{"id":98783,"date":"2020-02-07T17:14:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T00:14:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=98783"},"modified":"2020-02-07T17:14:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-08T00:14:37","slug":"christians-must-leave-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/02\/07\/christians-must-leave-india\/","title":{"rendered":"CHRISTIANS MUST LEAVE INDIA"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALI SUKHANVER<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Though\nthe Christians have been granted leverage in the CAA but practically in their\nday-to-day life, they have to suffer from a lot of degradation and humiliation\nin India. The leverage provided to them in the CAA is nothing more than a\n\u2018play-card\u2019 just to please the Western countries like US and UK and win their\nfavours. The Christians there in India are so helpless that they cannot even build\ntheir churches. The Hindu extremists don\u2019t allow them to do any type of\npreaching too and so many times they are barred from performing their religious\nrituals. Building huge statues of Hindu gods, goddesses and political figures\nand erecting them at prominent places has ever been a very common practice in\nIndia. Moreover, statue making has some religious relevance too with Hinduism but\nfor the minorities statue-making has been made a sin. The \u2018credit\u2019 of this\naction no doubt goes to Mr. Modi and his followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At\nHarobele village in Kanakapura, recently, the construction work on a statue of\nthe Holy Christ had to be stopped soon after it started. Reports say that the\nextremist Hindus objected that the proposed hill where the statue is set to\nstand is the abode of a Hindu god, although no temple exists there in the\nlocality. Harobele village is a predominantly Christian locality. The proposed\nstatue is said to be the tallest Christ monolith in the world. Just to get\nsupport and cooperation of the Hindu community in peaceful completion of this\nproject, the Congress leader DK\nShivakumar was invited to lay the foundation-stone of the statue on December 25,\n2019 but even this \u2018good-gesture\u2019 proved futile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On\n13th<\/sup> January 2020, the Right wing organizations took out a massive\nrally at Kanakapura in protests against the construction of that statue. The\nrally was participated by thousands of workers of BJP, the Vishwa Hindu\nParishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The protestors were raising\nslogans that \u2018Hindu land must not be Christianized\u2019. They said that the10 acres\nland allotted for the statue is sacred for the Hindus. On the other hand, the BJP-run\nstate government is blaming the previous administration of Congress party of\nillegally allotting the plot of land. In short, things are heading towards\nanother Gujarat Massacre like episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According\nto Aljazeera, the area of Kanakapura has a Christian dominating population and\nit has always been a target of the Hindu extremists. A horrible wave of\nviolence against the Christians of this area was witnessed in 2008 when Hindu\nextremists blamed that the local Christians were trying to convert Hindus into\nChristians by giving them heavy cash. The US Commission for International\nReligious Freedom said in a report last year that religious freedom was on a\ndownward trend\u201d, with a campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment\nagainst non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities in India\u201d. But the Hindu\nextremists are not ready to accept any such report. They are adamant rather\nstubborn in their approach to the matter and try to give nonsense type of\njustifications to prove them right. Prabhakar Bhatt, a top RSS functionary said\ntalking to media, We want to stop the statue, since it goes against the spirit\nof communal harmony and encourages religious conversions which are rampantly\ncarried out by Christian missionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atrocities\nagainst the minorities particularly against the Christians are nothing new in\nIndia. The Christian community in India would never forget the callous burning\nalive of Pastor Graham Steward Stains along with his two minor sons Timothy and\nPhilip in January1999. Pastor Graham was an Australian missionary and the day\nhe was burnt alive he was sleeping in his station wagon at Manoharpur village\nin Keonjhar district in Orissa. Bajrang Dal’s Dara Siingh aka Rajendra Pal was\nthe man behind that brutality. Javed Akhtar is a very popular poet of India\nwith a large number of his fans all over the world. In a recent tweet he said\ncriticizing the behaviour of the Hindu extremist parties with particular\nreference to the Kanakapura Statue, They boast they will give citizenship to\nall the religiously persecuted Christians from the neighbor countries at the\nsame time they claim that they will not allow a statue of Jesus Christ.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2018play-card\u2019 just to please the Western countries like US and UK […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ali-sukhanver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}