Religious Persecution as a U.S. Policy Issue
Introduction     Participants    Contents

II. Religious Persecution in China and India

Mickey Spiegel (China): The concern of the Chinese authorities is not so much with cracking down on religious expression as it is making certain that none of these groups becomes a political force. That’s the bottom line. Still, the state is, by its own admission, an atheist state and it makes no bones about the fact that in the short term the Chinese leadership will tolerate religious belief, but that the end product will be a totally atheist society.

Falun Gong is a form of practice that combines meditation and exercise. The number of adherents in China runs conservatively to two million. Those are the government figures; almost 60 or 70 million by other counts. The whole issue may have changed the party’s perception of where the danger to stability and to the preeminence of the Chinese communist party is coming from.

Indeed, there are major concerns with stability in China today. There’s a significant unemployment problem. There’s a huge problem in the countryside because of excessive taxes, corruption, and fees. And all of that plays into some of this policy. And in fact, one of the disturbing things for the Chinese leadership with this Falun Gong problem is the fact that this is an urban, as opposed to a rural, phenomenon. Religion in China is thought of as primarily a rural area phenomenon—primarily women, and primarily older folks. But what they’re seeing now is taking place in the cities. I think what is alarming to the government is the realization that the attraction of some kind of belief system for Chinese people is coming not from Western religions but from traditional sources: from Buddhism, which is certainly growing in China, and from popular religion—from all of the traditional religious practices.

There has been a major push to control sects and cults that are outside of the five major religions. I think we’re going to see new regulations. One of the things that the Chinese government and party have been very clear about in the last few years is not to use the methods of control that have brought international condemnation. They are not putting people in jail for long periods of time. They are not beating up on people in the ways that they had been before. They are doing this crackdown by what is called "rule by law." They have regulations in place on what religions can and cannot do. They have regulations in place on associations. Even when registered these groups must remain small, local, discreet, and scattered.

Another issue—and I think it’s an issue that is very important for this bill—is the whole issue of the impossibility of taking religion out, of making a hierarchy of human rights concerns. There is almost no way of dealing with issues of religious freedom without dealing with issues of association, assembly, and free press. And I think that’s one of the major concerns of Human Rights Watch.

If a monk or a nun in Tibet gets up and holds a sign up that says, "Freedom for Tibet" and the Chinese decide to arrest that person, that is not an issue of religious persecution, that is an issue of freedom of expression, and freedom of association. And I think we have been very, very careful to separate out the independent issues from the issues of religious freedom.

And this is not, by the way, to suggest that there aren’t enormous issues pertaining to religious freedom in Tibet and in Xinjiang both. Those issues are in many respects very, very similar. But nevertheless, we have to make that distinction.

Smita Narula (India): I am sure many of you are aware of increasing attacks on Christians in India. Probably the most highlighted example in the media has been the attack on missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in the state of Orissa. They were burned to death while sleeping in their car by local Hindu extremists.

There has been a lot of international scrutiny of the increasing violence against Christians in the country. From what I see in the India chapter of the State Department religion report, the U.S. government has also made its interventions. There is generally a lot more attention to communal violence in the country now than there was before when the victims of attacks were Muslims or other minorities.

For the last 52 years India has entirely escaped any kind of international scrutiny of what’s been called India’s "hidden apartheid"—abuses stemming from the caste system. The international community has not paid any attention to the abuses because there are plenty of constitutional provisions and plenty of legislation to suggest that the country is actually doing something about the problem.

Many convert to Christianity to escape abuses under the caste system. They find that the church’s focus on education, equality, literacy, and health services has a real pull for them. It draws them away from their poverty, from their state of bondage, or from the economic exploitation that they are facing in their rural communities.

These converts are indeed at risk. For example, in a ten-day spate of violence in the state of Gujarat between December 1998 to January 1999, churches were burned or razed and people were forced to convert to Hinduism or robbed and assaulted in over 22 villages in the state. We went there in April to take a look at some of what was going on because we felt as though it was very indicative of patterns that are representative of attacks against Christians across the country.

