by L S HERDENIA
The dividing line between the government and the saffron brotherhood in Madhya Pradesh has become so blurred that the two are now virtually indistinguishable. Thus the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, calls upon government employees to join the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and attend its shakhas, or cells, police officers perform shastra puja – arms worship – on Dussehra, government schemes are named after Hindu rituals and ceremonies and organisations associated with the sangh parivar are gifted prime pieces of government land.
On a more sinister level, data is being collected about the Christians living in the state even as the government funds “religious functions” which are nothing other than platforms to spew venom against the minorities. The chief minister has made it clear in so many words that the government would in no case implement the recommendations of the Sachar Committee (which examined the status of the Muslim community in India), as that would “divide society and pave the way for another division of the country”. A case of the pot calling the kettle black?
When, sometime in the first week of April this year, a couple of uniformed policemen turned up at the office of a Christian priest in Bhopal and started asking him all sorts of questions about the Christian populace of the city, the latter became suspicious and demanded to know at whose behest the information was being sought. The policemen, apparently unaware that they were parting with an official secret, handed over to the priest a copy of the order – with the word “Secret” written in bold relief at the top – issued by Bhopal’s senior superintendent of police (SSP) to all police stations, asking them to collect information about Christians residing in the area under their jurisdiction. The information sought included details about the churches, schools and other institutions run by the community as well as their sources of finance. Policemen were also asked to collect information about the political patronage enjoyed by the community leaders, their criminal antecedents, if any, and the public functions that the Christians had organised. Names and other personal details about Catholic and Protestant priests were also sought.
When the Christian community protested, the state police headquarters initially denied the existence of any such order but subsequently declared that it had been withdrawn. How an order that was never issued can be withdrawn continues to be an unsolved mystery. What is interesting is that even after the order was “withdrawn”, the police continued to act on it; the chief minister told a delegation led by Rev Leo Cornelio, the archbishop of Bhopal, that this was due to a “communication gap”. What makes this exercise – aborted, at least for now – particularly scary is the fact that a similar exercise had preceded the Muslim genocide in Gujarat and, of course, much earlier, the Jewish Holocaust in Germany.
(Thanks to Mukul Dube; his comment: “Please read this: … and then recall how Gujarat 2002 took us unawares because we had earlier sat back, complacent, and ignored clear warning signals.)