Anti-Christian Violence in India

By Chad M. Bauman

Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years?

Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians.

Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or "Hinduness," explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501751424

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Religion and Conflict

A series edited by Ron E. Hassner

A list of titles is available at cornellpress.cornell.edu

ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN INDIA

CHAD M. BAUMAN

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Charles Ryerson III (1933–2016), who arranged my marriage with India

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence

2. A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict

3. Everyday Anti-Christian Violence

4. Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men

5. The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The longer a writing project, the more difficult it is to adequately and thoroughly acknowledge the many generous friends and colleagues who in some way contributed to its success and completion. Chronologically speaking, the first person I must thank is Harry van der Linden. Around 2007, when I was contemplating shifting my research focus to the topic of this book, Harry, who was my department chair at Butler University at the time, encouraged it enthusiastically. Were it not for his confidence in the value of such a project, I may have never begun. Soon thereafter, I received a grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) at the University of Southern California, which was funded by the John R. Templeton Foundation. The grant was intended to fund research for a book on anti-Christian violence targeting India’s Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, but its munificence enabled the gathering of data for this one as well. That project also connected me with new friends and colleagues, like Brie Loskota and Dick Flory, who have been valued and supportive interlocutors ever since. CRCC staff also recommended me as a participant to directors of other, related projects, projects that have provided me with continual research funding and collegial support in the intervening years. Among these, I must in particular mention the Christianity & Freedom Project (sponsored by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs) and Under Caesar’s Sword (a project jointly managed by Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and the Religious Freedom Institute, at which I now serve as senior fellow). Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, and Rebecca Shah have been involved in the leadership of all three projects and have been immensely encouraging along the way. Daniel and Timothy both also played critical roles in helping me get this manuscript over the publication finish line. Among funders, I must also acknowledge the American Academy of Religion, which supported an international collaborative research grant that helped James Ponniah and me explore anti-Christian violence in Sri Lanka. Aside from providing an opportunity to spend more time with the inimitable James Ponniah, my regular partner in crime, the grant helped me develop a comparative regional perspective on antiminority violence. To all of these colleagues, project directors, and funders, then, let me express my deepest gratitude.

The American Academy of Religion has been a source of support in other ways, as well, and I have been sustained by stimulating interactions with colleagues there year after year. In particular, I am grateful for those associated (along with me) with the Religious Conversions Group and the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Group. In terms of scholarly companionship, I feel most at home when among friends and colleagues affiliated with the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies and the Conference on the Study of Religions of India. These two organizations promote leading-edge research, but more importantly, they have both created a culture of scholarly friendship and comradery. Among those particularly responsible for that culture, and therefore among my most valued colleagues, are Corinne Dempsey, Eliza Kent, Amy Allocco, Carol Anderson, Brian Pennington, Reid Locklin, Karen Pechilis, and Michelle Voss Roberts. Similarly, while I have known Arun Jones, Jon Paul Sydnor, and Kerry San Chirico since grad school, my appreciation for their fellowship, sustained now for over two decades, grows with every passing year. For the many drinks shared and things learned from people like these, then, I am eternally grateful.

I am grateful as well for the support of research assistants both in India (Naveen John, Yehova Das, and Abel Raj) and at Butler (Ariel Tyring, Katie Harber, Matt Miller, and Stephanie Cheuvront) and for a variety of people who helped me forge contacts and relationships in India. Among them are Mihir Meghani, of the Hindu American Foundation, who put me in touch with R. Venkatanarayanan, former secretary of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. Venkatanarayanan entertained me on multiple occasions and helped me understand the views of his famous and important close associate, the late Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Vijayesh Lal, John Dayal, and Richard Howell not only helped me develop a research network among Christians in India but were also important conversation partners themselves. Other scholars and activists located in India, like Jacob Cherian, Asha Kowtal, Joseph Prabhakar Dayam, Ashok Kumar M., Satish Gyan, Paul Parathazham, and Gyanapragasam Patrick, influenced me in considerable ways with their analyses of Hindu-Christian conflict.

