“It was with keen and eager expectation that I picked up and perused Chad M Bauman’s Anti-Christian Violence in India (originally published by Cornell University Press, 2020). The book is a timely contribution to understanding an issue of extreme significance not just to the Indian Christian community but also to the secular-democratic fabric of India itself. Much has indeed been written on the subject, but a dispassionate view, on which remedial thinking may be based, is rare to come by. The book under review, I expected, would fill that vacuum.The book has many strengths. It is not the task of a reviewer to expatiate on all of them exhaustively. His/her remit is to raise expectations, or signal caution, as the case might be, in relation to what might be expected of the work examined. Anti-Christian Violence in India is a well-researched and tightly argued work on a polyphonous and emotive issue, complicated further by proximity in time. The academic rigour the author maintains is laudable, except that the theoretical framework he labours to evolve could seem cumbersome, and loosely meshed with the empirical meat of the book, to non-specialist readers.The academic strength of the work is also its weakness. What most academics do is to fix a theoretical framework and then squeeze available data into its Procrustean metrics. Or, the lens is fixed, and the field of vision adjusted accordingly. Professor Bauman proffers the constructivist approach, as against the instrumentalist and essentialist. From that point of view, the foremost cause for anti-Christian violence is, according to him, that Indian Christians are the purveyors of secular-liberal, western ideals and values, perceived to be subversive by the Hindu elite, who, in self-defence, resort to violence.This queer conclusion stems, very likely, from the academic pressure to ‘say something new’, or to add a different note to the extant understanding of an issue. The result is that there develops, and escalates, a tension between the chosen theoretical framework and the empirical narrative the author portrays with patient skillfulness. The narrative core of the book is the Khandamal anti-Christian riots of 2007-2008, the worst of the many inflicted on Christians in India. The interpretative nexus between the anatomy of these riots and the theoretical outlook the author embraces remain somewhat obtuse. The ‘original’ contribution that Professor Bauman purports to make is the hypothesis that Hindus, or those who act on their behalf, are hostile to Indian Christians because they are the ‘primary beneficiaries and purveyors of western modernities in India’ (p. 60).As an Indian Christian priest-pedagogue-activist, who has endeavoured lifelong to understand and ameliorate the plight of the vast majority of Christians in India—as against the minuscule Christian elite—I read the author’s statements like, ‘Christians are perceived both as globalisation’s primary purveyors and its cardinal beneficiaries’ (p. 109) with bemused incredulity. The author produces no evidence to substantiate this notion, even though it is the lynchpin of his treatment. He continues: ‘Violence against Christians is a response to the perception that Christians benefit unfairly from their ostensibly greater access to Western education and wealth and that they are thereby competitive to a degree not warranted by their numbers’ (p. 138). In my four decades of involvement in this field, and the interactions I have had with many in secular and Hindutva camps, I haven’t heard such a thing. The ground reality tells a different story. Christians in India, barring those in Kerala and the Northeast, unlike their religious leaders and institutional coteries, are as backward socially, economically and educationally as Muslims. Certainly so in the North Indian States, where at least 75% of Christians are Dalit. The Muslim community has its niche in the political map of India. The Christian community has, in most places, only a shadowy existence. The author reiterates his hypothesis ever and anon. ‘Yet it remains my contention that part of what fuels distaste for Christians especially for the upper-caste and other traditional Indian elites, is that Christians are justifiably associated with the introduction and promotion of Western secular modernities’ (p. 209). I can cite a host of other, similar assertions. I am quite certain that Professor Bauman would not have contrived this conclusion but for his keenness to say something different to what others have.Most Indians know that Christians are not the pioneers and beneficiaries of globalization, liberalization and privatization. Further, that Christian educational institutions do not peddle any western ideologies or cultural agendas. A vast majority of them have compromised their Christian character and are indistinguishable from those run by others, but for their Christian names. What provokes social and public resentment against them is the corruption and arrogance of those who run them. There is a correlation between the increase in anti-Christian violence and the declining respect the general society used to feel towards Christians. This is a price that the Indian Christian community has to pay for the decay and degeneration of their religious leaders and institutional stakeholders in education and health.For all the extensive reading and research the author has done—for which we cannot but be grateful to him—it doesn’t seem to have come to his attention, what even a college sophomore knows, that the foremost charge against Christians and Muslims is that they are communal, not ‘modern’, or ‘secular’, or ‘pro-globalization’ or ‘pro-western in their ideals and values’. Muslims are decidedly anti-modern. Yet, they are the prime target of communal violence in India. Christians are not opposed to globalization and westernization; but the Christian community is, in no way, an enviable beneficiary of its perks. The Hindu elite outstrips them by far in this respect. The latter are the sponsors and beneficiaries of globalization, as is evident from the formidable alliance between Hindutva and