Early in VS Naipaul's terrifying novel about Africa and modernity, A Bend in the River, there occurs the brutal murder of a European priest. The priest has lived and worked in Africa for a long time, and his death moves the narrator-a deracinated Indian-into a reappraisal of the priest's achievement.
"The idea Father Huismans had of his civilisation had made him live his particular kind of dedicated life," he wrote. But the same idea "made him read too much in that mingling of peoples by our river; and he had paid for it."
This was also the tragedy of Graham Staines, the Australian missionary who had worked with leprosy patients for over 35 years, and was burnt to death, with his young sons, in India last month. But the poignancy of his life and death was lost in the political one-upmanship that followed news of his death. Not for the first time in India, violence against religious minorities brought an illusory clarity-and made analysis somewhat too easy.
Few among India's English-speaking metropolitan intelligentsia waited for evidence before blaming the ghastly act on a lumpen affiliate of the ruling BJP; and linking it to the so-called hate campaign launched by the Hindu nationalists against the minorities.
It helped that the murder came in the wake of events which further undermined the credibility of the government: the attack on the film Fire for portraying a lesbian relationship; and the agitation against the India-Pakistan Test series.
Angry editorials poured forth from India's English-language press, which responded with relative indifference to the massacre of 21 low-caste Hindus in Bihar, ruled by an anti-BJP chief minister. The west's reaction was equally typical. "Christians in Peril," screamed The Times on 26th January. Apocalyptic visions of Christian chapels, schools and homes in ruins were retailed throughout Europe and the US.
Not much note was taken of the fact that although the number of attacks on Christians has gone up this year, these attacks have been largely confined to areas with a missionary presence-the small Christian communities across India are untouched by the genocidal hatred that some Hindu groups have directed against Muslims in the past.
But why pick on Christian missionaries now? The complicated answer lies partly in the changing character of the missionary presence in India. After some reservations, the British came to see the missionaries as indispensable to Thomas Macaulay's project of creating a class of comprador Indians through western-style education. But as the urban, mostly upper-caste Hindu bourgeoisie awoke to new ideas of their identity and nationhood early in this century, doubts emerged about the role of Christian missionaries. The most consistent critic was Gandhi, who, despite his debts to Christianity, often accused missionaries of exploiting the vulnerability of the low-caste Hindus they managed to convert.
Freedom of religion was enshrined in independent India's constitution. After 1947, both Catholic and Anglican missionaries "sensitised" themselves to the new conditions; the old propaganda against the evils of Hinduism was toned down; education and health care were often given priority over proselytising.
But, more recently, missionaries from the American bible belt have aggressively played what is called the "numbers game"; they have taken the lead in Christianising semi-nomadic "tribals" and low-caste Hindus across India. Their web sites reveal self-reproach-a country of 945m people with only 20m Christians-tempered by go-get-'em exhortations to convert that many Indians by such-and-such a date. Mass conversion jamborees have led to a several-fold increase in the Christian populations of the northeastern states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, and have invited allegations of aiding armed secessionist groups.
In the last two decades, the allies of the BJP-the RSS and VHP, which are in many distorted ways the inheritors of Gandhi's economic and cultural nationalism-have often tried to raise the ante in their old campaign against Christian missionaries. Their anxieties about the missionaries run deeper than those about Islam: Muslims in India, a poor, much trampled-on minority, are not known for their proselytising; Christian missionaries are-and they have access to seemingly unlimited resources in the west. The VHP's ambition to integrate most low-caste Hindus and tribals into a casteless society, pits it directly against the Christians.
The recent aggression of these Hindu organisations is actually a sign of frustration-the result of some important failures. The economic-cultural self-reliance and pride which the BJP once espoused has been battered by events over which nobody seems to have any control. There is a general loss of confidence in all aspects of national life, to the extent that Indian democracy was recently described as "hollow" by the prime minister himself.
A humiliating devaluation of the rupee is imminent. And prospects for the Indian poor, after six years of a liberalised economy, have never been worse. Indeed, it often seems that, for the chattering classes of Delhi, knee-jerk denunciations of the BJP have become a way of ignoring the grim post-liberalisation disparities in India between the transnational e-mail class and the parochial poor.
Rural and semi-urban India is now full of disenfranchised restive people. The profile of the killer of the Australian missionary is typical. Extreme poverty forced this eldest among six sons of a labourer to travel hundreds of miles to a tribal district where he set himself up as a petty criminal, his services reportedly used by politicians from both the BJP and the Congress. Christian missionaries and converts, with their often lucrative links to the west, are a soft target for these lumpen Hindus. This xenophobia, which may well be turned again against Muslims in the near future, is another aspect of the free-floating rage which is the most sinister feature of contemporary India.n