Although I have surely lost track of all those who have read and provided valuable comments on earlier drafts and/or presentations of this work, I would like, in particular, to acknowledge the help of Brian Hatcher, Corinne Dempsey, Rowena Robinson, Sarah Claerhout, Nathaniel Roberts, Robert Frykenberg, Richard Fox Young, Charles Ryerson, Tamara Leech, Reid Locklin, Arun Jones, Brian Pennington, James Ponniah, Sarbeswar Sahoo, Richard Wood, and—at Cornell University Press—Ron Hassner, Roger Malcolm Haydon, and two simply spectacular blind reviewers. This book is immeasurably better due to the contributions of those mentioned here. Ron Hassner additionally increased the beauty of this book by generously contributing toward the cost of photographs.

Butler University supported my research on this project with two funded sabbaticals and a great deal of additional travel and research funding, while also making available the services of a copywriter, John Mugge, who patiently and charitably worked his way through a much longer, rougher, earlier version of the book. Additionally, I have benefitted, throughout my career, from the fact that my department is eminently functional and relatively drama-free, while being also full of colleagues who celebrate the accomplishments of others. I have also benefitted, over the years, from the presence in our department of two enormously capable administrative specialists, Mary Proffitt and Claudia Johnson, who have provided a great deal of friendship and encouragement in addition to so proficiently managing many of the logistical aspects of my work. Outside of the department, I have especially found collegial inspiration from colleagues in the programs of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; International Studies; and Peace and Conflict Studies; and from the Desmond Tutu Center and its successor, the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab (both of which financially supported my research on this project). For providing such a fertile ground for the scholarly life, then, I am grateful to Butler, both in its institutional and in its more human manifestations.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 appeared first in Rowena Robinson and Marianus Kujur’s Margins of Faith (Sage, 2010), and I am indebted to Sage for permission to reprint them in this book. Similarly, some elements of the conclusion were first published in the Journal of Asian Studies. Thanks to the journal and to its publisher, Cambridge University Press, for republication rights.

Many of us in academia write like we’re running out of time, as observers in the musical Hamilton repeatedly say of its title character. In a sense, of course, we are. But as Hamilton himself discovered, no matter how respectable or noble the objective, time given over to ambitious projects also constitutes time stolen from loved ones. I do hope that I have done better at achieving what we now call work-life balance than our nation’s famously ambitious forefather. Nevertheless, I remain keenly aware of the many ways that my devotion to work has affected the lives of my children, Annika and Nadya, my wife, Jodi, and even my parents (Chris and Glenn Bauman) and parents-in-law (Carol and Wade Mullet). To adapt a line from Dickens, I love these people, and it is not a slight thing that they still love me.

ABBREVIATIONS

Map of contemporary India.

Introduction

Anti-Christian Violence in Global Context

The stories are unsettling. A Christian woman finds her husband’s head hanging from a tree in the jungle after he was killed by his cousin and can still not return to her village even years later because her neighbors are angry that she filed a police report in the killing. A Hindu woman, seventy years old, holds her son as he bleeds to death after being cut on his legs, hands, and penis by rioters enraged that he had tried to protect his Christian neighbors. After being gang-raped and paraded through town half-naked, a Catholic nun is molested in the presence of police officers, who sit idly by and talk amiably with her attackers. A Hindu woman is raped repeatedly in the presence of dozens of men shouting pious Hindu slogans, simply because her Christian uncle will not convert to Hinduism. A Christian dalit (a term referring to members of India’s lowest castes) witnesses her niece being raped and handled like a plaything, before suffering the same fate herself.¹ A Christian woman, in terrorized flight from one village to another, watches along with her two young daughters as a small group of men drag, kill, dismember, and burn the corpse of her husband.² Young girls, studying in a Hindu ashram, cower in a corner as their beloved swami is gunned down along with four of his associates on the day of Krishna’s birth. Panic-stricken Christians flee to jungles and crouch in fields where they had once harvested turmeric, a plant traditionally associated, in India, with health, fertility, and protection from evil.

These are stories from Kandhamal, a remote, secluded district in the Indian state of Odisha, where, in 2007 and 2008, a series of devastating riots, largely but not exclusively targeting Christians, led to the destruction of six thousand houses and three hundred churches, dozens of incidents of sexual assault, the murder (officially) of around fifty people, and the displacement of more than fifty thousand.³ While the riots in Kandhamal constitute the most extreme violence ever suffered by India’s Christians, they took place within the context of rising levels of anti-Christian hostility and almost daily incidents of smaller-scale anti-Christian violence. These more regular incidents of violence are only rarely fatal. Much more commonly they involve mild to extreme physical violence, vandalism, theft, or the destruction of Christian property. Though sexual assault was common in the Kandhamal riots, sexual violence is much rarer in the context of the more diffuse, everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence.

