regional and national Sangh elites had an interest in facilitating and stoking the violence to perpetuate the simplistic Hindutva narrative of an essentially Hindu (of a particularly homogenous, upper-caste variety) India perpetually threatened by the existence and growth of nefarious, potentially violent “foreign” religions. That their involvement in the violence may have undermined their local electoral prospects does not diminish the fact that the perpetuation of this narrative generally benefits the Sangh and its politi cal party, the BJP, by promoting in-g roup Hindu loyalty and unity. Finally, the Naxalites would have known that they could benefit from chaos and social strife of any kind, since chaos and social strife would have made their strong-handed tactics appear more palatable and appealing to the local population. Similarly, by taking action on behalf of certain minorities, the Naxalites would have hoped to drive a wedge between minority and majority communities or between local elites and the underprivileged. In both cases, the desired outcome for which the Naxalites would have hoped when involving themselves in the Kandhamal violence was the easier recruitment of local cadres (though this hope does not appear to have borne fruit).
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That all of these groups whose involvement is well documented—Oriyas, regional and national Sangh elites, and the Naxalites—exploited and exacerbated the conflict between Kandhas and Panas in pursuit of their own interests is therefore not at all surprising, though it is no less forgivable for the fact that it can be explained, and could have been predicted. Many complicated, interacting, and counteracting factors therefore influenced the initiation and nature of the violence in Kandhamal. Some of t hese factors—like the conversion of local disputes into national, communal conflict by Sangh actors—are found commonly in the context of interreligious violence in India. O thers, such as the role of Pana-K andha tensions and the intervention of Naxalites, are more specific to the Kandhamal context. In the concluding chapter that follows, I step back to some extent from these significant but contextually specific factors and develop a more general theoretical analysis of Hindu- Christian conflict in India.
Conclusion A Geography of Anger
In every case, the geography of anger is not a simple map of action and reaction, minoritization and resistance, nested hierarchies of space and site, neat sequences of cause and effect. Rather, these geographies are the spatial outcome of complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders. —Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers
In the introduction, I indicated that this book would adopt a constructivist approach to Hindu-Christian conflict, one that recognized, with the instrumentalists, the important role of material (and ideal) interests while also acknowledging, with the essentialists, that religion really does matter. More specifically, religion does matter because it provides to proponents of Hindutva a convenient organizing principle, a principle that at the national level serves effectively to unite disparate local conflicts (some of which may be more clearly economic in their origins) u nder the banner of “Hindu-Christian conflict.” This unifying banner certainly serves the interests of the largely upper-caste Hindu leaders of the Sangh Parivar b ecause it enables them to unify Hindus (along, sometimes, even with India’s tribal peoples) against a common, external enemy, distracting lower-caste Hindus, tribal peoples, and other marginalized groups from the fact that their marginalization is at least partly the result of upper-and other dominant-caste Hindu hegemony. But the unity of these groups also at times serves the purposes of lower-caste and tribal communities, as it did in Kandhamal, by providing them broader support in their local disputes with Christians. Religion matters in another important way, however. Hindu-Christian conflict in India is often framed by proponents of Hindutva as a clash of incompatible world views. This framing obscures the many political and economic incentives Hindus have to marginalize Christians. But the fact that such a 215
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framing is possible and effective in terms of arousing emotions and mobilizing bodies is related to the fact that many more traditionally minded Hindus perceive in Christianity a threat to what they consider their Hindu religion and way of life. That it is necessary to refer to both Hindu religion and way of life is part of the issue, as Hindus associated with the Sangh perceive in the universalizing religion of Christianity an implicit rejection of their view that religions are and should be ethnic (i.e., stable, communal, bounded, nonproselytizing). Moreover, to the extent that Christians in India embrace, manifest, and perpetuate modern, secular values popularly associated with the West (e.g., individualism, equality, h uman rights, the privatization and portability of religion), they are seen as a more explicit threat to the traditional values of Hinduism (as construed by the Sangh). Among the t hings that Sanghis fear, then, is secular modernity in its dominant Western forms, since secular modernity of these kinds represent a totalizing ideology that threatens to undermine the traditional values and hierarchies allowing upper-caste and other elite Hindus to maintain their cultural, economic, and political hegemony. Chapter 1 advanced John McCauley’s language of “rules” and “land” as a useful shorthand for talking about intergroup conflict and about why some conflicts get framed as ethnic while o thers are constructed as religious. According to McCauley, conflicts framed as ethnic tend to evince a concern for the land, that is, for control of the land and its physical, economic, and politi cal resources, whereas conflicts framed as religious tend to evince a concern for preservation of traditional rules. Political actors seeking to stoke or achieve victory in conflicts will tend to frame those conflicts in whichever way they believe most suits their purposes, that is, in whichever way they believe will be most effective in arousing the sentiments and moving the bodies of their compatriots. In that same chapter, I suggested that we could helpfully extend McCauley’s analysis to help explain Hindu-Christian conflict. B ecause it is a religious nationalism, a welding of religion and ethnicity/nationality, Hindutva effectively mobilizes concern for both land and rules. Christianity in India threatens Hindutva’s vision, then, to the extent that it rejects or obstructs Hindutva’s desire to dominate both India’s economic and political resources (the land) and its social and cultural norms (its rules). However, secular modernity in its Western varieties is even more dangerous than Christianity, in this regard, for two reasons. First, while India’s Christian loyalties may be mildly divided because of their transnational alliances with Western Christians and because of Chris tianity’s theological insistence that only God deserves one’s full obedience, secular modernity in its Western but globalizing forms represents a complete lack of loyalty to the actual land of India (undercutting Hindutva’s insistence
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that true Indians consider India both fatherland and holy land). Second, even while it insists on the privatization and essential landlessness of religious belief and practice (the “secular” part of secular modernity), in terms of its modern aspect, Western secular modernities represent a threat to traditional ways of securing and maintaining control over the land and its resources by introducing modern routes to wealth and status (e.g., education, individualism, rational economic behavior, capitalism, and entrepreneurship). Nevertheless, secular modernity is an abstract, disembodied entity, difficult to identify and target, and for this reason, India’s Christians—framed as the vanguard of this faceless enemy’s forces and within striking range of the Sangh—serve as a con venient proxy. It is for this reason among many, many o thers that India’s Christians find themselves increasingly the targets of harassment, discrimination, and violence in contemporary India. The aim of this conclusion is twofold. In the first part, I return to the constructivist thesis that Hindu-Christian conflict is related at least in part to the various forces and effects of globalization, and here I understand globalization to stand in for the increasingly greater and more forceful projection of capitalism and secular modernity (in its Western varieties) to lands outside the West (and in particular to the formerly colonized lands of the Global South). In the second part, then, I return to a question raised in the introduction, that is, whether the theory I have developed here to help explain the nature and timing of anti-Christian violence in India might also help explain an increase in anti-Christian violence elsewhere during this same period.
Part 1: A Networked Analysis of Hindu-Christian Conflict1 One problem with many of the usual explanations of Hindu-Christian conflict is that they tend to focus narrowly on one individual factor—for example, economics, caste, ethnicity, religion, politics—without attending to how various individual factors influence and are influenced by o thers. A second problem with the most commonly provided explanations of violence against Christians is that they often decline (or are unable) to account for the participation, within that violence, of local low-caste or tribal non-Christians that I will call the coterminous castes and tribes (or CCTs) b ecause of their proximity (their coterminousness) to targeted Christian communities both in terms of geography and in terms of social, educational, political, and economic status and assets. A third problem with many of the usual explanations is that while
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they identify the issues and factors that contribute to Hindu-Christian conflict, they fail to adequately explain why that conflict should in so many cases lead to violence. It is one thing to suggest, for example, that some of the tension between Hindus and Christians may be due to economic competition. That is certainly true. But why should such competition lead “naturally,” or necessarily, to violence? And why more now than before the late 1990s? In this part, I attempt to expand and improve on the existing repertoire of explanations given for anti-Christian violence and the functioning thereof by broadening the frame of reference to the global sphere in order to move the theoretical exploration of Hindu-Christian violence toward more complex, networked analyses involving multiple, reticulating factors, and I attempt, along the way, to account for the counterintuitive participation of the CCTs in anti-Christian violence. Such a broadened approach is consistent with my constructivist orientation, as it recognizes the material sources of conflict while also helping explain both why conflict over economic resources often gets framed in religious terms, as well as who that framing serves, and how it unifies groups (e.g., the CCTs and upper-caste Hindus) that ordinarily compete among themselves for those same economic resources. In addition to the explanatory frameworks discussed in the introduction, another prevalent theory of communal violence suggests that anti-Christian riots in India should be understood merely as a species of riots more generally, toward which h umans seem to have a propensity, particularly when strong intergroup grievances, rumors, or perceived provocations remove the stigma that might ordinarily attach to violence or when the absence of effective and unbiased law and order removes the fear of judicial retribution.2 Similarly, some argue that h umans simply lose their ordinary individuality and moral qualms in the riot context and therefore do things (e.g., act violently) they might not otherwise do. For example, translating Durkheim’s collective effervescence into a psychological idiom, Sudhir Kakar has suggested that the riot “crowd’s assault on the sense of individuality, its invitation to transcend one’s individual boundaries and its offer of a freedom from personal doubts and anxieties is well nigh irresistible.”3 Such theories, however, as Paul Brass has indicated, place “the ultimate responsibility for communal violence in the irrational tendencies of the h uman 4 psyche, in other words precisely nowhere.” They also imply, problematically, that riots are equally possible everywhere, that their existence does not in any way reflect social or cultural peculiarities specific to the individuals and groups of p eople who participate in them. For this reason and o thers, such theories are not particularly useful in interpreting Hindu-Christian violence.
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Almost all interpretations of Hindu-Christian conflict emphasize the impor tant role that political calculations play in its production and framing. According to Brass, for example, communal riots in India take place “most notably in the case of competitive political systems in a context of intense political mobilization or electoral competition in which riots are precipitated as a device to consolidate the support of ethnic, religious, or other culturally marked groups.”5 For Brass, therefore, the question is not so much “What provoked the violence?” as “Whom does it serve?” And the fact that antiminority vio lence serves the interests of the BJP and its local/regional affiliates—though perhaps, as discussed in chapter 3, not as well as they imagine—helps explain its persistence.6 Still, it remains to be explicated why provoking violence along religious lines is particularly attractive to Sangh activists. Theories of communal violence in India that do not emphasize political competition tend to focus instead on economic competition. Engineer suggests, for example, that Hindu-Muslim riots often occur in midsized towns with thriving small-scale artisanal industries in which Muslims have achieved “a relative degree of prosperity.”7 In such cases, what appears to be interreligious violence very often masks an underlying economic conflict that plays out along religious lines.8 Economic competition has frequently been used to explain Hindu-Christian violence as well. As noted in chapter 3, research I conducted with Tamara Leech suggests that anti-Christian violence is more likely in states where Christian levels of workforce participation approach that of Hindus (that is, in states where they begin to resemble legitimate competitors). Similarly, in an analysis of the anti-Christian riots in the Dangs, Gujarat, Lancy Lobo notes that while Gujarat is one of the most industrially developed states in India, its development is unevenly distributed, and the advance of certain areas of the state depends on the exploitation of the tribals in a “tribal b elt” that runs along the hilly regions of the eastern part of the state.9 This arrangement is disturbed by Christian missionaries (foreign and indigenous but increasingly the latter) who initiate uplift programs among the tribal peoples, provide them with alternative sources of information and social power, and thereby diminish the extent to which traders, industrialists, and landlords can exploit them. Fearing the loss of cheap labor and easy access to affordable raw materials, these groups attempt to undermine the authority of missionaries, evangelists, and other Christian leaders by whipping up anti-Christian sentiment, which contributes to the likelihood of violence.10 Similar dynamics w ere at play in Kandhamal. I am sympathetic to Lobo’s views, and in fact he places t hese comments on the economic elements of communal violence within a broader discussion
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of globalization, as I intend to do. But one must be careful, as Pandey has suggested, to avoid the instrumentalist error of segregating the “economic dimension,” thereby reducing “the lives of men and women to calculations of financial profit and loss.”11 In my view, these most popular explanations for communal violence in India share two weaknesses. The first is that in isolation none of them provides a sufficient explanation for riot violence. The psychological theories, as has been noted, reduce all p eople to riot-prone savages but fail to explain why certain people are more inclined to riot or why riots tend to occur at certain places and between certain p eople more frequently. If we are all prone to riot vio lence, why are riots relatively uncommon in some diverse societies? Answering such questions would require an investigation of cultural, economic, political, and social factors. Similarly, political theories, if advanced to the exclusion of o thers, fail also to explain why all competitive politics do not lead to violence. Accounting for such differences requires reference to the peculiarities of culture and political system, to issues of law and order, perhaps to economic f actors, and so forth. Similarly, if economic competition is truly to blame for communal violence, why is it that not all competitive groups engage in riot violence with one another? Again, broader investigation is required to answer the questions “Why here?” and “Why now?” It bears mentioning that the theorists I have quoted above (Brass, Engineer, Kakar, and Lobo) do generally broaden the scope of their investigation to include multiple f actors. Brass’s emphasis on the political, for example, involves an analysis of cultural and economic f actors. And my own broader approach, as I have indicated, is inspired by Lobo’s attempt to look at the multiple and interconnected effects of globalization. The sole point I am trying to make here is merely that no single causal factor should be advanced in isolation from others. The second weakness of the most common explanations of anti-Christian violence is that they often fail to account for the participation of the CCTs in anti-Christian violence. The CCTs are castes and tribes that live in close proximity to and in social, economic, and political competition with groups targeted by communal violence. Generally speaking, the CCTs share an equal (and most often equally low) status with the targeted groups. Sometimes they are members of the very same caste or tribe, as in cases where there is vio lence within a caste or tribe but between adherents of different religions. Most theories of antiminority violence in India focus on the middle-and upper-caste Hindus who dominate the leadership of the Sangh Parivar, particularly at the regional and national levels. For example, Engineer argues, “The communal phenomenon is political in genesis. Communal tension arises as a result of the
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skilful manipulation of the religious sentiments and cultural ethos of a p eople by its elite which aims to realize its political, economic and cultural aspirations by identifying these aspirations as those of the entire community.”12 There is no doubt that in communal violence the participation of elite members of Sangh Parivar groups is often quite prominent (though that participation is sometimes more rhetorical than actual). And yet very often the CCTs participate along with Sangh affiliates in violence against local minorities, even though superficially it would seem that the CCTs should be skeptical of what most consider the Sangh’s upper-caste bias. It is not that the theories described above cannot account for the participation of CCTs. But generally speaking, those who advance them have not attempted to do so. Surely instances of communal violence in India do often include the attempt, by elite elements, to manipulate and co-opt members of the lower castes and tribes. But we do members of such communities a disservice by focusing too exclusively on upper-caste provocateurs. For if we insist that the CCTs are entirely guileless, we implicitly strip them of agency and indirectly assert that they are simpletons and dupes who are easily and frequently hoodwinked into acting against their interests (one of the general weaknesses of theories that focus too much attention on the manipulation of political leaders). A far simpler explanation, to invoke the lex parsimoniae, is that members of the CCTs participate in communal violence because it serves their interests as well. Their interests may be more particular and local than the general, well- known, and widely articulated interests of the Sangh Parivar. But we should make some attempt, it seems to me, to explain why the CCTs involve themselves in violence against their neighbors. In what follows, therefore, I discuss both of these problems by discussing globalization and its myriad effects on religious interactions in India. Globalization, as I understand it and will use the term here, refers to the increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching interconnectedness of national and regional economies, p eoples, and cultures through faster and more regular transportation and trade and the speedier exchange of ideas and lifestyles. Moreover, as I argue below, globalization involves within it an implicit, all-encompassing economic and political ideology. While globalization certainly fosters the interaction of disparate peoples, cultures, and world views, global imbalances of power currently make it such that on the w hole, globalization implies the exportation and sometimes imposition of free-market capitalism and Western forms of secular modernity to places where they have not, as yet, fully taken root. Globalization as I use it, then, pairs an implicit and economic ideology with the mechanisms for its broad diffusion. Understood in this way, globalization becomes a useful heuristic to help explain how communal
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violence (and violence against Christians in particular) results from the interplay of local exigencies and global flows of wealth, power, and money. Such a move is encouraged, even required, by Arjun Appadurai’s assertion in the epigraph that introduces this conclusion, as well as by Mark C. Taylor’s assertion that all knowledge is “webby,” requiring an emphasis on “nodes” of intersection.13 An emphasis on nodality would mean that one would not attempt to explain interreligious riots as a function of politics, economics, or psychology alone. In Taylor’s view, these three “networks” are merely aspects of the larger network of society, which is networked and interacts nodally with cultural networks (like t hose of religion, philosophy, and art), natural networks (like t hose of chemistry, biology, and physics), and technological networks (like those of bioinformatics, media/communications, and information). If this is so, then “since all t hese networks are codependent and coemergent, e very form of reductive analysis is simply wrong.”14 The alternative, however, is, like Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fas cinans, both awe-inspiring and at the same time awful. If all phenomena are but networks in a network of networks, the dispiriting reality is that no analy sis could ever be complete. And if this is true, one is faced with only two options: further reductive analysis or an increasingly complex yet never complete (or even completeable) investigation. In choosing to emphasize the effects of globalization, I choose a kind of reduction, for globalization is surely a simplification, a heuristic device. But it is one that inherently implies within it the kind of nodal, interconnected analysis Taylor enjoins. And so, while what follows is surely not complete, it does recognize the way that religion intersects with other cultural networks, as well as with social networks like economics, politics, and (to a lesser extent) psychology. And that, it seems to me, is about as “webby” as one can get without becoming, like ill-fated flies in actual webs, hopelessly entangled.
Globalization and Its Effects It is clear enough that history is itself its own kind of network, one that interacts with and informs contemporary social behavior, and the historical focus of chapter 2 demonstrates that Hindu-Christian relations were glocal—to use the 1980s neologism—right from the start. That is to say, they were affected in significant ways by a complex mélange of local and translocal factors. Yet while European expansionism (e.g., British colonialism in India) represents an important early form of globalization, the process accelerated significantly midway through the twentieth century, and a period of high or hyper global-
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ization was ushered in by, (1) the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reintegration of Soviet and East Asian economies into the global scene, (2) the privatization of nationalized industries in postcolonial societies like India, and (3) the internet and communications revolutions. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; Indian decentralization began the same year; and the internet revolution began as a public phenomenon at about the same time, becoming a staple of life in developed societies by the end of the decade. Cell phone usage also increased dramatically in India from the late 1990s, when t here w ere almost none, to today, when it seems that even many lower-class families own and use several mobile phones. The 1990s, therefore, mark an important new era in the history of globalization, and this corresponds, in India, with the rise in anti-Christian violence. To consider why this might be so, we must examine the mutually influential economic, political, and cultural effects of globalization in India.
