In 2009, appalling photographs
arrived in my e-mail account in a desperate plea for help. Interestingly,
although they had come from Pakistan on this particular occasion, I had
actually first received the identical set of images from India in 2008, during
the brief but blood-soaked attacks against Christians by Hindu extremists.
Wherever they originated, the ghastly photographs were genuine and could not
have been faked, even by the greatest experts.
For a couple of weeks, Orissa was
headline news and then, just as suddenly, silence fell. Yet inter-religious
dialogue and peace had, in no way, been restored: it was simply that the
interest of the world’s media drifted towards the credit crunch and its
consequences.
Anti-Christian violence continues
in this troubled region of India. In 2012, the ‘Evangelical Fellowship of
India’, an organisation which brings together several evangelical Christian
communities, built a small village church, made of wood and straw. On the night
of 2 April 2013, the building was set on fire, and destroyed in spite of the
best efforts of the local faithful to put out the flames. Villagers had donated
the land and their labour to build the church, which catered for worshippers
from a wide area in the locality, but, within the space of a couple of hours,
the building was a mound of smouldering embers and heartbroken parishioners.
Yet the destruction of the church
was not all that happened. The following day, Hindu fundamentalists belonging
to a group called the ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’, publicly insulted and threatened
believers, accusing them of forced conversions to Christianity. A complaint to
the local police is unlikely to bring results. Elsewhere in Orissa, on 13
March, a group of Hindu fundamentalists, helped by some police officers,
demolished a church, claiming it was built illegally.
Fides, the official news agency of the Vatican’s Congregation for
the Evangelisation of Peoples and hence of Missio, recently reported that, “Five years after the anti-Christian massacres that shocked Kandhamal
district in the Indian state of Orissa, justice is still far and impunity
prevails. In the "pogrom" of 2008, over 400 villages were
"cleansed" of all Christians; more than 5,600 houses and 296 churches
were burned, the victims were 100 (but the government recognizes only 56),
thousands wounded, several women raped (including a nun), 56,000 men, women and
children became homeless.”
Dr John Dayal,
one of India’s foremost voices on human rights, and particularly on the
situation of religious minorities, recently pointed out that, regardless of
media silence, the people of Orissa have found neither peace nor justice. “Five
years after she was gang-raped in Kandhamal, Orissa, on 25th August 2008,
people have almost forgotten Catholic Nun Sister M. There has been no justice
yet in the case. The Magistrate charged with recording her evidence in
identifying her rapists falsified the record. She has gone to the Supreme Court
against the magistrate. But the Media and the public seemingly no longer
remember her.”
In the light of
continued inaction on behalf of the legal system in India, Dayal has recently
published the Sister’s statement. It does not make for light bedtime reading!
Both she and the priest who tried to defend her suffered greatly at the hands
of the mob. It was an experience that neither will ever forget.
During the past
five years, Christians have repeatedly sought justice, only to find that this
was often denied by the police and judiciary. As a result of the pogrom in
Orissa, Dayal reported that Christians filed 3,232 criminal complaints of which
the police only accepted 1,541 and gradually reduced these to 828. In a system
in which corruption is the norm, little imagination is required to explain why
so few complaints led to criminal charges. Eventually 327 cases went to court
and as a result, in 169 trials, a total of 1,597 were acquitted of the violence
of which they were charged. Key
witnesses were threatened. Intimidated and afraid of reprisals against
themselves or their families, many withdrew their complaints or changed their
testimony... and so the suffering and injustice continue.
Meanwhile, in
Britain, we complain that Christians are increasingly marginalised and point to
the few cases which have gone through our courts. Some have been taken to the
European Court of Human Rights. In some verdicts gender equality has played a
greater part than freedom of conscience. So, for instance, there have been
arguments for and against Christians having a right to refuse to register or
perform a gay marriage or to provide psychosexual counselling to gay couples.
Midwives have fought for their right to non-participation in abortions. Others
have struggled to wear a Crucifix at work or to display a palm Cross in a taxi
cab. We have seen blasphemous and insulting posters and media aimed at
Christians and all that we hold sacred. We can all think of other examples –
but it is a while since we were called upon to face martyrdom. Even if we
disagree with verdicts handed down by the courts, we do not normally complain
that our judiciary is guilty of bribery and corruption. If even Abu Qatada is
able to appeal that his human rights be upheld, the chances are that most of us
will not witness or experience the violence and bloodshed which threaten the
lives of Christians elsewhere.
A Somali
immigrant recently said that the reason why he applied to come to Britain was
because there are so many mosques in our towns and cities. He had no intention
of frequenting them even if he did happen to be a Muslim, but it was, for him,
a sign that people in this country are able to practise their religious beliefs
in freedom, without fear of reprisal. That is a tremendous compliment. For
sure, we have had times of persecution. We have our Catholic martyrs before,
during and after the Reformation, but when was the last massacre of Orthodox
Jews in Golders Green, of Hindus in Tooting or of Muslims and Sikhs in
Wolverhampton or Coventry? For all that our history in this country includes
the horrors of disembowelling, burning at the stake and various other
unthinkable methods of capital punishment, they are no longer on our statute
books. We can hope to live in peace and a good measure of security denied many
people in other parts of the world.
We cannot allow
ourselves to be lulled into complacency, but, whatever the shortcomings, we
have cause to be grateful for religious freedom in Britain.