Before the end of the twentieth century, however, violence was not a regular feature of Hindu-Christian relations. Historically, Hindu-Christian conflict in India has manifested itself primarily in nonviolent forms, through mutual Hindu and Christian criticism and polemics, for example, or through social pressure brought to bear on those who do not conform to the dominant religious norm of their communities, or through the social and economic competition of communities aligned along the Hindu-Christian religious divide. Since the late 1990s, however, anti-Christian violence has been very much on the rise.

The rising levels of anti-Christian persecution in India coincide with a global increase in religious restrictions and violence against all religions over the last two decades. In just the years from 2007 to 2016, for example, Pew researchers observed the percentage of countries with high or very high levels of government restrictions on religion increase from 20 percent to 28 percent, while the percentage of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities involving religion grew from 20 percent to 27 percent.⁴ The significant increase in anti-Christian hostility and violence in India since 1998 has also coincided with a global rise in specifically anti-Christian hostility. India was but one of 151 countries in which Christians suffered some form of harassment, restricted freedom, or violence in the six years between 2007 and 2013, and from 2007 to 2016, the number of countries in which Christians were harassed or discriminated against by the government grew from 79 to 114, while the number of countries in which Christians faced social harassment and discrimination (instead of or in addition to what they faced from the government) grew from 74 to 107.⁵ This trend shows no signs of reversing; the Christian advocacy group, Open Doors, contends that the percentage of Christians persecuted worldwide in the 50 countries it monitors annually increased by 14 percentage points in the last year alone (from 2018 to 2019).⁶

The nature and causes of anti-Christian harassment, discrimination, and violence vary globally. In 1998, Indonesia’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy paved the way for majoritarian Muslim movements, some of them intolerant and intent on imposing shari’a-inspired laws even on non-Muslim citizens, and others organizing themselves into violent paramilitaries that contributed to the death of over ten thousand people in communal violence between 1999 and 2003.⁷ Christians in communist China and Vietnam have known many periods of official repression, but since the mid- to late 1990s, the governments of both countries have engaged in coercive and sometimes violent attempts to manage, contain, and impede the growth of Christianity, particularly in its evangelical and Pentecostal varieties.⁸ Nigeria’s transition to democracy in 1999 allowed for the democratically approved imposition of shari’a law in northern states, leading to simmering interreligious tensions that have boiled over into massive communal violence since the mid-2000s.⁹ The 2003, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq led to widespread anti-Christian violence there and provoked the beginning of a massive outflow of Iraqi Christians. The later emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been even more devastating, and in Syria, Christians were threatened by ISIS, until its decline, and other rebel groups who faulted them for siding with Asad (whose authoritarian rule had kept a lid on antiminority violence) in that nation’s civil war.¹⁰ At around the same time, anti-Christian sentiment and violence increased in Sri Lanka, as Buddhist nationalists gained ground and consolidated their efforts to emasculate or eradicate the island nation of its non-Sinhalese and non-Buddhist communities.¹¹ Pakistan’s Christians have also seen an increase in social discrimination and violence in the last two decades, as well as the broader, more regular, and more capricious application of long-standing antiblasphemy laws to Christians and other minorities.¹² Since the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a military coup, Egypt’s Christian communities have begun to have similar experiences, prompting as many as 350,000 to emigrate in the period between 2011 and 2013.¹³

Even the meager details provided in the preceding paragraph highlight important differences among these cases. India is not a communist country like China or Vietnam, for example; nor has the increase in anti-Christian hostility in India been linked to processes of democratization, as has been the case in Indonesia and Nigeria. Nevertheless, while the intent of this book is to explain, analyze, and theorize anti-Christian discrimination and violence in India, one larger question is whether and to what extent the explanations, analyses, and theories I provide for the Indian context may be useful to help explain this more global rise in anti-Christian hostility or the more general increase in antireligious hostility and interreligious violence over the last decades. I return to that question in the conclusion of this volume.

