Nothing makes you miss the former prevalence of overseas news bureaus like a really fantastic foreign service report. Emily Wax, who has moved from Africa to India, filed a personal but newsy account of the violence ravaging the state of Orissa.
Here’s how she sets the scene:
Babita Nayak was cooking lunch for her pregnant sister when a mob of Hindu extremists wielding swords, hammers and long sticks rampaged through their village, chanting “India is for Hindus! Convert or leave!”
The men, wearing saffron headbands, ransacked dozens of huts, searching for cash and looting bicycles and livestock. They torched the village church, leaving behind burned Bibles in the local Kui language and torn-down posters of Jesus. “Christianity is a foreign religion,” they shouted over bullhorns, according to eyewitness and police reports.
Hearing that such attacks were spreading in the mist-shrouded hills of this destitute part of Orissa state, the sisters fled with hundreds of neighbors, trekking through forest land. After two days, they reached this crowded makeshift relief camp, set up on the campus of a dank high school, 15 miles from their village.
Wax goes into great deal, putting the story in context of the more common violence between Muslims and Hindus. Even with how bad things are for Christians in Orissa right now, it’s been bad off and on for the past 10 years. There was the Christian missionary who was burned alive with his two sons in 1999. Last Christmas, there were four deaths and hundreds of Christian churches and homes burned. In recent weeks, some 4,000 Christian homes and 115 churches have been destroyed. Between 18 and 35 Christians were killed and 20,000 people have been displaced:
The violence is driven by rising anger over Christian conversions — members of the faith here are a mix of Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics — and economic tensions between communities, according to government and church officials.
She goes on to explain how even the economic tensions have a big religion angle — the Hindu caste system is deeply threatened by conversions of the lower castes to Christianity:
Conversions to Christianity have been happening fast among impoverished tribal communities in Kandhamal, a remote district with few links to the outside world or state services. The Christian population here, largely made up of traditionally nature-worshiping ethnic groups, has swelled from 6 percent in 1971 to 27 percent today, according to government census data.
Some people who convert often get better access to schools and health clinics run by Western Christian groups. But they lose their official status with the government as members of a disadvantaged caste and with it jobs and university seats reserved under the affirmative action program.
Christians among one such ethnic group, the Panos, have recently been agitating to continue to collect those benefits anyway. Some Hindu activists see this request as ridiculous. They say that Christians have rejected the Hindu-sanctioned caste system and should not get the benefits.
The entire story really must be read. Wax does a fantastic job of folding more and more perspective into each paragraph. She quotes Pope Benedict XVI and national leaders. She talks about events that sparked the violence. And yet she puts all of this context into a very human story. After introducing readers to Shyamala Nayak, the 7-months pregnant sister from the beginning of the piece, she ends with an anecdote about Hindu women marching outside a refugee camp demanding some of the food being offered to the Christians:
The camp seems barely able to manage as it is. It’s so crowded that children sleep on the floor of outdoor latrines. Most people have nowhere to shower and no fresh clothing.
Hearing the chanting women march by, Shyamala wiped her nose with her unwashed sari. She started to cry, again. Her feet are swollen and bloody, her stomach heavy. And she has a recurring nightmare.
“I am falling and falling down a big ditch. I see my newborn baby below me,” she said, weeping. “And it is dead.”
A heartbreaking story, beautifully told. Which is probably why she’s such an acclaimed reporter.
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Comments (8) |
September 17, 2008, at 9:27 am
I condem the attacks on Christian community. It is cruel, inhuman to attack a peace loving Community who contributes much in development and Education of the country. Please stop this violence.
September 17, 2008, at 11:33 am
Great reporting, and thanks for drawing it to our attention.
For US readers, a note of clarification may be helpful. The statement that “Christians here are a mix of Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics” may be true for the state of Orissa in particular, but Christianity in India is more diverse than that. The Churches of North and South India are large unions of Protestant denominations, and Lutherans maintain a strong presence (especially in Andhra Pradesh).
Christianity is India is also much older than most readers may realize. tradition, and some respectable historians, date it to the mission of the apostle Thomas; it has certainly been present in South India since the 2nd century. The Syriac Orthodox church and its dissenting daughter, the Mar Thoma Church, have had a significant presence in India for nearly 2000 years. So, despite what many Indians and Americans may assume, Christianity has not been a “foreign religion” there in a long time.
