Another Christian school ransacked in West Bengal, police blame burglars

KOLKATA: In yet another attack on a christian missionary school at Madhyamgram in North 24 Parganas early on Wednesday, four class rooms were ransacked and official and educational equipments were also damaged. The almirah in an office room was also broke open and several articles in the almirah were also found scattered on the floor. Police are looking for the culprits. But no one has been arrested in this connection yet.

The ransacking on Believers Charch missionary school at Abdalpur adjacent to the Badu Road towards Barasat's Kharibari in Madhyamgram, barely 4 km from Kolkata Airport triggered a tension in the area.

Panic gripped the bishop, fathers and nuns and the other teachers in the school and they also appealed to the police for a strong security arrangements for the school.

Juria Bardhan, the bishop of the school lodged a complaint on Wednesday morning with Madhyamgram police station in this connection. The school was also remained closed on Wednesday.

"We are really in panic following the attack for the first time in our under Charch school. We could be attacked any time. But We can't understand why the ransacking was carried out and by whom. We have no problem with anybody in the locality. Most of the students come from local area. I have urged police to take a legal action in this connection and to provide adequate security for the school," the bishop said.

The regional co-ordinator of the school, Rabin Dutta said, "Several Christian missionary schools across the country already came under attack. The horror of recent past brutal attack on a Ranaghat convent and subsequent horrible torture on an elderly nun is yet to die down. We got frightened with the Wednesday's attack."

He also said that the attackers damaged the books, study papers, several study equipments, food materials for the students and also musical instruments used by the students.

The school is run under believers Charch here for over a decade.

There are 130 students in the school and those students are studied at free cost. The lunch and tiffin are also provided to the students mostly come from under privileged families.

The guardians of the students also launched an agitation to protest against the attack on an educational institution under the Charch. They have also demanded immediate arrest of the culprits.

Police said the attack took place around 2.30 am and the goons sneaked into the building through an open window of a bathroom.

"Initially we suspect that petty burglars could strike in search of valuables. We are however investigating the mater and a raid is on to nab culprits", said Bhaskar Mukherjee,ASP, North 24 Parganas.

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Christians Say They are Under Siege in India After Nun's Rape, Church Attacks

Kolkata:  Christians in India said on Monday that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not done enough to protect their religion, after a spate of attacks including the rape of a 72-year-old nun in Bengal over the weekend.

Christians prayed and held vigils across the country to protest against the rape during an armed assault on a Bengal convent school, the worst in a series of incidents that followers of the faith say are making them feel unwelcome in their own country.

The motive for the assault and armed robbery in West Bengal on Saturday was not clear. Police said they have detained 10 people who broke into the Convent of Jesus and Mary School in Nadia district, northeast of Kolkata. The man suspected of rape has not been caught.

The rape victim who is still in hospital has appealed for peace. " The  nun has said she has forgotten the incident, has forgiven the crime and has asked all to pray for the culprits," said Sister Amala, who visited the assaulted nun this morning. 

A few days ago, a Catholic church being built in Haryana was vandalized; its cross was removed and a small statue of the Hindu god Hanuman was placed in the church.

Father Savari Muthu, spokesman for the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese and a national Church organiser, said, "We have to raise our voice against the atrocities. Christians will not tolerate this humiliation." 

Father Muthu said schools across the country were holding prayer meetings on Monday. Christians held a silent protest in the streets of Mumbai on Sunday.

Weeks ago, Mohan Bhagwat, the  leader of  the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), suggested that the charitable work of Mother Teresa had been aimed at religious conversion.

Critics say the remarks by the chief of the RSS, the ideological mentor of the ruling BJP, contributed to a climate where Christians are seen as outsiders, despite a more than 1,500-year presence in India.

"I am not Indian any more, at least in the eyes of the proponents of the Hindu Rashtra," prominent retired police chief Julio Ribeiro wrote in a column for the Indian Express paper.

The RSS has condemned the rape of the elderly nun. 

"No attack should be tolerated on any woman in India. Be it a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian," Suresh Joshi, RSS general secretary, told reporters on Sunday.

Opposition lawmakers in the Rajya Sabha or  Upper House of parliament on Monday said the attack could damage the secular fabric of the country, where about a fifth of the population belongs to faiths other than Hinduism.

Since December, half a dozen churches have been vandalized.

In February, shortly after U.S. President Barack Obama called for respect for religious freedom in India, PM Modi broke a long silence on the subject and, speaking at a church event, vowed a crackdown on religious violence.

