- Rightwing Hindu groups announce a Christmas Day ceremony where they planned to ‘welcome’ hundreds of Christians and Muslims into Hinduism
- A fundraising flier solicited donations for volunteers to undergo conversion, about $3,200 for each Christian and $8,000 for each Muslim
The trouble started a few months ago, when Hindu nationalists swept into a small village where several families had converted to Christianity more than a decade earlier. They held a fire purification ceremony with the villagers, tore a cross off the local church and put up a poster of the god Shiva. The space was now a temple, they declared.
Then right-wing Hindu groups announced a Christmas Day ceremony where they planned to welcome hundreds of Christians and Muslims into Hinduism. A fundraising flier solicited donations for volunteers to undergo conversion, about $3,200 for each Christian and about $8,000 for each Muslim.
After a nationwide furore, organizers on Tuesday postponed the ceremony. But one of them, Rajeshwar Singh Solanki, said in an interview Thursday that his group will demonstrate against any church baptisms performed on the holiday. He said his group’s ultimate aim is to ensure that Islam and Christianity “cease to exist” in India, a report in Washington Post said Friday.
Christians in Aligarh say they are afraid of what might happen on their holy day.
“We just want security from the government, particularly on Christmas,” said Ajay Joseph, 39, a lab technician.
His fears echo those of other religious minorities in majority-Hindu India, where some Christians and Muslims worry that incidents of religious intolerance will rise with the advent of a conservative government led by Narendra Modi, himself a fervent Hindu nationalist.
In recent days, carollers have been beaten in the southern city of Hyderabad, and a Catholic church in New Delhi burned in a suspected case of arson. A conservative Hindu group said Wednesday that another mass “conversion” event would be held in February.
For several days this month, India’s secular Parliament repeatedly lapsed into chaos as members debated religious conversions and a plan that would have kept students in school on Christmas, normally a holiday, and designate December 25 “Good Governance Day.” The country’s foreign minister also called for designating the sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita the “national scripture.”
“They are feeling nobody can do anything to them because of Narendra Modi,” said Yusuf Dass.
“They were saying this country belongs to Hindus and India should belong only to Hindus. I don’t know who is misguiding them,” Dass said.
Christians make up just over 2 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population and historically have been targeted less frequently than the country’s Muslim communities. Christian missionaries, who have been coming to India for centuries, have encountered resistance from Hindu devotees who say they use charitable work as a mask for proselytizing, particularly to members of the country’s lowest castes.
India’s 64-year-old prime minister has a troubling history of religious intolerance, opponents say. In 2005, while he was chief minister in the state of Gujarat, the United States revoked Modi’s US visa on the grounds that he had committed “severe violations of religious freedom” by not acting to stop Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002.
John Dayal, a former president of the All India Catholic Union and a member of the government’s National Integration Council, said that RSS volunteers, called pracharaks, now have an ally at the top of India’s government and feel emboldened to act more freely than in previous years.
“The Christian community is clearly concerned. We are actually scared,” Dayal said. “They are acting with impunity, and the government has done little to stop them.”
In Hyderabad on Friday, Christian carolers on their way home from a late-night church service clashed with revelers in a local wedding party, according to the pastor, Bheemudu Naik. About three dozen people objected to the Christians’ singing and began punching and kicking the carolers, Naik said.