Religious Persecution

In popular belief India is visualized as a
land of perfect religious tolerance in
which all schools of thought have been
allowed to grow unchecked. Although
true in its basic form, this picture is
greatly simplified. There is a long history
of competition between differing religious communities and schools of
thought, sometimes fueled by scathing
polemics designed to persuade listeners
that one was correct and the others
false. What has been quite rare, however,
are acts of violence accompanying these
arguments, or the notion that people
should have to fear for their lives
because of their ideas. In the literature
of the Nayanar and Lingayat communities—both devotees (bhakta) of the god
Shiva—language toward the Jains has a
genuinely hostile edge, and the Nayanar
leader Sambandar has been persistently
implicated in the impalement of 8,000
Jains in the southern Indian city of
Madurai. In the same way, the northern
Indian king Sashanka, who was also a
devotee of Shiva, harbored a pathological hatred of Buddhists. Sashanka
reportedly not only persecuted
Buddhists themselves, but also tried
to destroy the tree in Bodh Gaya
under which the Buddha purportedly
gained enlightenment.
Sectarian competition aside, people
whose religious faith has led them to
ignore generally accepted social conventions have been quite likely to
encounter stiff opposition. Stories of the
devotional (bhakti) poet-saints are
replete with tales of the troubles they
faced from guardians of conventional
morality, usually said to be brahmins. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
there was a running and often bloody
conflict between two groups of militant
ascetics—the Naga class of the
Dashanami Sanyasis, and the Bairagi
Nagas—although in that case the
motives might just as well have been
economic, namely, the control of trade
in the Ganges valley. A final example of
religious persecution appears in the rise
of Hindutva in the 1980s. Propelled by
verbal attacks on Muslims and
Christians, this persecution has all too
often prompted physical violence.