Economic Effects India’s economy began to falter in the late 1980s, and by 1991 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, in exchange for loans from the International Monetary Fund, was forced to agree to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which prescribed decreased spending on social programs, the elimination of certain state subsidies, liberalized trade, the privatization of failing public enterprises, and the free entry of foreign capital.15 As a result of the NEP, India’s financial gates were opened wide to the forces of globalization. Foreign investment increased exponentially, from $158 million in 1991–1992 to over $6 billion in 1996–1997. According to Lobo, this influx of capital enriched the old “industrial, business, political, military, bureaucratic and religious elite in India, but . . . impoverished the masses.”16 Privatization also increased economic anxiety for many by removing a major source of guaranteed employment in nationalized industries.17 Globalization was resented by t hose who did not benefit from it econom ically but also by many of those who did, because with globalization came greater foreign involvement and foreign control in India’s economy. This involvement was perceived as a threat to the sovereignty of India and pricked the national pride of India’s traditional elites. Additionally, economic globalization introduced new routes to wealth (e.g., education and entrepreneurism) based on merit and skill rather than ascriptive status, thus undermining, in another way, the traditional privilege of India’s old, dominant-caste elites.18 But by offering new avenues to wealth and power, globalization also threatened
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traditional status arrangements within and among castes and communities at all levels in the caste hierarchy. Education was one of those new avenues, and to the extent that Christians have had somewhat greater access to education in India, they have often been able, in terms of wealth and social status, to leapfrog over both upper-caste elites and the CCTs with whom they compete at the local level. Christian educational efforts are therefore seen not only as a kind of allurement (particularly when they are offered only to Christians or to Christians at a reduced price) but also as a destabilizing social force. Moreover, education and literacy reduce the extent to which the lower castes and tribes can be exploited by traditional elites, as discussed above.19 In fact, in some cases, better education has even turned Christians into exploiters in the eyes of their neighbors, as was the case in Kandhamal. It would seem natural that the forces of globalization would pit lower castes and tribes against the traditional upper-caste elite, and that is in fact how the story of globalization and communalism is often told: antiminority violence is perpetrated by upper-caste Hindu out-of-towners putting the “uppity,” formerly (or currently) lower-caste Muslims or Christians in their place. But in fact in both the Kandhamal and Dangs riots, local CCTs also participated in the anti-Christian violence. If we were to search for economic motives for their participation, we would need look no further than the fact that the CCTs are also threatened by the new market realities b ecause, rightly or wrongly, they perceive their Christian neighbors to be poised to more effectively take advantage of them. Sushil Aaron writes, “While an empirical confirmation of the beneficial effects of switching allegiance to Christianity among recently converted communities is yet to be demonstrated on a national plane, Christian communities do better on h uman development indices,” such as education, literacy, neonatal mortality, and antenatal care.20 Much of the relative success of Christian communities can be attributed to the current and historical activities of foreign and indigenous missionaries, particularly in establishing educational and medical institutions.21 It is not surprising, therefore, that schools are often targeted in anti-Christian riots, even schools where the majority of students are non-Christian, as was the case after the 1998 riots in the Dangs, Gujarat, where state chief minister Keshubhai Patel railed against the “foreign education of Christians.”22 Around India, Christian communities have also, frequently with missionary help, formed cooperatives and guilds that have helped them outcompete their neighbors in the marketplace or find effective ways to counter exploitation.23 And even if Christian educational facilities today rarely explicitly deny access to non-Christians, the perception is rather widespread that Christians
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generally have easier or cheaper access to them and, following from this, that this access has led over the years to the greater affluence of many Christian communities in comparison with their non-Christian neighbors. Surely there is some truth to this perception. Not surprisingly, then, jealousy about the higher financial status of Christian communities or grievances arising from a sense of being exploited by them often contribute to the condoning of or actual participation in anti-Christian violence by the CCTs. Certainly they did in Kandhamal. Most of the Christians targeted in the Odisha riots w ere low-caste Panas, and some members of the Kandha tribal community participated (actually and rhetorically) in the riots and their justification. In victims’ affidavits, for example, Kandha names appear alongside those of caste Hindus on lists of the accused (and in some cases convicted) of participating in the violence. The largely Christianized Panas and largely un- Christianized Kandhas shared a common language (Kui), history, and low social position, though the two communities had developed in opposition to one another over time, with the tribal Kandhas historically considering themselves superior to the low-caste Panas.24 Exacerbating t hese long-standing tensions was the fact that in the years leading up to the riots, the Pana Christians had become more educated and more noticeably wealthy, and many Kandhas believed the Pana Christians w ere using their education to exploit the Kandhas and expropriate their lands. In the Dangs, as well, similar tensions existed between the Christianized tribal community and their non-Christian tribal neighbors due to the fact that Christianized tribals seemed, through the formation of cooperatives and through better access to the outside world (via itinerant Christian workers), to have better resisted exploitation by nontribal merchants, traders, and landlords at work in the region. In the process, they also undermined the authority of local village elites.25 That said, the tensions created by Christian interventions in the Dangs may have been less significant than those in Kandhamal due to the fact that non-Christian tribals had also benefitted significantly from the formation of cooperatives, and both had a common e nemy in the nontribal middlemen who attempted to exploit them. In addition to specific, local jealousies there also appears in many parts of India to be a generalized sense of economic malaise due to shifting economic realities and growing inequality between India’s elites and its impoverished communities. In this context, Christians are often perceived not only as purveyors of economic globalization but also as its primary beneficiaries. So many members of the CCTs are united with many traditional upper-caste elites in their resentment of Christians, particularly those who appear to be financially advanced in comparison with their neighbors.26
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Political Effects As suggested in chapter 2, t here has been and remains, in India, relatively widespread and somewhat justified anxiety about the survival and integrity of the Indian nation. A nationalistic response is not particularly surprising in this context. Globalization merely exacerbates the nationalistic reaction by adding yet another perceived threat to national sovereignty. Many in India and elsewhere, therefore, contend that globalization is the “latest phase in the history of imperialism.”27 Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the BJP actually advocates for economic liberalization. The Sangh’s response to globalization in India is indeed complex. While many members of Sangh organizations (though more so among those associated with the BJP than with the RSS or VHP) seek the potential benefits of economic globalization, they continue to resent the loss of sovereignty that taking advantage of those benefits requires, as well as the foreign cultural and political influence that comes inevitably along with it. If the nation is under threat, according to nationalist thinking, then a strong, unified response is required. And unity requires a clearly defined central identity. Foreign or minority influences must be eschewed, and those suspected of purveying them (foreigners, minorities, the Westernized elite, missionaries, and the like) must be kept at bay for fear that they might undermine national unity. As indicated above, many of those who support the Sangh Parivar worry, even, that the Hindu majority could become a minority through the immigration of non-Hindus, higher than average reproduction rates of minority communities, and (as is the case with Christianity in India) through conversion. The fear that the majority might become a minority is particularly acute among upper-caste Hindus because they do, in fact, constitute quite a tiny minority.28 It is only in conjunction with the far more sizeable community of OBCs, SCs, and STs that upper-caste Hindus can pretend to represent a majority (and it is significant, in this regard, that in the landslide 2014 and 2019 elections the BJP overwhelmingly carried the OBC vote, which more than compensated for its losses among SC voters). Christianity represents a political threat to the Sangh’s political agenda by picking away, through lower-caste and tribal conversions, at the edges of this already unwieldy and tenuous coalition. The assumption, of course, is that Christians have divided (and at least somewhat foreign) loyalties. Their loyalty to the land, to use McCauley’s term once again, is suspect. In this view, conversions to Christianity are seen (or portrayed) as a threat to the nation because they diminish the numbers of those united by the common national identity, presumed to be at least vaguely Hindu in nature.
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The political effects of globalization on the CCTs are less obvious, perhaps, than the economic or cultural effects. Surely globalization alters the rules of the economic game in ways that, as indicated above, often advantage Christian groups and in ways that present an obstacle to the economic advance of the CCTs that compete with them. In the same way that Sangh groups respond to the challenge of globalization by attempting to forge a common and unified political alliance against it, so, too, do the CCTs often attempt to unify against the Christian competitive challenge. In Kandhamal, for example, the Kui Samaj, a pro-Kandha organization, had actively resisted the petition advanced by Pana Christians to have the official status of Panas changed from SC to ST. The Kui Samaj rightly recognized the petition as nothing more than a Pana strategy to gain economic advantage, and it was to press their concerns that the Kui Samaj planned the so very consequential bandh (strike) for Christmas Day 2007 that facilitated the broadening of the first round of anti-Christian violence there and prevented an adequate police response.
Cultural Effects “In today’s global village,” writes Lobo, “Americanisation or flow of American culture is setting new reference points in the evaluation of beauty, truth, status, power and lifestyle.”29 The introduction of these “new reference points” is often disconcerting for traditionalists (at both the national and local levels), because many perceive them to entail the loss of traditional culture (a transgression against the established rules).30 It should be noted here that there is also a cultural challenge implied by both the economic and political effects of globalization. The globalization- induced shift from ascriptive to merit-and skill-oriented bases of status and employability is not just an economic shift but also a cultural one. Likewise, the threat globalization poses to national sovereignty and self-determination is experienced not only as a challenge to the nation conceived of as a political entity but also to the nation construed as a cultural essence. Mounting an economic or political challenge to globalization at the national level would no longer even be possible, given the dismantling of the nationalized economy and the surely unhappy political fate of any politician who at this point suggested stemming the flow of foreign investment. So contestations about globalization in India and elsewhere take place largely on the cultural plane. And there again, Christianity poses a challenge to the Sangh agenda. As I have already argued, the Sangh Parivar believes that the threat of globalization
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requires a unified national response and contends that the basis of India’s unity is its Hinduness. But this claim requires the articulation of a broadly unifying definition of Hinduness, and that is difficult given the diversity of groups in India that might be labeled Hindu. In particular, those who advance the ideology of Hindutva are often stifled in their attempt to articulate a broadly appealing vision of Hinduism by the fact that the Sanskritic overtones of their articulation do not universally appeal to SC and ST groups. To counteract this problem, since the late 1990s, Sangh affiliates like the ABVKA and Sangh workers like Swami Lakshmanananda have begun establishing schools for lower-caste and tribal groups where basic lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic are supplemented with religious teaching designed to bring SC and ST religious beliefs and rituals more squarely in line with the more Sanskritic and all-India, upper-caste-oriented Hinduism articulated by the Sangh.31 The existence of Christian educational facilities in t hese same areas, therefore, represents a competitive challenge and an impediment to the prog ress of the Sangh’s political project. At the more local level, the CCTs also see in Christianity a cultural threat. The participation of non-Christian tribal p eoples in the Dangs riots was not nearly as conspicuous as that of non-Dangis nor even that of the Kandhas in the Kandhamal riots, yet they do appear to have been at least marginally involved.32 Their less active involvement may stem from the fact, as indicated above, that many of the Christian-initiated development projects in the Dangs had also benefited non-Christian tribal communities. Yet t here did exist, in the period before the riots, some tension between Christian and non-Christian tribals in the region. The tension was largely due to the sense among non- Christians that Christian conversion represented a kind of cultural disruption. Among other changes, converts to Christianity very often refused to drink alcohol, an important element of many Dangi religious and secular cele brations. More importantly, Christians tended not to participate in or contribute money toward village rituals if they believed them to involve superstition or idolatry. The refusal of Christians to participate in such rituals was considered unneighborly at best and—since the rituals were often conducted for the safety and prosperity of the entire village—potentially hazardous.33 In addition to t hese specific provocations, the very willingness of converts to break with village tradition is seen as a cultural threat. “Due to conversions,” one Dangi BJP leader complained, “village social and cultural life has been disturbed.”34 As noted e arlier, Lambodar Kanhar, the chairman of the aforementioned Kui Samaj and a prominent critic of Christians before and a fter the anti-
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Christian riots in Kandhamal, echoed this Dangi leader’s concerns: “How can we get along with [the Pana] Christians? It’s like cat and mouse. We d on’t like the ways of even those who are Christians among the Kandhas.”35 Many members of the CCTs therefore speak of conversion to Christianity as a kind of deculturation (or denationalization) in much the same way that upper-caste members of the Sangh Parivar do. If we look, then, at the wide-ranging effects of globalization in India, we see that Christians and Christianity stand or are portrayed as standing symbolically for many of the worst of them. (Whether they deserve to is another matter, since in the case of antiminority rhetoric and violence it is perception that m atters more than reality.) Christianity represents the shift to merit-and skills-based (as opposed to ascriptive) status systems b ecause of its penchant for establishing (and using to its advantage) educational institutions, training facilities, and co-ops. Similarly, Christianity symbolizes the challenge of foreign meaning-making systems because of its literacy programs (particularly those operating in English). Christianity represents the unwieldy and uncontrollable flow of foreign capital and investment because of the Christian community’s ostensibly greater access to foreign wealth and power (which is perceived to reproduce the inequities of globalization). And then, of course, Christianity comes to be associated with the socially disruptive effects of globalization through its discourse of human rights and through its development work among the SCs and STs, which threatens to invert traditional caste and class hierarchies, both in terms of the relationship of t hose communities with higher-caste Hindus and in terms of their relationship with the CCTs.36 In addition, the Christian community comes to be associated with the secularist critique of Hindutva b ecause it demands the right to live and practice its religion freely and because it demands the right to proselytize. In doing so, it is insisting on the essentially privatizable and portable nature of religion, on the differentiability of ethnicity and religion—a direct rejection of the idea that there could be an essential Hinduness that is both religious and cultural. Moreover, the Christian community represents an obstacle to the Sangh project of identity homogenization not only by merely existing as a minority but also by arguing (in the public debate about reservations, for example) that SCs who convert to Christianity continue to be SCs and should therefore receive all the reservation benefits available to non-Christian SCs. In this way, they implicitly suggest that the SC community is not Hindu (a suggestion that, if accepted as true, would further divide and diminish the Hindu community). In so many ways, then, Christianity represents all that threatens the traditional order (of both land and rules) whether imagined by the Sangh Parivar or by
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the CCTs. The Sangh has done well to forge the rhetorical link between the challenge posed by globalization and that posed by the existence of a minority Christian community. And, as I have argued, the CCTs have in many cases embraced that linkage because it gives voice to their particular concerns and serves their purposes as well. The world-historical processes of modernization (including free-market capitalism) and secularization make their way to India by many routes but most importantly, perhaps, by the global flows of wealth, power, culture, and ideologies we call globalization. These world-historical processes are diffuse, disembodied, and difficult to target, and Christianity embodies them only imperfectly, incompletely, and inconsistently. Nevertheless, b ecause of it’s putative foreignness, its colonial history in India, its contemporary ties to the wealth and power of the West, its theological and social orientation t oward modern values and human rights as understood in the West, its entrepreneurial and egalitarian ethic, and both its explicit and implicit affinity, in the modern world, for Western secular modernities, Christianity is a workable index for these diffuse forces. Among many other reasons, therefore, Christian bodies are targeted and v iolated at least partly in place of this disembodied threat. Surely the theory articulated h ere does not account for everything. No theory could ever do so. Moreover, it is not my intention to suggest that the other theories I have advanced and critiqued are invalid. Let me be quite clear in stating that I consider them valid as far as they go. As they have been articulated, however, they have rarely attempted to bring the local psychologies, economies, and politics they describe into conversation with the global psychologies, economies, and politics that so clearly affect and influence them. If, as Taylor has argued, all social phenomena are networked and interconnected, we would do well to privilege theories that both enable this local- global conversation and begin to demonstrate, as I have tried to do, how the political, the economic, and the cultural are interrelated. I have not taken Taylor’s broader challenge, that is, to bring t hese networks of social and cultural phenomena into conversation with the biological or technological networks with which they also interact. But broadening the conversation about antiminority violence to include the effects of globalization helps move us, I believe, in the right direction. And such a move is demanded by the analysis of violence against Christians, who, far more than is the case with Sikhs or Muslims, stand in as proxies for those very effects. Whereas “globalization, being a force without a face, cannot be the object of ethnocide . . . minorities can.”37
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Part 2: A Global War on Secular Modernities? As noted in the introduction, discrimination and violence against India’s con temporary Christians take place in the context of a global increase in anti- Christian discrimination and vio lence (along with a global increase in interreligious violence and religious persecution more generally). Paul Marshall has helpfully delineated four broad contexts in which anti-Christian persecution is currently common: (1) self-professed communist countries (e.g., China, Vietnam, Laos, North K orea, Cuba), (2) South Asian religious nationalisms (e.g., India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan), (3) the Muslim-majority world (with far too many countries and varied situations to enumerate here), and (4) the postcommunist national security or authoritarian states (e.g., Myanmar, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus).38 Without a doubt, both the provenance and the nature of anti-Christian discrimination and violence differs among these contexts. Nevertheless, there are also a variety of similarities among them as well. The clearest analogies to the Indian situation can be found among the countries that fall into Marshall’s category of South Asian religious nationalisms, and for obvious reasons. However, the similarities do not end t here. One of the questions raised in the introduction was whether there was some explanation for the global rise in anti-Christian violence since the late 1990s. Earlier in this conclusion, I suggested one possible explanation: the appreciable acceleration of globalization trends in that era. In my view, this acceleration surely helps account for the uptick in anti-Christian violence in India and likely helps explain why, since the late 1990s, it has been so easy and effective for anti-Christian political actors around the globe to portray Christians as the primary purveyors and beneficiaries of Western secular modernities and their vehicle, globalization. But we must be careful to not extend the Indian model too far, if for no other reason than that India obviously follows its own local political script. In addition to world-historical processes described above, which began to take effect in India in the 1990s, that era also saw the Sangh Parivar begin to grow progressively in strength after many years at India’s political margins. There are many possible explanations for the Sangh’s rise in that particular era, for example, the weakening of the Congress Party and its increasing association with political corruption, government policies like the educational and vocational reservations recommended by the Mandal Commission Report aimed at providing advantages to middling and lower castes (policies often forcefully opposed by upper-caste Hindus), the successful mobilization of nationalist masses around the movement to dismantle Babri Masjid, and the Sangh’s ability
23 2 CONCLUSION
to articulate an alluring narrative—using the Babri Masjid, the Mandal Commission Report, and so on as symbols—asserting that India’s Hindus (especially upper-caste Hindus) w ere disadvantaged and u nder threat, both nationally and internationally. Given this, one might be tempted to explain the rise of the Sangh and therefore the increase in anti-Christian violence in this era as a function, fully and simply, of local, internal political dynamics. However, the question remains: Why did the Sangh’s political message become particularly resonant at this particular historical moment? The movement to dismantle Babri Masjid had begun already in the 1850s, and India’s system of educational and vocational reservations was in place since the 1950s (and even earlier, in different form, under the British). Moreover, when, in 1990, V. P. Singh’s government attempted to implement the Mandal Commission Report’s recommendations, many of India’s states already had similar or more generous reservation policies in place. To account for why the Sangh’s rhe toric of a threatened Hindu social order became so much more widely resonant in the 1990s, then, in my view, we must look to external factors and in particular to the growing sense of national insecurity that had resulted, at least in part, from the rapid expansion of the cultural, economic, and political effects of globalization in that same decade. Nevertheless, it remains the case that each region and nation is also unique in its particular cultural, historical, and political circumstances, even while world-historical forces may be a significant factor. For example, in Indonesia and Nigeria, which both witnessed increasing anti-Christian violence after the late 1990s, the primary factor was new advances in democratization that allowed majoritarian parties to take control of certain states or regions.39 While majoritarian parties certainly became stronger in India at the same time as they did in Indonesia and Nigeria, India was not at the time a newly democratized nation. Likewise, in Pakistan, a salient factor in the rise of anti-Christian vio lence since the late 1990s was the global war on terror, which both responded to and encouraged the rise of Islamic extremism. The war on terror played little role in India’s anti-Christian dynamics of the time (though it did affect Hindu-Muslim relations). Moreover, the late 1990s are not universally significant. In some of the countries where Christians now experience persecution, the increase has been more recent. For example, while Egypt has seen fits of anti-Christian violence in the past, Coptic Christians were targeted particularly viciously between 2011 and 2013 (from the Arab Spring to the military’s toppling of President Morsi). On one day in 2013 alone, t here w ere sixty-four assaults on Christian churches, schools, civic associations, and private property in Egypt, and some estimates suggest that more than one hundred thousand Coptic Christians have emi-
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grated since the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in 2012.40 Similarly, the late 1990s are not particularly significant in terms of the treatment and experiences of Christians in Iraq. Iraq’s Christians occasionally had been targeted by Ba’ath politicians in the period between 1974 and 1989, but the most brutal violence began with the American invasion in 2003 and the subsequent rise of al Qaeda and then the Islamic State.41 Moving backward in time, it is also clear that fits of anti-Christian discrimination, hostility, and violence were a feature of post–Cultural Revolution China for decades before the 1990s. So while anti-Christian violence and persecution has increased globally since the late 1990s, the timing and reasons for this rise are somewhat idiosyncratic from country to country. There remain, however, several significant similarities between the Indian situation and that in other countries where Christians have experience increased persecution in recent decades. One of them is legal restriction. Antiblasphemy laws that are a legacy of colonial jurisprudence remain on the books in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and many Muslim-majority countries. Since the early 2000s, these laws have been used regularly to harass Christians, particularly evangelists, not only in India but also other South Asian countries (especially Pakistan) and in Indonesia as well. Many countries where Christians currently experience oppression and violence (e.g., Malaysia, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) also restrict or outlaw apostasy and proselytization. Similarly, countries as diverse and far-flung as Egypt, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka have used restrictive and malleable construction permitting to harass Christians and obstruct their growth. Such laws are particularly prone to be deployed against the fast-g rowing and often house-based evangelical and Pentecostal Christian groups, as they have been in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and elsewhere.42 If the existence of laws restricting religious freedom and expression is common to many countries where Christians are violently attacked, so too, not surprisingly, is a weak or weakening state, particularly in the realm of law enforcement and criminal justice. The ineffective, selective, or corruptible application of existing anti-discrimination laws creates problems for Christians not only in India but also in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Egypt. One of the dispiriting insights to be derived from a global investigation of anti-Christian persecution is that the disintegration of authoritarian regimes (as in Syria) or the replacement of more authoritarian regimes with more democratic ones (as in Indonesia, Egypt, and Nigeria) has often coincided with an increase in anti-Christian (and, more generally, antiminority) violence. As the previous paragraphs suggest, there are clearly certain similarities between the experiences and treatment of Christians in India and the experiences