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Fear and anger grow in India after rape of elderly nun

Prayers were said at churches across India on Sunday for an elderly nun who was raped at a convent in an attack that has intensified anger over sexual violence and fuelled fears among beleaguered Christians.

The assault on the 71-year-old is the latest in a high-profile string of rapes in India and follows a spate of attacks on churches that prompted the Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, to promise a crackdown on religious violence.

The nun was attacked late on Friday after a gang of half a dozen robbers broke into a convent school in eastern West Bengal state and ransacked the premises, police said.

The robbers gagged a security guard before assaulting the nun. They then entered the principal’s room and stole cash, a laptop and a mobile phone, according to police.

Four of the six attackers have allegedly been identified through CCTV footage and a reward of 100,000 rupees (around £1,075) is on offer for any leads on the suspects. Five others have been detained for questioning.

Arnab Ghosh, a police superintendent who visited the convent near the town of Ranaghat, said the robbery appeared to have been carefully planned.

“CCTV footage showed that six men, aged between 20 and 30, scaled the boundary wall around 11.40pm, entered the school and disconnected the telephone lines,” he told Agence France-Presse.

“At least two of them were armed and the rest were carrying burglary tools. In the chapel, a holy scripture was found torn and … a bust of Jesus was broken,” Ghosh said.

Prayers were held on Sunday in churches in West Bengal for the nun, who is recovering at a hospital in Ranaghat, some 45 miles from the state capital, Kolkata.

“In our Sunday mass, we prayed for the sister to recover quickly from trauma, fear and her physical injuries. We will pray for her again this evening,” Thomas D’Souza, the archbishop of Kolkata, told AFP.

“They not only committed a heinous crime, but they also vandalised the chapel …This is the first time such an attack has happened in India.”

Christian leaders in Kolkata said they were planning to hold a candlelight vigil on Monday followed by a solidarity rally in support of the victim.

“We are shocked that a thing like this has happened in our state. We want the culprits to be arrested and brought to justice swiftly,” Father Saroj Biswas told the NDTV news network.

The attack was condemned during morning services in the western state of Goa, which has a sizeable Christian population, and there were also prayers for the nun in the capital, New Delhi.

The rape has added to the sense of fear and dismay among members of the country’s Christian minority, who have been deeply upset by recent attacks on churches.

Modi had been heavily criticised for not speaking out earlier against religious violence and has also faced flak for remaining silent about a spate of mass “re-conversions” of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.

“Even if you call it an isolated incident, the background and the atmosphere for such an attack had already been there, so you cannot simply ignore it as a one-off incident,” Father Savarimuthu Sankar, a spokesman for the Delhi diocese, told AFP.

The incident also adds to a grim record of horrifying sexual assaults in India, which last week banned a documentary about a December 2012 gang-rape that sparked domestic and international outrage.

Authorities said screening the documentary could have caused public disorder, but critics accused the government of being more concerned with the country’s reputation than the safety of its women.

The gang-rape of a young physiotherapy student highlighted the frightening level of violence against women in the world’s second most-populous country and triggered mass protests.

It led to a major reform of India’s rape laws, speeding up trials and increasing penalties, although many campaigners say little has changed for women.

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Why Mamata’s Trinamool Congress is silent about a VHP ‘ghar wapsi’ ceremony in Bengal

West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is making unprecedented inroads in the state, are sworn enemies. Yet the Trinamool has been surprisingly quiet about a controversial ceremony in which the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which is affiliated to the BJP, tried to convert Christian tribals to Hinduism.

In a video clip (at the end of this article) of the ceremony, which took place on January 28 in Birbhum district, a local VHP functionary, Churka Tudu, claims that about a hundred Christians had undergone “shuddhikaran”, or purification, to become Hindus. Local television channels and newspapers covered the ceremony, which is part of a larger contentious campaign of “ghar wapsi”, or reconversion, that the VHP has launched countrywide after the BJP came to power at the Centre in May 2014.

A Trinamool Congress member filed a first information report on the same day against VHP general secretary Jugal Kishore for making a hate speech at the ceremony and against president Praveen Togadia for making one at a nearby venue on the same day.

Two weeks later, on February 12, Mamata Banerjee addressed a public rally at Rampurhat, near the village where the ceremony took place. There, she said her government would not tolerate forced conversions and that those involved would be brought to book. But the police have still made no arrests.

Municipal elections are due in Rampurhat in April and the BJP has more support there than the Trinamool, going by their vote shares in the general election last year.

If the police had arrested the VHP functionaries, it would have sent a clear signal to the group not to play the Hindutva card in the district. That it has not done so suggests that the Trinamool is anxious about lack of support in the region.

