Fast Broken, Struggle Continues: Hunger-Strike for India’s Persecuted Christians Concludes
I did a 7-day hunger-strike to protest persecution of Indian Christians
I have now completed 7 days of a 7-day hunger-strike against the persecution of Christians in India.
My last meal was on the evening of January 4th. Today is the morning of January 12th. It has now been nearly 180 hours since I last ate.
I can assure you that I have not been able to stop thinking about the ongoing and ceaselessly increasing suffering of Christians in India during this entire time. I know, from the countless messages of support I’ve received from Indian Christians, that my act has been welcomed as a sign of solidarity with them. And I hope that even just a few American Christians have begun to take a little notice of what is happening to their persecuted brothers and sisters in India.
I am breaking my fast with a hearty mug of beef bone broth. Cheers.
My fast is broken, but the struggle continues. I will certainly be strengthened to continue the struggle by once again returning to the food which I eradicated from my life for a week to stand in solidarity with the Christian community whom the Hindu nationalist movement seeks to eradicate from India.
Persecution of Indian Christians is not an entirely new phenomenon.
There were the anti-Christian riots in Gujarat in 1998. In 1999, there was the murder of Graham Staines and his two young sons. Graham Staines was an Australian missionary who ran a home for lepers; one night, while sleeping in his jeep, he and his sons were set upon by a mob of hundreds who burned them alive. Then there was the Kandhamal Pogrom in 2008. A hundred or more Christians were slaughtered, many women — including nuns — were gang-raped, thousands of homes were destroyed and hundreds of churches were burned.
All of these spates of violence — some more and some less lethal — have one thing in common: the perpetrators were members of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary, or one of the RSS’s subsidiaries. All the perpetrators belonged to organizations devoted to the Hindu nationalist ideology which teaches that Christianity — as well as Islam — should be eradicated from India.
Those horrific but irregular incidents, however, were different from today’s scenario.
For the past seven years of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime, persecution — first of Muslims and then of Christians — has been gradually ratcheting up, and up, and up, and up, and up. It has become systemic and it has become systematic.
Discriminatory acts by the BJP-ruled national government as well BJP-ruled state governments embolden and empower attacks by non-State actors. They receive impunity from the State — and sometimes even enjoy the complicity of the State when BJP officials or even the police join them. Meanwhile, these non-State actors — those from the RSS and its militant cohorts — are diehard supporters of the BJP who bolster its power by helping keep it in office. It’s a sick, symbiotic relationship in which, while scratching each others backs, the RSS and the BJP achieve success through stomping, smashing, and inflicting suffering on anyone who stands in their way.
And, according to the foundational ideology of the RSS-BJP, it is the Muslims and the Christians who — simply by existing — represent the greatest obstacle to realizing their fascistic goals.
Indian Muslims are already at severe risk. Indeed, over the past 30 years, they’re the ones who have endured the largest number of fatalities as the RSS-BJP ruthlessly massacred thousands upon thousands of them in multiple pogroms. Today, with the RSS-BJP holding an iron grip on national political power, their stormtroopers are rampaging through the streets openly, shamelessly, and with total impunity raising calls for the slaughter of Muslims. And, more and more frequently, those same supporters are hosting mass conferences throughout India where they blatantly, and in so many words, demand the genocide of Muslims.
These same conferences include calls not just for wiping out Muslims, but also Christians.
Christians are next. Attacks on Christians have slowly risen over the past seven years of the Modi regime, escalated in the past year, and sky-rocketed in the past four months.
After Muslims, after Christians, who will be next in line to fall beneath the blades of the hate brigades that now rule India?
Unless something gives, unless the world wakes up, unless someone somewhere begins to take action, the situation will only continue an unending, downward spiral until there are literally rivers of blood flowing through the streets. I, for one, will not wait until then before I make a move. But when will the international Church take notice? When will the American Church draw its attention to the normalization of the crucifixion of Indian Christians? When will the free democracies of the world decide to put people over profits, stand up, speak out, and act before fascism totally consumes the once-great Republic of India?
I send my love and solidarity to all Indian Christians — as well as to the Indian Muslim community and all those others, including Sikhs, Dalits, and many more who are facing persecution and enduring oppression today.
Especially to those living outside of India (whether you’re Indian or not), I urge you to take up the torch and struggle. Hunger-strike. Protest. Write. Speak. Talk to your neighbors. Call upon your elected officials.
Dig in your heels, grit your teeth, don’t back down, and fight the fight of peace and love as though lives depend on it — because they do.
