Christians Between a Rock and a Hard Place in India

By Sandro Magister


ROMA – catholic — The Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai has erupted while the Christians in India are still reeling from the Hindu violence in Orissa and other regions. The raw figures from the two offensives are similar. More than 190 were killed in a single day in India’s economic capital.

At least 118 deaths have been certified in Orissa over three months, but other sources push the number up to as high as 500. And then there are the hundreds of people injured, the churches destroyed, the thousands of homes burned down, the tens of thousands of refugees.

Hemmed in by the two forms of aggressive fundamentalism, Muslim and Hindu, the “little flock” of Christianity in India is distinguishing itself by its refusal to resort to violence. It is calling for the use of force by the constitutional authority, but this is failing in its duty to exercise it.

The international community is providing only weak and sporadic support. Not even the Christians around the world are strong in solidarity toward victims who share the same faith, whether in India or in other regions of the globe. On Thursday, November 27, during the same hours when Mumbai was under attack, Benedict XVI issued a new appeal for the release of two missionary sisters kidnapped two weeks earlier by Muslim gangs between Kenya and Somalia. Also during those same hours, in Cairo, ten thousand Muslims attacked, with impunity, a church full of Coptic Christians in prayer, whose offense was that they had opened a new house of worship.

Striking at the heart of Mumbai, its luxury hotels, its Western clientele, the Muslim attack gained extensive coverage in the media all over the world. Among the victims there were American, English, and Jewish, and this was enough to send a shock wave through international geopolitics. But it does not justify ignoring the daily interreligious violence that is bloodying the Indian continent, and that will probably escalate in the near future with new clashes between Muslims and Hindus.

The persecution impacting the Christians in India is not a purely local phenomenon. Some of the factors generating it are exclusive to a society divided by caste. But the case of India is a reflection of much more general fractures that divide the entire world along fault lines that are in part religious. It is enough to consider how different and conflicting the idea of martyrdom can be: the pure gift of life for some, a weapon of brutal murder for others. In this tormented global landscape, the Christians in India are peaceful, mistreated victims.

They are the only unarmed religious group in Iraq, and also for this reason the most persecuted. In the most devastated and hostile corners of the earth — in Somalia, but not only there — they are the ones who remain beside the “least,” after everyone else has fled.