Persecution in India.

New Delhi--Anti-Christian violence is continuing in India (see C.I., Nov. 2000, p. 22) as the extremist Hindu group RSS, the cultural voice of India's ruling BJP party, has called on all Indian Christians to "sever ties with foreign churches". About 3 percent or 30 million of India's one billion people are Christian. Of these, more than two-thirds are Catholic.

Indian Catholics are suffering persecution and even martyrdom. On December 2, Fr. Shajan Chittinapilly, 30, was murdered on the east coast of India, and on the night of Dec. 15-16 men armed with knives and clubs killed Father John Peter in Port Blair. The murderers left propaganda behind, denouncing the conversions to Christianity encouraged by Father Peter.

Meanwhile, the Sisters of St. Anne have decided to leave St. Anne Girls' High School in Kurpania, Bokaro, in the wake of a recent assault on the nuns and the rape of a young Adivasi cook at the school.

A close associate of the BJP claims that recent statements by the Catholic Church are provoking the anti-Christian movement. The Vatican statement Dominus Iesus, for example, opposes the Millennium Summit which called for the equality of religions. And the Pope's call for the conversion of the world angers RSS members who accuse foreign missionaries and Indian priests and religious of converting the poorest social classes.

K. Sudarshan, leader of the RSS, is calling for the creation of a Chinese type national church, to be completely dominated by the Hindu faith. Archbishop Oswald Gracias, secretary-general of the Indian Catholic Bishops' Conference, declared that Christianity has been in India for 20 centuries, and Sudarshan's suggestion was "a slur on our country's democratic polity and its plural cultural traditions".

Father Bernardo Cervellera, director of the Vatican's missionary news service Fides, has attributed the violence to Hinduism's reaction to modernity. "Hinduism's confrontation with modernity results in one of two ways: either by adapting to modernity, or by reacting with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism tries to prevent Western modernity, and, in this way ... prevent the spread of Christianity." Father Cervellera further states that on the other hand "Christianity ... represents a way for the poor and those without a caste ... to affirm their own dignity".

The U.S. State Department, in its Country Reports on Human Rights released in February 2000, stated that "efforts to prevent such incidents from occurring (i.e. violence against Christians) and to prosecute those responsible were inadequate.... In general, government response has been poor with respect to such incidents." (With files from The Tablet and the National Catholic Register, Nov. 19, 2000).