In India, while Christians on occasion attack Hindus, as they did in the context of the Kandhamal riots, the vast majority of the violence between Hindus and Christians in contemporary India targets Christians. Large-scale and deadly riots like those that took place in Kandhamal receive significant attention from national and international media. What is less widely covered, however, and therefore less widely known, both in India and abroad, is the occurrence of hundreds of smaller-scale, more isolated incidents of violence against India’s Christians every year. Taking a variety of factors into consideration, I estimate, on grounds discussed in chapter 3, that such incidents take place about 350 times a year, or approximately once a day.¹⁴ For this and other reasons, I refer to this phenomenon as everyday anti-Christian violence. While the book examines both everyday incidents of anti-Christian violence and the kind of larger-scale riot violence that affected Kandhamal, it is both useful and important to distinguish, analytically, between them.

Because the everyday forms of violence against Christians go largely unnoticed, when incidents of anti-Christian violence do garner international media attention, those who learn about them outside of India are often shocked and mystified, in part because of the tolerance and peacefulness that many romantically associate with Gandhi, with Hinduism, with yoga (in its many popularized forms), and therefore with India and its citizens. This mystification was apparent in December 2014 and January 2015 when half a dozen Catholic institutions were attacked in Delhi, where at least in several cases anti-Christian sentiment (as opposed to mere thievery) was the prime motivation. In the same period, regional and national organizations associated with the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar¹⁵ (or Sangh, with which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] is itself associated) engaged in a series of highly publicized ghar wapsi (homecoming) ceremonies intended to convert Muslims and Christians back to the Hindu fold. Praveen Togadia, the firebrand leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council [VHP]), a central Sangh organization, declared that in fact all Indian Christians and Muslims had originally been Hindu but had been lured away through acts of coercion and enticements of various kinds, and he pledged that the VHP would make India 100 percent Hindu. Rajeshwar Singh, the leader of a regional Sangh organization, promised to complete the effort by 2021.

Such a goal would not be particularly controversial—after all, its mimetic appropriation of well-publicized Christian attempts to Christianize the world by the year 2000 is obvious—except for the fact that the reconversions came on the heels of the BJP’s resounding national electoral victory in 2014 (duplicated and bettered in 2019), which seemed to have emboldened Sangh activists while striking fear in the hearts of India’s religious minorities and those who advocate for their rights. The controversy was additionally fanned by news reports about the ghar wapasi ceremonies alleging duplicity (e.g., the Christians converting were really Hindus), inducement (e.g., those reconverting had been promised cash or other benefits), coercion, and the publication of salacious stories about internal Sangh squabbles and other unflattering shenanigans related to the reconversion affair. And then, in the midst of it all, various Sangh leaders renewed calls for a national law that would ban or curtail conversion. One BJP member of Parliament (MP) even suggested that conversion, along with cow slaughter, ought to carry the death penalty.¹⁶

Highly placed BJP leaders attempted to distance the party from the attacks and the reconversion ceremonies and even declared that the BJP would not put forward an anticonversion law without the (very highly unlikely) support of opposition parties. Nevertheless, the silence of the party’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, troubled India’s religious minorities and raised doubts about the government’s position. Supporters of Modi’s government offered that the prime minister refrained from comment in order to not deflect attention from his development platform. Of course, the fact that Modi was a longtime leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS, perennially one of the most controversial and aggressive of the organizations within the Sangh) and that many continue to suspect him of at least tacitly condoning a series of bloody anti-Muslim riots that in 2002 left hundreds dead in the state of Gujarat (which he governed at the time) gave minorities a legitimate reason to interpret his silence in more sinister ways.

Visiting India in the midst of Modi’s silence, in late January 2015, U.S. president Barak Obama indirectly addressed the issue, declaring, among other comments, India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith.¹⁷ Perhaps feeling pressured by external or internal forces such as these, Modi did eventually break his silence on February 17, when he addressed a crowd of Christians, saying, My government will ensure that there is complete freedom of faith and that everyone has the undeniable right to retain or adopt the religion of his or her choice without coercion or undue influence. My government will not allow any religious group to incite hatred against others, overtly or covertly. Mine will be a government that gives equal respect to all religions. He added, We cannot accept violence against any religion on any pretext, and I strongly condemn such violence. My government will act strongly in this regard.¹⁸ The VHP and other Sangh organizations tried desperately to spin the prime minister’s words as a condemnation of Christian proselytization, and indeed Christians were troubled by the fact that Modi omitted a promise to ensure the freedom to proselytize. Nevertheless, many Christians were grateful that the prime minister had at least broken his silence on the matter.