These patterns include the role of local Hindu groups as allied with the national groups in increasing anti-Christian propaganda, and the role of the media in promoting that propaganda. For example, the idea that the church has a conspiracy to convert 51 percent of humanity to Christianity by the dawn of the 21st century. And that after making inroads in Africa, India has now become their prime target.

I was quite impressed at the focus on Muslims and Dalits [untouchables] as well as Christians in the State Department report, and with the accuracy with which a lot of the much more localized attacks were brought out—in a way that the media have not brought it out. But I think the final link of actually addressing the underlying problems is probably what’s missing in the U.S. and in the international community more generally.

Furthermore, it’s very easy for India to use intervention on Christianity or on religion and to turn it around to suit their purposes, by saying that there is a larger western conspiracy operating to promote Christianity throughout the country. I should add that Christians only form about 2.3 percent of the population in the country. So the fact that such charges are actually making inroads and having an effect I think has a lot more to do with those fears than any real belief that Hindus are going to be chased out of their own country.

But it’s these greater issues of the caste system, of not implementing domestic legislation, and the issue of state complicity in allowing the attacks to continue, that really need to be addressed.

It’s a very complicated situation. And the fact that India is not like China in that it does have a lot of constitutional protections and domestic legislation protecting minorities makes it a much trickier issue to deal with. In the recommendations in our caste violence report as well as the Christians report, we have tried to focus as much as possible on infrastructure and implementation of domestic legislation and not foreign legislation or even international law.

One of the nice things about working on India is that the NGO community and the secular community are incredibly vibrant. If there is a role that the international community can play, it is probably in pressing on improving and maybe even giving assistance to improving the type of infrastructure that is already in place in India, so as to facilitate honest and rigorous implementation of domestic legislation and constitutional provisions.

There really has to be a much more holistic focus on what’s going on. I think that just addressing the issue of attacks on Christians, or on isolated incidents which are heinous and awful, without allowing those attacks to be illustrative of much more deep-rooted problems in the country and without taking advantage of the domestic tools that India itself provides would be a real lost opportunity.

Jay Demerath: I am made very uncomfortable in countries around the world when I get complaints from well-meaning citizens about the U.S.’s moral meddling in their affairs. And I get these complaints even from people who you would think would gain from the U.S.’s role as a kind of policeman and vigilant monitor of rights. It makes me uneasy, especially when they then call to mind instances such as Waco or our policies towards Native Americans, our racial tensions and so on.

I was struck when the bill, the IRFA bill, was justified as an extension of America’s longstanding concern for the free exercise of religion. That is true, it is a longstanding concern, but there is also a longstanding concern, as you know, lest religion be established. And I am struck by the way in which one could interpret the IRFA bill both ways, as an expression of free exercise but also an establishment of religion, especially if religion is yanked out of a list of priorities and given special pride of place.

In some ways both China and India represent secular states, but very different kinds of secular states. In the case of China, the state is not only secular, but devoted to a national culture of secularism—indeed, atheism. And it’s hard to know quite where our rights begin and theirs end in pursuing their own ideological line. It is hard to know quite how to make a judgment about what the Chinese government sees in its national interest.

It is quite clear that there are religious persecutions in China. Nobody really disputes that. But I sometimes wonder if we don’t need to hear more of the Chinese point of view in, for example, Tibet. I would want to know why the Chinese moved into Tibet against the Buddhist community as they did. What is the position of the Chinese government? Clearly there was a struggle for power and hegemony. But there was also talk about the land held by Buddhist monasteries in Tibet—land that could be distributed to the peasants.

We need to understand any political or religious system from the standpoint of both victims and victimizers, both winners and losers.