September 17, 2008, at 12:19 pm
I really don’t agree that story is a great one. It ignores Christian initiated violence and makes it seem that all the violence is caused by Hindus and perpetrated upon Christians. I think from the reports that the vast majority of violence is being perpetrated upon Christians, but an acclaimed reporter should have also put the perspective in a story that was articulated by Human Right’s Watch in an earlier report:
And I think much more prominence should have been given in the report to the secular causes: (reservations are quotas)
September 17, 2008, at 1:02 pm
Perhaps the India government should do what Esther persuades King Xerxes to do when the Jews of his kingdom were faced with similarly violent attacks much like these.
“The king’s edict granted the Jews in every city the right to assemble and protect themselves, to destroy, kill and annihilate any armed force of any nationality or province that might attack them and their women and children; and to plunder the property of their enemies.”
True, it might be best in our modern context if last measure were carried out under the rule of law. Rather than plundering these groups, India courts could look with great favor on Christian lawsuits that strip these violent organizations and their leaders of their assets. But since it seems clear that the Indian government is unable to defend its Christian citizens from every attack, then the government has a responsibility to ensure that they can defend themselves. That means weapons and that means training in armed self-defense.
The right to self-defense is a basic human right. It’s taught in the Bible, as in this passage and numerous others, including Jesus’ command for his disciples to purchase a sword. And it can also be defended in a broader societal context. Societies are formed, in part, to provide mutual protection. The fact that the government offers some protection as one of its basic duties reinforces arguments that individuals, families and communities have a right to defend themselves that no government can set aside without destroying its own legitimacy.
I find it sad that so few Christians seem to believe this. Threatened with danger, as in the Columbine killings, they seem to think it more spiritual to curl up in a ball and hope “Jesus magic,” will somehow save them, almost gloating in what they consider “God’s favor,” when a killer passes by them to murder someone else. That is sick—very, very sick.
A similar heresy was part of an otherwise excellent film I recently watched, Beyond the Gates. The film centers around a older (white) Catholic priest and his young and new-to-Africa assistant. The priest is quite talented, able to explain complex theology in simple terms as well as deliver babies and dispense medicine. What he, like many Catholics and Protestants, lack is a belief in the biblical right to defend yourself and others with as much force as necessary.
In the film the priest keeps criticizing the head of a contingent of Belgian soldiers whose UN mission isn’t so much peacekeeping as observing the violence, taking care to get out of the way when innocent civilians are attacked. But his harassment won’t hold water. He wants those Belgians to do something his religion has made him too “prissy” to do. If it is the responsibility of soldiers from a distant land to use their weapons to kill in order to defend the 2500 people who’ve sought shelter in the school the priest heads, then it is certainly the responsibility of that priest and anyone among that 2500 who can fight to defend those under attack.
That he doesn’t do. He doesn’t demand that the Belgian officer train them to defend themselves. He doesn’t insist that the Beligians provide them with weapons from their ample store. He doesn’t organize the Rhwandans in the camp to force the Belgian soldiers into a situation where they’re forced to either shoot or give up their weapons. He doesn’t even organize the men in the camp to defend themselves with machetes, rocks, sticks whatever else they can find. 2500 people with a fighting spirit could do quite a bit against disorganized mobs that, in the film, never number more than about 50 people. In the end, they might have all died, but the time taken to kill them would be time when others weren’t being killed.
In short, the most depressing thing about the film is the disgusting image of Christianity it presents. In it, the Christians as a people are so stripped of their basic humanity by an unhealthy religion that they become passive in the face of a great evil. The men, one big and strong enough to defeat three ordinary men, either plead for the Belgians to shoot them so they die a bit more pleasantly or do nothing that matters while their wives and children are hacked to death. If that’s Christianity, give me something else, though of course it isn’t Christianity.
I’m not the violent type. I prefer to win disputes with words well spoken. I’m disgusted by some believers I’ve met who seem to think that the pinnacle of being a good father is to threaten every boy who comes courting their daughter with a shotgun. But in the end, fighting is better than dying. In fact, fighting and dying is better than simply dying, because by fighting you’re resisting evil in the only way it can often be defeated. You may be enabling others to win.
That and a hundred similar topics are matters Christians need to discuss and even debate energetically. It’s why the Washington Post was not that far off the mark in the 1990s when it claimed that Evangelicals were mostly “poorly educated older women” who were easily led.
