Mission & Justice

Alistair Scrutton; 14/10/08

Asked when he thought attacks by Hindu mobs against Christians would end in Cutttack, a remote part of eastern India, local Christian leader Ranjit Nayak replied immediately, and with a resigned smile. “March,” Nayak said, referring to a general election due in early 2009. “This is all totally politically motivated.” Like many Christians, human rights groups and government ministers, Nayak suspected hard-line Hindu groups of organizing these attacks in Orissa state, trying to win political support among Hindus over long-standing tensions with missionaries. From attacks on Christians to suspected Islamist bombings, communal politics is back on the agenda across India, to challenge an embattled secular-leaning government as its gears up for an election against a Hindu-nationalist opposition in 2009.

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Michael McKenna; 3/10/08

The Goss government ignored a warning about an Indian adoption agency five years before it sent a young girl to an unwitting Queensland couple after she had allegedly been stolen away from her parents. The Bligh Government yesterday released a 1995 letter to Queensland’s then Department of Family Services which raised serious allegations against the agency, now suspected of involvement in child trafficking. Despite the warnings from Indian welfare authorities, which included allegations of falsifying the records of children, subsequent Queensland governments allowed two more children to be brought to the state for adoption. One of those children, now a nine-year-old girl adopted by a Queensland couple, is alleged to have been kidnapped in 2000 and sold to the adoption agency, Malaysian Social Services.

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Lalit Raizada; 30/9/08

We have been experiencing a pleasant dilemma during Ramadan. This is because we receive a number of invitations from Muslim friends to join them over iftar, often more than one for the same evening. Just as we honour their invitation, they would be no less keen to come to our place. That is how it goes on in India, the land of composite culture. As such, like us, the children in our family eagerly wait for the arrival of Ramadan, and then finally the Eid day when there is joy, love and mirth in the festive air. Honestly speaking, while visiting our friends we like to embrace them a little longer - to enjoy the enchanting fragrance of typical oriental Indian scents (unlike the spirit-based perfumes) they would use that day. After all, for us, this opportunity comes only twice a year (on Eid Al Fitr and Eid Al Adha).

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Mohammed Ashraf; 27/9/08

Police in Kollam have booked six well-to-do children, including two living in the Gulf, for abandoning their partially paralyzed, octogenarian mother. Under India’s powerful Maintenance and Welfare of Parents & Senior Citizens Act 2007, children who do not look after aged parents face three months’ imprisonment and cannot even appeal against the punishment. This is the first case being registered under the law that came into force in the state barely four months back. According to the police, Laxmikutty, 84, had given birth to 14 children, eight of whom died young, but none of the remaining six were prepared to look after her in the twilight of her life. The police arrested the eldest of them, Ramanan, 58, in Kottayam, some 62 km from here, and was let off on bail. Police are on the lookout for her other children, Rameshan, 56, Ramani, 50, Rajendran, 48, Reghunath, 46, and Ragini, 43.

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27/9/08

The government yesterday deployed hundreds more federal policemen to eastern India after one person was killed and several injured in fresh clashes between Hindus and Christians triggered by religious conversions. More than 700 federal policemen are being sent to Orissa state after the death in rural Kandhamal district following clashes between Christians and Hindus on Thursday. Several houses were also set on fire. The violence came after a string of attacks on Christians in three Indian states that has left at least 20 people dead and dozens of churches damaged in the last month. Christians have responded with some violence in Orissa state.

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Andrew Buncombe; 26/9/08

However splendid everything appeared about his daughter’s prospective husband, something in the pit of her father’s stomach told him that something was wrong. The groom-to-be seemed upright and deeply religious — which was important to the Sikh family — but still, there was something amiss. Eventually, the anxious father turned to the professionals. He called a private detective, Taralika Lahiri, and asked her to look into the young man’s background. It was just as well he did. “We took the job and sent our people. To our horror we discovered that the man was living with his wife and two daughters. He was already married,” said Ms Lahiri. “He had proposed to the girl at the same time. The young man was looking to get some dowry. He was cheating the father and the daughter in order to get money.” In India’s rapidly changing society, Ms Lahiri is one of a growing number of female private detectives who specialize in so-called “matrimonial investigations”.

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Rhys Blakely; 22/9/08

Up to 500 Nepalese children have been sold as slaves to Indian circuses over the past year. The estimate, in a report by the Nepali Central Child Welfare Board, shines a light on the misery that lurks behind India’s dilapidated big tops and on the subcontinent’s burgeoning status as a hub for human-trafficking. Indian circus owners prize young Nepalese girls for their fair skin and “exotic looks” - features also favoured by the pimps who run prostitution rackets that span South Asia and the Middle East. Impoverished parents in Nepal are paid as little as $22 for their daughters by agents usually linked to powerful organised crime networks, activists say.

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Joseph Marques; 22/9/08

For the past few weeks, a systematic attack is being carried out on the Christian minority in India. It started in an eastern state called Orissa and the flames have spread to Karnataka, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, where a number of churches and other Christian places of worship have been desecrated. The anti-Christian violence began when a Hindu religious leader, who was opposed to conversion of tribals to Christianity, was killed in Orissa. Hindu fundamentalists blame the Christians for the heinous act, although Maoists who are active in that area have claimed responsibility. Indians, by nature are secular, and most of them have condemned the atttacks on the Christians.

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Bruce Loudon; 20/9/08

Horrifying accounts of children sold into prostitution for $13 are emerging as authorities take crisis measures to deal with traffickers exploiting poor victims of India’s flood disaster. More than 250 children were reportedly rescued from brothels and sweatshops following the arrest of six human traffickers in the state of Bihar, where more than three million people have been displaced by monsoonal floods. Parents are said to be selling their children to the traffickers for between 500 rupees ($13) and 1000 rupees in what is described as “the worst tragedy that the flood waters have brought in”. Reports said yesterday that the Government of Bihar, in India’s north, had sent volunteers to railway stations and brothels to rescue more women and children after claims a boy from the state had been found working as far away as Mumbai in the east.

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Rhys Blakely; 8/9/08

The mob appeared an hour after sunset, armed with axes, clubs and paraffin. The carnage that followed would have been much worse if the Christians of Gadragaon, a remote village in northeast India, had not been warned by text message: “The Hindus are coming to kill you.” The alert gave most enough time to flee to the jungle, where 114 of them would hide for a week, drinking rainwater and foraging for food. But the warning did not come early enough for those unable to run. “They doused him with petrol and taunted him; we could hear him screaming,” said Ravindra Nath Prahan, 45, of his paralysed brother, Rasananda, 35, who was burned alive by Hindu fanatics. “I could have tried to save him. But we had to save ourselves.” The attack on Gadragaon, by a mob that chanted “Hail Mother India” as they razed the village, was among the first of the grim litany of atrocities committed against minority Christians in the state of Orissa over the past two weeks. The Vatican has called the wave of violence “a sin against God and humanity”.

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