23 4 CONCLUSION
and treatment of Christians in other contexts. To what extent, however, do we see evidence that the broader thesis I have articulated for India can be applied elsewhere, that is, that in addition to whatever other factors might be at play, Christians are targeted in other contexts at least in part as a proxy for secular modernity? An analysis of these other contexts suggests that this dynamic is operative at least to some degree. As in India, in several other contexts one f actor in the persecution of Christians is their tendency to disrupt traditional social hierarchies, that is, the traditional social rules. In nearly all of the contexts where contemporary Christians are persecuted, the disruptive potential of Christianity is linked to its association with historically marginalized classes (e.g., lower castes and classes, ethnic and linguistic minorities, etc.). That disruptive potential is realized when Christians from these classes achieve status and wealth through education, trade cooperatives, and the like (or help recent converts do the same) or advocate for themselves or other historically marginalized groups with h uman rights talk and initiatives. T hese avenues toward status and wealth are indisputably modern, and the centrality of education to the potential social disruptiveness of Christianity is surely one of the reasons opponents of Christianity in these contexts often rail against “Western education” and the perceived illicit gains Christians have made by this route (a claim made in contexts of Christian persecution in countries as diverse as India, Syria, and Palestine). It is not for no reason that the Islamic State in West Africa is more popularly known as Boko Haram, which can be translated as “secular Western education is forbidden.”43 In nearly all of the contexts in which Christians are currently targeted for discrimination and violence, they are also accused of being inadequately loyal to the land (while at the same time competing with dominant religious groups for control of the economic and political resources of that same land). Despite two millennia of history (or almost) and legitimate claims of indigeneity in places like Egypt, Turkey, India, Iran, and Afghanistan, Christians there, as elsewhere across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, continue to be associated with the West, suspected of foreign loyalties, and accused of being a fifth column.44 While the putative foreignness of Christianity is often linked to the religion’s contemporary association with Western wealth and power— the geog raphical foreignness of its loyalties—part of what animates suspicion of Christians is also the cultural foreignness of their loyalty, that is, their alleged loyalty to Western secular modernities. The strength of that perception is perhaps nowhere more powerful than in communist countries like China and Vietnam, where secular modernity, perceived to work hand in glove with democracy and capitalism, is taken as a direct affront and threat to the gov-
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erning ideology. Christians in expressly atheistic communist lands like these not only undermine state ideology by merely being religious; they are also accused of undermining the governing ideology through their putative affinity for its primary global competitor. Throughout this volume, I have argued that proselytization and conversion are central to the conflict between India’s Hindus and Christians because of the fact that they presume and perpetuate a post-Enlightenment, secular notion of religion as something individual, private, and portable, a notion that directly contradicts the way that proponents of Hindutva understand what religion is and should be, that is, as something communal and tied inextricably and immutably to one’s land (i.e., one’s ethnic and national identity). A similar situation obtains not only in the context of religious nationalisms in other South Asian contexts (e.g., Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal) but also, despite the fact that Islam shares with Christianity its universalist pretensions, in many Muslim-majority countries. For this reason, as he surveys the many countries in which Christians are currently persecuted, Marshall comes to a conclusion more or less like my own on the symbolic potency of conversion: here is a particul ar relation of converts and modernity—they both emT phasize choice. Traditional societies have a tendency to be ascriptive— in economy, social position, and religion—you are what you were born to be; you will normally be what your parents were. With globalization, there is much more of an emphasis on choice; now you might, within limits, decide to do and be and believe something e lse. . . . Religions that emphasize freedom to change have an elective affinity (to use Weber’s term) with the choices offered by modernity. Hence, Christians may be persecuted as threats to traditional social o rders.45 The centrality of conversion in the conflict between Christianity and other religions is so significant, in fact, that it may help us to account for why anti- Christian persecution has risen so dramatically in recent decades. Those decades saw the global rise to prominence of evangelicalism generally and especially of its Pentecostal variant. As I have argued in t hese pages and more forcefully and thoroughly elsewhere, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism fall prey more easily than other forms of Christianity to the claim of foreignness because of their rhetorical rejection of non-Christian cultures and their concomitant espousal of social, sartorial, and artistic norms that appear troublingly Western (and especially American) to their suspicious detractors.46 But evangelicals have also refocused Christian missionary labor and finances on proj ects of proselytization while mainstream Christian denominations have been
23 6 CONCLUSION
increasingly moving in the opposite direction. In nearly every country where Christians currently experience persecution, evangelicalism has been on the rise. In many of them, evangelical Christians find themselves singled out for harassment, legal discrimination, and violence.47 As suggested above, I am broadly in agreement with Marshall’s conclusions about the source of animosity t oward contemporary Christians in the lands where they are harassed, discriminated against, and violently attacked. “Christians are often subjected to persecution by those who have a monistic conception of the social order and the state—that there is one order of authority in society whose reach applies to every person and institution and to which all must submit,” Marshall argues.48 Such monistic conceptions of social order come in many forms—communism, authoritarianism, “radical Islamist conceptions,” religious nationalisms, and so on.49 “The traditional Christian belief that sacerdotium (church) and regnum (state) were two distinct bodies,” he continues, “manifests itself practically in a denial that the state is all- encompassing or the ultimate arbiter of human life.”50 According to Marshall, then, what underlies contemporary Christian persecution is Christians’ confession that Caesar is not God, which is a confession that “can provide a foundation of social and political pluralism” and thereby challenges monistic conceptions of social order.51 While I resonate with this argument, my own interpretation diverges from Marshall’s in one key respect. For Marshall, the reason that Christians are persecuted u nder communisms, authoritarian regimes, and religious nationalisms is that Christianity implicitly and explicitly denies the totalizing aspirations of these “monistic conceptions of order.” That is certainly true. But this alone is not the true provocation, in my view. What lies behind the contemporary persecution of Christians is not merely that they are perceived to promote “social and political pluralism.” It is, rather, that they are associated with and perceived to purvey a competing, equally totalizing, and similarly “monistic” conception of order: secular modernity. They do not merely deny that “the state is the all-encompassing or ultimate arbiter of human life.” Rather, they insist that the only acceptable form of government is one in which the state assents to relinquish this right. That insistence comes with another: that the only acceptable form of religion is one that assents to relinquish its own claims to be the “sole and ultimate arbiter of human life,” that is, that assents to a significant degree of privatization. Religious nationalists therefore do not merely object to Christians’ refusal to grant them social and political hegemony. They object also, and more fundamentally, to the insistence of many Christians that only secular governance is acceptable and that only secularism done in particular (Western) ways is true
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secularism. What they object to, in the end, is the insistence that secularism is not its own totalizing world order and that it is incumbent on them to accept as superior that which represents the negation not only of their preferred form of governance but also of their understanding of the nature of religion itself, what religion is and should be. Secular governance is of course distinct from Christianity. But lands where Christianity predominated gave birth to Western secular forms of governance, and, nearly universally, Christians are perceived to implicitly and explicitly prefer and purvey the practices and values of secular modernity in its Western forms. While Christianity and secular modernity do not, therefore, constitute an equivalency, there is at least a weak connection between the two. Moreover, in most lands, like India, where they constitute a minority, contemporary Christians display a greater than average affinity and advocacy for secular modernity in something more like its Western varieties. This connection between Christianity and Western forms of secular modernity is exploited by majoritarian politicians whose goals are impeded by the existence and growth of the Christian minority. As a result, among many other reasons, such politicians encourage the targeting of Christians as a workable proxy for that which truly threatens their hegemony but that which is essentially untargetable: Western forms of secular modernity.
N ote s
Introduction
1. Saumya Uma, Breaking the Shackled Silence: Unheard Voices of W omen from Kand hamal (Belgaum, India: Omega, 2014), 12, 14, 18–20. 2. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal on Kandhamal Jury Kit (New Delhi: National P eople’s Tribunal on Kandhamal, 2011), 1–2; and National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting for Justice: A Report (New Delhi: Peace & ANHAD, 2010), 30. 3. Anto Akkara, Who Killed Swami Laxmanananda? (Thrissur, India: Veritas India Books, 2016), 90. 4. Pew Research Center, Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities, February 26, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/02 /Restrictions2015_f ullReport.pdf. 5. Todd M. Johnson, “Persecution in the Context of Religious and Christian Demography, 1970–2020,” in Christianity and Freedom, Vol. 2, Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Allen D. Hertzke and Timothy Samuel Shah (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 13. Pew Research Center, Latest Trends. 6. Open Doors, World Watch List 2019, accessed November 19, 2019, https://www .opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/world-watch-list/. 7. Zainal Abidin Bagir and Robert W. Hefner, “Christianity and Religious Freedom in Indonesia since 1998,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 191–221. 8. Reg Reimer, “Vietnam: Christianity’s Contributions to Freedoms and H uman Flourishing in Adversity,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 254–83; and Fenggang Yang, “The Growth and Dynamism of Chinese Christianity,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 161–90. 9. Richard Burgess and Danny McCain, “Christianity and the Challenge of Religious Violence in Northern Nigeria,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 306–37. 10. Matthew Barber, “They That Remain: Syrian and Iraqi Christian Communities amid the Syria Conflict and the Rise of the Islamic State,” in Hertzke and Shah, Chris tianity and Freedom, 453–88. 11. Chad Bauman and James Ponniah, “Christian Responses to Discrimination and Violence in India and Sri Lanka: Avoidance, Advocacy, and Interfaith Engagement,” Review of Faith and International Affairs 15, no. 1 (2017): 68–78. 12. Sara Singha, “The Challenge and Leaven of Christianity in Pakistan,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 284–305.
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13. Mariz Tadros, “Copts of Egypt: Defiance, Compliance, and Continuity,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 338–71. 14. It is important not to overstate the problem. And here some comparative data may provide perspective. Proportional to their national populations, the number of incidents of violence suffered annually by India’s Christians (approximately 350) is slightly lower than the 130 annual incidents of FBI-reported hate crimes against Muslims in the United States and significantly lower than the 840 anti-Muslim incidents recorded in E ngland and Wales in 2013 by the organization, Tell Mama. One significant difference, however, is that the incidents in India have more frequently ended in the death of victims and less frequently in the conviction of perpetrators. For the statistics, see Federal Bureau of Investigation, “2012 Hate Crimes Statistics,” n.d., accessed June 3, 2019, http://www.f bi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2012/topic -pages/i ncidents-a nd-o ffenses/i ncidentsandoffenses_fi nal; and PA/Huffington Post UK, “Hate Crimes against Muslims Soar after Woolwich Murder of Lee Rigby,” Huffpost United Kingdom, December 27, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/26 /hate-crimes-against-muslims-soar-in-2013_n_4506199.html. While I use the language of “violence” and the FBI of “hate crimes,” the list of what I include in my statistics is more or less the same: crimes against property (e.g., vandalism, arson, theft) and crimes against persons (e.g., murder, assault, rape, intimidation, kidnapping). 15. The term Sangh Parivar means “family of the Sangh,” that is, the f amily of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization, or RSS), the earliest of organizations inspired to give the ideology of Hindutva an institutional presence. For more on the Sangh Parivar and the historical development of its many organizations, see chapter 2. 16. The protection of cows, long both a project and potent symbol of Hindu nationalism in India, has become even more so u nder BJP, with several high-profile cases involving murder or mob violence against those suspected of trading in, killing, or eating beef. 17. Dan Roberts and Jason Burke, “Barack Obama Challenges India on Religious Tolerance and Women’s Rights,” The Guardian, January 27, 2015, https://www .theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/27/obama--india-womens-rights-religious -intolerance-delhi. 18. National Bureau, “Won’t Tolerate Violence against Any Religion, Promises Modi,” The Hindu, February 18, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/my -government-will-ensure-complete-freedom-of-faith-modi/article6905042.ece. 19. Ron E. Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 5. 20. See, for example, the chapter entitled “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 259–60. 21. M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, 2000), 72. 22. Pradip Ninan Thomas, Strong Religion, Zealous Media: Christian Fundamentalism and Communication in India (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 66. See also, Robert Frykenberg, “The Gospel, Globalization, and Hindutva: The Politics of ‘Conversion’ in India,” in Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth C entury, ed. Donald M. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 131; and Chad Bau-
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man, Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 5. 23. See Sonja Thomas, “Syrian Christians and Dominant-Caste Hindus,” in The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, ed. Chad Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 24. Anonymous interview, September 22, 2011. 25. Sathianathan Clarke, Deenabandhu Manchala, and Philip Vinod Peacock, “Dalits and Religious Conversion: Slippery Identities and Shrewd Identifications,” in Dalit Theology in the Twenty-First C entury: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways, ed. Sathianathan Clarke and Philip Vinod Peacock (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 181. 26. India’s tribal communities have long been a flash point in the controversies between Hindu nationalists and their various opponents and critics. Called adivasis (original inhabitants) by those who view them as ethnically distinct from and chronologically prior to the Indo-Aryan peoples that now predominate throughout most of India, and vanvasis (forest dwellers) by t hose who wish to deny both assertions (especially Hindu nationalists), the nature of tribal religion has been contested for more than a c entury. As part of their project to unify Hindus, Hindu nationalists argue that the tribal peoples are and always have been Hindu. Many scholars and other observers, however, make the opposite argument. While they acknowledge millennia of interaction and cross-pollination, they point to significant differences between the social and religious practices of tribal p eoples and caste Hindus regarding, for example, views about nature and names of gods and goddesses, about the propriety of eating meat and drinking alcohol, about sexual propriety, and so on. For a primer on the politics of nomenclature, see Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the So cial in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 20–22. 27. Though the distinction is not perfectly clear, in this volume I generally use evan gelism to refer to instances of Christians sharing their faith with others, reserving pros elytization for explicit attempts to convert others to Christianity. Regardless of the lack of clarity, b ecause critics of Christian evangelists and missionaries often make the distinction, I find it useful to do so as well. 28. This is a distinction I have discussed and wrestled with at some length in the conclusion of Bauman, Pentecostals. 29. Scott Baldauf, “A New Breed of Missionary: A Drive for Conversions, Not Development, Is Stirring Violent Animosity in India,” Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0401/p01s04-wosc.html. For another example, see Thomas, Strong Religion, Zealous Media, 137. 30. The intra-Christian issues that influence anti-Christian violence in India are discussed briefly in chapter 3 of this volume, and at more length in Bauman, Pentecostals, chap. 3. 31. Cited in Goldie Osuri, Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conver sion. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013, 155. Emphasis added. 32. For a close analysis of the data for 2010–2011, see Bauman, Pentecostals, chap. 5. 33. See “About ACTION,” https://www.actioninternational.org/about-action, accessed December 16, 2019. 34. Amalendu Misra, “The Missionary Position: Christianity and Politics of Religious Conversion in India,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 17, no. 4 (2011): 372.
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35. J. M., Hindu Nationalism in the United States: A Report on Nonprofit Groups (n.p.: South Asia Citizens Web, 2014), http://www.sacw.net/IMG/pdf/US_HinduNationalism_Nonprofits.pdf. On the activity of Sangh organizations in the West, see S. Kamat and B. Matthew, “Mapping Political Violence in a Globalised World: The Case of Hindu Nationalism,” Social Justice 30, no. 3 (2003): 4–16; Prema Kurien, “Multiculturalism and ‘American’ Religion: The Case of Hindu Indian Americans,” Social Forces 85, no. 2 (2006): 723–41; and Goldie Osuri, Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conversion (Abingdon, UK: Routeledge, 2013), 61–69. 36. Nathaniel Roberts, To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and the Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 111–23. 37. Arvind Sharma, “Notes and Comments,” Journal of Religious Ethics 28, no. 1 (2000): 159. 38. C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Reli gious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5. 39. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe are official governmental designations for what in the former case w ere once called “untouchables,” “pariahs,” or harijans (by Gandhi) and what are now often called dalits or “low castes” (the phrase I most regularly use), and what in the latter case are called “tribals” (my preferred term), adivasis, or vanvasis. 40. Lancy Lobo, Globalisation, Hindu Nationalism and Christians in India (New Delhi: Rawat, 2002), 15. 41. Ibid., 150. 42. Ibid. 43. Sebastian C. H. Kim, In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 44. Adcock, Limits of Tolerance; and Ankur Barua, Debating “Conversion” in Hindu ism and Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015). 45. Osuri, Religious Freedom, 36, 29. 46. Ibid., 33. 47. Ibid., 35. 48. Chad Bauman, “Identity, Conversion and Violence: Dalits, Adivasis and the 2007–08 Riots in Orissa,” in Margins of Faith: Dalit and Tribal Christianity in India, ed. Rowena Robinson and Joseph Marianus Kujur (Washington, DC: Sage, 2010). 1. A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
1. The term religious is in quotation marks h ere to signify that the understanding of a particular conflict as religious is itself a social construction. Hereafter, I drop the quotation marks. 2. Philip Gorski and Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Religion, Nationalism, and Vio lence: An Integrated Approach,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 193. 3. For an overview of these three positions, see Andreas Hasenclever and Volker Rittberger, “Does Religion Make a Difference? Theoretical Approaches to the Impact of Faith on Political Conflict,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 641–74. 4. For an overview of instrumentalist (or, in their terminology, rationalist) positions, see Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach.”
NOTES TO PAGES 2 9 – 3 5
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5. Amartya Sen, “Violence, Identity and Poverty,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 1 (2008): 8. 6. Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 645; and Cecelia Lynch, “A Neo- Weberian Approach to Studying Religion and Violence,” Millennium: Journal of Inter national Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 279–80. 7. Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 645. 8. Gabriel A. Almond, Scott R. Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, “Politics, Ethnicity, and Fundamentalism,” in Fundamentalism Comprehended, ed. Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 500. See also Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 664. 9. Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach,” 201. 10. Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 24–25 11. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1996), 1. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Ibid., 25. Concerning denoting it “primordialist,” see, for example, Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion.” 14. Huntington, Clash, 27. 15. See, for example, Geertz, Interpretation, chap. 4. 16. Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach,” 201. See also Hassner, War, 2. 17. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York City: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Sen, “Violence.” 18. John F. McCauley, The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 5. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 646. 21. Manuel Vasquez, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 22. Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 647–48. 23. Matthias Basedau, Johannes Vüllers, and Peter Körner, “What Drives Inter- religious Violence? Lessons from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36 (2013): 857. 24. Hasenclever and Rittberger, “Does Religion,” 649. See also p. 642; and Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, “Religion and Violence from an Anthropological Perspective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 375. 25. Mark Juergensmeyer, “Sacrifice and Cosmic War,” in Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 101–17. 26. Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach,” 203. 27. Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Daphna Canetti, and Ehud Eiran, “Radicalizing Religion? Religious Identity and Settlers’ Behavior,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 39, no. 6 (2016): 1. 28. Eli D. Berman and David D. Laitin, “Religion, Terrorism, and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model,” Journal of Public Economics 92, no. 10 (2008): 1942–67. The study is cited by Hirsch-Hoefler, Canetti, and Eiran, “Radicalizing,” 3.
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29. Sarbeswar Sahoo, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 30. For a similar but somewhat different and six-item list of resources, see Rogers Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence,” Sociological The ory 33, no. 1 (2015): 7. 31. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). See also Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Daniel Philpott, “Religion and Violence from a Political Science Perspective,” in Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, Oxford Handbook, 403–4. 32. Monica Duffy Toft, “Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War,” International Security 31, no. 4 (2007): 97–131. Similarly, see Isak Svensson, “Fighting with Faith: Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 6 (2007): 930–49; and Jonathan Fox, “The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945–2001,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 6 (2004): 715–31. 33. Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions,” 12. 34. While the term is Juergensmeyer’s, as indicated above, Reza Aslan may have done even more to popularize it. See Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Glo balizatin, and the End of the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2009). 35. Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions,” 9. See also Catherine Wessinger, Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 36. Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions,” 8. 37. Basedau, Vüllers, and Körner, “What Drives,” 861. 38. Veena Das, “Violence and Nonviolence at the Heart of Hindu Ethics,” in Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, Oxford Handbook, 35. 39. Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions,” 7. 40. On religion’s emphasis on nonmaterial interests, see McCauley, Logic, 43. On the way that religion can shift goal-seeking behavior toward longer, even eternal timelines, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 220. On religious encouragement to devalue the body and physical survival, see Monica Duffy Toft, “Religion and Political Violence,” in Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, Oxford Handbook, 337. 41. Barbara Stoller Miller, The Bhagavad Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War (New York: Bantam Dell, 1986), 2:37. 42. McCauley, Logic, 6–7. 43. Ibid., 6. 44. Ibid., 7. 45. Swami Dayananda, “Conversion Is an Act of Violence,” Hinduism Today, November 1999, http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php ?itemid=4308; and Swami Dayananda, “Conversion Is Violence” (keynote address at the seminar Violence to Hindu Heritage, organized by the Citizen’s Committee for Dharma Rakshana Sammelan, Chennai, 1999). See also Chad Bauman, “The Violence of Conversion: Proselytization and Interreligious Controversy in the Work of Swami Dayananda Saraswati,” Open Theology 1, no. 1 (2015): 175–88. 46. Nick Cheesman, “Introduction: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 3 (2017): 343.
