DUIN: Christians persecuted in India

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By Julia Duin

On my refrigerator, there is a laminated photo of a serious-looking man from India named Arakhita.

He is a missionary I am sponsoring in Orissa, India's poorest state. Tourists never go there, but missionaries do. Sometimes they don't end up so well. In January 1999, Australian missionary (and leprosy worker) Graham Staines and his two sons, ages 9 and 6, were burned tp death by Hindu radicals as they lay sleeping.

That gruesome murder alerted the world to the true state of affairs in east-central India, where the law of the jungle reigns. A spokesman for Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a radical Hindu group, admitted to the Indian magazine Frontline "that some of our activists got carried away."

I'll say.

In December in Orissa's hilly Khandamal district, an anti-Christian rampage by Hindu activists destroyed 610 homes, 71 churches, convents, hostels and medical centers. On Aug. 24, a Hindu swami was killed by unidentified persons who the government later said were Maoists because of the style in which he was executed.

"Within hours [in Khandamal], mobs were rampaging through villages, burning down the churches first and then houses of Christians," said Angela Wu, international law director for the Becket Fund, who spent much of September in India.

"The attacks were targeted toward Christians, and the attackers had the help of villagers who knew where the Christians lived," she said. "Christians hacked to death with machetes, axes and tridents," the latter a symbol for the Hindu religion.

She also visited northeast Uttar Pradesh, a state in central India where Hindu mobs are burning Muslim villages.

"The person who incited the violence there is a sitting member of Parliament," Ms. Wu told me.

By far the worst scenes are in the Orissan capital of Bhubaneswar, where thousands of Christians are languishing in refugee camps.

"Some of these people had walked 300 kilometers [about 185 miles] to get there," she said. "Houses are still being burned down, and Christians have been ethnically cleansed from this area."

Others - constituting three generations of Christians - have been forcibly converted. "I met a priest in Bhubaneswar whose father is a Catholic catechist from Khandamal," she said, "who had an ax held to his neck. He had to profess Hinduism because he had no choice."

The Indian Supreme Court gave Orissa four weeks to stop the violence, she added, "but the Catholic archbishop of Bhubaneswar told me, 'That just gives them four weeks to finish the church.' "

The Indian Embassy has not responded to my call asking what meaningful actions the government is taking to help these refugees move back home. I called the mission agency that works with Arakhita. His fate is not known, the director said, but evangelical Protestant leaders are getting death threats all over Orissa and in Karnataka, home of the technology capital, Bangalore.

Some Indians are concerned about the chaos. In this week's editions of the Indian weekly Tehelka, the editor in chief mourns "democracy's continuing free fall" in this country of 1 billion souls. Ms. Wu asks why the American government looks the other way.

"We should not have inked a nuclear deal with a country," she said, "that cannot provide basic security for its citizens."

• Julia Duin's column "Stairway to Heaven" runs Thursdays and Sundays. Contact her at jduin@washingtontimes.com.