Hindutva Radicals Expel Tribal Christians from Villages In Congress-led Chhattisgarh a ‘Sar Todo Yatra’ is going on

Abdul Bari Masoud reports horrendous acts of violence against Christians, including displacement of more than 1,000 tribal Christians, severely injuring nearly two dozen others, and vandalization of churches and sacred objects in Bastar Division of Chhattisgarh.

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Abdul Bari Masoud

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Abdul Bari Masoud reports horrendous acts of violence against Christians, including displacement of more than 1,000 tribal Christians, severely injuring nearly two dozen others, and vandalization of churches and sacred objects in Bastar Division of Chhattisgarh.

 

Recant or Leave.This frightening call was allegedly given to tribal Christians by the Hindutva radical gangs, who attacked and destroyed homes and churches of tribal Christians in Bastar Division of Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh, resulting in displacement of more than 1,000 tribal Christians and rendering nearly two dozen others severely injured.

The horrendous acts of violence against Christians as well as the outrageous vandalization of churches and sacred objects have caught the attention at the national and international levels and raised grave concerns.

Since the ascendency of Hindutva fascist forces, religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, have experienced persistent stigmatisation and attacks, with governments and law enforcement agencies complicit in a culture of impunity.

After weeks of organised attacks, over 1,000 Christians were rendered homeless and many are now traumatised in Chhattisgarh. Right-wing Hindutva radicals in the state’s Bastar division have evicted Christians from their houses, vandalised and wrecked their homes, and destroyed their churches out of ‘wrath’ because their neighbours have refused to forsake their faith.

In addition to violent attacks, Christians have been barred from using community borewells as a source of water, ostracised and subjected to social boycotts.

In recent weeks, Christians have been summoned before their local village councils and offered the choice of renouncing their faith or leaving the village. These meetings frequently took place in every village.

According to Salim Hakku, a pastor in the Bastar area, “Some bowed in to the pressure and renounced their Christian beliefs, while those who didn’t were attacked and forced to leave the village immediately.”

The timing of these expulsions has meant that those fleeing have had to contend with harsh cold weather. At times, they’ve had to beg the government for shelter, and Christian organisations have been the only parties to provide food, clothing and basic necessities. And, at ‘the advice of the police’, the Christian tribals also had to forgo Christmas and New Year gatherings.

For instance, on January 1st, a 500-person crowd gathered in the village of Gorra, a tiny settlement in the state and summoned the Christians. The group of Hindutva extremists launched an attack when roughly 15 individuals had arrived.

Aytu Ram Dhruw, a local Christian youth, narrated that the majority of the youth escaped the mob, but three others, including Dhruw’s father Bahadur, were found.

“The mob accused us of following a foreign religion and leaving the tribal culture, and gave us a choice either to recant our faith or leave our homes and our village, never to return,” said Dhruw.

The Chhattisgarh Christian Forum (CCF) has documented nearly 400 incidents of violence against Christians in the past three years. Even before the violence really got out of hand, Chhattisgarh already had the second-highest number of incidences of Christian persecution,second only toBJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, according to a 2021 report from the Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI).

Speaking with Radiance from Raipur, President of Chhattisgarh Christian Forum, Arun Pannalal said several incidents were reported to the police frequently. They did nothing, and as a result, the Christian community has been the target of repeated attacks.

“The police have not only neglected our complaints but also encouraged the attackers and we have evidence of this,”Pannalal alleged.

He underlined some facts about the violence in Chhattisgarh as below:

  • 380 attacks on Christians during the last three years; No FIRs!
  • One pastor shot dead. One boy slaughtered inside a Church.
  • Christian pastors beaten up by police inside a police station, when they went to report attacks.
  • 200 churches and houses razed to the ground.
  • 1,000 Christian refugees. No food, no shelter. No employment now.

According to reports, the violent activities reached the peak in Bastar in November when Hindutva right-wing organisationsconvened mahapanchayats (regional council meetings) began ruling, and started passing measures meant to drive Christians out of their towns. The councils prohibited pastors from visiting Christian families in the village, restricted local Christians from performing their rituals like marriages and burials of their dead in the village, and stopped Christians from praying in the privacy of their own houses. Additionally, they forbade Christians from working and from buying or selling goods.

A fact-finding team from Delhi also corroboratedthat radical Hindutva hooligans stormed 18 villages in Narayanpur and 15 villages in Kondagaon districts between December 9 and December 18, 2022, displacing approximately 1,000 tribal Christians and rendering nearly two dozen others severely injured. Many of them are in critical condition and receiving care at various hospitals.

The fact-finding team report released in Delhi stated that people who had been forced to leave their villages were threatened to renounce their Christian faith and adopt Hinduism, failing which they would suffer severe repercussions, including death.

Despite the Christian victims’ complaints, nothing was done to hold the offenders accountable. According to the report, Christian tribals were allegedly thrashed in front of 10 to 15 policemen.

Even though the anti-Christian violence is by and large portrayed as a reaction of non-Christian tribals against their Christian tribal neighbours, the local authorities admit that the attacks appear to be planned by the outsiders. RSS and its political wing BJP both are accused by the locals of encouraging the attacks. Two local BJP leaders were detained in relation to a number of violent incidents against the Christian community.

