BENGALURU, INDIA, January 23, 2012 (samvada.org): [HPI note: the author is a Christian freelance journalist]. A retired judge of Karnataka High Court, M.F. Saldanha has recently said that Christians in Karnataka State are under an unprecedented wave of persecution. He has also termed Karnataka as “the Rogue State No.1.” Unfortunately for Saldanha, he himself admits that the State has not recorded any killing in this season of “persecution.”
Despite the horror stories trotted out by Saldanha and his friends about the unprecedented “persecution of Christians in Karnataka” it is interesting to not that there has not been a single instance of Christians fleeing the State and migrating to neighboring states!
The same retired judge had alleged last year that there were 1,000 attacks against Christians in Karnataka at that time. Asked for the details of the attacks, Saldanha failed to provide me with the list of names of churches and even dates of attacks. Thus, his baseless charges against the State government now also reflect his shocking ignorance of the real religious situation in Karnataka.
I am at present a member of the Karnataka State Minorities Commission, representing the Christian community in the State. I have the first hand information about several of the alleged attacks against Christians in Karnataka. I can thus confidently say that the incidents of violence against Christians in Karnataka have been few and far between. However, all of them have been blown out of proportion and internationalized by a handful of leaders from the Christian community and by unscrupulous politicians. They are using ordinary Christians as pawns in their hands for their narrow selfish ends.
The reasons for the attacks against certain Christian groups are not difficult to ascertain. Simply put, they are a reaction to the “aggressive faith marketing,” propaganda, and mindless evangelism and conversions through foul and unethical means indulged in by Christian missionaries who denigrate and make fun of Hindu gods and abuse Hindu rituals as barbaric.
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