All too often we behave that way. All too often we’ve done nothing when state legislatures have passed “lie laws” requiring people who work in schools and clinics to lie about our children’s sexual behavior and the medical treatment they’ve received behind their parents back, including abortions. All to often we’ve sat on our rumps in the pews while politicians do to us horrors not all that different from what happened in Rwanda and what is happening now in India. The only difference is that we face vicious slander if we speak out, the sorts of attacks now being directed at Sarah Palin, rather than death.
Evangelicalism, I sometimes tell people, is Christianity stripped of courage and intelligence. If God wanted to overrun the world with sweet but rather clueless little children, then Evangelicalism would be a good start. But we should be different from that. What Jesus praises in the Gospels are mature sons, able to carry on their father’s work without a lot of niggling attention. What he praises are talented business men, able to take risks and turn what they have been given into spiritual profit. We should have the courage to fight intelligently about the important things that are happening in our culture rather than squabble over petty things huddled inside our churches. Personally, I’m convinced that one big factor in the rise of megachurches is the desire of believers-as-sheep to huddle in bigger and bigger flocks, awaiting an unpleasant end that they somehow hope against all the evidence won’t come in their own lifetime.
I was particularly stuck when one of the best known of those churches announced that it was starting new programs that would, they hoped, teach their more mature believers to be “self-feeders.” Self-feeders, I thought. Christians should be more that sheep who can find their own grass. They should be shepherds fighting our society’s wolves, many of who are celebrities or hold high political office. And the great difference between a sheep and the shepherd is that the shepherd has weapons and fights.
One final note about the media and horrors such as these. As bad as it often is in how it slants and misrepresents issues, reporters do understand that life is about conflict and fighting. They may say nice things about people who die as wimps rather than fight, but in their heart of hearts you can suspect that they regard such people with concealed contempt, the sort of people they’d never want to become. In Beyond the Gates there’s a BBC reporter who admits that she can’t get as emotionally involved in the deaths of African blacks as she was in the Balkans where the victims looked like her. But she nevertheless does her job, risking her life to report what was going on in an effort to get the outside world to act. Unlike all too many believers in the film, she wasn’t passive in the face of evil.
And yes, that’s also why the press needs foreign bureaus, people who can do what William Shirer and Edward Murrow did so well from Europe in the late 1930s, people who’ve lived in a country long enough to know what’s actually going on there and report it accurately. But, alas, much of our modern press seems to have so made up its mind about issues, that having experienced reporters on the scene would only confuse them with facts they don’t want to hear. What they want are videos that can be cut and clipped in particular ways while a US-based talking head tells us what he thinks we ought to think about matters about which he knows nothing. That’s modern journalism.
Sadly, many Christian organizations do have people who lived in these countries for decades and who do understand it quite well. Only the narrow definition many believers give to spirituality keeps them from providing excellent on-the-scene coverage from these countries. I remember in the early 1980s when there was much fighting in Ethiopia with some relief organizations being accused of harboring CIA spies by the countries Marxist leaders. Someone with one Evangelical group mentioned that they didn’t have that problem. Their staff had been in the country for decades and had known some of those political leaders since they were children. Those same people could provide us with excellent news stories if they were so inclined.
—Michael W. Perry, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
September 17, 2008, at 1:21 pm
[…] GetReligion.org noted today a must-read story in Monday’s Washington Post about the persecution of Christians in India. […]
September 17, 2008, at 10:44 pm
Emily Wax:
What looks to be Motive behind killing 80 year old Hindu Guru?
Was he a obstical in the path of noble work of Christian Missionary?
Has Govt. of India OUTSORCED Medical and Education of its people to Christian Missionaries?
Why Missionaries are exploiting weakness of Govt, Hindu Cast system and vulnarable innocent tribes?
September 17, 2008, at 10:53 pm
To Emily Wax,
It is time to investigate the Hindu phobias and the Christian laissez faire.
September 19, 2008, at 12:38 am
Jerry has one report of Christians in Orissa responding to Hindu initiated violence that he (again) stacks up against the mountain of journalistic evidence of brutal Hindu oppression of all minorities in that state.
The poor misguided man can only see his one lonely tree in the forest, but calls himself a woodsman nonetheless.