A Strange Silence - (Indolink.Com, 11/02/2004)

By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Neither the media nor the government in Delhi has protested the unseemly and repeated interference of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in matters strictly domestic. In a report, it has clubbed us among ‘countries of particular concern’ for violations of religious freedom. When the commission did the same thing two months ago and earlier, we looked the other way. That emboldened this intrusive body to try again. That time,China took strong exception to the commission linking it with states ‘attempting to control religious belief.’ China did what any country zealous of its sovereignty does. In its report, the commission accused India of institutionalizing Hindutva and using it for political purpose. It is extraordinary that our government should casually dismiss the report as an internal affair of the US administration. This silence amounts to an admission of the contents of the American report. This document, which is an annual feature, was presented to US Congress and referred to anti-conversion laws passed by some Indian states. This is an attack on India’s sovereignty and the freedom of its democratically elected legislatures to pass laws.

Not a single intellectual in the country or parties claiming to be secular protested this incursion into our internal affairs. Assume that the State Department report is true. Look at the number of agencies at home that can deal with the Hindutva ‘menace.’ The President who is a sentinel of the Constitution, Parliament with an extraordinarily vocal opposition, the media that have adopted minorities as their constituency, not to mention the hundreds of NGOs who are hypersensitive to attacks on minorities. This is what three prominent members of the commission said in a dissent note: “India has the legal and democratic traditions to deal with religious intolerance and should be strongly encouraged to do so."

Several Indians travelling, invited on their own, to Washington to depose before this (religion-obsessed) Commission, a wing of the State Department, and disparage their country, emboldened the American agency to indict India. Those who appeared before the commission did so all the time knowing that the State Department can do nothing beyond chuckling in our discomfiture. Many of them are radicals who hate to set foot on the American soil and who are linked to organizations which make a political living out of inciting the minorities against the majority community and keeping the communal fires eternally blazing. In a reaction that bordered on the bizarre, a spokesman for the External Affairs Ministry told the media what he should have told the State Department. He said that any abuse of religious rights was handled by “our own internal processes which include the judiciary, the press, the civil society, the National Human Rights Commission, and so on.”

Yet prominent people who regard themselves as progressives and intellectuals ignore these internal processes and appeal to the international community to intervene despite the record of our Supreme Court in upholding minority rights, the record of the press in reporting and condemning any injustice done to the minorities and despite the reality of several members of the minority community like Khushwant Singh, Saeed Naqvi, M. J. Akbar, John Dayal, Seema Mustafa, B. G. Verghese, Pamela Philipose, A. J. Philip and T. J. S. George occupying the media vanguard. Besides, the entire national press is behind the minorities and their interests.

What prompts these sentinels of minority interests to visit Pakistan, of all the countries, and tell its leaders and people of how minorities are treated in our country. It cannot just be an overpowering concern for humanity because that should include the plight of minorities in the country they are visiting. Is Pakistan a model in the matter of treating minorities? Why do these celebrities complain to countries that have a far from flattering history of human rights suppression? If their objective is to invite international intervention, it amounts to a betrayal of the sacrifices their own ancestors had made to expel foreign rule from the country and to pure treason. I suspect that there are gains to be made by internationalising purely domestic matters.

The government’s silence and the love of some Indian intellectuals for self-flagellation encourage every Tom, Dick and Harry to pillory India. The latest attack on the Indian administration comes from a London-based feminist outfit, the International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat, which called for ‘genocidal alert’ (whatever it means) in Gujarat. It released a feminist analysis of what happened in the western state. Of the nine women groups comprising the initiative four are Indian. It called for the prosecution of some organisations representing the majority community. The silence of the Initiative on massacres elsewhere betrays its view that those atrocities are exempt from prosecution. This selectivity is a novel interpretation of international jurisprudence, if such a thing exists. The group demanded protection for the rights of Muslims in Gujarat as per international human rights. Are minorities under siege in India?

Anyway, who wrote these rights, what are they and are they unacceptable if Indians write them in India? These ‘citizens of the world’ want the British government to withdraw tax concessions to organisations supporting Hindutva agenda. Why does not this group ask Saudi Arabia, why it is sending every year ten billion dollars to Islamic groups all over the world, including India? Farah Naqvi, Meera Velayudan, Uma Chakravarti and Vahida Nainar are the four Indians among the nine women who wrote this document of prejudice and malice. Did they ever check with Taslima Nasreen what is happening to Indian women in Bangladesh?  Do they agree that asking Indian women in some Islamic countries to wear the veil is a violation of their human rights? It is this selectivity that is indefensible.

Last month, Amnesty International, another London-based self-appointed human rights sentinel, expressed concern over the ‘retaliatory harassment’ of civil rights activists in Andhra Pradesh. AI wanted the AP government to provide protection to PUCL chief K. G. Kannabhiran. This must be a joke because PUCL is a great defender of the People’s War Group that nearly killed Chandrababu Naidu some time ago and regularly kills innocent people branding them as police informers. A look at PUCL website shows that it is a rabid communal organization like Combat Communalism devoted to defending faith that is at the root of communalism. Hundreds of NGOs and rights groups in the country have discredited themselves by being selective in their condemnation of communalism and by their anxiety to vilify the country abroad. Thanks to these groups, a nondescript lecturer in Delhi University became a national hero and an intellectual of the stature of Che Guevera. After reaping the benefit of our judicial system he showed his gratitude by declaring he had no faith in the country’s judiciary.

It is clear that reports as those of the Commission on Religious Freedom are aimed at facilitating Vatican’s drive to increase the Pope’s flock in Asia. The Indian Constitution does not permit conversion and the Supreme Court of India clearly defines the limits of religious freedom. The Indian legislatures are elected by the people and make laws on the basis of majority, as is the practice in all democracies all over the world. Why does not any Christian missionary try his conversion charity in any Muslim country? Why is the conversion drive confined only to Hindus and not to the followers of other faiths? No healthy society tolerates the depletion of its ranks. Anyway, how does change of faith alter the economic or even the social status convert? First, nobody has a right to convert anybody. Those who want to convert, do it themselves like Kamala Das in Kerala who became Kamala Soraya. Second, everybody has a right to resist a violation of the Constitution. Even if the missionaries pretend that they are only preaching peacefully, the Constitution demands that the right of propagating one’s faith should be exercised without disturbing public order.

Conversions are a major cause of communal violence in the country because the desire to convert is based on hatred of other faiths and on the puerile conviction that ‘my God is the greatest of all’. In fact, the Commission on International Religious Freedom should inquire into the activities of the missionaries and the harm they can do to public order. I wonder why secularists go to any length to condemn an entire community for the sake of God and religion even while calling themselves secularists. How is religion the business of secularists? In India, do the secularists ever talk of anything else but religion?  It is time that the people and the government of this country refuse to be intimidated by religious secularists and reject certification from outside.