Chhattisgarh: No grave to lay my head | John Dayal

January 21, 2025

Indian citizens, regardless of their religion, have freedom of dignity in life, and in death, assurances that are seldom kept

In the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, villagers, local authorities and even the state’s High Court have denied a Christian man the right to bury his father’s body in the village graveyard.

There is no peace of the graveyard yet for Subhash Bhaghel who died on Jan. 7 in Chindhwara district in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

In a morbid coincidence entirely lost on India’s ruling elite, the Supreme Court is asked to decide if Bhaghel has the right to be buried in the village graveyard a day before the 26th anniversary of the cruel triple murder of Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his pre-teen sons, Timothy and Phillips, in neighboring Odisha state.

In doing so, the apex court is also expected to call out the bigotry of the Chhattisgarh government’s administrative and police apparatus. Ironically the state’s High Court also told Ramesh Bhaghel that his father had no right to be buried next to his kin in a section of the graveyard allocated for Christians.

Chhattisgarh’s judiciary is not unique in this. In Uttar Pradesh and many other provinces, more than one judge has been accused of bringing their religion into the courtroom, making a mockery of the country’s constitution which declares India to be a secular country in which citizens and visitors can practice the religion of their choice, or no religion if they so wish.

Citizens also have the freedom of dignity in life, and in death, assurances that are not always delivered.

With an overwhelming Hindu majority of close to 80 percent, according to the last national census of 2011, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power since 2014 feeding a trope that Hindus are in danger from Muslims and Christians.

This is a hysteria fed daily by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteers´ Corps), which controls the BJP and scores of other frontal political, social, and cultural organizations reaching down to the village level, drilling millions of cadres, called Swayamsevak’s or volunteers, into vigilante groups enforcing a religious code in conflict with the rule of law.

One such mob of volunteer self-styled protectors of the cow had lynched Staines and his sons by burning them alive as they slept in their jeep in a forest in Odisha after a prayer meeting on the night of Jan. 21, 1999. The lynch squad’s commander, a man named Dara Singh, is serving a life term in prison.

Dozens of young Muslim men have been lynched in recent years, beaten to a pulp, stabbed, or smothered. Few, if any, of their killers have been convicted.

Bhaghel is a member of an indigenous tribe which worships nature. The identity of the tribal people and rights to their land are protected under special provisions in the constitution, as are those of Dalits, the former untouchable castes in Hinduism.

Many tribal people converted to Hinduism, some to Christianity, and very few to Islam or Buddhism over the decades. The ruling BJP and the RSS have been coercing the converts to become Hindus in a political movement called Ghar Wapsi (homecoming).

The government does not think conversion to Hinduism is a crime, while it penalizes conversions to Christianity under the so-called “Freedom of Religion” laws prevalent in a dozen states of the Indian Union.

This law regretfully has been upheld by the Supreme Court, but it is expected to be challenged once again soon as more states enact similar legislation wherever the BJP comes to power.

Irrespective of the anti-conversion law or its absence, RSS cadres still carry out their threats. Many villages, particularly in states such as Chhattisgarh, have ostracised converts to Christianity, denied them drinking water and food supplies, and ensured they do not get employment or even access to their land.

Some daring converts have gone to court and won but found it difficult to live without police protection, not that such protection is any good in a hostile neighborhood.

In the experience of Christians, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh are the top two states which have the highest incidence of Christian persecution. While the perpetrators are free, Uttar Pradesh has over 100 pastors and ordinary Christians in jail under the anti-conversion law for “crimes” that range from offering prayers for a sick person or celebrating a child’s first birthday.

These two states in 2023 saw massive Dharma Sansads, so-called “parliaments of Hindu faith,” where political and religious leaders promised to rid India of the “alien” Christians and Muslims, root and stock. The police filed criminal charges, but no one has been jailed for publicly threatening members of the two religious minorities with genocide.

It did not surprise anyone that the year 2024 saw record violence against Christians in their motherland. Christian monitoring groups have documented some 834 incidents of violence — more than two a day. This is a modest figure as perhaps one in five incidents get reported in the pall of fear that shrouds the countryside.

Sometimes, judges of the highest court show they too can be shocked by what they see. Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma on the bench in Bhaghel’s case seemed mortified when shown photographs of other Christian graves in the village.

Justice Nagarathna, one of the handful of women to have sat on the Supreme Court, caught the government lawyers fumbling by questioning why this issue of a Christian burial was being raised now when several Christian graves existed in the village.

Bhaghel’s counsel, Colin Gonsalves who is one of India’s most respected human rights lawyers, alleged that this was “the beginning of a movement to kick Christians out… by trying to create a precedent where they are saying if you convert, you will have to go out of the village.”

“This is dangerous,” Gonsalves said. Indeed, a grave matter, beyond puns, which would anyway be entirely lost on India’s ruling class in the political environment of the times.

[Courtesy: UCA news]