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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. This is the Nordic Asia Podcast.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Katinka Froestad and I'm an anthropologist of religion and politics based at the University of Oslo. In this episode we discuss Sudhir Selvaraj and Kenneth Boon Ilsen's new special issue on Hindutva and anti Christian violence in India in the journal Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. This is a special issue that traces the forms and faces of anti Christian violence across the country with contributions specializing on five of India's federal states, Orissa, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Goa. Sudhir Selvaraj is a political scientist based at the University of Bradford while Kenneth Bunilsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo. Sudhir and Kenneth, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Thanks Katinka.
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A
Thank you for having us.
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B
So let me begin by asking, why should we be concerned with anti Christian violence in India today?
- [01:20]
C
Well, I mean, there's always reason to be concerned about violence targeting minorities anywhere in the world. But for India, I think the issue of violence against Indian Christians has become particularly acute over the past 10 to 20 years at least. We have reports that indicate that this kind of violence has witnessed a fourfold increase between 2014 and 2023. And this is the period, as we know, when the Hindu nationalist BJP has been in power. This violence includes beatings and disruptions of services and prayer meetings and the desecration of churches. And last year alone we had more than 800 documented instances of violence targeting Indian Christians. Most of these attacks are carried out by right wing Hindu nationalist groups. The well known India scholar Christoph Shafalo, who we all know and whose work we admire, has said that Indian Christians have by now become the prime targets of Hindu nationalist violence. And this is a relatively recent development that we really need to be critically aware of and attentive to. In a sense, this is both a tragic and an ironic development. I think that Christianity in India has never been as Indianized as it is today, and yet it's never been as vilified by the Hindu right as it is today.
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B
So the theme is, as you say, more pressing today than it has ever been. But at the same time there is a much longer history of hostility, of skepticism towards Indian Christians on the part of the Hindu nationalist movement and its organizations. So what is the historical backdrop to what we're seeing today?
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A
Anti Christian sentiments began emerging in the late 1800s in response to colonial rule and the start of Christian missionary work in India anxieties about what we call the Christian threat accelerated with the publication of the census. From the early 1900s onwards, these anxieties made their way into the writings of Hindu nationalist ideologues who described Christians as foreign or enemies. And these notions have been more or less consistent till today. Using Johann Galtung's conception of multiform violence of direct structural and cultural, we show that in independent India violence has taken many forms. The 1960s saw the institution of anti conversion laws which sought to regulate religious conversion, particularly to Christianity. These were restricted to a few states initially and the conversion around anti conversion laws died down from the late 1970s onwards. The next phase of this violence emerged in the late 1900s which coincided with the ascendancy of the BJP to power at the national level. This phase saw the rise of physical attacks including the murder of Australian missionary Dr. Graham Staines and also larger violence in Orissa and Karnataka in 2008. We also see from this period onwards anti conversion laws have been passed in several states around the country, mostly BJP led states. Throughout all of this, Dalit Christians continue to be denied state resources and protections when they convert to Christianity and we perceive this as a form of structural violence.
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B
Thank you. So exactly how is the current movement different in your view?
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A
Nowadays we see an intentional synthesis of these different forms of violence taking place. For example, scholarship including our own, shows that there is extrajudicial and often violent enforcement of anti conversion laws by organizations affiliated with the Sampariwar. Oftentimes these violent attacks are filmed and circulated on social media to serve as a warning shot to Christians. Recent research shows that states which have these laws witness a higher number of instances of attacks against Christians. Recent anti conversion laws also place a focus on Christian institutions which could potentially lose their ability to receive funding and foreign money from foreign sources under the Foreign Contribution Regulatory Authority Act. Similarly, some laws re emphasize that Dalit Christians will be ineligible to access state resources in the form of reservations in employment and education and other special legal protections if they convert to Christianity. Meanwhile, anti Christian rhetoric is all over social media today and is being utilized by the general public but also being led by politicians and also actors from Sad Paribai.
- [05:47]
C
If I can just jump in and add to this an extension of what you said now Sudhir, because I think it's important that we're also seeing this intensifying production of a more widely shared form of common sense about the fundamental anti national essence of non Hindu minorities and their unbelonging to the Hindu nation. I mean this is a long standing trope in Hindu nationalist rhetoric that holds that the loyalties of Indian Christians almost by definition lies elsewhere. And this is a form of cultural violence that is also part and parcel of the Hindu nationalist project kind of violence that normalizes the stigmatization of minorities. And as you said, Sudhir, I think we have to acknowledge just how important social media is here. I mean, more than half of all Indians rely on social media as their main source of news. And for the so called Gen Z, the figure is as high as 90% according to some surveys I've seen. And these Hindu nationalist groups, of which there are very many, they're extremely adept, the users of social media platforms to spread their worldview. And that's sort of one channel that also mainstreams this worldview into almost a new kind of political common sense.