corporate India. Indian Christians offer no worthwhile economic or political competition to anyone. Intellectually, culturally and socially, the Indian Christian community has lost, rather than gained, grounds during this period.A strange assumption that the author harbours is that by complicating an issue or situation one gets closer to the truth of it! ‘Mine is not an attempt to simplify but rather to complicate the theorisation of Hindu-Christian conflict’ (p. 13). He does so in the hope that ‘doing so brings us closer to the truth about that conflict’ (pp. 13-14). I’d rather agree with Gandhi’s view in his autobiography that truth can be, indeed needs to be, accessible no less to children than to adults and scholars. Simple folks in India know that communal riots are weapons, or tools of violence. It is used as per need. As the dictum goes, communal riots happen ‘when the state wills it’.Even so, I’d recommend this book to those who are willing to be proactive, rather than passive, in reading it. The worth of this book is not in the hypothesis it pushes, but in providing the material on the basis of which readers may undertake their own explorations. The author succeeds in alerting the reader to the extent and gravity of the issue. This is invaluable, given how co-opted and wilfully blind the Indian media has become.I would commend this book especially to church leaders. It is common knowledge that conversion is the main catalyst of anti-Christian sentiments in India. The author’s account does not exaggerate the extent of atrocities inflicted on poor and vulnerable Christians, a vast majority of whom are first-generation converts to Christianity. Yet, the Indian Christian community has not bothered to examine the conversion project objectively. This is because every church leader knows that conversion—which is seen by Hindus as scalp-hunting or religious poaching—cannot be justified on rational or factual grounds. The strange thing is that it cannot be justified, strictly speaking, even on religious grounds. The only time Jesus talked about conversions, he denounced it. The legal defence of it, based on Article 25 of the Constitution, is becoming less and less convincing.Consider this strange thing. Christians are alleged to have unleashed the conversion war on Hinduism ‘to eradicate it from the land of its birth’. It is understandable if that apprehension persists. National seminars and global consultations used to be held in India on ‘winning India for Christ by 2000’. Quixotic declarations and projections were aired. The Joshua Project, to which the author refers, is a case in point. This was deemed righteous by Christians, even as each denomination remained suspicious and vigilant against being poached into numerical depletion by other churches. This hypocrisy persists: the reason, no attempt happens in Indian churches to understand conversion, or proselytization, in an honest and objective manner. Rather than convert others in order to swell one’s ranks, Jesus would surely have preferred that Christians treated others as they liked to be treated by them. Clearly, they don’t think they need to.I state the above in order to flag a major deficiency in Professor Bauman’s treatment of his theme. He is blind—either by default or by design—to the violence and intolerance pervasive in the Indian Christian community. Anti-Christian violence of a different genre—violence of Christians on Christians—lurks pervasively in churches and religious groups. The author makes a promising beginning, in this regard, by raising a radical question: does religion have a special genius for provoking and sustaining violence? (Voltaire would have answered in the affirmative.) But, alas, he chooses to sideline this central question. As a Christian who is also a citizen of the secular-democracy of India, I have no hesitation in stating that churches and Christian groups are no better than Hindu communalists in resorting to violence to attain their ends. It is only fear of consequences that keeps the lid on their propensity for violence and intolerance. Every bishop, every priest, is a petty tyrant in relation to those under their authority. Christian leaders may profess respect for the Indian Constitution, but they do not carry it into practice. A Christian leader is as communal as a ringleader of the Hindutva is. As Voltaire put it succinctly, it is impossible to hold dogmatic beliefs and be tolerant at the same time.The Indian Christian community is truly at the cross-roads today. This is not an accident that has struck the community like a bolt from the blue. Much of it is self-inflicted. Christians make a virtue of taking everyone else on their terms. (As Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out in Anti-Semite and Jew some seven decades ago, it is the anti-Semite, not the Jew, who defines and decides what a Jew is.) They invoke ‘faith’ and religious freedom as alibis for doing so. In the last half century, there has been no consistent, worthwhile effort—sporadic concerns emerged and disappeared from time to time, though—to understand what it takes to be a responsible and spiritually wholesome presence as a religious minority in the Indian context. Indian Christians took a great deal for granted. They continue to, despite the tectonic shifts that Professor Bauman chronicles.So, here is the true value of the book. It robs church leaders and self-styled, self-righteous Christian activists of the luxury of living in denial. After reading this book, they’d have no excuse for professing ignorance of the context. Through this book the author has served a wake-up call on the Indian Christian community. I would hope also to all religious minorities in India. I hope very much that they—especially, Indian Muslims—would read this work to be acquainted with the nameless, faceless sorrows that, as Shakespeare would have put it, ‘daily strikes the heaven on its face’ from the soil of India.”
—Valson Thampu, an educator and Christian theologian, is former Principal, St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi, The Book Review, Volume XLVII Number 6 June 2023