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	Subcontinental Drift: The Mind of the Mob Why India's Christians are under attack - Thursday, July 6, 2000 Subcontinental Drift: Artless Advani India's Home Minister doesn't make minorities feel at home - Thursday, June 29, 2000 Subcontinental Drift: Farooq's Folly Or, how bad leaders can undermine good ideas - Thursday, June 22, 2000 Subcontinental Drift: What Really Happened? Pakistanis deserve an explanation for Kargil - Thursday, June 15, 2000 Subcontinental Drift: The Tax Test Musharraf must show he is tougher than Bhutto and Sharif - Thursday, June 1, 2000
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Hindu fundamentalist groups and their apologists triumphantly seized on the news of the arrests and promptly arrogated to Islamic organizations responsibility for all the recent attacks on Christians. Inevitably, their fingers pointed to Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. (Deendar Anjuman apparently has links to religious groups across the border.) It was the ISI, they said, that orchestrated the attacks on Christians in order to make India look bad.

Reality check: the police are only accusing the arrested men of bombing churches in south India. The prime suspects of the anti-Christian violence in other parts of the country -- from Gujarat in the west and Uttar Pradesh in the north to Orissa in the east -- are members of Hindu organizations. And those attacks have not abated.

Indeed, on the day Ibrahim was arrested in Bangalore, Indian papers reported an assault on a nun in a village in Gujarat by the local headman and his friends. Apparently, the men were outraged that the nun was distributing grain to poor farmers in the drought-stricken area; they suspected her of converting the farmers to Christianity in exchange for food. The reports suggested that the headman was a member of the Bajrang Dal, a hard-line Hindu group.

If that's not irony enough, try this: the Deendar Anjuman advocates religious tolerance and the equality of all faiths. Its members are taught to worship all gods and believe that Jesus, Rama, Krishna and Mohammed were all prophets. Based in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, the organization has a 75-year history of community service.

Predictably, some Islamic groups have accused their Hindu counterparts of trying to make a scapegoat out of the Deendar Anjuman and paint all Muslims in a poor light.

Caught in this crossfire, India's Christians must now feel very lonely indeed.

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