Rise In Attacks On Christians In India
AN ANONYMOUS FAKE LETTER ABOUT THE RISING ATTACKS ON CHRISTIANS IN INDIA GOES VIRAL
This article, first published March 3, 2023, is being re-published since Global Indian Times has also begun posting on Substack.
Photo: a church in India
March 3, 2023
Last month, more than 15,000 Christians took part in a protest in New Delhi. The organizers asked the government, judiciary, and civil society to end “the sharp escalation of targeted hate and violence against Christian communities in many (Indian) states.”
Violent attacks on Christians have increased dramatically since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, according to the Vatican News. The publication, based in the Vatican City, represents the views of the Catholic Church.
Each year, official reports acknowledge more than a hundred incidents of violence against Christians. But the actual number of attacks is likely far higher since few of the victims make official complaints. The attacks include the ransacking of churches, monasteries, and other Christian institutions, the burning of copies of the Bible, the desecration of cemeteries, the murder of priests and missionaries, and the sexual assault of nuns, according to Vatican News.
Christian missionaries are offering money, shelter, and food to try and entice Hindus to convert to Christianity, say some Hindu nationalists.
“You were educated at the famous St. Stephens College at New Delhi,” states a fake letter to Subrahmanyam (S) Jaishankar, India’s Minister for External Affairs in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. “That is a very well known Christian college of India… (Were you) forced to covert to the Christian faith while you were a student there?”
Jaishankar earned a BSc in chemistry from St.Stephen’s College, Univerrsity of Delhi, which is run by the Church of North India. In 2018, a group of students from a Hindu nationalist organization defaced the door and a cross of the chapel, located on the college campus. They painted the Hindi words Mandir Yahi Banage (A temple will be built here.)
The anonymous letter, which has gone viral on WhatsApp, is falsely described as being written by Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Foreign Secretary. However, Blinken and other U.S. State Department officials have often been critical of attacks on civil liberties and religious minorities in India.
In April 2022, for instance, Blinken said in a statement that, “We regularly engage with our Indian partners on…shared (democratic) values, and to that end we’re monitoring some recent concerning developments in India, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials.” The statement was issued by the U.S. State Department following a meeting between Blinken, Jaishankar and other U.S. and Indian officisls in Washington DC.
In June 2022, the U.S. State Department released the 2021 International Religious Freedom Report. The report, an official said in a statement in Blinken’s presence, “documents how religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities are under threat in communities around the world. For example, in India…we’ve seen rising attacks on people and places of worship…”
The fake anonymous letter also questions the desire of Hindu nationalists to migrate to the U.S. Why, it asks, are they “trying everything to migrate to a Christian majority nation from the paradise of Hinduism under the BJP rule led by PM Modi??”
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