ALI SUKHANVER

Though the Christians have been granted leverage in the CAA but practically in their day-to-day life, they have to suffer from a lot of degradation and humiliation in India. The leverage provided to them in the CAA is nothing more than a ‘play-card’ just to please the Western countries like US and UK and win their favours. The Christians there in India are so helpless that they cannot even build their churches. The Hindu extremists don’t allow them to do any type of preaching too and so many times they are barred from performing their religious rituals. Building huge statues of Hindu gods, goddesses and political figures and erecting them at prominent places has ever been a very common practice in India. Moreover, statue making has some religious relevance too with Hinduism but for the minorities statue-making has been made a sin. The ‘credit’ of this action no doubt goes to Mr. Modi and his followers.

At Harobele village in Kanakapura, recently, the construction work on a statue of the Holy Christ had to be stopped soon after it started. Reports say that the extremist Hindus objected that the proposed hill where the statue is set to stand is the abode of a Hindu god, although no temple exists there in the locality. Harobele village is a predominantly Christian locality. The proposed statue is said to be the tallest Christ monolith in the world. Just to get support and cooperation of the Hindu community in peaceful completion of this project, the Congress leader DK Shivakumar was invited to lay the foundation-stone of the statue on December 25, 2019 but even this ‘good-gesture’ proved futile.

On 13^th January 2020, the Right wing organizations took out a massive rally at Kanakapura in protests against the construction of that statue. The rally was participated by thousands of workers of BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The protestors were raising slogans that ‘Hindu land must not be Christianized’. They said that the10 acres land allotted for the statue is sacred for the Hindus. On the other hand, the BJP-run state government is blaming the previous administration of Congress party of illegally allotting the plot of land. In short, things are heading towards another Gujarat Massacre like episode.

According to Aljazeera, the area of Kanakapura has a Christian dominating population and it has always been a target of the Hindu extremists. A horrible wave of violence against the Christians of this area was witnessed in 2008 when Hindu extremists blamed that the local Christians were trying to convert Hindus into Christians by giving them heavy cash. The US Commission for International Religious Freedom said in a report last year that religious freedom was on a downward trend”, with a campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities in India”. But the Hindu extremists are not ready to accept any such report. They are adamant rather stubborn in their approach to the matter and try to give nonsense type of justifications to prove them right. Prabhakar Bhatt, a top RSS functionary said talking to media, We want to stop the statue, since it goes against the spirit of communal harmony and encourages religious conversions which are rampantly carried out by Christian missionaries.”

Atrocities against the minorities particularly against the Christians are nothing new in India. The Christian community in India would never forget the callous burning alive of Pastor Graham Steward Stains along with his two minor sons Timothy and Philip in January1999. Pastor Graham was an Australian missionary and the day he was burnt alive he was sleeping in his station wagon at Manoharpur village in Keonjhar district in Orissa. Bajrang Dal’s Dara Siingh aka Rajendra Pal was the man behind that brutality. Javed Akhtar is a very popular poet of India with a large number of his fans all over the world. In a recent tweet he said criticizing the behaviour of the Hindu extremist parties with particular reference to the Kanakapura Statue, They boast they will give citizenship to all the religiously persecuted Christians from the neighbor countries at the same time they claim that they will not allow a statue of Jesus Christ.”