- [07:09]
B
Thank you. So if I understand you correctly, you are also showing that there is a great variation in how Hindu nationalist organizations approach or deal with Christian communities. Could you spell out that a little bit more please?
- [07:23]
A
In the special issue we actively chose to focus on the state as a unit of analysis. And this is for several reasons. Anti conversion laws are often passed at the state level and the state government is in charge of the police force in each state which has the power to actively protect minorities or be willfully inactive. Similarly, Christian communities are varied across different states. Some are more more common, more prominent in certain states and more affluent in certain states than others. So for example, my paper revisits the 2008 Anti Christian Violence in Orissa and Karnataka. Using Galtung's concept of cultural violence as an analytical tool, I showed how justifications of anti Christian violence can travel between states and between the states and the national level. Because the context of violence was very different in both Orisa and Karnataka, the relatively broad framing of the Christian threat allows it to be deployed adroitly across varied state contexts. And once these justifications are deployed, you can see a blurring of its moral colors and acceptance amongst the general public. Similarly, the next paper, Kaiser et al. Explores the context of contemporary violence in Chhattisgarh, showing how anti Christian violence can exist even under an Indian National Congress led government. The Congress is supposedly a secular party, yet its soft Hindutva strategy through willful inaction is needed to maintain its electoral viability in the state which has thus far been dominated by the bjp. The authors in this article conclude that there exists, as Christophe Jaffaleur describes, a deeper state in Chhattisgarh.
- [09:04]
C
But as you mentioned, we also have contrasting examples from very different contexts where Christians have traditionally been so called privileged minorities. The cases in point Bling Goa and Kerala for our collection. In both of these states the Christian minority is demographically significant and has also historically enjoyed both social and political influence. So here we find that Hindu nationalist groups have targeted or engaged Christians in very different ways. And physical violence that is so prominent in these other papers has not been pronounced at all. In Kerala. We see some of these Hindu nationalist groups working with different spatial strategies designed to take over and Hinduize what used to be shared communal spaces. And they've even tried to reach out to the Syrian Christian community, for example, by claiming that both Hindus and Christians have been the victims of so called Muslims love Jihad. And thereby they appeal to a shared sense of victimhood based on anti Muslim sentiments, but also to a shared upper caste identity that cuts across these religious divides. In the case of Goa, the strategy has also been very subtle, cultural and symbolic, mainly with a number of these Hindu nationalist fringe groups promoting a more hardline version of Hindutva which while the BJP that sits in government appears relatively more moderate, at least for now. An interesting thing in this Goan context that you won't find in many other places is the use of Portuguese colonialism as a kind of dog whistle for Christianity. So you have a chief minister in Goa who will talk about wiping away all the remaining signs of the Portuguese, of changing Portuguese sounding names of places to vernacular ones, of rebuilding destroyed Hindu temples and so on. So it's not so far fetched to think that Catholicism is included in this category of Portuguese science that should somehow be wiped away or erased. But that's never spelled out clearly of course. So there is this kind of more subtle doublespeak or almost dog whistle that targets Christians in ever so many ways. And that of course also produces a gradual hardening of the entire political discourse.
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B
I see. Well, let me return to Galtung's perspective for a moment because in your introduction you analyzed anti conversion lawmaking as a modality of structural violence. That's a typical Kaltungin concept. But at the same time you also indicate that these anti conversion laws are ostensibly secular, if I understand you correctly. Could you please explain this seeming paradox to us?
