Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
India: The Neglected Majority Wins!
By Pankaj Mishra
In the fall of 1999, a year after the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party) and its allies formed the federal government in New Delhi, I met some Indian Christian missionaries at a small church near Simla. They seemed full of despair. Hindu extremists had attacked Christians in the western state of Gujarat, and had allegedly burned alive an Australian missionary in the eastern state of Orissa. To make matters worse, the Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had appeared to question the religious freedoms guaranteed by the Indian constitution by calling for a 'national debate' on conversions. The missionaries told me that the BJP government had created a 'culture of impunity' in which even low-level police officials felt emboldened to harass them. They said they had never before felt so insecure in their own country.
Feature, 4351 words
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