SUDIPTO MONDAL

The damaged case holding the statue of Mother Mary at the Adoration Monastery in Mangalore.

A LARGISH crucifix with Jesus Christ’s left hand dangling from the nail hangs in a corner of the prayer hall, which can accommodate some 70 persons. The monstrance kept in a wooden cabinet mounted on the wall at the altar lies broken. The Adoration Monastery, on Milagres Road in Mangalore city, was attacked by activists of the Sangh Parivar on September 10, a day after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government completed 100 days in office in Karnataka. The monastery, located near the 300-year-old Milagres Church, is revered greatly by the local Catholic community. Ten nuns of the order of Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration live here a life of prayer, as a cloistered community.

At the Believer’s Church in Ganjimath, a half hour’s drive from the city, vandals were unable to enter the church as it was locked from outside. So they went around the building, breaking all the windows. When the church was opened, shards of glass were found lying on the floor of the prayer hall like macadam. Every Sunday some 50 worshippers congregate in this hall. “Four young men damaged the building. They sped away before we could do anything,” said Father Josemon of the Believer’s Church.

These two prayer halls were among the 15 places of worship of Christians that were vandalised in the second week of September in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Chickmagalur districts of Karnataka by young men affiliated to the Bajrang Dal and other Sangh Parivar organisations. At a press conference convened after the attacks, Mahendra Kumar, State convener of the Bajrang Dal, and M.B. Puranik, Dakshina Kannada district chief of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), claimed responsibility for the acts and described them as a “spontaneous upsurge” of the Hindu community.

These incidents are perhaps the most blatant attacks against the Christian community in the State. The previous week, churches in Davangere district were attacked and subsequently the Hindu Jagran Vedike gave an ultimatum to a local church to close down. Similarly, in Bondel in Dakshina Kannada district, saffron flags appeared overnight on a plot of public land used irregularly by Christians in the area. Members of the Bajrang Dal also barged into St. Aloysius College, Mangalore, a day after it was kept closed for a day in support of the Christians of Orissa who were attacked in August. Even the State president of the BJP Minority Morcha and nominated MLA, Derrick Fullinfaw, was not spared. His car was damaged in an attack in Bangalore.

S.K. MOHAN/AP

Inside a vandalised church in Mangalore.

The spate of anti-Christian incidents has led to a sense of insecurity among the community. While attacks on churches have been reported in the State in the past, they have become more frequent since the BJP came to power.

According to Sajan George, editor of Persecution Update India, an online magazine that chronicles attacks against Christians in India, “56 major attacks” have taken place against Christians in the State since June 2008. Only 24 such attacks took place between January and May. Sajan George defined major attacks as incidents involving “physical violence, destruction of property and desecration of prayer halls”.

A senior official of the local administration of Mangalore, who did not want to be named, said that “members of the Sangh Parivar have been emboldened since the BJP government came to power”. Some Christians called for a bandh in Mangalore following the attacks, and for the first time Catholic youth were mobilised to come out on the streets in protest. They were primarily motivated by the religious symbolism of the Adoration Monastery.

On the day of the bandh, the Christian protesters were manhandled by the police. Sister Mary Carmel, the convent’s superior, alleged that at the monastery the police threw stones, injuring the protesters and breaking a case holding a statue of Mother Mary.

According to an eyewitness, Arun Lobo, around 1,000 Christians who were peacefully protesting inside the premises of the Holy Cross Church in Kulshekhar were caned and teargassed by the police. Twenty-three of them were arrested after the police chased the group into the church premises. Many of the victims alleged complicity of the police with the Bajrang Dal, saying that they saw a group of men hanging around the policemen deployed, although Section 144 was imposed on the city. The Deputy Commissioner of Mangalore City, Maheshwara Rao, denied that the police were partisan in their behaviour.

The local media’s role during the violence was not objective, to say the least. A local journalist with an English-language daily said that the local language press was prejudiced against the Christian community in its reportage of the events. Further, in the Permanur church in Ullal, some mediapersons actually provoked and taunted a group of Christians who had gathered there, leading to police action against the Christians. The mediapersons were also allegedly involved in desecrating the church and beating up Christians.

Christians form 8.7 per cent of the population of Dakshina Kannada district, and 90-95 per cent of them are Catholics. Along with the districts of Udupi and Karwar, Dakshina Kannada has become communalised over the past couple of decades with increased animosity between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

R. ESWARRAJ

Christian protesters who were chased by the police into the St. Sebastian church at Thokuttu in Mangalore on September 15. They were brought out of the church and arrested.

The coastal area, according to Professor Valerian Rodriguez, Chairperson, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, “has been systematically communalised over the past couple of decades with the growth of Hindutva organisations and a ‘communal regime’, to use political scientist Paul Brass’ phrase, has come into being in the area”. In spite of this trend, the Christian community in the area has largely shared cordial relations with Hindus. A small minority of Christians who believe themselves to be converts from high-caste Hindus has even been politically supporting the BJP.