Clearly, there is a very different kind of problem in India. Where does one begin and end in meddling with Hinduism? Reforming Hinduism is like saying that the cosmos is going to be stopped and frozen at this point and we’re going to get rid of some aspect of it that offends us at the moment. To say that the untouchables of today are not going to suffer because of what happened in their previous lives is to tamper with a critical theodicy of the faith. On the other hand, we certainly know how this system can be abusive both from our point of view and from the viewpoint of others.

None of this is easy, even in a globalizing world. In fact we often talk about the new "global village" in glib terms, when to many around the world it is a code word for a subtle form of Western imperialism. This is especially true when we are suspected of being most concerned about constraints upon our own proselytizing faiths in other lands.

Lee Boothby: The underlying question—is this a form of neo-imperialism? How does one distinguish general progress toward societal improvement from imposition of alien values? I think the point was made very clearly by some of the panelists that the International Religious Freedom Act is expressly not geared to American standards but rather to international standards.

Mickey Spiegel: I guess the question then becomes, if these are international standards why then are we not part of an international effort to make changes within some of the countries that we are concerned about? China, for example, has done an incredible job of bilateralizing the multilateral push within the United Nations Human Rights Commission by establishing a human rights dialogue with the United States and Australia and Japan and the UK and the European Union. It would behoove the United States and other countries to work within the United Nations system to try to implement some of those recommendations by the Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance.

Abdullahi An-Na’im: As can be seen from the language of the Act and State Department report, this U.S. initiative is premised on an American understanding of religious freedom and practice, including notions of "disestablishment" or separation of church and state. This is problematic as a basis for the protection of freedom of religion at a global level because of fundamental differences about what "freedom of religion" means. For example, to those Muslims who believe that unity of Islam and the state or politics is an integral part of their faith, it is meaningless to speak of separation of the two as a matter of freedom of religion. On the contrary, those Muslims would want to use their freedom of religion to establish an "Islamic state."

Smita Narula: On the idea of imperialism—thinking about this in the Indian context in particular as a cultural problem is very problematic because India’s domestic structure, legislation, and the entire tradition of having a secular democracy in India are premised on the notion that all religions should be treated equally and should be equally free to exercise their belief or their faith, and to propagate it. It makes India pretty unique in that regard. That there are human rights and basic freedoms I think is something that’s not just part of U.S. or Western values, but is also very much a part of Islamic tradition and Indian tradition.

Jeremy Gunn: I think the discussion that we have been hearing is a very interesting microcosm of the larger issues that surround this problem. On the one hand, the U.S. government needs to be very sensitive to the issues that have been expressed here about how the United States presents itself and the perception that it is imposing Western values, Western ideas and notions, upon all parts of the world. On the other hand, virtually every international covenant prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and language. They all say that. You do not hear, however, people saying "no discrimination on the basis of race" is a Western value or "no discrimination on the basis of language" is a Western value or "no discrimination on the basis of sex" is a Western value. The one place where the "Western value" comes up most strongly is on religion, although exactly the same language is used in the international covenants for race, sex, and language—but for religious freedom that somehow becomes a Western value. I would suggest that the reason that this happens is not because religious freedom really is a Western value, but because cultural prejudices and stereotypes are more strongly implanted in the area of religion than in any other area. This makes it very, very hard for people to see that what they think of as their values, their traditions, their histories, and their cultures may, in some instances, merely be prejudice against other religions—leading to scapegoating and demonizing of other religions. That is sometimes hard for people to see. The religious discrimination issue is frequently one of the blind spots in the human rights community.

