RELIGION-INDIA: Attack on Evangelist Bad Omen for Secularism

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India, Jan 28 2003 (IPS) - The tourism brochures bill India’s southern Kerala as ‘God’s Own Country.’ So when a Christian evangelist was brutalised in this state, earlier this month, it left people wondering if violent Hindu fundamentalism sweeping across India has finally hit these shores.

Historically, Kerala, a verdant strip at the tip of the Indian sub-continent sandwiched between golden beach sands and a ridge of hills stretching up to 8,000 feet, has been known for its pluralism and readiness to adopt and accommodate other faiths and belief systems.

Kerala had a flourishing Christian community by the 3rd century AD, Islam arrived here in the time of the prophet and the state has played host to a significant portion of the Jewish diaspora, which build the quaint synagogues that the tourism brochures never tire of mentioning.

But none of this eclecticism was evident on Jan. 13, when Joseph Cooper, a 67-year-old U.S. bishop was waylaid at Kilimanoor, 30km north of this city, by members of the fanatical Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) or National Self-help Organisation, which has sworn to resist conversions by Dalits (low-caste Hindus) to other faiths.

Cooper, whose right hand was nearly severed in the attack, told reporters in hospital that this was his 12th visit to Kerala and that he was caught unawares by it. ”I have forgiven my attackers and I will certainly be back here,” he said.

But the attackers were not so forgiving, and were demanding Cooper’s arrest on the grounds that he was ”carrying out religious propaganda after arriving in this country on a visiting visa”. A local court allowed the pastor to leave peaceably for his home in New Jersey last week.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, a sister organisation of both the RSS and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is now busy drawing up a list of foreign missionaries resident in the state and who they want expelled.

”We already have a list of 50 foreign missionaries in this state and our units are gathering more information on their activities so we can have them expelled according to legal provisions,” said Kummanam Rajasekharan, a member of the RSS and state organising secretary of the VHP.

India restricts the issuance of visas to religious functionaries but this seems directed mostly against Christian missionaries says John Dayal, secretary general of the All Indian Christian Council.

”India has not given religious visas to Christians since 1957 and has since the coming of the BJP government expelled scores of Catholic and Protestant priests – among them scholars with life-long dedicated service to this country,” he said.

Rajasekharan claimed that Cooper was responsible for the conversion of two members of the Dalit Vedar community at a ‘Gospel Convention’ he addressed shortly before he was attacked. But ”we don’t know what they gained by attacking the ‘padiri’ (father). We are very poor people and except for the church nobody ever bothered about us until now,” said a terrified member, Marykutty.

Other people had little doubt as to why Cooper was attacked.

”The RSS and the VHP are trying to carry out here an agenda of intimidating church functionaries in the same way that they have been doing in western Gujarat and eastern Orissa state,” said Veliyam Bhargavan, state secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) which is powerful in Kerala.

Soon after the pro-Hindu BJP came to power in 1998, the RSS and VHP let loose a nationwide hate campaign against Christian missionaries and the church which, among other things, resulted in the gruesome immolation in January 1999 of Australian evangelist Graham Stuart Staines and his two young sons as they lay asleep in their jeep in a remote part of Orissa state.

In Gujarat, churches were burned down and graves dug up but the fury of the Hindu fundamentalists soon turned toward another minority community – the Muslims who became the victim of a vicious pogrom last year. Some 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered and another 150,000 forced out of burning homes and businesses.

The pogrom seemed to revive the popularity of the corruption-ridden BJP government in Gujarat, led by chief minister Narendra Modi who, to the consternation of human rights activists, returned to power in state assembly elections in December with a thumping two-thirds majority.

The leader of the VHP, Ashok Singhal, had then declared publicly that what happened in Gujarat was an experiment which would soon be repeated in other states of India as well.

But there are those who say that the attack on Cooper was an isolated incident that could earn no public support for the fundamentalists in Kerala, a state which that boasts hundred percent literacy and is famous for having the world’s first popularly elected communist government in 1957.

Said Communist leader Pinarayi Vijayan, ”What you are seeing frustration within the BJP and its supporters in the RSS and the VHP at not being able to make any serious impression among Kerala’s discerning voters.”

Power in Kerala has traditionally alternated between Left Front alliances and a right-of- centre alliance led by the opposition Congress party, which now happens to be in power under chief minister A K Anthony, who is Christian by faith but swears by the secular outlook of his party.

T K Oommen, professor of sociology at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, says one reason why Kerala cannot easily fall under the Hindu fundamentalist sway is the fact that Muslims and Christians together make up nearly half of state’s 30 million people.

Barring northern Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, and the north-eastern states where Christianity holds sway, Hindus form the overwhelming majority of India’s billion plus people.

Oommen said the recent political success of pro-Hindu groups like the RSS and the VHP in states like Gujarat arise from their ability to created a ”persecution mania” among Hindus who regard this country as their ancestral homeland.

”This is simply a case of a majority community being induced to develop a minority complex,” he said.