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47. Juergensmeyer, Terror, 12. 48. Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible Retrievable Selves (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 49. Juergensmeyer, Terror, 208. See also Mark Juergensmeyer and Mona Kanwal Sheikh, “A Sociotheological Approach to Understanding Religious Violence,” in Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, Oxford Handbook, 636. 50. Sikata Banerjee, Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism, in In dia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 51. Roger Friedland, “The Institutional Logic of Religious Nationalism,” Politics, Religion and Ideology 12, no. 1 (2011): 84. 52. Juergensmeyer, Terror, 191. 53. Peter S. Henne, “Constructing Cosmic War: Rhetorical Outbidding and Religious Violence” (paper presented at the International Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, 2010). 54. Paul Kingston, “Reflections on Religion, Modernization, and Violence in the Islamic Middle East,” Method and Theology in the Study of Religion 13, no. 3 (2001): 293–309. 55. Alexei Procyshyn, “Manifest Reason: Benjamin on Violence and Collective Agency,” Constellations 21, no. 3 (2014): 393–94; and Juergensmeyer, Terror, 221–24. 56. Juergensmeyer, Terror, 125. 57. Osuri, Religious Freedom, 15, 23–24, 41; T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat, “Introduction,” in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, ed. T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3. 58. James Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War,” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (2015): 808. 59. Scott M. Thomas, “Culture, Religion and Violence: René Girard’s Mimetic Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 322; John R. Hall, “Religion and Violence: Social Processes in Comparative Perspective,” in A Handbook of Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 363; Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach,” 197–99; L. Coser, The Function of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956); and James K. Wellman Jr. and Kyoko Tokuno, “Is Religious Violence Inevitable?,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 3 (2004): 292. 60. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. C. Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 302–3. See also E. Tyler Graham, “The Danger of Durkheim: Ambiguity in the Theory of Social Effervescence,” Religion and Educa tion 37, no. 1 (2007): 31–32. 61. Steven Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 62. Juergensmeyer, Terror, 6; and Toft, “Religion and Political Violence,” 337. 63. Philpott, “Religion and Violence,” 403. 64. Toft, “Religion and Political Violence,” 333; and Juergensmeyer and Sheikh, “Sociotheological,” 631. 65. Rob Imre and Jim Jose, “Religious and Political Violence: Globalising Syncretism and the Governance State,” Religion, State and Society 38, no. 2 (2010): 153. 66. Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Global Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 64, no. 3 (2010): 265.
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67. Friedland, “Institutional Logic,” 67–88; and Roger Friedland, “Religious Terror and the Erotics of Exceptional Violence,” Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures 14, no. 1 (2005): 39–71. 68. The phrase “symbolic capital” is from Juergensmeyer, who also quotes Habermas and Bourdieu on succeeding pages in Juergensmeyer, Terror, 228–29. 69. See William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4; William T. Cavanaugh, “The Invention of Fanaticism,” Modern Theology 27, no. 2 (2011); and Scott Thomas, “Culture”; and Jason Kemp Winfree, “Sacred Violence and the Death of God: Bataille’s Lucid Fanaticism,” Philosophy Today 56, no. 2 (2012): 211–20; and Kingston, “Reflections.” 70. The language of “minimalist” and “maximalist” comes from Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3, 5. 71. Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213. Quoted in Philpott, “Religion and Violence,” 407. To some extent, this is a circular argument. The more pressing question may be u nder what circumstances either party—the state or religious communities—might come to be unhappy with the state of affairs. 72. Samantha May et al., “The Religious as Political and the Political as Religious: Globalisation, Post-Secularism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Sacred,” Politics, Re ligion and Ideology 15, no. 33 (2014): 331–46. 73. See, for example, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, “Diwali Milan: Narendra Modi Puts behind Past Animostiy with Media,” Economic Times, October 27, 2014, https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/diwali-milan-narendra -modi-puts-behind-past-animosity-with-media/articleshow/44943963.cms?from =mdr. 74. Juergensmeyer, “Global Rise,” 268. 75. Casanov is quoted in Juergensmeyer, Terror, 232. See also Juergensmeyer, “Global Rise,” 262. 76. Toft, “Religion and Political Violence,” 333–34. 77. Imre and Jose, “Religious,” 158. 78. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Bharatiya Sahitya Sadan, 1969), 92. 79. Ibid., 100–101. 80. Ibid., 113. 81. Ibid., 134. 82. Ibid., 140. 83. M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, India: Bharata Prakashan, 1939), 66–67. The pagination in this and the following quotations follows that in the e-book available online at https://sanjeev.sabhlokcity.com/Misc/We-or-Our-Nation hood-Defined-Shri-M-S-Golwalkar.pdf (accessed March 25, 2019). 84. Ibid., 68–69. 85. Ibid., 69–70. 86. Ibid., 74, 76. 87. Ibid., 101. 88. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 149, 148–49.
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89. Ibid., 149. 90. Ibid., 150. 91. “Varnas and ashram[a]s,” h ere, refer to four-fold caste (varna) hierarchy (with Brahmans at the top and dalits, or untouchables, off the bottom of the scale altogether) and stage in life (ashramas). According to dharma texts written as early as the first millennium BCE, one’s dharma, or spiritual duties and rituals, and propriety in one’s vocation and everyday behavior were determined in part according to one’s caste and stage in life. Presumably, the “codes” here are a reference primarily to the Laws or Code of Manu, or the Manusmriti, also known for its traditional and now quite controversial views on caste and gender. The quotation comes from Golwalkar, Nationhood De fined, 115. 92. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 22. 93. Ibid., 23. 94. Ibid., 24. 95. Ibid., 25. 96. Ibid., 103. 97. Ibid., 126. 98. Ibid., 103. 99. Ibid., 125–26. 100. Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: Rupa, 1994), 166–67. 101. Radha Rajan, “Tamil Nadu Politics: Cancerous Church Eats into Dravidian Parties,” The Organiser, April 10, 2011, https://www.organiser.org/archives/dynamic /modules01eb.html?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=392&page=16. 102. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western Interven tions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultines (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011), 2, 88. 103. For one prominent Indian American Hindu’s view of the difference between Hinduism and Hindutva, see Anantanand Rambachan, “The Coexistence of Violence and Nonviolence in Hinduism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 52, no. 1 (2017): 104. 104. Gayatri Spivak, “Terror: A Speech after 9–11,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 106. 105. Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Tolerance,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 344–47. 106. Aparna Devare, “Secularizing Religion: Hindu Extremism as a Modernist Discourse,” International Political Sociology 3, no. 2 (2009): 159. 107. Ibid., 174. 108. The speech can be viewed as “Prime Minister Narendra Modi | Speech | Thuglak 38th Anniversary (2008),” posted by SanskritiSeries, May 11, 2011, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=VY9fMPn0SQg&t=31m43s (33:45 and following) (accessed March 14, 2019). 109. See, for example, Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleration,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Triloki Nath Madan, “Secularism in Its Place,” in Secu larism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 110. Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Integrated Approach,” 204. 111. Juergensmeyer and Sheikh, “Sociotheological,” 2–3. 112. See Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954).
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2. A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict
1. Mohanty’s definition of communalism is as good as any: “As an ideology, communalism refers to the belief that p eople belonging to one religion also share common socio-economic, political and cultural interests. As a social phenomenon, it refers to an exclusive assertion justified in the name of a group—in this context, a religious group.” M. Mohanty, “Communalism: A Democratic Rights Perspective,” Lokayan Bulletin 5 (1987): 58. Mohanty’s definition is quoted and discussed in Veena Das, “Introduction: Communities, Riots, Survivors—the South Asian Experience,” in Mir rors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 4. The historical argument detailed in this chapter is an altered and much expanded version of one that appeared first in Bauman, Pentecos tals, 43–54. 2. C. A. Bayly, “The Pre-History of ‘Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1985): 179–81, 193. 3. Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian So ciety 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8. Though scholars generally doubt the community’s claim that St. Thomas arrived in the region in 52 CE, many are convinced that the community came into existence no later than the third century. 4. C. Bayly, “Pre-History,” 35, 181, 247–48, 273–74, 460. 5. The quotation marks around Hindu and Muslim are intended to acknowledge that one must be careful in applying these terms to the religious practices of Indians in the premodern period. W hether or not it should be the case, to the modern reader, terms like Hindu and Muslim (or Hinduism and Islam) connote religious referents that are settled, internally homogenous, and easily differentiated one from the other. However, such connotations are inappropriate for the historical era and geog raphical context under discussion, where religious practices, traditions, and identities appear to have been somewhat more malleable, diffuse, and interwoven. Moreover, as Pennington and others have pointed out, terms like Hindu and Hinduism were rarely used by any party (internal or external) to designate the religion of Indians before the 1830s. Having noted these concerns, however, hereafter I dispense with the quotation marks and caveats. See Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 59–60. 6. S. Bayly, Saints, 27, 35, 69–70, 275. 7. In one of the most fascinating accounts from these early Portuguese visits to Malabar, a member of da Gama’s second voyage crew reported being taken to a “big church” with images of “Our Lady” and “saints” along the walls. T hese “saints” all had “four or five arms,” and the “church’s” ministers belonged to a “certain set of people” who wore “some thread . . . over their left shoulders and u nder their right arms” and smeared “a kind of clay” on their heads, chests, and arms. Clearly, without knowing it, the explorers had been taken to a Hindu temple. See A. M. Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol. 1, From the Beginning up to the M iddle of the Sixteenth Century (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1984), 249. 8. Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present, ed. Henry Chadwick and Owen Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 124, 122–25.
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9. Ibid., 126, 129–30; and M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India, vol. 1.1 of The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116–17. 10. Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 137–38, 140; and Rowena Robinson, Christians of India (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 42. 11. Pearson, Portuguese, 117–20; and Anant Kakba Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition: Be ing a Quatercentenary Commemoration of the Inquisition in India (Bombay: Bombay University Press, 1961), xi–xii, 24–25, 50, 67–68, 78–84. Historians debate the relative ferocity of the Goa Inquisition. Frykenberg, for example, suggests that it was “not as terrible as its Iberian sisters.” Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 134. Similarly, Pearson suggests that it was, particularly after the sixteenth century, “not completely intolerable.” Pearson, Portuguese, 123. Meanwhile, and pace Frykenberg, Priolkar avers that the Goa Inquisition “is known to have surpassed all its counterparts in severity.” See Priolkar, Goa Inquisition, 30. 12. Robinson, Christians of India, 45; T. R. De Souza, “Rural Economy and Life,” in Goa through the Ages, ed. T. R. De Souza (Delhi: Concept, 1990), 103; Priolkar, Goa In quisition, 72; and A. X. D’Souza, “Cuncolim, Martyrs of,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann, et al. (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913). The five Jesuits were canonized as martyrs and a feast day was established in their honor. The non-Jesuit and the fourteen native Christian victims have not been similarly commemorated, and at least one history of Indian Christianity that references the event fails even to mention them. 13. Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 131–36; and Pearson, Portuguese, 119. The Padroado Real, established through a series of papal bulls throughout the fifteenth century, divided responsibility for colonizing and Christianizing the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, giving each an array of privileges and responsibilities and the right to act on behalf of Rome in the territories they controlled. For a succinct description of the Padroado, see Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 128. 14. For example, see the writings of Sita Ram Goel (discussed later in this chapter), who frequently returns to the Inquisition as a symbol of Christian rapacity. 15. The BEIC had been granted a charter in 1599 and slowly established its foothold in India, eventually eclipsing the might of Portuguese, French, and Dutch traders, particularly after the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757. 16. S. Bayly, Saints, 281–84, 460; and Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 73. 17. S. Bayly, Saints, 282, 285, 288; Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India (New Delhi: South Asia, 1989), 54; and Subramanian, Shorelines, 74. 18. William Strickland and Thomas William M. Marshall, Catholic Missions in South ern India to 1865 (London: Longmans, Green, 1865), 148. Quoted in David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 52. 19. S. Bayly, Saints, 252, 258–68, 296–98. 20. Subramanian, Shorelines, 82; and Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: At titudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Centre of South Asian Studies, University of London, 1980). 21. Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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22. S. Bayly, Saints, 292–93, 300–302, 313; and Subramanian, Shorelines, 75. 23. See Corinne Dempsey, “Selective Indigenization and the Problem of Superstition in Kerala,” Vidyajyoti: Journal of Theological Reflection 69, no. 6 (2005): 404–14.; and Bauman, Pentecostals, 44–45. 24. S. Bayly, Saints, 379–80, 383, 393–406, 415–19. 25. Ibid., 410–15, 421. 26. Ibid., 383–84, 397, 402–4, 408. 27. For an excellent historical overview of the varied reasons different officials and communities in Britain and India supported or opposed the work of missionaries, see Penelope Carson, “An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 2 (1990): 169–90. See also, Penelope Carson, “A Turbulent Frontier: The East India Company, Christian ity, and Hinduism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, ed. Chad Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 28. Ian Copland, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company, c. 1813–1858,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1037; and Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7. 29. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented?, 42. 30. Ibid., 4. 31. Copley, Religions in Conflict, 12. 32. Muhammad Mohar Ali, The Bengali Reaction to Christian Missionary Activities 1833–1957 (Chittagong, Bangladesh: Mehrub, 1965), 8; and Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented?, 20. 33. Copland, “Arm of Empire,” 1042–43. 34. Ibid., 1038, 1042. 35. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 36. Prareparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel) is the title of Viswanathan’s second chapter, which focuses on Duff. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 44; see also 45–67. 37. Copland, “Arm of Empire,” 1042; Brian Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, or The Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 38. Ibid., 8; see also 86–90. 39. Ali suggests that the Tattvabodhini Sabha was established primarily for the purpose of counteracting missionary influence. See Ali, Bengali Reaction, 8, 17–18. Hatcher disagrees and argues convincingly that such an understanding of the Sabha’s origins was the later creation of members of the society, who seemed to have been relatively uninterested in missionaries in their early years. See Hatcher, Bourgeois, 17, 85. 40. Ali, Bengali Reaction, 36, 44–45, 53–55. 41. Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apolo getics in Early Nineteenth Century India (Vienna: Indological Institute, University of Vienna, 1981); Daniel Jeyaraj, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, the F ather of Modern Protestant Mission: An Indian Assessment (Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2006); and H. Grafe, “Hindu Apologetics at the Beginning of the Protestant Mission Era,” Indian Church History Review 6, no. 1 (1972): 43–69. 42. Ali, Bengali Reaction, 137–40.
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43. Ibid., 144–63. It is important to highlight the fact that t here were generally, in the colonial period, successful prosecutions of t hose who perpetrated such crimes. Such is not as commonly the case t oday, except in the case of murders (e.g., that of Graham Staines) outside of the riot context. 44. Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 8, World Christianities, c. 1815–1914, ed. Brian Stanley and Sheridan Gilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 483. On conflict in Madras, see also G. A. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in South-East In dia (London: Curzon, 1991). 45. Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions,” 484. Emphasis added. 46. Both Cuddapah and Nellore are located in what is now Andhra Pradesh. See Copland, “Arm of Empire,” 1050; and Carson, “Imperial Dilemma,” 184. 47. The rebellion is known by many other names (e.g., the Mutiny, the First War of Independence, the Great Revolt, the Sepoy Rebellion, etc.), each of them reflecting a certain opinion about the nature and appropriateness of the rebellion, as well as about whom to label its heroes and villains. The term the rebellion seems about as neutral a one as one can get in this debate, which is why I use it. 48. Kim Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010). 49. Copland, “Arm of Empire,” 1047; and Wagner, Great Fear. 50. Copland, “Arm of Empire,” 1048. 51. Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 61. 52. Ibid., 57, 78. 53. Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 159. 54. Chandra Mallampalli, “Caste, Catholicism, and History ‘from Below,’ 1863– 1917,” in India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding—Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical—in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed. Richard Fox Young (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 145. See also, Chandra Mallampalli, Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863–1937: Contending with Marginality (London: Routledge, 2004). 55. Freitag, Collective Action, 79. 56. Ibid., 19. 57. Sen, Identity and Violence; Sumit Sarkar, “Conversion and Politics of Hindu Right,” Economic and Political Weekly, June 26, 1999, 1692. 58. Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 115–19. 59. See also Osuri, Religious Freedom, 13–15. 60. Sushil Aaron, Christianity and Political Conflict in India: The Case of Gujarat (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 2002), 11; and Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 53. 61. Harold Coward, “Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Untouchability,” in Indian Critiques of Gandhi, ed. Harold Coward (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 41–66.
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62. Subramanian, Shorelines, 80. 63. Ibid., 96; see also 38, 76, 80–81, 90–98. 64. P. P. Mahapatra, “Class Conflict and Agrarian Regimes in Chotanagpur, 1860– 1950,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 28, no. 1 (1991): 1–42. 65. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Na tionalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 12–18, 166, 170–71, 184. 66. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a M iddle Class in Colonial North In dia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 103–4; and Freitag, Collective Action, 53, 56, 80, 284. 67. Freitag, Collective Action, 292. 68. Ibid., 146; see also 94–95, 125. 69. Ibid., 96, 127, 177, 218, 294. 70. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured, 4, 8, 12, 162. 71. Ibid., 2–3; Peter van der Veer, “The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 23–44.; and Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 72. Kidambi, Making, 12–13, 161, 166. 73. Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Quoted in S. Sarkar, “Conversion.” 74. Kidambi, Making, 174–76; Iris Vandevelde, “Reconversion to Hinduism: A Hindu Nationalist Reaction against Conversion to Christianity and Islam,” South Asia: Jour nal of South Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 34–39; Christophe Jaffrelot, “Militant Hindus and the Conversion Issue (1885–1990): From Shuddhi to Dharm Parivartan; The Politicization and Diffusion of an ‘Invention of Tradition,’ ” in The Resources of His tory: Tradition and Narration in South Asia, ed. J. Assayag (Paris: EFEO, 1990), 129; J. T. F. Jordens, “Reconversion to Hinduism: The Shuddhi of the Arya Samaj,” in Religion in South Asia: Religious Conversion and Revival Movements in South Asia in Medieval and Mod ern Times, ed. G. A. Oddie (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), 146–62; and Jones, Arya Dharm. 75. T. Sarkar, Hindu Wife, 18, 36, 39. 76. Ibid., 2. H ere “Sanatani” refers to traditionalists who adhere to the sanatana dharma (eternal religious way of life). Sanatana dharma is a term that many have proposed as an alternative and more accurate name for Hinduism. 77. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured, 141–44, 148, 170. 78. S. Bayly, Saints, 445–47. 79. Ibid., 446. 80. C. Bayly, “Pre-History,” 180. 81. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured, 133, 154. 82. Bauman, Christian Identity, 76–79; and John Zavos, “Conversion and the Assertive Margins,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 82. 83. U. N. Mukherji, Hindus—a Dying Race (Calcutta: M. Bannerjee, 1909). The essay was first published, in serialized form, during the month of June 1909 in The Bengalee. 84. Quoted in Christophe Jaffrelot, ed., Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 243. 85. Jaffrelot, Reader, 11–13; Kenneth W. Jones, “Politicized Hinduism: The Ideology and Program of the Hindu Mahasabha,” in Religion in Modern India, ed. Robert D.
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Baird (Delhi: Manohar, 1981), 447–80.; and Keith Meadowcroft, “The All-India Hindu Mahasabha, Untouchable Politics, and ‘Denationalising’ Conversions: The Moonje- Ambedkar Pact,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (2006): 9–41. 86. Swami Shraddhananda, Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race (Delhi: Arjun, 1926). 87. Jaffrelot, Reader, 13–14; and Jaffrelot, “Militant.” 88. J. W. Pickett, Christian Mass Movements in India (New York: Abingdon, 1933); and J. W. Pickett et al., Church Growth and Group Conversion (Lucknow, India: Lucknow Publishing House, 1956). 89. Savarkar, Hindutva. 90. Jaffrelot, Reader, 15. See also Jones, 1981 #834. . White nationalism in the United States has historically, in similar ways, linked Anglo-Saxon identity, the English language, and American exceptionalism. See Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 3–47. 91. Formed in 1885, the Indian National Congress was the most important politi cal party in the movement for independence and became the dominant political party in independent India, holding power, with very few exceptions, for nearly all of the years between independence and 1998, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (see below) came to control the center. 92. Meadowcroft, “All-India,” 11–12. 93. Jaffrelot, Reader, 16. 94. Ibid., 15–17. On the RSS pracharaks, see Pralay Kanungo, “The Navigators of Hindu Rashtra: The RSS Pracharaks,” in Assertive Religious Identities, ed. Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), 233–54. 95. Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Introduction: Dealing with Contested Definitions and Controversial Perspectives,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Com munication since 1500, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 7–8; and Susan Billington Harper, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 292–345. 96. Kim, In Search, 33. 97. Quoted in Kim, In Search. 98. Adcock, Limits, 168. 99. Ibid., 13. 100. Nathaniel Roberts, “Anti-Conversion Law in a Secular State: Religious Difference and the Threat to ‘Public Order’ ” (paper presented at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, February 22, 2011), 7, 10. 101. Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999), vol. 27: 204., http://www.gandhiserve .org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm. 102. Sumit Sarkar, “Hindutva and the Question of Conversions,” in The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism, ed. K. N. Panikkar (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1999), 73–106. 103. Kim, In Search, 38–39. 104. The All-India Muslim League was founded in 1906 to represent India’s Muslims in the independence movement. The league at various times cooperated and
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competed with the Congress. After 1930, the league began calling for a separate Muslim homeland, an idea that eventually came to fruition in the partition. 105. Sumit Sarkar, “Conversion.” Around forty million Muslims remained in India after the partition. 106. Vazira Fazil-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 229. 107. Ibid., 238. 108. Kim, In Search, 39. 109. Ibid., 51, 55. For a thorough and fascinating analysis of debates about conversion within the Constituent Assembly, see ibid., 37–55; and Sarah Claerhout, “ ‘Losing My Religion’: Conversion, Secularism and Religious Freedom in India” (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2010), chap. 3. 110. Jaffrelot, Reader, 17–18. 111. Chad Bauman, “Postcolonial Anxiety and Anti-Conversion Sentiment in the Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 196–200. 112. What may seem, from a contemporary vantage point, a case of strange bedfellows (particularly since the RSS was still associated in the public mind with Gandhi’s assassination) makes sense if one keeps in mind that in the 1950s t here w ere still Congress politicians open to the work of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS and that the Congress Party in Madhya Pradesh had an unusually high proportion of them. See Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 19–25. 113. Jaffrelot, Reader, 17–19. 114. Ibid., 17–19, 234. 115. Nandini Sundar, “Verrier Elwin and the 1940s Missionary Debate in Central India,” in Between Ethnography and Fiction: Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in India, ed. T. B. Subba and Subit Som (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005), 86–109.; Nandini Sundar, “Adivasi vs. Vanvasi: The Politics of Conversion and Re-conversion in Central India,” in Assertive Religious Identities, ed. Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), 357–90.; and Vandevelde, “Reconversion,” 45–46. On Elwin more generally, see Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Trib als, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 116. Kim, In Search, 60–61. 117. Ibid., 74. 118. Sundar, “Adivasi,” 366; and Sundar, “Verrier Elwin.” 119. Sita Ram Goel, Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report on Christian Mis sionary Activities (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1998), 1:6. This version of the report, from which I quote throughout the article, is a reprint. One can find it online as well at https://archive.org/stream/VINDICATEDBYTIMENiyogiCommitteeReport/VIN DICATED%20BY%20TIME%20-%20Niyogi%20Committee%20Report_djvu.txt. With the exception of Goel’s short introduction, which has been appended to it, this version is an exact duplicate of the original. Unless otherwise noted, therefore, quotations from it are not from Goel but rather from the original text. Goel’s reprint retains the organization and pagination of the original. 120. Ibid., Niyogi Committee Report, 1:167.
