It is clear that there is a campaign of terror, not necessarily coordinated, underway against selected minorities in India. This has serious implications for the country´s democratic polity, one which has taken a definitive turn towards the presumptuous right ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power two years ago.
A few days before his death in an accident, the late Bishop of Delhi Alan Basil de Lastic had described the attacks and hate campaign as the "most serious challenge facing the [Christian] community since Independence". A crisis indeed, not only for that one beleaguered community but also for India´s secular and pluralistic traditions. A few weeks later, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray had the gall to say that India would burn if the Maharashtra government went ahead with his prosecution for alleged acts of incitement in the Bombay riots that followed the demolition of Babri Masjid. The statements, contrasted, reflect the heightened insecurity of the minority communities, most particularly Muslims and Christians.
Both civil society and the State, with its constitutional authority, have failed to adequately address the rapidly growing intolerance expressed in neo-fascist aggression. The Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief K.S. Sudarshan issued a warning earlier in the year of "an epic war between Hindus and anti-Hindu forces". The one-sided battle seems to have begun, and alarmingly, there have been far too few calls for restraint. Instead, we have a studied silence and, if at all, attempts at deliberate obfuscation of the issues. Some say that the incidents of terror are essentially retaliations for religious conversions carried out with "inducement and enticement". Some of the incidents are being written off as nothing more than "cases of robbery and assault with no religious motive".
There are two points to be made, relating to the constitutional role of the state and the out-of-control nationalistic jingoism. Some within the BJF seem to believe that the state would do better to withdraw from its role as the guarantor of rights of minorities, seen as pampered, appeased. Meanwhile, the neo-fascist rhetoric of nationalism treats the minorities as the enemies within, as subversive and antinational. It was in this vein, for example, that the ´state convenor´ of the Bajrang Dal for Uttar Pradesh announced in late July that his group would begin to keep watch on all Muslims in the state, and track the travels and phone calls they made overseas, to deter "anti-national" activities.