Tea at Trianon: India's Christians Are Being Targeted for Genocide

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, April 3, 2024

India's Christians Are Being Targeted for Genocide

From The Stream:

Oddly, while North-East India’s vibrant Christianity has remained a mystery even to most Indian Christians, it has been a bitter pill for India’s Hindu ethno-nationalists to swallow. This cluster of Christianity has presented an almost unassailable bulwark to their totalitarian goal of a pan-Hindu India. The idea of an exclusive Hindu nation comes largely from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s 1923 book Hindutva: Who Is Hindu? — a work that has been seminal in spawning violence and militant Hindu hatred against Christians and other religious minorities in India.

Savarkar’s invented metanarrative of “Hindutva” (Hinduness) consists of nation (rashtra), race (jati), and civilization (sanskriti). At the core of Savarkar’s paradigm is the idea of India as pitrubhoomi — literally Fatherland — interpreted by Savarkar as “holy land.”

Historian Tanika Sarkar in an essay in Public Hinduisms (2012), explains how Hindutva conjoins “nation with faith, and, in the same move, makes the land of India the property, in a literal sense, of Hindus alone.” Since Christians, Jews, Parsees and Muslims do not fulfill the criterion of India as their “holy land,” they cannot be regarded as Indians, notwithstanding the antiquity of their religious presence in the land.

The tribal Christians of North-East India, however, fail the test of “Indianness” on all four counts! On land, the very inclusion of tribal territory into India after independence from British colonial rule, has been fiercely contested. On ethnicity, the “hill people” of the North-East are racially different from most Indians, enjoying closer ethnic ties to the peoples of China, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim than to the “plains people” of the Indian subcontinent.

As for Savarkar’s criterion of a Hindu sanskriti, nothing could be more remote from the proudly indigenous tribes than identifying with Hindu “civilization” or “culture.” This is a marked difference from other Indian Christians, particularly Catholics, who have happily enculturated within a Hindu culture — some to the extent of a troubling syncretism. (Read more.)