Every Indian, who wishes to see India grow in unity, strength and prosperity, will be concerned over the implications of the emergence of a growing Hindu-Christian divide in the Indian civil society.
The recent shocking incidents of violence in some parts of the State of Orissa have brought home to us the extent to which the poison in the relations between the two communities has spread. What one saw in Orissa was nothing less than a mini version of what one saw in Gujarat in 2002.
In Gujarat, the massacre of a group of Hindu pilgrims travelling in a railway compartment by a group of Muslim fanatics when the train had stopped at a railway station called Godhra, led to widespread retaliatory attacks on members of the Muslim community in different parts of thestate. The brutal violence witnessed during these incidents committed initially by the Muslims and subsequently by the Hindus should be a matter of shame to us as a nation.
In Orissa, the brutal murder of a highly-respected leader of the Hindu community belonging to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) by a group of suspected Christian elements led to widespread attacks by members of the Hinducommunity--most of them allegedly belonging to the VHP-- on the Christan community. The casualties in Orissa were thankfully small as compared to those in Gujarat in 2002, but the brutality witnessed on bothsides--initially by alleged Christian elements and subsequently by alleged VHPmembers-- was no less disturbing than what one had seen in Gujarat in 2002.
The seeds of the Hindu-Muslim divide were initially sown by the British during the pre-1947 colonial days. It resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the subsequent violent incidents between the Hindu and Muslim communities in different parts of India. The jihadi terrorism witnessed in different parts of India since the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a group of Hindus inDecember,1992, marked a new phase in the continuing divide between some sections of the Hindus and the Muslims.Fortunately, this mental divide remained confined to small sections of the two communities. The two communities as a whole have till now not allowed the attempts of these small sections to spread this poison further to succeed. One of the objectives of the repeated jihadi terrorist strikes is to aggravate this divide.
The seeds of the Hindu-Christian divide were sown much later--long after India became independent. Even in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were concerns over the objectionable activities of foreign Christian missionaries in Indian territory. These activities perceived as objectionable not only by large sections of the Hindu community, but also by the intelligence and security agencies and by highly-respected leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi consisted of attempts to indulge in large -scale conversion of underprivileged Hindus and animist tribals in Central India into Christianity with the help of large, unrestricted flow of funds from the Vatican and from Catholic and Baptist organisations in the US and the role played by foreign missionaries such as the lateRev. Michael Scot in instigating the insurgency in the North-East where many of the inhabitants in Nagaland and Mizoram are Baptists.
Just as the flow of money from so-called Muslim charity organisations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim countries sought to sustain and aggravate the divide between the Muslims and the Hindus, projected as infidels, and to promote jihadi terrorism in Indian territory, the flow of money from the Vatican and Christian missionary and fundamentalist organisations in the West tended to create a mental divide between the Hindus and the Christians and promote and sustain the insurgency in our North-East.
But the leaders of India in the post-independence years sought to see that the concerns over the role of the foreign Christian missionaries and the massive funds at their disposal did not create unwarranted suspicions in the minds of the Hindu community against their Christian fellow-citizens. They realised that if they allowed such suspicions to appear in the relations between the two communities, they would only be playing into the hands of foreign missionary organisations, which wanted to create a mental divide. They refrained from viewing our Christian fellow-citizens as surrogates of the foreign missionaryorganisations.