Contact: Linda Bloom·(212) 870-3803·New York

Politics is one of several forces driving the increased attacks on Christians in India, according to an Indian-born United Methodist Church executive.

The attacks came to international attention in January, when an Australian missionary and his two sons were burned to death while they were sleeping inside their car.

The resurgence of the National Congress Party in recent mid-term elections poses a threat to the dominant Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said Sarla Lall, a 20-year veteran of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, in an interview.

The Congress Party is led by Sonia Ghandi, daughter-in-law of the late Indira Ghandi and widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi, who was assassinated in 1991. She is an Italian-born Roman Catholic. Most of India's 21 million to 22 million Christians are Catholic, Lall noted.

Although India has had non-Hindu presidents in the past, "there is a big fear to have a Catholic prime minister," explained Lall, who most recently visited India in February. "You undermine her by saying that Christians are out to convert us and she's a leader."

Christians make up only 2.3 percent of India's 960 million or so people, but they have become more visible in the past 10 to 15 years. The visibility comes both in the manner of evangelism – a focus on prayer meetings and public religious forums rather than the "witnessing through service" long practiced by mainline denominations – and the growing presence of Pentecostal, fundamentalist and other Christian organizations.

"You have all kinds of groups who have been operating saying India has got to be Christianized," Lall said.

And it is Indians themselves, not foreigners, who are doing the evangelizing. "The Christian presence is being felt in ways that India had not seen before," she added.

"Christians, though very small in number, have had a great influence in education and in health," Lall said. While the government has improved the state-run health system, "the Christian institutions are still the flagship institutions when it comes to education."

Regardless of influence or increased visibility, there are no "forced conversions" to Christianity, as some Hindu nationalists have claimed, according to the Rev. James Massey, a clergy member of the Church of North India. Formed in 1970, the Church of North India is a union of six denominations, including the British and Australian conferences of the Methodist Church.

Massey, who spoke in New York on Feb. 25, is honorary general secretary of the Dalit Solidarity Peoples, an interfaith movement supporting the Indians formerly labeled as "untouchables" in the Hindu caste system. Dalits compose about 95 percent of the Church of North India and up to 90 percent of the Methodist Church of India.

"These so-called majority Hindu rightist groups say Christians are forcing conversions among the Dalits and tribal people," Massey said. That, he added, is just an excuse for what he considers to be planned, strategic attacks on Dalits and other Christians by Hindus. Behind the recent violence, he believes, is the fear of upper-caste Indians that Christians are eroding their power base by educating the masses about their rights.

Lall, whose grandfather served as a Methodist minister in villages outside Delhi, pointed out that attacks on Christians have always occurred in India, usually as sporadic incidents in remote areas. But over the past year, there have been dozens of attacks on Christian churches, schools and individuals, according to news reports. More than half occurred in the state of Gujarat, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The National Council of Churches in India has blamed the attacks on the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu nationalist groups that includes the Bharatiya Janata Party. Lall added that while local and state governments may not be orchestrating the attacks, "they have to look away in order for these things to happen." She believes the government wants "to, in a way, suppress the Christians," which is easy because "Christians don't fight back."

However, the outcry after the death of Australian missionary Graham Staines has spurred the Indian government into action. On Jan. 24, police arrested 47 people who are part of a militant Hindu youth group and charged them with setting the fire that killed Staines and his sons. In a Jan. 30 address to the nation, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee strongly condemned recent attacks on Christian places of worship, The New York Times reported, and called the killings "a blot on our collective consciousness."

Lall predicted the attacks on Christians would dwindle in the light of such developments. She said the Methodist Church in India had not been affected by the violence, except for one incident in which threats were made at a church in Hissar.

March 15, 1999