Reporting on these events, many news outlets, both within India and elsewhere, wrote of an increase, rise, spike in, or slew of, anti-Christian attacks and controversies in India since Modi’s January 2014 election, giving the impression that they were in some sense unusual, an aberration, and clearly related to BJP rule. But to me, and surely to all other consistent observers of contemporary Hindu-Christian relations in India, they appeared, rather, as more of the same, and not at all unlike the kinds of attacks and controversies that had taken place during the previous decade when India was ruled by the more secularist and pro-minority Congress Party, with the exception that the Congress Party, now in the opposition, had incentive to publicize and protest the attacks for political gain, as they did when their MPs, along with those of other opposition parties, protested so vociferously in late December that the parliament itself had to be shut down. Far from being an aberration, then, the events and controversies of late 2014 and early 2015 represent something more like an intensification of a far more widespread and deeply entrenched problem, one that has developed over several centuries within a discernible historical trajectory traced within the pages of this book. It is to make this point, more than any other, and to provide this context that I offer this book.

Aims and Limitations

Paying adequate attention to both the contemporary manifestations and historical construction of Hindu-Christian conflict requires an interdisciplinary approach. Accordingly, the book pilfers unapologetically from the methods and theories of history, anthropology, religious studies, and political science. Scholars in the latter two of these disciplines (religious studies and political science) are prone to talking impertinently past one another, which is unfortunate, as Ron Hassner has argued, because interreligious conflicts are related to both politics and religion, and to understand and mitigate such conflicts requires the involvement and investment of both religious and political leaders.¹⁹ The problems that religion scholars and political scientists have conversing with one another is no doubt related both to the post-Enlightenment Western tendency to think of religion and politics as easily disentangled and preferably distinct, but it also derives from the tendency of religion scholars to take religion seriously—sometimes naively so—a methodological orientation that grates against that of many political scientists, influenced as they are by the Marxist tradition to think of religious beliefs as epiphenomenal, a mere mask or justification for the real motivations lying behind human behavior.

This book attempts to speak the language of both religious studies and political science, and it does so in part by adopting a constructivist approach to the analysis of Hindu-Christian conflict. In chapter 1, I more fully describe the distinctive nature of this approach relative to the well-developed literature on ethnic and religious conflict. For the introduction, suffice it to say that the constructivist approach differs from both the instrumentalist and essentialist (or primordialist) approach to interreligious conflict in important ways, though the lines dividing these approaches are often quite misty and nebulous. To put it simply, in the instrumentalist view, conflict between groups occurs as a result of competition over material resources and political power, either as individuals pursue their own interests or as they are convinced by political entrepreneurs to pursue the interests of some collective. In the essentialist view, conflict between groups occurs because of long-standing, stable (primordial) differences between those groups in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, social custom, culture, and political governance.²⁰

The constructivist position, as I understand and employ it, accepts from instrumentalist orientations the insight that human behavior is primarily driven by material and political interest. However, noting the regularity with which conflicts organize themselves along the fault lines of preexisting ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups (as opposed to class), a regularity that is not easily explained in the instrumentalist view, constructivists accept as important the essentialist insistence on the significance and enduring influence of culture. At the same time, recognizing that essentialists find it difficult to explain why distinct groups only conflict at certain times and places (and not others), constructivists desire to explore the particular social and historical processes (both local and global) by which a particular group comes into conflict with another group in a particular time and place, as well as the processes by which such conflict comes to be framed or interpreted as religious or ethnic (or something else).

To do so in the case of Hindu-Christian conflict is, accordingly, one of the primary aims of the book, and chapter 2 provides a historical exposition on the development of Hindu-Christian conflict, or, to be more precise, a historical exposition on how certain conflicts in India came to be understood as religious conflicts between Hindus and Christians. Such an understanding, as chapter 2 demonstrates, developed only after well more than a millennium of Christian history in India.