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121. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 164. 122. Goel, Niyogi Committee Report, 1:2. 123. Bauman, “Postcolonial Anxiety.” Several of the paragraphs below borrow heavily from this publication. Goel, Niyogi Committee Report, 2:55. 124. Ibid., 1:153–63. 125. Ibid., vii. 126. Bauman, Christian Identity, 237. 127. Ibid., 192. Many of these laws w ere also modeled on laws promulgated by princely states, such as Rajgarh, Patna, Surguja, Udaipur, and others. These states were quasi-autonomous political entities under the British but became part of the Indian union at independence (with several prominent exceptions, e.g., Kashmir). As part of that process, the princely state laws were officially superseded by those of India and the states of which they became part (in which there were at the time no anticonversion laws) and were thereby abrogated. 128. Faizan Mustafa and Anurag Sharma, Conversion: Constitutional and L egal Impli cations (New Delhi: Kanishka, 2003), 109–11; and Jaffrelot, Reader, 234. 129. Goel, Niyogi Committee Report, 1:160. For a thorough examination of the nature and history of t hese laws, see Ian Douglas Richards, “Poles Apart: The Debates on Religious Conversion in Post-Independence India” (University of Toronto, 2016). 130. Gauri Viswanathan, “Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism,” in The Crisis of Secularism in India, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 336. 131. Kim, In Search, 79. 132. Sarah Claerhout and Jakob de Roover, “Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation: Conversion in the Constituent Assembly of India,” Religions 10, no. 157 (2019): 1–23. 133. Kim, In Search, 76–81. 134. Times News Network, “Rajasthan House Okays Religion Bill,” Times of India, March 21, 2008, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2885975,prt page-1.cms. 135. Shourie, Missionaries. 136. Osuri, Religious Freedom, 34. 137. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 189. 138. Ibid., 190. Interestingly, critics of Islam in the United States have frequently alleged that it is not solely religious but also an inherently expansionistic and imperialistic political ideology. For more on the similarity of the Indian and American situations in this regard, see my blog post in “Conservative Christians: Think Twice before Claiming Islam Is Not a Religion,” Religion Dispatches / Rewire.News, October 26, 2018, https://rewire.news/religion-dispatches/2018/10/26/conservative-christians-think -twice-before-claiming-islam-is-not-a-religion/. 139. Jaffrelot, Reader, 235. 140. Devendra Swarup, “Editor’s Note,” in Politics of Conversion, ed. Devendra Swarup (New Delhi: Deendayal Research Institute, 1986), 5. Quoted in Kim, In Search, 125. Ambedkar was similarly criticized when he threatened, in 1935, to lead the lower castes in a mass conversion away from Hinduism. Nevertheless, he did agree with many within the Hindu nationalist movement that the lower castes, if they were to convert,
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should not convert to a “foreign” religion. On this, see Meadowcroft, “All-India,” 15–16. 141. Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters AD 304 to 1996 (New Delhi: Voice of India, 2010), 4; Sita Ram Goel, “Genesis and History of the Politics of Conversion,” in Christianity: An Imperialist Ideology (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1983), 33. 142. Jaffrelot, Reader, 235; and Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Vishva Hindu Parishad: A Nationalist but Mimetic Attempt at Federating the Hindu Sects,” in Charisma and Canon: Essay on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar, and Martin Christof (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 388–411. 143. Vandevelde, “Reconversion,” 40, 47. 144. Ibid., 40–41; and Jaffrelot, “Militant.” 145. Vandevelde, “Reconversion,” 47; and Raj Eshwar, Paravartan (Back to Hindu ism): Why and How (New Delhi: Suruchi Prakashan, 1999); Press Trust of India, “Togadia Says Ancestors of Indian Muslims Were Hindus,” The Hindu, December 17, 2014, http://w ww.t hehindu .c om /n ews /n ational /t ogadia -s ays -a ncestors -o f -i ndian -muslims-were-hindus/article6701055.ece. 146. Jaffrelot, Reader, 20. 147. Ibid., 3, 20–21. 148. Rakesh Peter-Dass, Hindi Christian Literature in Contemporary India (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 149. Carole M. Cusack, “The Gods on Television: Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, Politics and Popular Piety in Late Twentieth-Century India,” in Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions, ed. A. Possamai (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012), 279–97. 150. Romila Thapar, “Syndicated Hinduism,” in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Günther- Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (Delhi: Manohar, 2005), 55. 151. Ibid., 74. 152. I must emphasize my choice of the word conflict over violence here. I am not attempting, in this passage, to account for violence against Christians but rather for heightened tensions between Hindus and Christians, of which violence was only one manifestation. No easy correlations can be drawn from the factors I enumerate here to violence per se. 153. Aaron, Christianity, 44. 154. Zavos, “Conversion,” 75. It should be noted, of course, that many Christians also objected to what they considered a reduction of Christian mission to “an exercise in management and logistics.” See, for example, Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden, “Introduction,” in AD 2000 and Beyond: A Mission Agenda, ed. Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1991), ix. The quotation appears in Kim, In Search, 135; see also, 136–37. 155. Chad Bauman, “Hindu-Christian Conflict in India: Globalization, Conversion, and the Coterminal Castes and Tribes,” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (2013): 633–53. 156. See, for example, Young, Resistant; and Richard Fox Young, “Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century,” in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. Judith M. Brown and Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 37–60. 157. On these latter two, see, for example, Malhotra and Neelakandan, Breaking; and Suhag Shukla, “The Question of Evangelism in India,” Huffington Post, February 5,
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2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suhag-a-shukla-esq/harvesting-souls-yields-c _b_817793.html. 158. Sumit Sarkar, “Conversion”; and Zavos, “Conversion,” 84. 159. Aaron, Christianity, 31. 160. Both quotations come from Aaron, Christianity. The perpetrators w ere alleged at first to have been Hindu extremists, though the story now seems somewhat more complicated. (Several of the accused appear to have been Christian.) 161. Roberts, “Anti-Conversion Law,” 8–9. 3. “Everyday” Anti-Christian Violence
1. A. Maria David, Beyond Boundaries: Hindu-Christian Relationship and Basic Christian Communities (Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2009), 70–72. 2. Aaron, Christianity, 47. 3. Kim, In Search, 157–59. 4. Ibid., 162. 5. Quoted in Janki Bahadur Kremmer, “Haunted by the Holy Ghost,” in John Paul II Revisits India, ed. Fr. Dominic Emmanuel (Indore, India: Satprakashan, 2000), 177– 78. Kremmer’s essay originally appeared in Outlook (November 22, 1999) and was reprinted in this collection. 6. Dayananda, “Act of Violence.” Saraswati would later establish and convene the influential Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. 7. Kim, In Search, 160–63. 8. Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, Hate and Targeted Violence against Christians in India (New Delhi: Evangelical Fellowship of India, 2018), 1. 9. When it does report on violence against Christians in its annual reports, for example, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs usually logs fewer than a hundred incidents. See the Ministry of Home Affairs, MHA.gov.in, “Annual Reports,” https://mha .gov.in/documents/annual-reports. 10. Jason Mandryk, for example, asserted in 2010, without reference to any partic ular study, that anti-Christian attacks “number over 1,000 a year. They are sporadic and concentrated in BJP-ruled states.” Jason Mandryk, Operation World: The Definitive Prayer Guide to Every Nation (Colorado Springs, CO: Biblica, 2010), 411. 11. Pandey, Routine, 8. 12. These videos are often short on contextual detail and are therefore, for the most part, not terribly useful for the purposes of analysis. See, for example, the sometimes disturbing videos at Hindutva Benaqaab, “Christian Minorities in India Being Attacked by Radical Hindus,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFmOytBtw2k, October 22, 2013; and Faris710, “Hindu Extremists Attack Christians in Karnataka,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqiPuSUr-pQ, November 17, 2008 (both accessed December 17, 2019). 13. That said, some Christians perceive there to be a trend toward increasing attacks on women, particularly the wives of targeted pastors and evangelists, who are perhaps more regularly now than before beaten, molested, and even raped. More so than attacks on men, such attacks, as one Christian rights activist puts it, are “an insult, an injury, a lesson, a political statement . . . victimhood of a superior nature.” If
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I do not include many examples of attacks on w omen in what follows, it is b ecause they are not as regularly publicized, due to the social shame that accompanies the violation of women. 14. That said, it should be noted that such encounters do not always end in tension or violence. In a video she posted to YouTube (but which has since been made private), for example, the British evangelist Shirley Worden preaches somewhat temerariously outside an Andhra Pradesh temple, to a small crowd that seems at first to even include a Hindu priest. Occasionally participants walk away in annoyance or disinterest, but the exchange is generally marked, on the part of the Hindus listening, by curiosity and respectful listening, and at the end, one responds positively to an improvised altar call. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ fV93QLv7zI&feature=youtu.be (accessed July 7, 2014). 15. P. Thomas, Strong, 145. 16. Mandryk, Operation, 419. 17. The Kumbh Mela, largest of all Hindu pilgrimages, is held e very three years, rotating among four cities. The Ardha (half ) Kumbh Mela is held every six years, alternating between Haridwar and Allahabad. It is possible that the pastor telling this story meant to say he was in Haridwar, since Rishikesh is not one of the Kumbh Mela towns. That said, Rishikesh is very close to Haridwar and is visited by a large number of pilgrims on their way to the latter. And so he may have merely been signaling that he was in Rishikesh during this time of heightened pilgrimage traffic. Some of the stories told h ere and in the next few paragraphs were first reported, albeit slightly differently and for different purposes, in Bauman, Pentecostals. 18. Janyala Sreenivas, “Under Attack in Andhra, Churches Seek CM’s Help,” Indian Express, February 2, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/under -attack-in-andhra-churches-seek-cms-help/. 19. James Verghese, “Pastor Attacked in Karnataka, India,” Worthy News, May 29, 2007, http://www.worthynews.com/1369-pastor-attacked-in-karnataka-india. 20. Indian police, particularly in rural areas, are often not particularly well armed, well supported, or well-paid and are frequently unable or unwilling to resist or reject the demands of a large crowd or mob, particularly one threatening violence, at least in the short term. 21. Morning Star News, “Two Pastors in India Arrested after Being Beaten and Threatened by Hindu Mob,” Christian Post, February 19, 2013, http://www .c hristianpost.com/news/two-pastors-in-india-arrested-after -b eing-b eaten-a nd -threatened-by-hindu-mob-90357/. 22. Aaron, Christianity, 52. For amateur and somewhat grainy video footage of a number of anti-Christian attacks that follow pattern 1, see Hindutva Benaqaab, “Christian Minorities in India Being Attacked by Radical Hindus,” October 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X FmOytBtw2k (accessed July 9, 2014). 23. I first related this story in very similar form in Bauman, Pentecostals, 88–89. 24. The video is available on YouTube, Tehelkatvusa, “Hindu Extrimist [sic] BJP,VHP,RSS)Attack [sic] on Christian in India 2008 Jan,” https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=3 znSTS9WcBc (accessed July 7, 2014). 25. Nitin Mahajan, “Christian Missionaries Attacked in Chhattisgarh,” Indian Ex press, January 17, 2008, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/christian-missionaries -attacked-in-chhattisgarh/262640/.
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26. “Nandini” is a pseudonym. 27. The bindi is a red dot worn between the brows, particularly (but not exclusively) by women and particularly (but not exclusively) in South India. It is associated religiously, inter alia, with the third eye of yogic meditation and with the goddess but now is often worn simply as adornment, both in India and elsewhere. 28. Because of the large proportion of lower-caste Christians that comprise the Christian community, particularly in certain areas, it is known as a lower-caste, or SC, faith. 29. A fuller explanation and analysis of the data is provided in an article I authored with the sociologist Tamara Leech: Chad Bauman and Tamara Leech, “Political Competition, Relative Deprivation, and Perceived Threat: A Research Note on anti- Christian Violence in India,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 12 (2011): 2195–216. 30. The rest of the top ten for 2007–2008 w ere Chhattisgarh (35), Maharashtra (28), Uttar Pradesh (20), Rajasthan (12), Delhi (10), and Himachal Pradesh (9). Computing according to incidents per resident and limiting the analysis to 2007, the top-ten states (in order from highest to lowest) w ere Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jammu and Kashmir. Considering incidents per Christian resident, the top-ten states in 2007 were Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra. 31. See Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 19. 32. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian En cyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 360. 33. See, for example, Baldauf, “New Breed.” 34. Bauman, Pentecostals. 35. Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, Hate and Targeted. 36. The 2018 report is referenced above. The other annual reports are Evangelical Fellowship of India and Alliance Defending Freedom India, Hate and Targeted Violence against Christians in India: Report 2014 (New Delhi: Evangelical Fellowship of India and Alliance Defending Freedom India, 2014), 9; Evangelical Fellowship of India, Hate and Targeted Violence against Christians in India: Report 2015 (New Delhi: Evangelical Fellowship of India, 2015), 21; and Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, Hate and Targeted Violence against Christians in India: Report 2017 (New Delhi: Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, 2017), 7. 37. Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, Hate and Targeted. 38. The Dravidian movement, now more than a c entury old, formed in the British Presidency of Madras to protest, among other issues, the disproportionate represen tation of Brahmans in government jobs. The movement and the political parties it has spawned have retained something of their anti-Brahman edge ever since, making it less likely they might whole-heartedly support upper-caste-inflected Sangh politics. Dr. James Ponniah, email correspondence with the author, April 29, 2019. 39. Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Other Saffron,” Indian Express, October 6, 2014, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-other-saffron/99/.
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40. Dr. James Ponniah, email correspondence with the author, April 29, 2019. 41. Henrik Urdal, “Population, Resources, and Political Violence,” Journal of Con flict Resolution 52, no. 4 (2008): 590–617; Varshney, Ethnic Conflict; Wilkinson, Votes and Violence. 42. I am grateful both to Ethnic and Racial Studies and to Tamara Leech for permission to summarize aspects of our analysis here. 43. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Eco nomic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–95; and Urdal, “Population.” On these four topics, see, for example, Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 381; Asghar Ali Engineer, “The Causes of Communal Riots in the Post-Partition Period in India,” in Communal Riots in Post-Independence India, ed. Asghar Ali Engineer (Bombay: Sangam Books, 1984), 36; Urdal, “Population,” 590, 601– 3, 608; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Vio lence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 44. See, for example, Horowitz, Deadly; David Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict,” in Nationalism and Eth nic Conflict, ed. Michael E. Brown (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 126–60; and Monica D. Toft, “Differential Demographic Growth in Multinational States: Israel’s Two-Front War,” Journal of International Affairs 56, no. 1 (2002): 71–94. Note, however, that Wilkinson did not find a statistically significant correlation between the proportion of Muslims and the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots in India: Wilkinson, Votes and Violence, 44. 45. See, for example, Dipankar Gupta, “Citizens versus People: The Politics of Majoritarianism and Marginalization in Democratic India,” Sociology of Religion 68, no. 1 (2007): 28. 46. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence, 43–44. 47. See, for example, Zavos, “Conversion.” 48. Ali Kouaouci, “Population Transitions, Youth Unemployment, Postponement of Marriage and Violence in Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 9, no. 2 (2004): 28–45; Gregory M. Maney, “Variations in the Causes of Ethnonationalist Violence: Northern Ireland, 1969–72,” International Journal of Conflict Management 16, no. 1 (2005): 70–96. For an opposing view, see Matthew Lange and Andrew Dawson, “Education and Ethnic Violence: A Cross-National Time-Series Analysis,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 16, no. 2 (2010): 216–39. 49. Jean Drièze and Reetika Khera, “Crimen, género y sociedad en India: Observaciones de datos de homicidios,” Population and Development Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 335– 52; Niveditha Menon and Michael P. Johnson, “A Feminist Study of Domestic Violence in Rural India” (paper presented at the Conference Papers: American Sociologic al Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 2004). 50. Engineer, “Causes,” 40. 51. John Dayal, email correspondence with the author, April 22, 2019. 4. “Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men”
1. Portions of this chapter and the next w ere originally published as Bauman, “Identity, Conversion and Violence,” in Margins of Faith: Dalit and Tribal Christianity in In
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dia, Copyright 2010 © Rowena Robinson and Joseph Marianus Kujur. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi. As indicated in the introduction to this book, though the accounts given here resemble those appearing there, I have been able to expand the account considerably, correct some errors, and supply new details based on testimonies and reports that have emerged since that time. I am grateful to Sage Publications for permission to reprint the earlier material. 2. Haq: Centre for Child Rights New Delhi, Kandhamal’s Forgotten C hildren: A Sta tus Report (New Delhi: Aspire Design, 2010), 4. 3. Vrinda Grover, Kandhamal: The Law Must Change Its Course (New Delhi: Multiple Action Research Group, 2010), 14–15; and PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed and Crucified: Parivar’s War against Minorities in Orissa (Delhi: PUCL, 2009), 2, 20–21. 4. Biswamoy Pati, “Orissa Today: Fantasy and Reality,” Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2007, 1516. 5. Anto Akkara, Kandhamal: A Blot on Indian Secularism (Delhi: Media House, 2009), 93. Rath yatras (chariot journeys) are festivals in which deities are processed on large, usually wooden carts or chariots. 6. Justice on Trial, Kandhamal: Root C auses (Ahmedabad, India: Justice on Trial, 2008), 32. 7. National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting for Justice: A Report (New Delhi: Peace & ANHAD, 2010), i. 8. Akkara, Blot, 94; and Grover, Law, 16. 9. Kalyan Chaudhuri, “Another Attack in Orissa,” Frontline, April 10–23, 1999; and National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 22. 10. Aaron, Christianity, 74. 11. Akkara, Blot, 93. For fuller lists of anti-Christian violence in Odisha from the 1970s u ntil 2007, see PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 36; and Grover, Law, 15–16; and National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 21–22. 12. Angana Chatterji, Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2009), 86. 13. Paul Divakar, Sirivella Prasad, and Annie Namala, “Do We Have Freedom of Faith with Dignity?,” in Faith under Fire, ed. Peace Justice and Development Commission (Delhi: Media House, 2008), 130; and Clarke, Manchala, and Peacock, “Dalits and Religious Conversion,” 187. 14. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 21. 15. Ibid., 14. 16. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities in Kandhamal, Orissa,” news release, January 14, 2008, http://www.sanghparivar.org/blog/indiaputr/christian -aggression-in-kandhamal-orissa-vhp-press-release; and National Commission for Minorities, Report of the NCM Visit to Orissa, 6–8 January 2008 (Delhi: National Commission for Minorities, 2008), http://ncm.in/pdf/orissa%20report.pdf. 17. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 23. 18. John Dayal, “White Paper on Hindutva’s Anti-Christian Violence in Orissa, India, during Christmas Week 2007” (Delhi: John Dayal, 2008). 19. Bibhuti Pati, “Reaping the Whirlwind,” Tehelka, October 7, 2008, http://www .tehelka.com/story_main37.asp?filename=Ws230208Reaping.asp, accessed June 6, 2008.