In the recent incidents, members of the Sangh Parivar targeted the activities of New Life churches. New Life is a term used to describe churches established in the area since the 1980s with the global, particularly American, growth of Born Again Christian groups. The New Life Fellowship (NLF) was established in the area in 1983 and includes non-Catholic and non-mainline Protestant churches. There is also a subtle theological estrangement in the area between the Catholics and members of New Life groups. Some New Life Churches, which are more fervent and charismatic in their demonstration of faith than the institutional Catholic Church, have been successful in stealing adherents from the Catholic order, causing some resentment among the Catholic clergy.

Vinay Shetty, district convener of the Bajrang Dal, proudly stated that the Bajrang Dal supported the acts against the churches, which he called “conversion centres”. Threatening “more action” if the conversions did not stop, he demanded that Roman Catholic Church representatives in the area stand by the Bajrang Dal in endorsing a complete ban on religious conversions. Much of the violence against Christians is justified by members of the Sangh Parivar on the grounds of opposing “forced conversions”. While there have been cases of conversion in the area there is no record of how many people have converted. Shetty alleged that 800-900 families had converted to Christianity in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts over the past 10 years. It is difficult to obtain figures about the number of converts from members of fringe Protestant Christian Churches such as the Believer’s Church and the NLF, but they did not deny that voluntary conversions, a constitutional right, had taken place.

Suresh Naik, 30, who joined the Believer’s Church a few years ago, told Frontline that the conversions he witnessed were merely spiritual exercises and were not “forced”.

Members of the Sangh Parivar, however, allege that while in some cases money is not offered as an inducement, there is a persistent effort by members of the New Life Churches to degrade the Hindu religion. Terming this as “brainwashing” and “mental torture”, they argue that this constant rhetoric forces people to re-evaluate their own beliefs. They call this form of conversion “forced”, arguing that the pamphlet “Satya Darshini”, which they claim was distributed by members of the NLF, provided ample proof of this. The provenance of this pamphlet is uncertain because senior members of the NLF denied they had anything to do with it.

The text of the pamphlet, which is an autobiographical note of a Brahmin who converted to Christianity in 1972, critically examines the idea of caste hierarchy and supports his argument with the Telugu poet Vemana’s verses.

Another allegation against members of the NLF, brought by Shetty, is that they have been inducing people to convert by offering them “Rs.3,000 as a one-time payment and a regular commission for bringing in new converts, as they have large foreign funds”. Pastor Menzes, senior pastor of the NLF in Dakshina Kannada district, denied the allegation of foreign funding or of conversion by inducement and stated that the only source of NLF funding was the tithe (one-tenth of the income) that the faithfuls contributed.

During the bandh called against the attacks, a member of a Hindutva group was stabbed, leading to the call for another bandh the next day, this time led by the Sri Rama Sene, a peripheral group of the Sangh Parivar. The Rama Sene bandh, which was a total success, led to some disturbances. According to a report in a local newspaper, a Muslim was stabbed.

K. BHAGYA PRAKASH

A Church after it was ransacked by miscreants at Bada village near Davangere on September 7.

In this communally sensitive area, Muslims have not got involved in the incidents of the past few days, but there is a looming threat that, with aggressive Hindutva on display, things could spiral out of hand.

The local administration fears that a Hindu-Muslim riot could be far more serious than the disturbances witnessed in early September. Serious Hindu-Muslim riots in the area took place in Suratkal in 1998 and in Mangalore in 2006.

Given the sensitive nature of the issue, the local administration and the State government should have taken swift action against those involved in the church attacks and against senior members of the Bajrang Dal in the State who have openly endorsed the violence.

Instead, the response of the government has not been effective enough to allay the fears of the Christians. There has not been any unequivocal condemnation of the incident by any senior leader in the government. Senior Cabinet Ministers preface any response to questions about the violence with a statement about “conversions”. They deny that the police have been tardy in dealing with complaints from Christians. This is an allegation that many Christians, including H.T. Sangliana, Member of Parliament representing Bangalore North, have been making.

Home Minister Dr. V.S. Acharya, in response to a question about the vandalism, condemned the incidents but only after he pointed out that there were “reports of conversion there”. Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa told mediapersons that the incidents were a “backlash” of “forced conversions” and has refused to take any action against the Bajrang Dal. This, in spite of the fact that members of the National Commission for Minorities, who visited the area, stated that no forced conversions had happened in Udupi.

H.D. Deve Gowda, former Prime Minister, has condemned the incidents and called for a judicial probe. But the culpability of the Janata Dal (Secular) cannot be ignored. Its refusal to support the BJP when it was the latter’s turn to lead the government in the State led to the recent elections that brought the BJP to power. Even the Congress has not carried out any sustained campaign in the coastal area against communalism.

U.R. Ananthamurthy, the Jananpith Award winner, alleged in a press release that the BJP wanted to consolidate its Hindu vote bank as it knew that Christians would not vote for it.

The attacks on the churches are certain to lead to a polarisation of voters along religious lines. This in turn might help the BJP increase its vote share in the Lok Sabha elections, which are due early next year.