A related second aim of this book is to emphasize—as constructivists are prone—the world-historical forces that played and continue to play a role in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict. Several of these forces, like colonization and globalization, are well known, though this book provides a much needed, detailed articulation of how precisely they have contributed to the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict over time. The point of emphasizing world-historical factors in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict is not to deny the role of local interests and politics nor to exonerate the perpetrators of interreligious violence. Rather, the point is to make clear that local individuals, interests, and politics exist in a far more complex and global context. Local groups compete with one another for material and political resources all the time. Attending to both local and global factors helps us explain why particular groups come into conflict, why at a particular time, and why in a particular way. Why, then, is there conflict between Hindus and Christians in contemporary India? There are many reasons, of course. An important one, however, is the resistance of some Hindus to what they perceive as the undesirable but inexorable global diffusion of certain (but not all) modern, secular ideals, as aided by processes of globalization over which Western peoples, governments, and institutions appear to have the greatest control. Christianity, in this view, is inextricably embroiled in the diffusion of these ideals as both beneficiary and transmitter.

A third aim of the book is to demonstrate that Hindu-Christian conflict now, at the end of these local and world-historical processes, is not the result of religious difference per se but rather the result of a framing of Hindu and Christian, primarily by Hindu nationalists, as indexes of total ways of life (Hinduness, or Hindutva, as opposed to what I call Christianness) that are incompatible with one another. For simplicity, and for heuristic reasons explained in chapter 1, I refer to the way of life that Hindu nationalists accuse Christians of espousing and perpetuating—this Christianness—as Western secular modernity, though I do so primarily in the plural—modernities—to make it clear that there are multiple, contested varieties of Western modernity. This way of life both characterizes and is diffused around the world by globalization, another term I use as a heuristic simplification, as described in the conclusion. What is important to emphasize, in this process, is that the construction of Hindutva as normative Hinduism in competition with Christianity, constructed as part and parcel of the project of Western secular modernity, is a construction that comes at the end of a long historical process that began in a time when none of these constructions would have made any sense.

Thinking of Hindu-Christian conflict in these terms has several advantages. First, it helps us recognize that Hindu-Christian conflict is religious but not in the particulars of Hindu versus Christian belief and practice so much as in disparate understandings of what religion is and should be (e.g., universal versus ethnic, proselytizing versus nonproselytizing, portable versus space based, privatized versus part and parcel of a total public way of life, and so on). This element of Hindu-Christian conflict has not been adequately recognized or explored by Western scholars investigating the issue, and I suspect it is because many of them are blind to it because they themselves unconsciously accept and operate within a Western secular framework. This blind spot, incidentally, is one that afflicts both political scientists and scholars of religion alike.

A second advantage of thinking of Hindu-Christian conflict in these terms is that it encourages attention to both material/political interests and culture, thereby transcending the instrumentalist-essentialist divide. One of the reasons that Western secular modernities are resisted by the traditional elites who constitute the overwhelming majority of Hindu nationalist opponents of Christianity is of course because they perpetuate ideals that are a threat to the authority and privilege of those traditional Hindu elites (e.g., equality, secularism, individualism, merited versus ascriptive status, etc.). However, Hindu nationalists also perceive in Western secular modernity a threat to certain of their most fondly regarded cultural values. Chief among these is tolerance.

It is beyond historical dispute that there has been a long if inconsistent and imperfect history of tolerance for divergent religious pathways in India. In the view of many Hindus and particularly Hindu nationalists, this tradition of tolerance derived from the nature of Hinduism itself (or Indian religions more broadly). Certainly, the tradition of tolerance in India was made possible in part because of the fact that many Indian religious leaders have since ancient times proposed an understanding of other religions best captured by the phrase made popular more recently by Gandhi and others: sarva dharma sambhava (often translated in English as equal respect to all religions). As is true of most forms of tolerance, however, India’s particular variety has limits and struggles to accommodate such proselytizing religions as Christianity and Islam, which in their assertive universalism are perceived to contravene the spirit of sarva dharma sambhava, to the extent that some contemporary proponents of Hindutva suggest that such religions should not be considered dharmas at all (dharma is the word in sarva dharma sambhava that is usually translated as religion). Take, for example, the view of the early RSS leader, M. S. Golwalkar:

When words like dharma and spirituality are uttered, [back] comes the remark: Why do you bring religion into politics? This question stems from a misunderstanding of our concept of dharma and confusing it with the Western concept of religion. The Western countries suffered for centuries because of their dogmatic concept of religion and the control of the state by the church. Our concept of dharma is as different from that as cheese is from chalk. Dharma or spirituality is not a dogma but a view of life in its totality. It is not a separate sphere of national life just as political or economic spheres. Spirituality is, in our view, a comprehensive vision of life that should inform and elevate and correlate all fields of society for the fulfilment of human life in all its facets. It is the sap of our national tree, the life-breath of our national entity.²¹

If religions like Christianity and Islam are not properly dharmic, in this view, they do not merit equal respect or rights. Indeed, the disparate and contested meanings assigned to the terms dharma and religion reflect different understandings of what religion is and should be, as suggested above, and therefore lie at the very heart of contemporary conflict between Hindus and Christians.