Poll calculations

Officials down the line are trying to play down the incident. “I don’t know the details. I have heard that some people were forcibly converted, but I cannot confirm it,” was all Anarul Hossain, a local Trinamool Congress leader would say.

“Our officials went to the spot and submitted a report to the state government,” said a senior bureaucrat in the district administration who did not wish to be named. “There has been no conversion.”

The Trinamool chief minister Mamata Banerjee has in the past vociferously condemned the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, but she now has other pressures. Her party swept to power in 2011, dislodging a coalition led by the Communist Part of India-Marxist, which had ruled the state for 34 years in a row. But over the past two years, members of her party have become embroiled in a huge chit fund scam involving the Saradha group of companies.

These are the same two years during which the BJP has been on a roll across the country, and is trying to put down roots in West Bengal as well.

Rising tension

Ethnic and religious tension has been growing in the Rampurhat area over the past year.

Hindus are in a majority in the area in the Rampurhat municipal area but it has a large minority of Muslims, who form about a third of the population, and Christians.

The Rampurhat 1 block, which contains 34 tribal villages, has a population of 90,000 people. Of these, about 50,000 tribals follow the Sarna religion, an indigenous tradition, while about 30,000 are Christians, those whose ancestors began converting in the mid-19th century after missionaries began settling in the area, said Sunil Soren from the non-profit group Birbhum Adivasi Unnayan Gaonta. About 10,000 tribals are Hindus, although Soren explained that their practices overlap with the Sarna tradition.

The Trinamool has been assiduously wooing Muslims in this area, yet is worried about further polarising communities, and votes, on religious grounds, said a party member, who did not wish to be named.

Forced conversion?

Unlike Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal does not have an anti-conversion law, but legal action can be taken against forced conversions, although it is often hard to define coercion and even harder to prove it.

VHP leaders said about 3,000 villagers attended the event. But 10 days after the ceremony, when Scroll visited the villages from which the participants came, such as Khormadanga, where the ceremony itself took place, and Boropahari, Khurbona, Narayanpur and Taloan, none of them admitted to attending the programme, suggesting there is fear in the air.

“I was at my in-law’s place,” said one villager. “I had gone to work in the fields,” said another. It was impossible to talk to the tribals without their Hindu neighbours insisting on listening in.

But two families in Loripahari village, which is located in neighbouring Jharkhand state and borders the village where the ceremony took place, admitted that they have been converted to Hinduism. Pani Murmu and Srimati Tudu, said their families had converted to Christianity, the only ones in the villages to do so, and had taken part in the VHP ceremony.

Pani Murmu at her Loripahari homePhoto: Swati Sengupta

“We were Hindus earlier,” said Pani Murmu as she boiled rice in a pot and stirred a broth made from leaves in another vessel, both set on earthen ovens in the courtyard. “But my family members fell ill. Nothing was going well for us. So we converted to Christianity, in search of peace,” Her toddler stood by munching on maize soaked in a cup of water.

The family is among the poorest of the poor in the village. Pani’s husband, who did not want to reveal his name, is already drunk at 10 in the morning. He says he wants money to buy liquor in return for talking about the ceremony. He wants to know why people are interested in what happened. “We will adopt any religion we like,” he said aggressively. “They [the Christians] never built us a house or gave us anything else. So why can’t we opt for a different religion” Then he left the house.

After the police lodged the FIR, the VHP began denying that the ceremony had been a ghar wapsi event. “The police were present at the event, so if conversion had taken place, why didn’t they arrest anybody?” asked Amiya Sarkar, the VHP’s vice president in Birbhum.

Dhanapati Hansda, one of the priests who performed the yagna, the ceremony, also denied it had to do with conversion. “It was simply a bhumi shuddhikaran [purifying the land] for a plot donated by a family to the VHP, where a students’ hostel, meditation hall, goshala [cow shed], temple and a school will be built.”

Dhanapati HansdaPhoto: Swati Sengupta

The VHP might be trying to hush up the event because arrests could backfire. At the same time, it plans to continue with its agenda. “Through our meetings, we have been able to put a check on the conversion of Hindus to Christianity and Islam. In the coming days, the result of our meetings and appeals to people will show,” said VHP’s Amiya Sarkar.

In this video clip, Churka Tudu, a VHP member from Birbhum district in West Bengal, talks to local journalists. The exchange has been translated from Bengali.


Video: Kanchan Dey

How many are Christians here and how many have "come back”?
About a hundred.

