ROME - In the United States, political chatter right now is dominated by the Democratic contest to take on President Donald Trump in 2020, while those of us living in Europe are focused on elections for the next European Parliament that wrap up today and the extent to which anti-immigrant populists may add to their heft on the Old Continent.
One can make a good case, however, that the most important political news of the past week didn’t come anywhere in the West but literally half a world away in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi obliterated his opposition and swept to reelection in the world’s largest democracy.
Modi rode a wave of nationalism sparked by a mid-February suicide bombing in which Pakistani militants killed 40 Indian security personnel, followed by mutual airstrikes by each country in the other’s territory. The BJP, along with allied parties, won 353 seats in parliament, paving the way for Modi to become the first prime minister in decades to return to government with an even stronger majority after completing his entire tenure in office.
That’s a noteworthy development for all sorts of reasons, but seen through a Christian lens it raises pressing questions about the future for religious minorities in one of the world’s emerging superpowers.
Modi’s background is as a leader in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group, and later as a rising star in the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which is the RSS’s political wing. In effect, Modi is the Donald Trump of India - he appeals to an “India for the Indians” mentality, in part by identifying what it means to be Indian with Hinduism.
By extension, minority groups are styled as, to greater and lesser extents, “un-Indian,” tolerated in good moments and actively persecuted in bad ones.
Today, India’s fault lines are increasingly defined by a force for which the country has invented a new bit of political argot: “saffronization.” Saffron is the color of the robes worn by Hindu sages, so “saffronization” has been coined to mean a drive to foster Hindu values and practices, even to give them the force of law, resulting in what critics see as virtually a Hindu version of Islamic sharia.
While all minorities are thus potentially at risk in the wake of Modi’s triumph, I’ll focus here on what it means for the country’s small Christian community, which has already faced severe threats.
India’s northeastern state of Orissa, in the region of Kandhamal, was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals, and thousands more injured and at least 50,000 left homeless.
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https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2019/05/26/indias-political-earthquake-could-jeopardize-christian-minority/
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