ICC Note:

After a team from India’s political opposition visited Chhattisgarh’s Bastar District, some leaders have come out and said that Christians there are being denied basic human rights. In June 2014, over 50 villages in the Bastar District passed local ordinances making the practice of Christianity practically illegal. Following the bans on Christianity, Hindu radicals began attacking and socially boycotting the 100’s of Christian families living in Bastar District. Over the past two years, the situation for Christians in Bastar District has become almost unbearable. Will the political opposition taking interest in the plight of these Christians signal the beginning of change? 

8/3/2016 India (Business Standard) – Concept of “Hindu Rashtra” was “almost realised” in parts of Bastar even as Christians are being denied basic human rights there, a forum comprising Left leaders alleged today and sought monitoring of Constitutional rights in the district by a SC-appointed special commissioners’ team.

The All India People’s Forum also demanded setting up a separate team to monitor the conduct of the police and district administration in responding to communal campaigns against the minorities in the area.

“In certain villages and parts of Bastar, it is almost as if the Hindu Rashtra is already there in place because the Christian minority community is not allowed basic human rights.

“The PESA law which allows gram sabha to safeguard its own customs, is being misused to equate those customs with Hinduism and prohibit Christians from entering a village, from getting rations, so on,” CPI(M-L) leader Kavita Krishnan said.

Krishnan, who was part of the eight-member fact-finding committee of the forum, made the remarks at the release of its report here. The team had paid visits to four districts of the state – Bastar, Dantewada, Sukma and Bijapur between June 8 and June 11.

Krishnan likened the situation at ground-level in these areas to that “of a war” and said the fact finding committee investigated a series of “fake encounters, fake surrenders and acts of sexual violence” during its visit.

The committee noted that some Hindutva forces are allegedly working in tandem with police and Bastar district administration to “isolate and create a state of siege” for Christians there.

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