What is happening here?
A land that will have goshala, Shiva temple, students’ hostel, playground, etc -- things that will attract people to this place.

What is happening as part of the ghar wapsi and shuddhikaran?
Whatever the rituals are. To clean up the place and people [words unclear here], yajna, all those things that are part of the Hindu shastra for those who are coming back.

Which religion are they "coming back” from?
Christianity.

Why did they adopt Christianity?
They had been lured with promises for education, etc. Now they are coming back on their own.

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India investigates reports of mass ‘reconversion’ of Christians

Reports of a new mass conversion of Christians in India have raised concerns over freedom of worship, days after Barack Obama challenged the country’s record on religious tolerance.

Details of the incident are unclear but it was reported that between 50 and 100 Christians from some of the poorest communities in India were “welcomed back” to Hinduism in a “homecoming ceremony” in a remote area in the eastern state of West Bengal on Wednesday.

A series of attempts by rightwing Hindu groups to hold mass conversion ceremonies have caused controversy in recent months. Conversion is illegal if there is any element of compulsion or bribery.

“The worry is that some kind of coercion is involved. The communities [involved in the recent incidents] are already vulnerable and the campaign seems quite aggressive and the combination is concerning,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

Last week the hardline group Vishnu Hindu Parishad (VHP) claimed to have “reconverted” more than 20 Christians in the southern state of Kerala. In December another group conducted a similar ceremony for more than 200 Muslims in the northern city of Agra.

The VHP appears to be behind Wednesday’s ceremony. “We are not committing any sin by bringing back our people to our own religion. This is a service to our country and we will continue with the ghar wapsi [homecomings],” Jugal Kishore, a VHP official involved in the event, was quoted as saying in the Indian Express newspaper.

Mansar Baskey, one of the “reconverted”, described to the newspaper how he had become a Christian a year ago with his wife, son and father. “I was told I have committed sin by converting to Christianity. Now, my family and I want to become Hindu again,” Baskey said.

Church authorities told the Indian Express that around 1,000 local people had been baptised in the poverty-stricken and remote area over the last year. Most are from the so-called tribal or adivasi community, among the most deprived in India.

However, other officials from the VHP denied to local reporters any reconversions, saying the ceremony had been to lay a foundation stone for a hostel, healthcare centre and school for the poor. Senior VHP functionaries contacted by the Guardian on Thursday said they were unable to comment.

Officials say an inquiry has been launched into Wednesday’s event. “Initial reports suggest those converted at the VHP rally are BJP workers who were lured. Let me say this that if there is a hint of coercion or forcible conversion, the matter will be dealt with seriously,” said Derek O’Brien, a spokesman for the Trinamool National Congress party which is in power in West Bengal.

The groups responsible for the conversion ceremonies come from the same broad Hindu nationalist movement as the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, which was led to a landslide victory in elections last year by Narendra Modi.

Modi, 64, a former organiser with a revivalist Hindu organisation, has yet to make any public comment on the reconversion ceremonies. However, he has warned members of parliament and ministers not to make statements that might distract from his development agenda, after one member of his government called Indian Muslims “bastard children” last year.

Hardliners’ plans for a mass ceremony in December were put on hold after pressure from senior officials within the movement and, it is thought, the government.

Obama’s words on Tuesday on the rights of religious minorities in the predominantly Hindu country came after three days of carefully choreographed demonstrations of warm relations between the US president and Modi.

“The peace we seek in the world begins in human hearts; it finds its glorious expression when we look beyond any differences in religion or tribe and rejoice in the beauty of every soul,” said Obama, who namechecked prominent Indian Muslims, Sikhs and sportswomen.

“No society is immune from the darkest impulses of men. India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith,” he added.

Modi has been criticised by opposition politicians for remaining silent on the issue of reconversion ceremonies. Digvijaya Singh, of the ousted Congress party, thanked Obama on Twitter for “speaking up for the Indian citizen’s rights to profess practice and propagate his religious belief”.

Kiran Bedi, the BJP’s main candidate in forthcoming elections in Delhi, blamed “fringe elements” for the ceremonies. “They are fringes. Fringes have been stopped, they have been given the message. The message has been conveyed in the party leadership’s own style,” Bedi said at the weekend.

Before becoming prime minister, Modi was previously denied a US visa following accusations that he stood by during, or even encouraged, sectarian violence in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, when he was chief minister. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed by rioters. Modi has denied any wrongdoing and a supreme court inquiry has found insufficient evidence to support the charges.

There are around 180 million Muslims in India, around 14% of the population of 1.3 billion. The Christian minority is significantly smaller.

 

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