Christian persecution peaks every year at Christmas time. On an average, Christians allege during Modi era as Prime Minisier of India they face about 400 attacks a year.
The states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka are the worst impacted by right wing Hindu violence.
This year, on Christmas Day, there were at least seven attacks on churches or Christian groups in the states of Haryana, Karnataka, Assam, among others.
The small Christian community here is reeling under a fusillade of Sangh extremist violence against churches, statues of Christ, and as always, against children, women and men deep in worship, and perhaps singing lullabies to the new-born Yesu.
Social media pops up with evens For the record, at least 300 cases of such violence were recorded primarily from Karnataka, which is enacting an anti-conversion law targeting Muslims and Christians, Assam which saw such communal violence in recent years.
Below events were the specific acounts Christmas Day incidents of violence:
1. Sangh Parivar activists burned the effigy of Santa Claus shouting Santa Claus Murdabad in Agra, UP
2. Protests were held in front of Matridham Ashram, Varanasi, UP, and slogans were raised against the church.
3. Haryana Bajrang Dal activists protested at Christian schools where celebrations were being held on Christmas.
4. ‘Hanuman chalisa’, a Hindu chant, was played by zealots in Kurukshetra, Haryana, on a stage set up for Christmas celebrations
5. Statue of the Holy Redeemer was vandalised in Ambala, Haryana.
6. Christmas celebration was disrupted in Pataudi, Gurugram, Haryana
7. Bajrang Dal activists stormed a church in Silchar, Assam, during the midnight Mass
8. Christmas celebrations were interrupted by right wing Hindu groups at Nirmala school, Mandya, Karnataka.
After Narendra Modi become PM , Right wing Hindutva forces have been empowered and strengthened, and the state is actively conniving with them.
Often, the police and lower judiciary are also complicit. This had never happened, and at such a scale, ever in the past, even when the BJP was in power between 1998-2004 with Atal Behari Vajpayee as Prime minster allege Christian institutions who are minorities in India.
The prime Print and TV medias in India remain to refrain from reporting news that bring humiliation to BJP led Union government ..
Here it is to be noted Prime Media in India refuse to speak on the plight of Christian minorities and the press freedom index continuously deteriorating 142 Rank out of 180 countries as India goes below in rank much worse than neighbour Srilanka and Afghanistan
The report published in Press freedom Index rank site states below :
With four journalists killed in connection with their work in 2020, India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists trying to do their job properly.
They are exposed to every kind of attack, including police violence against reporters, ambushes by political activists, and reprisals instigated by criminal groups or corrupt local officials.
Ever since the general elections in the spring of 2019, won overwhelmingly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, pressure has increased on the media to toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line.
Indians who espouse Hindutva, the ideology that gave rise to radical right-wing Hindu nationalism, are trying to purge all manifestations of “anti-national” thought from the public debate.
The coordinated hate campaigns waged on social networks against journalists who dare to speak or write about subjects that annoy Hindutva followers are terrifying and include calls for the journalists concerned to be murdered.
The campaigns are particularly violent when the targets are women. Criminal prosecutions are meanwhile often used to gag journalists critical of the authorities, with some prosecutors invoking Section 124a of the penal code, under which “sedition” is punishable by life imprisonment.
In 2020, the government took advantage of the coronavirus crisis to step up its control of news coverage by prosecuting journalists providing information at variance with the official position.
The situation is still very worrying in Kashmir, where reporters are often harassed by police and paramilitaries and must cope with utterly Orwellian content regulations, and where media outlets are liable to be closed, as was the case with the valley’s leading daily, the Kashmir Times.
