A Matter of Equity: Freedom of Faith in Secular India

The pieces in this volume constitute roughly two genres, if I may describe them so.  One is an introspection or analysis of Church and Society in India, and the other is in the nature of a Christian response to persecution and the hate campaigns of the fundamentalist Hindutva Parivar, the Brotherhood in Saffron consisting of the Bharatiya Janata Party which one ruled India and still rules many states, and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh which makes no bones about its genetic links with Hitler’s Nazis.  Together, these pieces were meant to inform, even provoke.  Sometimes I succeeded.  Sometimes not.  But I would like to think they are relevant today as they were in the week of their publication in presenting a Christian Civil Society activist’s view of an India he loves.  I have added an Appendix of Select Readings which I hope will help readers unfamiliar with the Indian reality to better relate to what I have written.  I must add here that I make a sharp distinction between the Hindus of India, and those who profess and practice the ideology of Hindutva.  The Hindu is as peaceful as the Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsee, and Jew, atheist or animist in this country.  The Hindutva ideologue and activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its agencies such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram or the Bajrang Dal is as much a bigot and terrorist as a member of any other fundamentalist terror group anywhere in the world which believes in violence as the means to impress its design on society and the body politic.