Sam Ericcson: Now, one of my problems with blind spots in the human rights community and in Washington D.C. is that there is good news. I know. I’ve been doing fundraising and the last thing you ever want to do in sending out a fundraising letter report is to report "good news." Fundraisers say you need to have 13 bad news stories a year to keep your books in balance. And sadly, the human rights community, Washington and the press in America—including the Christian press—want to demonize China. When baby steps of progress occur in China there is silence about it. We must report the truth. "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." We must tell the truth, including the good things happening in China. For example, 10,000 churches have been built. The most memorable church service in my life was with 1,500 people in a church in China. It was a hell-fire and brimstone sermon. I haven’t been to one of those in 25 years in the United States. So the bottom line is, we must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about China. When it comes to the church of China, generalizations are hard to find. Everything is true somewhere; nothing is true everywhere. Is there freedom of religion in China? Are people worshipping? Yes.

Mickey Spiegel: I do not think that some of the things you are bringing up are manifestations of freedom of religion, and I think that’s where we differ considerably. I don’t see necessarily—and I have to be careful the way I say this—I don’t see necessarily that growth in religious practice is proof that there is freedom of religion. What the concern here is, and not just with China, is with changing systems. And to change the system, as Smita said, you have to recognize why the system is in place and not attack just one piece of it.

Rosalind I. J. Hackett: I happen to be organizing a world congress in South Africa. I have been amazed at the number of submissions from India, and at the people who are doing work and research on tribal religions in those regions. So I would like to ask Smita whether the money that is obviously going into this research is tied to a sort of colonialist approach to this? That is, if you know more about them then you can manipulate and control them?

Smita Narula: Christianity has been in India since 54 A.D., which is something that a lot of people don’t realize. People think that it is something recent, that it has to do with evangelism in the last 20, 30, maybe 40 years. But it’s actually had a very, very strong tradition of participation in health care, in education, in societies, particularly in the south and in the northeast of the country where three small states do, in fact, have Christian majorities. Where the money is coming from right now is a source of real contention because it’s seen as possibly funding missionary activities in the country. So that’s really where the tension is coming from. A lot of missionaries are denied visas or refused entry altogether. And a lot of the foreign funding by these groups is now under much greater attack from the government itself.

Lee Boothby: I would like briefly to revisit the suggestion that the United States government’s concern and action with reference to religious freedom or religious persecution is a Western export. It may be, but it seems to me that it is the same export as the concept of democracy. If that is a Western export, that may be because perhaps some cultures have an anti-democratic viewpoint. It seems to me that this is a very important part of democracy and if we miss that point what will happen is something like what concerns people in Russia today. People in Russia tell me that if religious freedom is circumscribed in Russia, the next freedom that will be circumscribed is the right of free speech and free press and the right to criticize the politicians and the government in Russia. It always goes hand in hand. If you do not have freedom of religious speech, ultimately, you don’t have freedom of political speech and free expression.

Tom Farr: On the issue of universality—that U.S. promotion of religious freedom is somehow an example of Western cultural imperialism—I, like others, really have to reject this idea. I think the universality of truth and of human nature is implicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the United Nations Charter itself. We try to lay out in the introduction of the Report one argument—not the only argument, but a religious argument—for human dignity and universality. I don’t consider this approach to be a Western invention. I think the case for universal human dignity is implicit in many of the world’s religions. It’s expressed in different ways but I think it underpins not only all human rights but the value of religious freedom itself.

William Inboden: I was really surprised the Chinese government did not react more violently to the Falun Gong. Do you think that by the Falun Gong getting away with what they did, that it might have carved out more theoretical space for other religious groups to have more public, organized visibility? Or is it just the opposite? That they kind of really caught the Chinese government off guard?

Mickey Spiegel: Well, I don’t agree with you, first of all, that there hasn’t been a violent response to it. And by "violent" I don’t mean that they are torturing people or anything like that, but they certainly were burning some 1.5 million pieces of material.

William Inboden: I was surprised the tanks didn’t come in.

Mickey Spiegel: They didn’t need the tanks. They don’t have a policy in place that says you can burn the books, but they burned the books. They had 15-day re­education sessions for most of the rank and file believers, which is what you can do by law before you charge somebody. They have arrested the leaders. I don’t think it’s going to, by any stretch of the imagination, offer space for any other religious expression.