“Although such acts are interpreted as isolated attacks, in reality they are orchestrated attempts to malign the Christian community. It is understood to be the continuation of a series of attacks against Christians in Chhattisgarh state in recent years,” said Asir Ebenezer, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches in India, in a statement. “The increase in violence against Christians all over India especially among the economically weaker sections of the society exposes the persecution meant to cleanse a particular religious community from all spaces.”

It is to be noted that tribal populations in India have long endured prejudice and marginalisation, and Christians in the tribal groups experience further persecution.

“By now it is no secret that the Hindutva forces, including their mother source, the RSS, have no love lost for the Christians and the Muslims. Their top most leader has made it clear in almost all his speeches, as have those who write their policy papers. In India Christians and Muslims are second class citizens in dreams,”Dr. John Dayal, activist and writer, told Radiance.

Towards this goal, the Sangh and the BJP, now firmly in control of all state apparatus in the country, are using all their wiles and stratagems. Dividing caste and ethnic communities and ranging them against Muslims and Christians has been their policy in every state, from Kashmir to Karnataka. And they seem to have succeeded in great measure, he added.

Dr. Dayal highlighted that tribal communities, whether in the northeast or in the Chhota Nagpur region, are not by definition Hindus in response to the lie of conversion peddled by fascist forces.

“They belong to hundreds of local faiths, and some of them have been converted over the years to Hinduism and to Christianity.  But the governments seem to feel that anyone who is not a Christian is a Hindu. This robs the Tribal or Adivasis of their agency and their constitutional right to choose their religion.”

Christians have documented numerous instances of forced conversions occurring in Chhattisgarh during this violent wave. For instance, one Christian leader stated that in December, Hindutva radicals in the village of Madamnar destroyed over two dozen copies of the Bible and subjected locals to Hindu cleansing rites.

The process of largescale conversions of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists or followers of other faiths to Hinduism is known by the Hindu right as “homecoming,” or gharwapsi in Hindi. According to Hindutva, a right-wing Hindu political philosophy, all Indians or their ancestors were originally Hindus; as a result, returning to Hinduism is not a form of conversion but rather a “homecoming” or returning to their ancestral religion.

The term “tribals” or “Adivasi’’ (literally, “first inhabitants’’) refers to a group of people who are not Hindu. Right wing extremists, however, have been carefully infiltrating the tribal communities throughout the years with two main objectives. Through a syncretic approach to tribal religious customs and by persuading them that they are Hindus by origin, they are first trying to Hinduise the tribal people. By inciting non-Christian tribals against Christian tribals and Christian missions in tribal communities, they also want to operate against them.

The villagers in Kalepal village disturbed a tribal Christian woman’s funeral service and wouldn’t let her family carry out her final rites until they renounced their Christian beliefs and carried out the rituals in accordance with Hindu customs. The family changed its mind despite the backing of the entire tribal Christian community.The family and the deceased woman’s body were later the subject of cleansing ceremonies by their Hindu neighbours, who were also preparing to cremate the body.

Local pastor Samson Baghel has seen first-hand how radical Hindutvawadis carry out their conversion method and has witnessed nine families in his community succumb to ‘gharwapsi’ after enduring physical, emotional and social abuse.

“They initially target the Christian families who have large extended or joint non-Christian family members. Then they begin to exert organised pressure from all the family members on one side and local villagers from the other,” pastor Samson Baghel stated. “If the Christian family still does not give in, they use techniques like physical assault, ostracization, infringing their property, house or land and if that too doesn’t work, they use opportunities like death of a loved one to leave the family with no option but to give in.”

In the case of Adivasis, who under various ethnicities live from the western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan to West Bengal, Dr. Dayal pointed out that the practice has been to try to first rob Christian converts of their lands despite the protection of the Scheme Tribes Act, and then to turn the non-Christians, including the nature worshipping majority, and those arbitrarily dubbed as Hindu, against them.  This is happening in Chhattisgarh in full measure.

Alarmed by the incessant attacks on Christian minority members, several Christian outfits questioned the “deafening silence” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Meghalaya’s leading Christian organisations expressed concern over the “increasing targeting of the Christian community in the country”, also lamenting the Prime Minister’s silence on the issue.

PM Modi’s deafening silence on atrocities against Christians over a long period of time in different parts of the country is a notable matter of concern, said the Khasi Jaintia Christian Leaders Forum.

It is a pity and irony that the violation of the Constitution is taking place in Chhattisgarh where Congress is ruling the government. All of this is taking place as Rahul Gandhi leads the Bharat Jodo Yatra, whose stated goal is to eradicate hatred from society.

When this question was asked to Dr. Dayal, he averred that the organisers of the Bharat Jodo Yatra are not shying away from attacking communalism, but they must be forthright in defending the rights of the minorities, including those of Dalits or Adivasi origin.”

But Arun Pannalal took a dig at the Bharat Jodo Yatra, saying under Congress Party’s government in Chhattisgarh a “sartodo yatra”(break-head journey) is going on but he has no time to check into this.

He said,“We just want the government to uphold the Constitution, demonstrate the political will to protect the state’s social fabric and intervene to end violence against Christian tribals in Bastar.”