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20. S. Anand, “Next Stop Orissa,” Tehelka, January 19, 2008, http://www.tehelka .com/story_main37.asp?filename=N e190108next_stop.asp, accessed June 26, 2008. 21. Dayal, “White Paper.” 22. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 31. 23. Ibid., 23–24. 24. Personal email correspondence, June 6, 2013. 25. Dayal, “White Paper.” 26. Ibid. 27. Saraswati’s name was spelled in ensuing news reports in multiple way. Press Trust of India, “Orissa Violence: NCM Seeks Report,” Economic Times, December 27, 2007, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-12-27/news/27666270_1 _orissa-violence-kandhamal-district-orissa-government. 28. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 71, 78. 29. Akkara, Blot, 96; and Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 18. 30. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 176–80. 31. All-India Christian Council, Research and Fact Finding Report Based on Visits to Kan dhamal, Orissa in the Aftermath of Anti-Christian Attacks (Secunderabad, India: All-India Christian Council, 2008), http://indianchristians.in/news/content/view/1826/45/; and Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 15. 32. Dayal, “White Paper.” 33. Anand, “Next Stop Orissa.” 34. Akkara, Blot. 35. Dayal, “White Paper.” 36. Sandeep Mishra, “More Churches Burnt in Orissa,” Times of India, December 28, 2007, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/More-churches-burnt-in-Orissa/arti cleshow/2656686.cms. The Naxalites are a Maoist insurgent group that at the time controlled large swaths of particularly rural territory along the eastern third of India. For more on the Naxalites, see the next chapter. 37. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” 38. Press Trust of India, “11 More Churches Torched in Orissa,” India Today, December 27, 2007, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/11+more+churches+torched+in +Orissa/1/2866.html. 39. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” 40. Compass Direct News, “Top 10 Stories of 2007,” Compass Direct News, January 7, 2008, http://www.compassdirect.org/en/display.php?page=news&idelement =5 182&lang = e n&length = s hort&backpage = a rchives&critere = t op%2010%20 stories&countryname=& rowcur=0 , accessed February 20, 2008. 41. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 22. 42. Dayal, “White Paper.” 43. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 20. 44. Dan Isaacs, “What Is b ehind Hindu-Christian Violence?,” BBC News, January 29, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7214053.stm. The identification of the Christians as “tribal” h ere is curious. It is possible that the Christians accused of the act were indeed tribal Christians (though that would be less likely than them being Pana Christians). It may also be that the reporter (or his source) was confused about the matter.
NOTES TO PA GES 1 5 6 – 1 6 1
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45. Associated Press, “Christians Fear Attacks by Indian Hindus,” USA Today, December 29, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-12-29-259769465 _x.htm. 46. All-India Christian Council, “Fact-Finding Report.” 47. NDTV Correspondent, “Kandhamal Remains Tense, Poor Families Suffer,” NDTV.com, December 30, 2007, http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/k andh amal-remains-tense-poor-families-suffer/21530; and Agence France-Presse, “Hundreds in Shelter a fter Religious Unrest in India,” Daily Star, December 31, 2007, http://archive .thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=1 7164. 48. Associated Press, “Christians.” 49. Compass Direct News, “India: Two More Victims of Violence Succumb to Injuries in Orissa,” Compass Direct News, February 20, 2008. The Compass Direct News site no longer exists. However, the story can now be found at http://kuidina.blogspot .com/2008/02/india-two-more-victims-of-violence.html 50. Grover, Law, 64. 51. Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Vio lence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 56. 52. Times News Network, “Leader’s Death: VHP Calls for Orissa Bandh,” Times of India, August 25, 2008, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3519025 .cms. 53. Grover, Law. Some of this information was also obtained from Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha (a lawyer representing Christian victims of the violence), email message to author, February 13, 2019. 54. Sanjay Chaudhury and Sanjay Dubey, “Muslims, Widen your Hearts,” Tehelka, November 8, 2008, http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=hub 081108Muslims_widen.asp. 55. Akkara, Blot, 21. 56. Akkara, Who Killed, 196. 57. Harsh Mander, “Barefoot: Remembering Kandhamal,” The Hindu, December 17, 2011, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Harsh_Mander/barefoot -remembering-kandhamal/article2723257.ece; and Grover, Law. 58. Akkara, Who Killed, 198. 59. Akkara, Blot, 18–19. 60. Indo-Asian News Service, “One Year on, Kandhamal Victims Still Await Rehabilitation,” Thaindian News, June 13, 2009, http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal /uncategorized/one-year-on-kandhamal-victims-still-await-rehabilitation_100234975 .html. 61. Akkara, Blot, 23. 62. Ibid., 60–61. 63. Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha (a lawyer representing Christian victims of the violence), phone conversation with author, February 13, 2019. 64. Grover, Law, 58–59, 100; and PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 17. 65. For one such photo, see Persecution Alert, “The Little Girl Namrata Nayak,” Persecutionalert.blogspot.com, http://persecutionalert.blogspot.com/2008/12/little -g irl-namrata-nayak.html (accessed August 8, 2019). See photos of a healed Namrata
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at Journal Gospel News, “Igreja Perseguida—Quando o preço da fé é o sangue,” Jornalgospelnews.com.br, http://jornalgospelnews.com.br/2010/06/29/igreja-perseguida -quando-o-preco-da-fe-e-o-sangue/ (accessed August 8, 2019). 66. Akkara, Blot, 104–5. 67. Prafulla Das, “Violence Spreads in Orissa,” The Hindu, August 27, 2008, http:// www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/violence-spreads-in-orissa/article1324407.ece. 68. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 1–2; and National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 30. 69. Akkara, Who Killed, 92. 70. Sandeep Mishra, “ ‘Most Wanted’ in Kandhmal Riots Held,” Times of India, October 16, 2008, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Most-wanted-in-K andhmal -riots-held/articleshow/3606091.cms. 71. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 214–15. 72. Ibid., 72, 177, 223. 73. The term panchamrita refers to the “five nectars”: honey, sugar, milk, yogurt, and ghee. Sometimes, however, as here, the details of victim testimonies suggest that they are instead referring to panchakavya, or panchgavya (blend of five substances), which replaces the honey and sugar in panchamrita with cow urine and cow dung. 74. Akkara, Blot, 76–77. For another similar incident, see Uma, Breaking, 21. 75. Gethin Chamberlain, “Christians Hide in Forests as Hindu Mobs Ransack Villages,” The Guardian, August 30, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008 /aug/31/india.religion. 76. Indo-Asian News Service, “Tension in Orissa’s Kandhamal District a fter Sangh Parivar Activists’s Murder,” Times of India, November 6, 2008, http://timesofindia .indiatimes.com/India/Tension-in-Orissas-K andhamal-district-after-Sangh-parivar -activists-murder/articleshow/3681193.cms; and Soumyajit Pattnaik, “Saffron of Reconversion Rises in Kandhamal,” Hindustan Times, September 30, 2009, http://www .hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=& id=1 a43d964-c0d5 -4052-a1e6-f5c077cfe0b0&&Headline=K andhamal%3a+Flags+of+fear+and+protest. 77. Express News Service, “Kandhamal Painted in Saffron,” Express Buzz, May 18, 2009, http://christianpersecutionindia.blogspot.com/2009/05/kandhamal-painted-in -saffron.html. 78. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 114. 79. Human Rights Organisations, From Kandhamal to Karavali: The Ugly Face of the Sangh Parivar (Nine Human Rights Organisations, 2009), 14. 80. Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Study of the Conditions of Women Affected by Communal Violence in Kandhamal District, Orissa (Mumbai: Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, 2010), 29, http://www.countercurrents.org/ORISSA _TRIBUNAL.pdf. 81. National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 69. 82. See, for example, Uma, Breaking, 18, 19, 20, 22, 95–100. 83. Ibid., 19. 84. Haq: Centre for Child Rights New Delhi, Forgotten Children, 24. 85. National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 85. 86. Akkara, Who Killed, 68. 87. See ibid., 67–68.
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88. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 13. 89. Akkara, Who Killed, 53. 90. Ibid. 91. Uma, Breaking, 14. 92. Anonymous, dir., The Agony of Kandhamal, (Delhi: India Foundation, 2009). The section of the film referenced here is available was once but is no longer available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k FmP2jw6bo4 (accessed June 17, 2013). The film was produced by the same Sangh-affiliated India Foundation that published Michael (or Brannon) Parker’s problematic books, as discussed below. Anto Akkara catalogs a variety of problems with the film, including that, according to him, it attempts to pass off Christian victims as Hindus. See Akkara, Who Killed, 225. 93. For a longer list, see National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 37. 94. Debaranjan Saranji, dir., From Hindu to Hindutva (Bangalore: Pedestrian Pictures, 2010). 95. Trishuls are tridents associated iconographically with the god Shiva and now often feature prominently in Hindu nationalist protests and violence. 96. National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 76, 177. 97. National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 9, 28, 37, 105. 98. Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Study. 99. Grover, Law, 65. 100. OneNewsNow.com Staff, “Attacks, ‘Reconversions’ Continue in Orissa, India,” One News Now, September 10, 2008, http://onenewsnow.com/persecution/2008/09 /10/attacks-reconversions-continue-in-orissa-india#.U-z44MVdV8E. 101. National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 57, 153; Grover, Law, 182; and PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 12. 102. Vijay Simha, “In the Name of God,” Tehelka, September 13, 2008. 103. Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Study. 104. Grover, Law, 39. 105. Akkara, Blot, 13. 106. Press Trust of India, “Saffron Flags Protect Christian Homes in Kandhamal,” Times of India, April 10, 2009, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/File-Saffron -flags-protect-Christian-houses-in-K andhamal/articleshow/4384049.cms; Pattnaik, “Saffron of Reconversion”; National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 160; and National Solidarity Forum, National People’s Tribunal, 192, 250. 107. Grover, Law, 65–66; and National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 153. 108. Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Study. 109. National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 79–80, 111, 114. 110. Uma, Breaking, 45. 111. National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 81. 112. Ibid., 103. 113. Haq: Centre for Child Rights New Delhi, Forgotten Children, 22. 114. Ibid., 11. 115. Ibid., 31–32. 116. Akkara, Who Killed, 70. 117. Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Study.
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118. Akkara, Who Killed, 90. 119. Some of this information was also obtained from Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha, email message to and phone conversation with author, February 13, 2019. 120. Akkara, Who Killed, 89. 121. Ibid. 122. Some of this information was obtained from Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha, email message to and phone conversation with author, February 13, 2019. 123. Uma, Breaking, 13. 124. Ibid., 49. 125. Akkara, Who Killed, 181, 190–91. 126. Ibid., 99–113. 127. R. K. Tosh, LL. B., “Judgment in Swami Laxmanananda Murder Trial,” 1, italics added [“IN the Court of the Additional Sessions Judge, Phulbani” / Sri R. K. Tosh, LL.B. / Additional Sessions Judge, Phulbani / S.T. Case No. 16/18 OF 2013-2009 / (S.T.03/2009 of Fast Track Court, Phulbani) / (Arising out of Tumidibandh PS case no. 37 dt. 23.08.2008 and GR Case No. 176/2008). / Dated, this the 30th September / Counsel for the Prosecution: Sri A.K. Pradhan, Public Prosecutor, Phulbani / Counsel for the accused Persons: Sri S.K. Padhy & associates, Advocates, Phulbani / Date of argument 13.09.2013 / Date of Judgment 30.09.2013.] 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 6. 130. The village name is sometimes given as Betikola. The full document is reproduced as appendix 3 of Akkara, Who Killed, 315ff. 131. Ibid., 315. 132. Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha, phone conversation with the author, February 13, 2019. 133. Tosh, “Judgment,” 10. 134. Akkara, Who Killed, 159. 135. Tosh, “Judgment,” 15. 136. Ibid., 21. 137. Ibid., 26. 138. Ibid., 12. 139. Ibid., 30. 140. Ibid., 5. 141. Ibid. 142. Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha, phone conversation with the author, February 13, 2019. 143. National P eoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 161–62. 144. Akkara, Blot, 41–46. 145. Fr. Dibyasingh Pariccha, phone conversation with the author, February 13, 2019. 146. Akkara, Who Killed, 259–60. 5. The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence
1. Paul R. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17. 2. Ibid., 16.
NOTES TO PA GES 1 8 4 – 1 9 2
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3. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds. 4. PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 26. 5. Clarke, Manchala, and Peacock, “Dalits and Religious Conversion,” 184. 6. On this, see Bauman, Pentecostals, chap. 4. 7. PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 37. 8. Clarke, Manchala, and Peacock, “Dalits and Religious Conversion,” 184–85. 9. The matter of tribal Indians’ “original” religion is a matter of g reat debate and too big a topic to thoroughly explore here. While some assert that they were and always were Hindu, others suggest that tribal religion was of an entirely different taxonomical species. Suffice it to say here that the traditional Kandha religion differed significantly from the upper-caste, Sanskritic, all-Indian Hinduism the Kandhas w ere being taught through these Hinduization efforts. 10. PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 23–24. 11. Grover, Law, 54. 12. PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 27. 13. Harijan is a term popularized by Gandhi for the untouchables, low-caste Hindus, or (in official parlance) Schedule Tribes of India. Staff Reporter, “Communal Trou ble Brewing up in Kandhamal Dist.,” The Hindu, September 22, 2007, http://www .thehindu.com/2007/09/22/stories/2007092252750300.htm. 14. Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 16. 15. Anand, “Next Stop Orissa.” 16. Biswamoy Pati, Identity, Hegemony, Resistance (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2003), 21. 17. Ibid., xiii. 18. Sen, Identity and Violence, 2–4. 19. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, eds., The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Tanika Sarkar, “Missionaries, Converts, and the State in Colonial India,” Studies in History, n.s., 18, no. 1 (2002): 122–33; Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001), 45; and Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1. 20. Sen, Identity and Violence, xiii, 4. 21. Ibid., 5, 34. 22. Akkara, Who Killed, 73. 23. Akkara, Blot, 72. See also Osuri, Religious Freedom, 43. 24. Akkara, Blot, 73. 25. Debaranjan Saranji, dir., From Hindu to Hindutva (Bangalore, India: Pedestrian Pictures, 2010). 26. PUCL (Bhubaneswar) and Kashipur Solidarity Group, Crossed, 21, 30. 27. Ibid., 31. 28. Pralay Kanungo, “Hindutva’s Entry into a ‘Hindu Province’: Early Years of RSS in Orissa,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 31 (2003): 3293–3303. 29. Akkara, Who Killed, 54–55. 30. Special Correspondent, “Attack on Christian Institutions Was Pre-Planned,” The Hindu, September 22, 2008, http://www.hinduonnet.com/2008/01/18/stories /2008011857421200.htm.
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31. All-India Christian Council, “Fact-Finding Report.” 32. National Peoples Tribunal on Kandhamal, Waiting, 48. 33. Ajaya Kumar Singh, “Orissa: For the First Time the Government Acknowledges the Role of Hindu Movements in 2008 Pogrom,” AsiaNews.it, November 24, 2009, http://w ww.a sianews .i t /n ews -e n /O rissa: -f or -t he -f irst -t ime -t he -g overnment -acknowledges-the-role-of-Hindu-movements-in-2008-pogrom-16946.html. 34. Ashok Sharma, “Hindu Hard-Liners Attack Churches in India during Christmas,” Seattle Times, December 26, 2007, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html /nationworld/2004092817_webindiachurchattack26.html; and Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” 35. Debasis Tripathy, “Christmas Day Terror: Hindus Protest Attack on Swami Laxmanananda,” The Organiser, January 6, 2008, http://www.organiser.org/dynamic /modules.php?name=C ontent&pa=s howpage&pid=217&page=14. 36. Ibid. 37. Rama Prasad Tripathy, “Pseudo-Seculars Deliberately Trying to Shun Facts,” Kamal Sandesh, February 1–15, 2008: 20–22. 38. The NISWASS is the National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences, founded in 1971 by Radhakant Nayak, Congress MP in Odisha. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” 39. Brass, Theft of an Idol, 6. 40. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 15. 41. R. Tripathy, “Pseudo-Seculars.” 42. Basant Kumar Mohanty, “Kandhamal Tale in New Light,” The Telegraph, May 6, 2016, https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/odisha/kandhamal-tale-in-new-light /cid/1505538. 43. Akkara, Who Killed, 220. 44. Ibid., 207–21. 45. See Mythinfromed, “What Can We Learn from The Vedic Scriptures? w/ Brannon Vrin Daavin Parker,” Mythinformed.com, https://www.mythicistmilwaukee .c om/m ythicistmilwaukeeblog/2 015/1 2 /7 /what -c an -we -l earn -f rom -t he-vedic -scriptures-w-brannon-vrin-daavin-parker (accessed February 15, 2019). 46. See Vedic Friends Association, “Founders & Leadership,” Vedicfriendsassociation .org, https://www.vedicfriendsassociation.org/leadership (accessed February 15, 2019). 47. See, for example, Brannon Parker, Orissa in Crossfire: Kandhamal Burning (Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2011), 143–44, where he smooths out the prose and adds greater detail to a quotation from Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 49. 48. Parker, Orissa in Crossfire, 157, 158. 49. Justice on Trial, Root Causes; Parker, Orissa in Crossfire, 159–60. 50. Ibid., 293–302, 323. 51. See, for example, ibid., 60. 52. Ibid., 325, 199. 53. Kanungo, “Hindutva’s Entry,” 3293. 54. Osuri, Religious Freedom, 55, 57. 55. Tappan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1993), 67; Peggy Froerer, Religious Division and Social Conflict: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in Rural India (New Delhi: Social Science, 2007), 12; and Kanungo, “Navigators,” 149–52.
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269
56. Kanungo, “Navigators,” 151. 57. Ibid., 150–55. 58. Ibid., 150. 59. Ibid., 156. 60. Bhagbat path, naam Sankirtan, and Gyana Yagna are, respectively, recitation of the Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, or other scriptures; recitation of the names the divine; and discourses on Hindu scriptures given by a swami or other religious figure. Quoted in Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 24. 61. Saranji, “From Hindu to Hindutva.” 62. Kandhamali Christians, interviewed by the author, Pune, India, September 12, 2011. Some Christians even accused Saraswati of sexual impropriety at his Jalespata ashram, though such accusations struck me as hearsay and propaganda. 63. Justice on Trial, Root Causes, 32. Opinion about the legacy of Bal Thackeray (1926–2012), founder of the Shiv Sena, which functions primarily in Maharashtra and has a reputation for thuggish and violent antiminority activities, is similarly divided. 64. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, 81. 65. Ram Madhav, “Local Factors Led to Kandhamal Violence,” Rediff News, January 8, 2008, http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jan/08guest.htm. 66. Horowitz, Deadly, 217. 67. Mukherji, Dying Race; Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke, eds., Reli gious Conversion in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17; and Yoginder Sikand, “Arya Shuddhi and Muslim Tabligh: Muslim Reactions to Arya Samaj Proselytization (1923–30),” in Religious Conversion in India, ed. Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 98. 68. “Daringibadi” is an alternate spelling of Daringbadi. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” 69. Kesavan, Secular Common Sense, 82, 113. 70. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Christian Atrocities.” able: The Development of an American 71. Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural T Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 144. For an analysis of available data on foreign donations for Christian organizations in India, see Bauman, Pentecostals, chap. 5. 72. CNN-IBN, “QOTD: Violence and Conversion in the Name of God,” CNN-IBN, January 2, 2008 (accessed February 17, 2008), http://www.ibnlive.com/news/qotd -violence-and-conversion-in-the-name-of-god/55440–3.html. 73. Baldauf, “New Breed.” 74. For a significantly more thorough analysis of this issue, see Bauman, Pentecostals. 75. Kristine Greenaway, “India: Orissa Religious Violence Spotlights Caste Tensions and Evangelists,” Episcopal Life, March 7, 2008, http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/81808 _95518_ENG_HTM.htm. 76. R. Tripathy, “Pseudo-Seculars.” 77. CNN-IBN, “QOTD.” 78. Bauman, “Postcolonial Anxiety”; Bauman, Christian Identity, 248–53; Jaffrelot, Reader, 234; and Kim, In Search, 61–72. 79. Bauman, Christian Identity, 71–99. 80. David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell2002); Peter Berger, “You Can Do It! Two Cheers for the Prosperity Gospel,”
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Books and Culture, September–October 2008, http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc /2008/005/10.14.html. 81. A much expanded version of this argument can be found in Chad Bauman, “Does the Divine Physician Have an Unfair Advantage? The Politics of Conversion in Twentieth-Century India,” in Asia in the Making of Christianity: Agency, Conversion, and Indigeneity, ed. Jonathan Seitz and Richard Fox Young (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 297–321. 82. David Hardiman, “Assertion, Conversion, and Indian Nationalism,” in Religious Conversion in India, ed. Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Robinson and Clarke, Religious Conversion in India, 10–11; B. Pati, Identity, Hegemony, Resistance, 11–16. 83. Kesavan, Secular Common Sense, 70–72. 84. Viswanathan, “Literacy and Conversion,” 337. 85. Bauman, Christian Identity, 94–98. 86. R. Tripathy, “Pseudo-Seculars.” 87. Tosh, “Judgment,” 2. 88. Debabrata Mohanty, “Maoists Own Up Laxmanananda Killing, Police Say Claim May Be True,” Indian Express, October 5, 2008, http://www.indianexpress.com/news /maoists-own-up-laxmanananda-k illing-police-say-claim-may-be-true/369862/. 89. Jed Lea-Henry, “India’s Panda: The Rise and Fall of Sabyasachi Panda in India’s Maoist Movement,” Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Research Paper 29, New Delhi, August 2016, 1, 3. 90. Ibid., 4. 91. Odisha Sun Times Bureau, “Who Is Sabyasachi Panda?,” Odisha Sun Times, July 18, 2014, https://odishasuntimes.com/sabyasachi-panda/. 92. Lea-Henry, India’s Panda, 10. 93. Ibid. 94. Uma, Breaking, 23. For a similar story of a Hindu social worker targeted in the violence, see Akkara, Who Killed, 53. 95. Uma, Breaking, 26. 96. Ibid., 18. 97. See, for example, ibid., 24, 25. 98. See, for example, ibid., 28. 99. Ibid., 18. 100. Ibid., 24. Conclusion
1. Sections of part 1 are drawn from Bauman, “Hindu-Christian Conflict.” They are reprinted with permission. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of the Jour nal of Asian Studies for their permission to reprint that material here. 2. Horowitz, Deadly, 4. 3. Sudhir Kakar, “Some Unconscious Aspects of Ethnic Violence in India,” in Mir rors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 143. 4. Brass, Production, 30.
