US, NATO, ISAF Must Punish All Hindu Terrorists Who Killed Christians

By Chad Hazlett
Daily.pk

Original Credit: http://www.feer.com

The terror attacks on Mumbai made headlines around the world. When the dust settled, we found ourselves asking the same questions: “How did this happen?” and “What could we have done to prevent this?” But while India and the world contemplates the causes and consequences of these attacks, we ignore India’s Hindu Terrorism:
From late August through October 2008, organized Hindu extremist groups committed systematic attacks killing more than 100 people, mostly Christians, in the eastern India state of Orissa. Most worrying, the Hindu terrorists responsible for Orissa’s violence remain at-large and have explicitly threatened to repeat their attacks
after December 25, 2008.

Three Hindu extremist groups – the RSS, VHP, and the Bajrang Dal – are responsible for this autumn’s violence, destroying some 4500 homes and burning 147 churches in India. The dead are mostly Christians and some
moderate Hindus. Father Akbar Digal, a Christian, was beheaded after three times refusing to convert to Hinduism. Gayadhar Digal, a Hindu, was hacked to death, and his wife and son nearly killed for appearing sympathetic to Christianity. Others have been burned alive and beaten, then buried alive. Some 40,000-60,000 sought refuge in the forests where they were further hunted. Hundreds remain missing. Over 11,000 remain displaced and the attackers have threatened to kill them upon returning if they do not convert to Hinduism.

The attacks have been alarmingly systematic. Repeating tactics used by these Hindu terror groups in similar attacks last year, the August attacks began with cutting down trees to block the roads and cutting phone lines to block communications. Mobs led by these Hindu extremist groups were armed with guns and machetes, shouting slogans such as “Christians must become Hindu or die. Kill Them. Kill Them. Kill Them.” The same Hindu terror groups have organized related attacks across the country, the best known being in Gujarat, India, in 2002 where about 2000 to 5000 Indian-Muslims were killed.

In each of these cases, violence continued for weeks without intervention by the state and the Hindu perpetrators have enjoyed impunity thereafter. Six years after the Gujarat killings, there has been only one conviction. There were no convictions after the December 2007 violence. Without any punishment, we can expect these Hindu extremist groups to continue terrorizing civilians as a tactic to impose their will on the state and drive out minority religious
communities.

In fact, threats of renewed violence in the coming weeks are so clear that if we ignore them and violence escalates, nobody can say we “didn’t know.” The Hindu extremists remain at-large and have demanded that the Orissa Government pass several laws to further suppress Christianity. Failure to impose these laws, they threaten, will result
in more violence through a ban on all public activity after Dec. 25 – enforced by club-toting members of these Hindu terror groups – effectively prohibiting Christian festivities.

Responsibility for preventing further violence lies with the Indian Government. The attacks in Mumbai have shown that when terrorists strike at Westerners and expensive hotels, Indian security forces can react and kill or arrest the terrorists within days. In Orissa, by contrast, two months into the violence, victims of Hindu terrorism were still being burned alive.

Orissa’s Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik, does not appear to be a Hindu nationalist zealot. But he is politically beholden to Hindu extremist parties that use this violence to rally votes. At the national level, federal security forces finally came to stop the violence – after two months. However, [Indian-Sikh] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not
banned all Hindu terrorist parties responsible despite calls from advisers to do so, perhaps because doing so could be bad for politics in this Spring’s election. This element of Indian Government sympathy and political hedging make international condemnation all the more important. The international community should do its part to ensure
that banning violent Hindu extremists and ending impunity for them is to India’s political and economic advantage. However, if the West is to speak more loudly on this issue, it must do so in the name of counter-terrorism, religious freedom and the fundamental human rights, not because it is Christians who were attacked this time.

The U.S. public response has been almost entirely the result of mobilization by Christian groups with close ties to churches in Orissa. But the public coalition that can and should unite behind this is much larger. Darfur’s atrocities provoked an unprecedented American constituency for stopping genocide. While this constituency continues
pressing for peace and protection in Darfur, situations like Orissa that are more tractable and still in their formative stages offer an opportunity to achieve the most important goal of fighting genocide and atrocity: prevention.

This issue must not be swept aside in the aftermath of Mumbai’s attacks, but raised as an important part of India’s role in fighting terrorism within its borders. The U.S. Government should consider naming the individuals responsible for leading these Hindu extremist groups as Hindu terrorists by adding them to the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of “Specially Designated Nationals” (SDN). The U.S. Government should add all Hindu terrorist organizations to the U.S.
State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). It should also begin investigating Hindu-American charitable organizations that appear to be providing funding for these Hindu terror groups and ask that India investigate Hindu terror financing on their side in parallel. [Read: SFH: http://www.stopfundinghate.org ]

U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama should end their silence on India’s Hindu terrorism. Every U.S. Government official, whether in the U.S. Congress or the Administration, should raise Orissa in the course of his/her other dealings with Indian officials and ask what their plan is for ending impunity for domestic Hindu terrorism. How will they investigate and punish all those Hindus who plan and lead these terrorist attacks? How will the state and federal governments in India ensure that next time it does not take two months to stop the killing? It is not too late to head off mass killing of Christians by Hindu terrorists in Orissa after this Christmas and to prevent it [the genocide of Christians, Muslims, Kashmiris, Bengalis, Sikhs, Dalits and other nations] elsewhere in India where it is sure to recur if Hindu terrorism again goes unpunished.

Hindu Extremists’ Reward to Kill Christians, as Britain Refuses to Bar Members

Mr. Chad Hazlett is Protection Director of the Genocide Intervention Network (GIN) based in Washington DC, USA. He has lived and worked in India.