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The funeral service was held in the courtyard of the Baptist Union Church in Baripada, where Graham Staines had been a member of the congregation and an occasional preacher. Some mourners watched from the roof of the leprosy clinic were he had worked.
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A continued wave of violence against Christians became lethal late January this year as members of Bajrang Dal, a radical Hindu group, burned an Australian missionary and his two sons to death as they slept in a jeep in eastern India. Nearly 100 attackers pelted the jeep with stones, breaking the windows, and beat up people who tried to help.
Graham Stewart Stains, 58, who had been working with leprosy victims in India for 34 years, and his sons, Philips, 10, and Timothy, 8, died in the fire shortly after midnight January 22.
The attack took place outside the village of Manoharpur, in the Keonjhar District of Orissa, 620 miles southeast of New Delhi, near a makeshift church. Stains' group had been holding a five-day program of Bible-reading and prayer in the village, as they have for the past 20 years.
Every day hundreds of Christian missionaries visit India's poor in remote areas, bringing basic necessities like food and medicine. Many of the educational and hospital facilities of India have been set up and run by the Christian community.
Nearly every member of the English-speaking Indian elite has acquired his or her education in missionary-run institutions. When Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen prescribed higher literacy rates as a remedy for poverty, Hindu fundamentalists saw in it a foreign plot to promote Christian missionary activity in this country.
These kinds of Christian activities have ignited violence on an unprecedented scale in recent months, sending tremors of terror through their community. Churches have been burned and nuns raped as a small fringe of right-wing Hindu activists accuse Christian missionaries of seeking forcible religious conversions. In the face of this, church leaders say they will brave the attacks and have no plans to stop their work.
And the violence has not been easing up. The United Christian Forum for Human Rights says it has recorded more than 60 cases of violence against Christians in India in the past year. This compares to about 40 cases between 1964 and 1996.
In early December, millions of Christians all over India held a peace rally protesting the violence. Church leaders submitted a memorandum to parliament and the government, requesting action to stop the violence, but the violence continued with several attacks on the Christian community around the Christmas season with churches being burned, and schools and hospitals attacked with many injured by stone-throwers.
Residents of Gujarat state's Dangs district say activist groups have been emboldened by the Bhartiya Janata Party's (a Hindu Party) accession to power at the head of a coalition government in this secular nation. Gujarat state is also headed by a BJP government.
But Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee (BJP) has denied his party and government had anything to do with the attacks and stressed that the attackers would be punished by the law.
On the other side, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, a sister organization to the BJP, feels that the violence began with an emboldened Christian population. gThe attitude of Christians has changed in the last six months, they have become more forceful from the time Sonia Gandhi became Congress [a politcal party] leader,h VHP spokesman Ramnath Ojha said. Sonia Gandhi is a Roman Catholic.
Hindu activists accuse Christians of converting the poor by force, such as using the promise of employment. But missionaries say they are only offering charity. Hindu right-wing activists have repeatedly said the violence is retaliation against forced conversions by Christians. The VHP, which like the BJP is considered an ideological offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS), denies instigating such violence, but its leaders mince no words in criticizing Christian evangelists.
In early January this year, Prime Minister Vajpayee called for a national debate on religious conversion. BJP vice-president K.L. Sharma told a news conference in the southern city of Madras that the debate should focus on the issue of forced conversion as against conversion by conviction.
Some Christian groups, however, see this as a move to call attention away from the violence and are calling for the Prime Minister to address the violence against Christians directly.
German Ambassador Heinrich-Dietrich Dieckmann has stated that, gThe first aspect which comes to mind is the Indian image problem. India used to have a secular, tolerant peace-loving image abroad. This issue has already done damage for the image of India.h
The Prime Minister may be bending. He was seen as-and elected because-people felt his relatively moderate position would keep him out of trouble. There are now signs that he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the fundamentalism of the RSS and its agenda, and may move towards distancing himself from the group. Yesterday, Vajpayee had announced the Bharat Ratna, the nation's highest civilian award for Amartya Sen who has not only been vocal against the neglect of education in India but also champions a multi-religious, plural society.
Over 80 percent of India's population is Hindu-a little over 2 percent is Christian.
Please see the following article as well as the Ecumenical News section for more information on the present situation in India.
| More...India:Reactions to Graham Stains' Death |
| Next Article:India:The Church's reaction to violence |
