Action4Canada - October 12, 2023


Hindu Mobs Destroy 300 Churches as Indian Govt Fueling 'Serious Religious Persecution'


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

127.299484

Word count

519

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

India's north-eastern state of Manipur is making headlines. Some argue the northeast Indian state is in a state of civil war, with news of burnings and beheadings. Religious and ethnic clashes between the Hindu majority and the Christian minority over land and influence in the state has left at least 180 dead and over 500 injured.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 India's north-eastern state of Manipur is making headlines.
00:00:15.080 Manipur means land of jewels.
00:00:18.060 Outside the capital, armed guards protect Akuki village.
00:00:21.680 They're volunteers who are on the lookout for Meite attackers.
00:00:24.500 But the state, affectionately known as the Switzerland of India for its natural beauty
00:00:30.140 and remoteness, looks more like a war zone today.
00:00:35.660 Some argue the northeast Indian state is in a state of civil war, with news of burnings
00:00:40.960 and beheadings.
00:00:41.980 Religious and ethnic clashes between the Hindu-majority Métis community and the tribal Christian
00:00:48.620 Kuki minority over land and influence in the state has left at least 180 people dead and
00:00:55.660 over 500 injured.
00:00:57.620 300 churches have been destroyed.
00:01:00.500 And just imagine that if one, two, five, ten were destroyed.
00:01:04.860 But we're talking about 300 churches destroyed.
00:01:07.960 The European Parliament accuses India's Hindu-led BJP government and its Prime Minister Narendra
00:01:14.820 Modi are fueling the violence by pursuing, quote, politically motivated, divisive policies
00:01:21.280 promoting Hindu majoritarianism. 0.61
00:01:26.180 Modi, whose party controls Manipur's state government, faced a no-confidence motion in
00:01:31.900 Parliament last week for his silence on the escalating violence.
00:01:35.820 The underlying issue here is that the central government, the BJP party led by Prime Minister
00:01:42.280 Modi, has not reacted.
00:01:44.720 He's been forced to make one comment, but even that was setting a context for why the
00:01:50.500 violence was happening that ignored the violence against Christians.
00:01:53.740 In Manipur's capital city, Hindu women creating roadblocks like this one to check cars for Christians. 1.00
00:02:00.520 In May, a Hindu mob paraded naked two Christian women.
00:02:05.640 One had been reportedly gang-raped.
00:02:08.400 Several videos on social media showed mobs also burning down churches.
00:02:13.080 The perpetrators themselves are posting videos of mob attacks on churches.
00:02:18.700 They're showing the churches being burned down.
00:02:20.920 They literally show the police stepping aside to allow the mob to attack these Christian churches.
00:02:28.100 As a result, Christians have lost complete trust in the Manipur police.
00:02:36.140 This video showing dozens of Christian women kneeling, crying and begging Indian soldiers
00:02:42.060 to stay in their village, fearful of more Hindu attacks.
00:02:47.020 Fighting erupted in early May, when the state government extended land, jobs and other benefits
00:02:53.180 typically reserved for the minority Christians to the Hindus.
00:02:57.220 The decision led to some of the worst fighting between the two biggest tribes in the state.
00:03:02.860 Human rights and religious freedom experts accused Modi's government of pushing a radical ideology
00:03:08.700 that believes India is for Hindus only, despite its pluralistic and diverse society.
00:03:16.100 This political movement is essentially saying India is your homeland, but it must also be your holy land.
00:03:22.720 And it's putting a religious umbrella over everything that happens.
00:03:27.000 And it's allowing them to force other minority faces out. 1.00
00:03:31.320 The violence in Manipur has displaced more than 60,000 people internally.
00:03:36.800 And it's not just in Manipur.
00:03:39.160 The New Delhi-based United Christian Forum says there have been more than 400 incidents against Christians
00:03:45.960 in 22 other Indian states in the first six months of this year.
00:03:51.420 India, with 1.4 billion people, is the world's largest democracy.
00:03:57.240 However, Modi's critics argue democracy has been in retreat since he took power in 2014.
00:04:04.180 India and benefited from China.