Cady Barrett
10 October 2008
Religious Conflicts
Nearly six weeks after the start of the tension and violence between Hindus and Christians in India, it has only gotten worse. Neither the state government nor the Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) national government has taken any action to end the conflicts. As of now, 50 Christians have been killed and 13,000 have been displaced by the mobs armed with iron rods, bows, homemade bombs, and kerosene. Another 50,000 are thought to be hiding in the regions forests. Their attackers are demanding that they convert to Hinduism or they can never return to their homes. The Indian government last week got additional paramilitary forces to the region in which the violence is occurring. This may be a tactic to avoid ordering the attacks to stop because it has been discovered that many police officers let numerous attacks occur without intervention. The Congress party-led UPA government has responded to the anti-Christian violence in Orissa by issuing statements to halt the violence. Only after a meeting with the concerned French President Nicolas Sarkozy, did the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh begin to press the government to put a stop to the violence.
After following this conflict from the very beginning, I feel like the situation is arising from an internal social conflict as well as a corrupt government. It was only after the French President met with the Indian Prime Minister and voiced his concern for the Indian people that anything was truly done by the government to stop it all. International relations play a role in all of this as well in the sense that discrimination of religion cannot be expressed by such a diverse country. Even though the majority of Indians are Hindu, a vast amount of the population is converting to Christianity.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/indi-o07.shtml
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