NOTES TO PA GES 2 1 9 – 2 2 8
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5. Ibid., 15, 34–35. 6. Engineer, “Causes,” 34. 7. Ibid., 36. 8. Ibid. 9. Lobo, Globalisation, 18. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Pandey, Routine, 32. 12. Engineer, “Causes,” 34. Emphasis added. 13. Mark C. Taylor, “Refiguring Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Reli gion 77, no. 1 (2009): 117. 14. Ibid., 114. 15. Lobo, Globalisation, 122. 16. Ibid., 126. 17. Ibid., 112, 124. 18. Suman Lata Pathak, “Religious Conversion and Social Change,” in Reform, Pro test and Social Transformation, ed. Satish K. Sharma (New Delhi: Ashish, 1987), 214. 19. Sushil Aaron, “Emulating Azariah: Evangelicals and Social Change in the Dangs,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia, ed. David H. Lumsdaine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 111; Mustafa and Sharma, Conversion, 151; and Viswanathan, “Literacy and Conversion,” 346, 348. 20. Aaron, Christianity, 23. 21. Ibid.; and Pathak, “Religious Conversion,” 220. 22. Francis Gonsalves, “Grisly Christmas for Christians in Gujarat,” Communalism Combat, January 1999, 11–14. 23. Sushil Aaron, “Contrarian Lives: Christians and Contemporary Protest in Jharkhand,” Asia Research Centre Working Paper 18, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 2007, 9, 32; and Aaron, “Emulating,” 110. 24. Georg Pfeffer, “Times of Trouble for Christians in Muslim and Hindu Societies of South Asia,” in Constructing Indian Christianities: Culture, Conversion and Caste, ed. Chad Bauman and Richard Fox Young (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 161–87. 25. Satyakam Joshi, “Tribals, Missionaries, and Sadhus: Understanding Violence in the Dangs,” Economic and Political Weekly, September 1999, 2667–75. 26. More wealthy Christians w ere specifically targeted in the Kandhamal violence. See Bauman, “Identity, Conversion and Violence,” 272. The targeting of “advanced groups by backward groups” is a common feature of the “deadly ethnic riot.” See Horowitz, Deadly, 179. 27. Aijaz Ahmad, On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right, 2nd ed. (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2007), 94. 28. Richard A. Schermerhorn, Ethnic Plurality in India (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1978), 16–19. 29. Lobo, Globalisation, 114. 30. Ahmad, Communalism, 103. 31. Aaron, “Contrarian,” 8; David Hardiman, “Christianity and the Adivasis of Gujarat,” in Development and Deprivation in Gujarat: In Honour of Jan Breman, ed. Ghanshyam Shah, Mario Rutten, and Hein Streef kerk (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 175; and Lobo, Globalisation, 57, 68.
27 2 NOTES
TO PAGES 2 2 8 –2 3 6
32. Aaron, “Emulating,” 119–20. 33. Ibid., 115. The same refusal also prompted the village leadership in fifty Chhattisgarh villages to ban “non-Hindu religious propaganda, prayers and speeches.” See Pavan Dahat, “In Bastar, 50 Villages Ban Non-Hindu Missionaries,” The Hindu, July 5, 2014, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/in-bastar-50-villages-ban-nonhindu -missionaries/article6180825.ece. 34. Satyakam Joshi, “Tribals.” 35. Anand, “Next Stop Orissa.” 36. Mosse, Saint, 201. 37. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 44. 38. Paul Marshall, “Patterns and Purposes of Contemporary Anti-Christian Persecution,” in Hertzke and Shah, Christianity and Freedom, 64–65. 39. On Indonesia, see Bagir and Hefner, “Christianity and Religious Freedom.” On Nigeria, see Burgess and McCain, “Christianity and the Challenge.” 40. Tadros, “Copts,” 241–48. 41. Barber, “They That Remain,” 454–55. 42. Bagir and Hefner, “Christianity and Religious Freedom,” 207–09; Tadros, “Copts,” 350; and Singha, “Challenge.” 43. Burgess and McCain, “Christianity and the Challenge,” 312. 44. Marshall, “Patterns and Purposes,” 79. 45. Ibid., 80. 46. Bauman, Pentecostals, chap. 3. 47. On the significance of Pentecostal growth in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Nigeria (where it has corresponded with that of Islamic extremism) in the context of anti- Christian harassment and violence, see Bagir and Hefner, “Christianity and Religious Freedom,” 202; Reimer, “Vietnam,” 268; Burgess and McCain, “Christianity and the Challenge,” 309. 48. Marshall, “Patterns and Purposes,” 59. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 58–59. 51. Ibid., 79.
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Index
4/14 window, 122 10/40 window, 122 AD2000 and Beyond. See Joshua Project Adcock, Cassie S., 23, 94–95 Adityanath, Yogi, 133 Adivasis. See tribal peoples Advani, L.K., 18, 201 Age of Consent Act, 1891, 89 Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, 98–99, 104 and Hinduization, 99 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, 98, 12 Akkara, Anto, 195–96 All-India Christian Council, 121, 153, 155 All-India Muslim League, 96 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 95, 149 Ambedkar Vanijya Sangho. See Dr. Ambedkar Banika Sangh Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 134–35 Andhra Pradesh, 119, 121, 123, 129, 132, 134–35, 258n14 Andhra Pradesh Federation of Churches, 121 anti-blasphemy laws, 3, 233. See also Section 153A; Section 295A anti-conversion laws, 96, 124, 173 and the Constituent Assembly, 97 national, 5, 97 and Niyogi Committee report, 101, 203 anti-semitism, 61 Article 355 (of the Indian Constitution), 165 Arunachal Pradesh, 101, 134–35 Arya Samaj, 88–89, 92, 94–95, 104, 112. See also ghar wapsi Assam, 134 Assemblies of God, 120, 128 Ayodhya Mosque. See Ram Mandir controversy Ayodhya Ram Mandir. See Ram Mandir controversy
Baba, Kishore, 157 Baba, Krutanananda, 157 Babri Masjid. See Ram Mandir controversy Badamajhi, Munda, 177 Badamajhi, Sanatan, 177 Bajrang Dal, 104, 122–23, 153, 158, 168, 172, 192–93 Baliguda, Odisha, 153–54, 156, 159, 166, 191 Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, 83 bandhs, 140 and violence, 149, 152, 154, 188, 227 Bangalore, Karnataka, 120, 128, 174 Bangladesh religious discrimination in, 23 Bankura, Bengal Presidency, 86 Bapalomonti, Odisha, 168 Barakhama, Odisha, 153 destruction of Christian homes in, 153 Barwa, Sister Meena, 159–61, 196 rape of, 160–61 Bayly, C. A., 65 Belarus religious violence in, 231 Bengal, 79, 92, 112 Bengal Renaissance, 77 Beticola (Odisha) Parish Counsel Church forged minutes of, 158, 178, 180 Bhaktimayee, Mata, 157 Bharatiya Jana Sangh, 97–100, 105 Bharatiya Janata Party and anti-Christian violence/harassment, 6, 121, 123, 125, 133, 138–40, 147–48, 152, 162, 219 concerns about proselytization of, 18, 102, 116, 201 Electoral fortunes of, 4–5, 107–8, 182, 184, 226 and foreign funding, 201 and ghar wapsi, 5, 104 history of, 97, 104–5 and media, 194–95
291
29 2 I nde x
Bharatiya Janata Party (continued) and religious/ethnic minorities, 15 and tendency to consider Christianity a threat, 42, 55, 108, 206, 228 Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, 98 Bhol, Narasimha, 154 Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 147, 150, 162, 163, 174, 188, 199 Bhutan religious violence in, 231 Bihar, 92, 98, 111, 132, 136–37 Biju Janata Dal Party, 150, 184 collusion with Sangh in Kandhamal of, 192 Bindhani, Chitta, 192–93 Boko Haram, 234 Boliarsingh, Father Alphonse, 148 Bombay, Maharashtra, 78, 80, 83, 88–89 Bombay Presidency, 92, 112 Brahmanigaon, Odisha, 112, 156, 190–92 attacks on Christians in, 148–52, 154 attacks on Oriyas in, 155, 206 Brahmo Marriage Act, 1873, 89 Brahmo Samaj, 77 Brass, Paul, 184, 218–19 British East India Company, 66, 71–72, 76–78, 87 Christianization and, 81 education under, 77 evangelistic officials in, 71–72 missionaries under, 76 social reforms in, 78 British Raj, 87 Budedipa, Odisha, 162 Burma. See Myanmar Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, 68–69 Calcutta, 79, 86, 206 caste history of, 247n91. See also Dalits Caste Disabilities Removal Act (1850), 78, 96 Catholics/Catholicism accusations against, 196 attacks on, 1, 4, 70, 115, 126, 130, 148, 153, 159–66 Catholicization by, 69–71 disapproval of Pentecostals of, 127 growth in India, 69 Indianization of, 83, 85 Indian missions of, 75, 202 provocative behavior of, 116–17 of Sonia Gandhi, 108
censuses, 24, 66, 84–86, 89, 94, 112, 134, 171, 197, 200 and religious conflict, 83 Central Reserve Police Force, 154, 163, 172 Chakkapad, Odisha Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati’s ashram at, 158, 198 Challenseth, Gornath, 177 Chandigarh, 134–35 chants (by mobs). See slogans Chatterji, Angana, 25 Cheenath, Raphael, 147, 199 Chellan, Fr. Thomas attack on, 159–60 Chhattisgarh, 98, 134–36 Chhattisgarh Christian Forum, 98, 126, 132 China, 234 religious violence in, 3, 231, 233 Chotanagpur, 86, 98 Chowgule, Ashok, 109–10 Christian Missionary Activities Inquiry Committee Report. See Niyogi Committee Report Christians global persecution of, 2 triumphalism of, 14. See also Indian Christians Christian Solidarity Worldwide, 129 Christ the King Church (Phulbani) attack on, 159 churches attacks on, 125–26, 128 vandalism of, 126, 128–29. See also vandalism Church Growth Movement, 93, 108 Church Missionary Society, 72–73, 85 Church of North India, 120, 202 Church of our Lady of Lourdes, Brahmanigaon attack on, 154 Church of South India, 127, 130 Clapham Sect, 76 Clinton, Bill, 147 colonization, 8, 48, 77, 113 Christian association with, 81 Communal Award, 84 communalism, 65, 80, 84, 88, 89, 91, 184, 197, 224 definition of, 248n1 Compass Direct News, 129, 155 compensation for victims of Kandhamal attacks, 156–57, 181–82
I n d e x congregations. See churches Congress Party, 164 and anti-Christian violence/sentiment, 6, 106 declining political power of, 108, 231 history of, 93, 98, 253n91 secularist outlook of, 15, 133 soft nationalism of, 46 Constituent Assembly Debates, 96–97, 101 constructivism, 7–8, 27–29, 32–37, 41, 58, 62, 215, 217–18 conversion anti-conversion laws (see anti-conversion laws) as factor in violence, 37, 195, 199–200 after famines, 91 force, fraud, and inducement in, 5, 17, 101–2, 121–24, 177, 201–5 through healing, 185–86 propagation, meaning of, 102 putative disruptiveness of, 19. See also mass conversions; proselytization converts violence against, 126–28 Coptic Christians, 232 cosmic war. See holy war coterminous castes and tribes, 217–18, 220–21, 224–25, 227–30 cow protection/slaughter, 5, 39, 81, 159, 196–97, 240n16 Cuba religious violence in, 231 Cuddapah, Madras Presidency, 80 Cuncolim Revolt, 70 Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 136 Da Gama, Vasco, 68, 248n7 Dalits alliance with upper castes against Christians, 15, 30 association of Christianity with, 128, 234 Communal Award and, 84–85 evangelistic targeting of, 71 Gandhi on, 94 Poona Pact and, 95 prejudice against, 15–16 as real targets of anti-Christian violence, 15–16 as threat to Hindu unity, 16 violent targeting of, 15–16 Daman and Diu, 136 Dangs, 116, 136, 147, 201, 219, 224–25, 228
293
Daringbadi, Odisha, 154, 166, 192 attack on Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, 150–52 Das, Arunachal, 156 Dayal, John, 155, 196 Dayananda Saraswati, Swami (1824–83). See Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83) Dayananda Saraswati, Swami (1930–2015). See Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015) Daya Sagar (film), 123 de Albuquerque, Afonso, 69 de Britto, John, 75 Delhi, 15, 17, 21, 132, 194, 196 Attacks on Christians in, 4 Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 21, 119, 122, 134–36 denationalization of economy. See globalization: denationalization of economy and Deshpande, Ramakant Keshav, 98–99, 104 dharma, 9–10, 34 Dharma Jagran Vibhag, 104 Dharma Raksha Samiti, 104 Dharma Sabha, 77 Dharma Sena, 126 Dharma yuddha, 34 Digal, Fr. Bernard murder of, 163 Digal, Manini rape of, 164 Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre (Baliguda) attack on, 159 domestic violence, 126–28 Doordarshan Ramayana and Mahabharata on, 106 Doss, F ather Arul, 148 Doval, Ajit Kumar, 195 Dr. Ambedkar Banika Sangh, 149 Dudukangia, Odisha, 163 Duff, Alexander, 78 Durga Puja, 149 Durga Vahini, 168, 172 Ecclesia in Asia, 116 economic competition, 2 and violence, 8–9, 12–13, 20–21, 30, 37, 62, 138–41, 190, 208, 218–20 education, 191, 198–99, 217 Christian association with, 77–78, 95, 109, 185–86, 203, 209, 223, 229, 234–35
29 4 I nde x
education (continued) Hinduization and, 98, 106, 211–12, 230 targeting of institutions of, 165–66, 182 violence and, 138, 140 Egypt religious violence in, 3, 232–34 Elwin, Verrier, 99 employment, 174, 203, 223 and violence, 138, 140 England religious violence in, 240n14 Eritrea religious violence in, 231 essentialism, 7, 31–32 Estado da India, 69 Ethiopia Religious violence in, 231 Evangelical Christianity, 58 disproportionate targeting of, 130, 202, 235–36 evangelism of, 17, 73, 122, 166 targeted violence against, 3 triumphalism of, 14 Evangelical Fellowship of India, 117 Evangelicalism, British, 71, 74, 76–77, 81 evangelism at Hindu temples and pilgrimage sites, 119–20 through film, 123. See also proselytization evangelists, 16 attacks on, 119–24, 128 Evangelization 2000, 108 famine, 91, 203 fast-track courts, 175–77 high number of acquittals in, 176 intimidation of witnesses in, 176 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 240n14 first information reports coerced, 160 failure of police to register, 175 in Kandhamal riots, 160, 175 force, fraud, and inducement. See conversion: force, fraud, and inducement in forcible conversion. See conversion: force, fraud, and inducement in Ford Foundation, 201 Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, 2010, 18, 201 foreign funding, 104 of Christian activities in India, 18, 194, 200–201 of the Sangh Parivar, 18, 201
fractured modernity, 88, 91 fraudulent conversions. See conversion: force, fraud, and inducement in Frawley, David, 196 freedom of religion laws. See anti- conversion laws Gadapur, Odisha attacks on Oriyas in, 155, 169 Gait Circular, 84 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 4, 85, 93–95, 97, 113 assassination, 97 and conversion, 17, 95–96, 110, 112 tolerance of, 4, 9, 23, 94 Gandhi, Rahul, 108 Gandhi, Rajiv, 108, 223 Gandhi, Sonia, 108 Ganga (goddess), 119–20 Ganges River, 119–20 ghar wapsi, 4–5, 23, 89, 92, 94–95, 104, 133, 194, 198 Gill, S.S., 106 Global Council of Indian Christians, 129, 172 globalization, 8, 217 association of Christianity with, 21, 109, 225, 229–31, 235 and caste, 224 cultural effects of, 227–30 definition of, 221–22 denationalization of economy and, 50, 223 economic effects of, 223–25 and Hindu-Christian conflict, 219–20 history of, 222–23 political effects of, 226–27 and sovereignty, 223, 226 Goa, 69–71, 111, 116, 134–35, 137 inquisition and. See Inquisition in India God TV, 128 Goel, Sita Ram, 104, 109–10, 249n14 Golwalkar, M. S., 9, 11, 52–55, 93–95, 99, 103 Gorakhnath Math, 133 Gospel for Asia, 119 Gossner Mission, 86 Government of India Act, 1909, 84 Greenpeace, 201 G. Udayagiri, Odisha, 162, 166–67, 170, 173, 177 Gujarat, 136 anti-Muslim violence in, 5 Dangs riots in, 116–17, 147, 201, 219, 224 Gumpala, Andhra Pradesh, 121
I n d e x Gunjibadi, Odisha, 174 Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, 122 Hanuman in Sangh Parivar symbolism, 40, 104, 153, 163, 170 Hanumanthappa Temple, 124 harijans. See Dalits Haryana, 134, 136 healing, 121, 185–86 Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram, 93 Himachal Pradesh, 132, 134–37 Hindi belt, 136 Hindu American Foundation, 110 Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, 110, 208 Hinduism history of term, 248n5 tolerance in, 4, 9 Hindu Jagran Manch, 104 Hindu Jagran Samukhya and forged Beticola Church minutes, 158, 178 Hindu Mahasabha. See Hindu sabhas Hindu revivalism, 86. See also Bengal Renaissance Hindu sabhas, 41, 89–90, 92, 197 Hindu scriptures, 106, 123 and anti-minority violence, 40 Hindutva, 40, 43, 99, 215–16 and Congress party, 106 and conversion/proselytization, 24, 101, 229 history of, 11, 51–61, 65, 67, 91–94, 240n15 and nature/definition of religion, 9, 37, 109, 235 as normative Hinduism, 8 and secular modernity, 42, 51–61 as total way of life, 8, 31, 37 and tribal education, 99, 197–98 and upper-caste Hinduism, 228 views of Christianity of, 38, 189 and violence, 42, 213 Hindu Vahini, 121 Hindu Yuva Vahini, 133 holy war, 34, 39 honors (mariyatai), 68, 71, 74–75, 90 human capital and violence, 138–39 Huntington, Samuel, 31–32 Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, 119, 121, 125, 128
295
India Foundation, 195 Indian Christians access to western wealth of, 18 association with Inquisition, 71 foreignness/disloyalty of, 14, 52, 55, 67, 189, 227, 234 obscuring Christian identity of, 189. See also Panas; reservations Indian Congress Party. See Congress Party Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, 257n9 Indian Muslims, 16–17, 40, 65, 68, 70, 73, 75, 82, 83, 87–89, 100, 105, 111 as allies of Christians, 32 foreignness/disloyalty of, 52, 54–55 grievances/violence against, 30, 34, 58, 61–62, 83, 96–97 as threat, 34, 92, 103, 106 reconversion of, 4, 104 Indian Mutiny. See Indian Rebellion Indian National Congress Party. See Congress Party Indian Rebellion, 39, 79, 81–82, 85–87 targeting of Christians in, 81–82 terminology for, 251n47 Indonesia religious violence in, 3, 232–33 inducement. See conversion: force, fraud, and inducement in Inquisition in India, 69–70 association of Indian Christians with, 71, 116–18, 135 instrumentalism, 7, 9, 15, 28–30, 32–33, 35–37, 41–42, 58–59, 89, 140, 215, 220 interfaith violence. See religious violence interreligious violence. See religious violence Iran, 234 Iraq religious violence in, 3, 233 Islamic State (ISIS), 39, 233–34 islamophobia, 61 Jagatshingpur, Odisha, 147 Jain, Sandya, 110 Jalespata, Odisha Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati’s ashram at, 157–58, 166, 198, 269n62 Jammu and Kashmir, 135 Jana Sangh. See Bharatiya Jana Sangh Jan Vikas, 160 Jashpur, Chhattisgarh, 98–99, 104 Jayalalithaa, Jayaram, 133 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus
29 6 I nde x
Jharkhand, 98, 132, 134–36 John Paul II, Pope, 116 Joshua Project, 108 Judeo, Dilip Singh, 104 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 62–63 Justice on Trial, 155 Kalugumalai, 90–91 Kamal Sandesh, 194–95, 206 Kandhamal District, Odisha demographics of, 145 economy in, 146 environment of, 145 growth of Christianity in, 200 health in, 145 Kandhamal riots aftermath of, 171–75 atmosphere of, 170 decline in health after, 175 demographic effects of, 175, 184 desecration in, 171 economic competition and, 36 emotional trauma after, 167 forced conversion in, 164, 173 Hindu victims of, 168–71, 210 indiscriminate targeting in, 166 political effects of, 184 precursors to, 146–48 proselytization as cause of, 195, 199–200, 202–3 planning of, 170, 192–94 poisoning in, 171–72 propaganda in, 143–44, 194, 196–97 prosecutors of perpetrators in, 175–81 rape in, 1–2, 156, 160–61, 164–65, 167–70, 196, 211 sex-trafficking and, 167 weapons in, 171 women victims of, 167–68, 210–11 women perpetrators in, 168. See also compensation; fast-track courts Kandhas, 62, 146, 196, 228 alliance with upper-castes of, 30, 36, 43, 191–92, 224 Hinduization of, 186, 189, 197–98, 267n9 history of, 185 killed in violence, 153 tensions with Panas of, 20, 185–90, 213–14, 225, 229 Kanhar, Lambodar, 187–88, 190, 228 Karnataka, 68 anti-Christian violence in, 124, 129, 132, 134–35, 164
Karunamayudu (film), 123 Karunamoorthy (film), 123 Karunanidhi, Muthuvel, 133 Katimaha, Odisha, 163 Kerala, 68, 174 anti-Christian violence in, 134, 164 Khilafat Movement, 92 Kishore, Acharya Giriraj, 111, 117 Kolkata. See Calcutta Kotgarh Church, 178 Krishna, 1, 41, 106, 124, 157 Kui (language), 176, 185, 188, 225 Kui Samaj Coordination Committee, 149 Kumbh Mela, 119, 258n17 Kumuti. See Oriyas Lady of Charity Catholic Church, 148 Lakshadweep, 136 Lakshmanananda Saraswati, Swami. See Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati Laos religious violence in, 231 literacy Christianity and, 229 as competitive advantage, 187, 224 and violence, 138, 140 Lobo, Lancy, 21, 219–20 London Missionary Society, 72–73, 85 low castes. See Dalits Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 88–89 Macauley, Col. C., 72 MacDonald, Ramsey, 84, 95 Communal Award, 84 Poona Pact, 95 Madhav, Ram, 195, 200–203 Madhya Pradesh, 98–101, 111, 129, 132, 134–35, 203, 254n112 Madras Presidency, 79–80, 83, 112 Mahabharata, 106, 123 Maharashtra, 132, 134–35 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 174 Majhi, Rajani murder of, 168–69 Malaysia religious violence in, 233 Malhotra, Rajiv, 55–56, 110 Mallick, Khageswar, 153, 156 Mandal Commission, 231–32 Mandaikadu, Tamilnadu, 115 Manipur, 134–35 Maoists. See Naxalites
I n d e x Marshall, Paul, 231 Marxist social analysis, 6 mass conversions, 80, 91–93, 255n140 In Meenakshipuram, 103–4 mass movements. See mass conversions material interests. See economic competition McCauley, John, 41–42, 56, 216 McGavran, Donald, 92–93, 108 media coverage of violence, 4, 6, 118, 121, 126, 129, 143–44, 151–52, 155, 161, 194 Meenakshipuram, 103–4 missionaries in India, 16, 58, 60, 69, 71–78, 109, 111–12, 195, 198–99, 201–3, 206, 226 attacks on, 112, 224, 60, 66 education and, 77–78, 198, 219, 224 debates with Hindus of, 78 modernity. See secular modernity modernization, 48–49, 58n210 Christian association with, 166, 202, 235 cooperatives/guilds and, 186, 192, 202, 209, 224–25 Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and, 211–12 Modi, Narendra, 42–43, 108, 133 refusal to condemn violence, 5–6 secularism and, 60 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 84 Morocco religious violence in, 233 Morsi, President Mohamed, 232 Muir, John, 78 Mukherji, U.N., 91–92 Mukkuvars, 69 Mumbai. See Bombay, Maharashtra Mundargi, Karnataka, 124 Munro, Col. John, 72 Muslim Brotherhood, 3, 233 Muslims, 3. See also Indian Muslims Myanmar religious violence in, 44, 231 Mysore Presidency, 80 Mythicist Milwaukee Show, 196 Nadars, 80. See also Shanars Naik, Bhogra murder of, 153, 156 National Commission for Minorities, 144, 156, 192 National Democratic Alliance, 105, 138 National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences, 194
297
nationalism religious, 231–32, 235–36 territorial, 52. See also Hindutva National P eople’s Tribunal on Kandhamal, 168 natural leaders, 82–83, 94 Naxalites, 185 assassinations by, 157, 165, 207 and Christians, 206–8 history of, 205–6 role in Kandhamal violence of, 154–55, 165, 178, 205–8, 213–14. See also Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati: role of Naxalites in death of Nayak, Abhimanyu, 167 Nayak, Avinash, 150 Nayak, Budhadeb, 177 Nayak, Kanaka, 162 Nayak, Lipsarani, 162 Nayak, Namrata attack on, 161 as symbol of violence and recovery, 161 Nayak, Parakhita murder of, 162 Nayak, Prakash Kumar, 152 Nayak, Priyatma, 167 Nayak, Savitri, 173 Nayak, Suresh forced conversion of, 164 Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, 80 Nepal, 235 religious violence in, 231, 233 New Delhi. See Delhi New Economic Policy, 223 Nigeria religious violence in, 3, 232–33 Nishchalananda Saraswati, Swami. See Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati Niyogi Committee Report, 44, 99–100, 203 and anti-conversion laws, 101 noise in worship/as provocation, 125 nongovernmental organizations, 156, 172, 213 attacks on, 13, 141, 165–66, 209–10 foreign funding of, 201 disproportionate involvement of Christians in, 20, 55 and secular modernity, 13, 55–56, 210–12 Northeast (region), 111, 136 North Korea religious violence in, 231 Nuagaon (city and relief camp), Odisha, 160, 164, 166, 174
29 8 I nde x
Obama, Barak, 5 Ocean of Mercy (film), 123 Odisha, 98, 101, 132, 134–35 anti-Christian violence in, 17, 129. See also Kandhamal riots Oriyas, 146, 212–13 alliance with Kandhas of, 191 Christian attacks on, 155, 190 and land-g rabbing, 187, 191, 199 role in Kandhamal riots of, 25, 152, 191–92, 213–14 and Sangh Parivar, 191 Osuri, Goldie, 24 Pakistan, 32, 57, 61, 96, 100, 102, 235 religious violence in, 3, 232–33, 235 Palestine religious discrimination in, 52, 234 Panas, 146, 152, 162, 165, 196–97, 214, 225 and caste, 149, 186–88, 227 Christianization of, 145, 185–86 economic advance of, 149, 184, 186, 191, 225 history of, 185 and land-g rabbing, 187, 213 and literacy, 187, 229 and reservations, 149, 185, 187 tensions/competition with Kandhas of, 20, 30, 36, 43, 62, 185–90, 197, 213, 225, 229 Panchayati Sahi, Odisha, 161 Panda, Bhagaban, 192–93 Panda, Sabyasachi, 207–8 Pandals as source of religious conflict, 90, 112, 126, 148–50, 154, 195 Panigrahi, Prabhat assassination of, 165 Paravartan. See ghar wapsi Paravas, 69 Parikkar, Manohar, 135 Parker, Brannon. See Parker, Michael Parker, Brannon Vrin Daavin. See Parker, Michael Parker, Michael, 195–97 Parker, Vrin. See Parker, Michael Parker, Vrindavan. See Parker, Michael Parker, Vrindavan Brannon. See Parker, Michael partition, 53, 57, 96–97, 111 pastors attacks on, 119–24, 128, 202 verbal abuse of, 127
Patna, 255n127 Patnaik, Naveen, 154, 190, 193 Patna State Freedom of Religion Act, 1942, 96 Patros. See Oriyas Pentecostals disproportionate targeting of, 130, 166, 202, 233, 235–26 targeted violence against, 3, 233 Phulbani Kui Jankalyan Sangh, 187–88 Phulbani, Odisha, 154, 159, 163, 177 Pickett, J. Waskom, 92 Pillai, Christian Devasakayam, 75 Pirigada, Odisha, 164 Pobingia, Odisha, 153 police, 125, 149–50, 155, 227, 258n20 accusations of sexual assault by, 172 attacks on, 147, 154, 156 collusion with attackers, 1, 122, 124, 129–31, 147–48, 153, 159–61, 175–76 correlation of presence and levels of violence, 137–40 failure to prevent assassination of Swami Lakshmanananda of, 143, 157 killings by, 115 and investigations of anti-Christian attacks, 157, 162–63, 176–77, 187, 206 preventing attacks/aiding victims/ arresting attackers, 120–21, 123, 167, 169 political competition and violence, 12, 138–39, 140–41, 208–9, 213, 219, 220 political entrepreneurs. See religious violence: political entrepreneurs in Pondicherry. See Puducherry Poona Pact, 1932, 85, 95 population growth/density and violence, 137 Portuguese, 71, 74, 111 alliance with St. Thomas Christians, 69 colonization of India, 68–69, 135, 248n7 and conversion, 204 inquisition and, 69–70 in Kandhamal, 145 suppression of Hinduism by, 69 and violence, 29, 137 Pradhan, Dhanu assassination of, 165 Pradhan, Manoj involvement in anti-Christian violence, 162–63, 176
I n d e x Pradhan, Motilal, 147 Pradhan, Rasanand, 147 murder of, 159 Pradhan, Ravindranath, 159 Pradhan, Rev. Enos das, 202 Pradhan, Sidheswar, 169 Pradhan, Sudhir, 173 Prarthana Samaj, 88 priests (Catholic), 126, 159, 196, 199 attacks on, 148, 159, 163 proselytization, 12–13, 94, 233 condemnation by Christians of, 17, 130 controversy about, 10–11, 37, 40, 43, 60–62, 89, 109–10, 235 as element in violence, 12, 16–20, 37, 131, 201, 208 freedom to engage in, 6, 102 foreign funding of, 121 laws proscribing. See anti-conversion laws Puducherry, 134–35 Punjab, 92, 134 Raigarh State Conversion Act, 1936, 96 Raikia, Odisha, 26, 142, 148, 161, 166, 170, 172, 191 Rajan, Radha, 55, 110 Rajasthan, 36, 102, 132, 136 Rajgarh, 255n127 Ram. See Rama Rama, 106, 124 mandir of, 105–6 in Sangh Parivar symbolism, 40 in televised Ramayana, 106 Ramayana, 106, 123 Ram Mandir controversy, 105–6, 108, 133, 231–32 Ranchi, Jharkhand, 86 Rashtra Sevika Samiti, 198 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 5, 9, 52, 99, 105, 165, 169, 195, 198, 201, 226, 240n15 and attacks on/harassment of Christians, 121–22, 125, 150, 152, 192–93 opposition of conversion to, 97–98, 116, 168, 200 origins of, 93 reconversion and, 104, 173 Rath, Gouri Prasad, 157 rath yatras and anti-Christian violence, 147 Raut, Bikram, 150, 192–93
299
reconversion. See ghar wapsi Redemptoris Missio, 116 refugees, 153, 155–56, 162, 171–72 age and, 174 forcible return of, 173 gender and, 156, 172 prevention of aid for, 156, 172 prevention of return of, 173 religion and, 169 relative deprivation and violence, 138 relief camps. See refugees religion as brake on violence, 34 as cause of violence, 28–38 contested definitions of, 9, 19, 36–37, 40, 52–53, 216 religious identity, 189 religious violence appeal/function of, 43–47 causes of, 28–38 distinctive nature of, 38 and ethnic violence, 37 factors increasing, 26 global increase in, 2, 47–51 methodological approaches to, 28–38 othering and, 39 political entrepreneurs in, 35 profanation/sacrilege and, 39 Rent Act, 1859, 86 reservations, 149, 185, 187–88, 198, 229, 231–32 riots causes of, 184, 218–21 Hindu-Muslim, 83, 87–88 as natural response, 194 Rishikesh, 119, 123, 258n17 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholics/ Catholicism romanticism M. S. Golwalkar and, 52–53 routinized violence, 117–18 Roy, Rammohun, 77, 94 Sabhasundar, Father Rabi, 154 saffron (color) as symbol of Sangh, 153, 168, 170, 173, 192 Sagar, Ramanand, 106 Salia Sahi slum (Bhubaneswar, Odisha) resettlement of Christians in, 174 Samal, Subhas, 147
30 0 I nde x
Sangh Parivar anti-Christian violence and, 14–15, 36, 45, 67, 95, 113, 120–21, 152, 172, 213–14, 217–21, 232 anti-Dalit prejudice of, 15 concerns about Christianity of, 11–12, 21, 34–35, 42–45, 51, 58–60, 62, 100–102, 108, 111, 159, 206, 208, 216, 226–30 and conversion, 5, 17–19, 44, 62, 104, 112 and definition/nature of religion, 37 and Hinduization, 197–98 history of, 52–53, 93, 98, 103, 105, 240n15 and minorities, 32, 88 political support for, 139–40, 231 propaganda of, 144, 161 role in Kandhamal riots of, 25, 143, 192–99, 211–13, 151–52, 157–58, 163, 170, 188–99 symbols/symbolism of, 40 upper-caste bias of, 16, 30, 57–58, 212, 215, 220, 229 violence of/and, 46, 135–36 violence against, 165, 207 Sanseth, Bijay Kumar, 159, 177–79 sarva dharma samabhava, 9, 17 scheduled castes. See Dalits scheduled tribes. See tribal peoples Section 153A (Indian Penal Code), 124 Section 295A (Indian Penal Code), 124 secular governance Indian government and, 12 and minorities, 32 Narendra Modi and, 60. See also secular modernity secularists, 57–58 as sickularists, 59 secularization, 48–50 Christian association with, 11, 52, 55, 109, 166, 230, 236–37 as sickularism, 50, 59 secular modernity, 58–59 association of Christianity with, 11, 52, 55, 109, 166, 202, 217, 230–31, 236–37 inappropriateness of western models for India, 60 proselytization and, 19 resistance to, 8–10, 31, 141, 208–12, 216–17 Seiple, Robert, 147 separate electorates, 84, 92 Sepoy Revolt. See Indian Rebellion Sequeira, Fr. Edward, 168–69 Seva Bharati, 98
sex ratio and violence, 137 Shanars, 75, 80, 90. See also Nadars Sharma, B.L., 111 Sharma, Prakash, 158 Sheikh, Mona Kanwal, 62–63 Shourie, Arun, 55, 109–10, 113, 203 Shraddhananda, Swami. See Swami Shraddhananda shrines, 68, 73–75, 166 shuddhi. See ghar wapsi Shukla, Ravi Shankar Shukla, 98–99 Shukla, Suhag, 110 Singh, Dara, 17 Singh, Manas Rajan, 177 Singh, Manmohan, 164 Singh, Rajeshwar, 4 Sita, 106 Sitharaman, Nirmala, 195 slogans (chanted by mobs), 17, 98, 146, 152–53, 155, 163, 170, 192 Society of Jesus, 69, 72, 75 criticism of Protestant evangelism of, 72, 90, 11q1, 249n12 Sri Lanka, 235 religious violence in, 3, 48, 231, 233, 235 Staines, Graham, 17, 116, 147–48, 251n43 St. Peter’s Church (Pobingia) attack on, 153 St. Thomas Christians, 55 Catholicization of, 70 participation in Hindu festivals of, 73 Protestantization of, 73 religion of, 68, 75 status of, 68, 71, 73–74 syncretism of, 68 war-making of, 68 Sulesaru, Odisha, 169 Sunamajhi, Bhaskar, 177 Sunamajhi, Duryodan, 177–79 Sundhis. See Oriyas Surguja, 255n127 Surguja State Apostasy Act, 1935, 1945 Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), 88–89 Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015), 44, 110, 117 Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, 98–99, 143, 147, 149–51, 170 and anti-Christian violence, 147, 192–93, 199 assassination of, 39, 143, 157–58, 165–66, 176
I n d e x Christians accused of killing, 39, 176–80, 206 competition with Christians of, 194, 198–99, 211–13, 228 December 2007 attack on, 151–52, 193–94, 197 funeral procession of, 158–59 and Hinduization, 186, 191, 198, 206 role of Christians in death of, 157, 176, 206–7 role of Naxalites in death of, 157, 165, 178, 206–8 social work of, 198–99, 177, 211–12, 228 Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati, 194 Swami Shraddhananda, 92, 94 Swarup, Devendra, 104 Swarup, Ram, 109–10 Synod of Diamper, 70–71 Syria, 68 religious violence in, 3, 111, 117, 132, 134–35, 137 Syrian Christians. See St. Thomas Christians Tagore, Debendranath, 78 Talukdars. See Zamindars Tamil Nadu, 103, 115 violence against Christians in, 90 Tarakeswar, West Bengal, 86 Tattvabodhini Society, 78 Tattvabodhini Patrika, 78 Telangana, 132, 134–35, 137 terrorism, 35, 47, 232 Tiangia, Odisha, 166 Tikabali, Odisha, 163, 166, 191 Tipu Sultan, 71 Tirunelveli, 80, 103 Tirupati, 119 Togadia, Praveen, 4, 12, 105, 113 And Kandhamal violence, 158–59 tolerance. See Hinduism: tolerance in Tosh, Judge R. K., 177, 178, 206 Travancore, 71, 72, 74 treatment of Christians in, 85 tribal peoples conversion to Christianity/evangelization of, 16, 86, 94, 97–99, 116, 202, 219, 226 Hinduization/reconversion of, 99, 104, 106, 191, 197–98, 204, 207, 211–12, 228 and Naxalites, 208 relation to Christians of, 217, 225
301
religion of, 107, 267n9 Sangh Parivar work among, 98, 111, 177, 199 as threat to Hindu unity, 16, 43, 84, 103, 215 See also, Kandhas trishuls as symbol of Sangh, 40, 147 Tumidibandha, Odisha, 166 Turkey, 234 Turkmenistan religious violence in, 231 twin tolerations, 50 Twitter, 133 Udaipur, 255n127 Udaipur State Anti–Conversion Act, 1946, 96 United Christian Forum for Human Rights, 116 United Provinces, 83, 92 urbanization, 82, 87–88 upper-caste Christians, 17, 56 upper-caste Hindus, 192, 211, 226 alliance with lower castes/tribes against Christians, 15, 30, 43, 218, 225 association with Sangh Parivar of, 15–16, 30, 58, 99, 106–7, 139–40, 211–13, 215, 220–21, 228–29 and attacks on/concerns about Christians, 13, 209 dietary restrictions of, 81, 197 tensions with/privilege vis-à-vis lower-castes of, 73–74, 85, 88, 110, 207, 216, 223–24, 231–32 Uttarakhand, 132, 134–36 Uttar Pradesh, 132 Uzbekistan religious violence in, 231 Vacation Bible School, 121–23 Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 116 vandalism, 2, 13, 81, 116, 126, 128–30, 148, 151, 153, 156–57, 159, 165–66, 170, 240n14 Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. See Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram vanvasis. See tribal peoples Varanasi. See Banaras Vedic Friends Association, 196 Vietnam, 234, 272n47 religious violence in, 2–3, 231, 234 Vikarabad, Andhra Pradesh, 121
30 2 I nde x
violence appeal/function of, 43–47 religious. See religious violence Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 4, 98, 12, 98, 103–5, 110–11, 116–17, 152, 154–55, 157–58, 168, 192–94, 198, 200–201, 226 Wales religious violence in, 240n14 war on terror, 232 West Bengal, 98 Wilberforce, William, 76 World Bank, 21, 50, 55 World Vision, 192, 194
Xavier, Francis, 69, 75 Yadagirigutta Temple, 119 Young Men’s Christian Association, 194 youth bulges and violence, 137 YouTube, 118, 170, 257n12, 258n14 Zamindars, 79 Conflict with missionaries of, 79 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus, 78