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C
Yeah, thanks for pointing this out, Katinka. I've been thinking about whether this was a poor choice of word on our part perhaps. I think what we meant to say by using the word secular was that these anti conversion laws that we also discussed, on the surface they seem to be religiously neutral. If one knows nothing at all about contemporary India and went and Picked up one of these anti conversion laws that you mentioned. One wouldn't find any literal indication that they were designed to target any particular religious community. The laws will state that any religious conversion that is caused by force or fraud or through marriage should be declared illegal and punishable with imprisonment and fines. Nowhere will it mention that the law is intended to be applied almost exclusively to criminalize conversions to Islam or Christianity. But of course, as we know, no law interprets itself and no law can implement itself. And so to really understand what these laws are about, I think we need to contextualize them much broader. In Uttar Pradesh, where you have worked for so many years, Katzenka, their anti conversion law is routinely spoken of in the media simply as the loft Jihad law. So it's very clear that the intent and purpose is to target Muslims in Karnataka. It's to a greater extent Christians that are the intended targets. And you'll find that all these laws state as well that if people choose to return or to reconvert to their original religion, that's not a crime on the law. Again, this sounds as if it neither targets nor benefits any religion in particular. Only in the Hindu nationalist view of things, all the inhabitants of India were once Hindus. So in effect, no conversion to Hinduism can ever be construed as being covered by an anti conversion law. I mean, this is what we had in mind when we spoke about these laws as, as secular in letter. They don't seem to discriminate at all, but in practice they very much do.
- [14:21]
B
Right, so this is similar to what you have in another piece of work called Dog Whistle Legislation, is it?
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C
Yeah, it's the same line of thinking that it's also at work in that other paper you mentioned. And I think the point is that if we want to understand what these laws are about and what their intention is, we can't just look at the letter of the law. There's a need to contextualize them with reference to political discourse and all the other things that shape how laws are interpreted and how they are implemented.
- [14:56]
B
Right, so moving on in your analysis in this special issue, the initial phase of anti Christian violence is the long period from independence in 1947 until the early 1990s. But throughout this period, Hindu nationalism was still an oppositional movement. Does this mean that Hindutva's current othering of Christians represents a continuity even though the modes of violence have changed?
- [15:24]
A
Yeah. So Christians have always been viewed as an Other or an enemy by Hindu nationalist ideologues and Hindu nationalist groups. However, since the 90s we see that Christians have played a more active role in the wider Hindutva imagination and its othering. The modalities have evolved, as we described, to become more comprehensive, but very much the Christians have taken a more stronger place in this imagination. But it's important to note that this is not uniform across the country. So there's not a uniform approach to dealing with the Christian threat across the country. As Kenneth showed in Kerala and Goa, it takes on different forms. In some ways it is almost more complementary to Christian groups or certain Christian groups. So it's, it shows that Hindutva is not fixed in its approach, even though it comes out as being against, quote, unquote, all Christians. But there is a varied approach taken to different Christian groups in different state contexts. And it's willing to make these compromises perhaps for long term gains or short term electoral gratification.
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B
Okay, so the final question I have. Your special issue presents a very useful bird's eye view of anti Christian violence in India from independence and until today. But if other scholars were to continue the research on anti Christian violence, which sources and perspectives would you advise them to emphasize? I mean, which research gaps, if any, have you discovered in this process?
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C
Well, first let me say that I really hope that there are scholars who would like to do this and who are able to do such research. As we worked on this special issue, we actually lost the paper or two along the way because the authors chose to withdraw from the collaboration for fear of various forms of more or less direct reprasals. So this kind of preemptive self censorship is becoming more, more widespread among academics in India, but I mean, increasingly among academics in many parts of the world, including but not limited to those who work on, on India. Of course, our collection is specifically about studying anti Christian violence and its links to Hindutva. And, and this of course, makes the theme very complicated to engage with, politically speaking. And it may not become any easier in the future, unfortunately.
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A
Yeah, I agree with Kenneth. So what we've done in this special issue is to show how forms of violence operate in different state and local contexts. But moving forward, I think what is needed is more analysis and how violence compares across states and across time to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. This would be useful to also better understand the nature of violence, who the aggressors are, who the victims are, and allow us to build on existing scholarship. Of course, we recognize there are significant challenges to this in terms of collecting this data, classifying this data and publicizing this data. While violence against Muslims rightfully so, has got a lot of attention from scholars. Anti Christian violence, we have hope with this special issue, is an incentive to sort of look more into this phenomenon, to study it deeper, to not only understand this as a phenomenon, but also the trajectory of where the country is going and what could be possible. Future paths.
- [19:05]
B
Sudhir Selvaraj and Kenneth Bunilsen, thank you for this stimulating conversation on your special issue on Anti Christian violence in India, which just appeared in the journal Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. Most of the contributions, including the introduction, is available open access. My name is Katinka Frojstad. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
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A
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.