NEW DELHI, 12 March 2003 — The Gujarat state has confirmed it is surveying a section of the Christian population living in the region, provoking court action from minority rights organizations alleging harassment, officials said yesterday.
Hitting out at the Gujarat government, Congress leader Jaipal Reddy said yesterday in the Lok Sabha, “Terror has been unleashed by the state government on the Christian community.” He also drew attention to the fact that it was for the first time in the history of India that the police force had been asked to conduct a survey by visiting houses. Reddy demanded a statement from the government on the issue. Several other members also supported Reddy and called for a statement from the government.
Speaker Manohar Joshi said, “It is up to the government to make a statement.”
Junior home minister of western Gujarat state Amit Shah said that the government had asked for “some information” on Christians in the state.
But he denied a media report that the government was carrying out a discreet survey and was compiling a file listing family sizes, job profiles and sources of foreign funding.
“We sought this information after a member of Parliament raised the anti-conversion bill issue in the lower house,” Shah said by phone from Gujarat’s Ahmedabad city.
The Hindu-nationalist coalition federal government headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has been advocating an anti-conversion bill which seeks to ban forced religious conversions.
Right-wing Hindus accuse Christian missionaries of forcibly converting people to Christianity, alleging they lure poor people with rewards. Low caste Hindus, called Dalits, however, say they convert to escape discrimination in Hinduism.
Christians constitute 2.4 percent of India’s billion-plus population. The issue once again came under the spotlight after the media reported that the Gujarat government had ordered a survey of all Christians, who constitute less than a quarter of the state’s 50 million people.
“The police have been asking insensitive questions in an intimidating manner, and at times inappropriate times,” said Father Cedric Prakash of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights.
He said the state’s highest court had ordered the government to stop a similar move in 1999, saying no community should be singled out for survey.
Father Prakash said he had received around 50 complaints from churches and individuals in the past week alone.
“If the government wanted information in connection with a question in Parliament, it could have asked the heads of churches, who normally have all the records.”
Shah denied that objectionable questions had been asked, saying there was “nothing wrong” with the survey. The minister also declined to comment on whether the government planned to garner similar information from other communities, saying, “It’s only the Christians who are creating a noise.”
But minority rights bodies are trying to stop the exercise. The All India Christian Council has filed a case against the government in the state high court.
At the same time, the government-appointed National Commission for Minorities has demanded a report on the survey from the state’s highest ranking bureaucrat.
“We want to know why the survey has been ordered,” commission chairman Tarlochan Singh said. Violence against Christians is not unknown in the state, which witnessed extreme communal polarization, especially between Hindus and Muslims, following a mob attack on a train in February last year in which 58 Hindus were burned to death.
Vajpayee’s right-wing BJP party won a resounding re-election in December’s provincial polls in Gujarat with an aggressive Hindu-nationalist campaign which capitalized on months of rioting that followed the train attack and left some 2,000 people — mainly Muslims — dead, according to human rights groups.