This, then, leads naturally to the third advantage of emphasizing that Hindu nationalist rejections of Western secular modernity are at least one factor in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict: doing so makes it quite clear why proselytization (which I take to mean activity intended expressly to convert another to one’s faith) has become such a flash point in the relations of Hindus and Christians. In the view of Hindu nationalists, proselytization is a rejection of the traditional Hindu culture of tolerance and thereby (in the understanding of nationalists) a rejection of Indian culture itself. But here again, in addition to cultural concerns we also find material and political interests operative, since to the extent that conversions provoked by proselytization lead (or could lead) to a numerical increase in the number of Christians in India, and to the extent that those Christians are bearers of certain ideals of Western secular modernities, the authority and power of the traditional elites who most regularly support Hindu nationalism in India could be challenged or undermined by the proselytization of Christians. Whether or not it reflects sincere belief, then, suggesting that desirable and proper religions (or dharmas) are nonproselytizing also very conveniently serves to maintain the hegemony of traditional Hindu elites.

It is important to note that there are several things that my theoretical emphasis on resistance to Western secular modernities as one aspect of Hindu-Christian conflict cannot accomplish. First, it cannot and does not displace the reality that other factors play a role, perhaps even a much more significant one, as discussed below. Resistance to Western secular modernities may be an aspect of the motivation for anti-Christian violence in contemporary India, but it is surely not a sufficient cause in and of itself.

Second, the element of hostility toward Western secular modernities cannot be isolated and investigated alone. It is not possible to perfectly disentangle Sangh hostility toward Christianity from Sangh hostility toward Western secular modernities. And the reason for this—as implied by my use of the term Christianness, above—is that most Sanghis and indeed most Indian Hindus do not naturally perceive a clear distinction between what most Westerners would distinguish as the religious and the political. Because of this, many Hindus presume an intimate link between Christianity/Christians and the Western secular modernities they helped birth and now directly and indirectly, knowingly and unknowingly, promote. Similarly, criticism of proselytization is not merely a criticism of Christianity but rather also of the sociocultural system it presumes and requires (e.g., one regarding religion as private, an individual affair, and portable).

Many Western scholars will insist that my conceptual framework lacks clarity because it cannot easily disentangle religious from other cultural, political, or economic factors in the construction of Hindu-Christian conflict. However, this insistence, in my view, exposes an acceptance of the Western secular vision (and its presumption to be able to keep religion and politics distinct) as normative, an acceptance that may prevent scholars from hearing the Sangh’s critique of Christianity as I do, that is, as a more holistic critique of a totalistic, competing religio-politico-cultural system.

To properly hear the Sangh Parivar’s critique of Christianity as part of a broader effort to preserve Hindu culture by resisting certain kinds of secular modernities, one must listen with Sangh ears, so to speak. As I explain more fully in chapter 1, the earliest Sangh ideologues articulated an argument that remains influential today. According to that argument, religion informs and is part and parcel of a civilizational nexus that includes culture, politics, and economics. Western forms of secularism, which attempt to remove religion from politics and other areas of life, are therefore based on an incorrect and naively minimalist understanding of religion. Additionally, the strength of any nation lies in its distinctive but comprehensive integration of religion, culture, and politics. For this reason, Western forms of secularism are a threat to the Indian nation both because they seek to differentiate religion from other aspects of civilization and because of their universalizing pretensions (as a result of which they do not respect individual nations’ distinct ways of life). Because the inseparability of religion and culture/politics/economics applies not only to India but everywhere else as well, Christianity cannot be disentangled from the Western secular modernities it helped spawn. For early Sangh critics like Golwalkar, then, Christianity and these secular modernities were just different facets of the same civilization, one that was a competitor and threat to Hindu civilization, or Hindutva. Resistance to the