On Wednesday 10th January 2001, Star News reported the curious case of a school in Gorakhpur, a distant town in Uttar Pradesh closer to Bihar and Nepal than to New Delhi. I mention the distances because the incident has not found place, not even in the inside pages, of any national newspaper.

Words cannot have the force of the images, and the spoken sounds that came through in the report. The local Bharatiya Janata party member of the Lok Sabha mouthing imprecations against the Christian community. He said he would not tolerate anyone trying to turn young boys into traitors subverting Indian culture. And so he was going to stop youth from coming to a local school run by an evangelistic missionary group.

A spokesman of the group faces the camera to say that the school filled a need in the underdeveloped area, that the community wanted it, and that no parent had ever found fault with the school. There has not been single conversion in the school, he said.

A smiling district collector corroborated the evangelist’s statement. There indeed has been no conversion, just an innocent school. But, said the collector, he was taking no chances, and was strengthening precautionary measures to ensure there was no physical clash.

The NDTV cameraman and reporter then walked over to a makeshift school run by the local Hindutva group. Children who had been prevented from going to the Christian school for fear they would be converted, had been given a bath in Ganga–water, had been draped with saffron cloth towels printed with holy words, and were mugging up shlokas. Indian culture was safe. Good story.

Star TV has done its social duty. A few days earlier, its camera had gone to the border of Gujarat and the Udaipur district of Rajasthan. This is one contiguous area populated by tribals, separated by the technicality of the former Udaipur principality. This is part of the larger Banswara region of Rajasthan, which earned notoriety several years ago (just before the main volcano of anti–Christian violence burst in its fury of lava) when the sangh parivar threatened to make the area "Christian free" by the turn of the last century.

NDTV recorded the gory details of the injuries suffered by two evangelical priests who were beaten close to death by a bunch of VHP–Bajrang Dal goons soon after they had screened a Jesus film in a village in the district. The two were not foreigners, not outsiders, but first generation Indian Christians, going about their work peaceful, without triumphalistic slogans, armed with nothing more than their Testaments, and a popular film. TV camera had close–ups of their bleeding heads, their haunting eyes still in tears with the terrible brush with death, and with intolerance.

Reports say that the police have been able to arrest a couple of culprits, of the three dozen who assaulted the Christians. The All India Christian Council leadership in Gujarat, which took up the cause of the injured, says the state government is shielding the culprits. The government of Rajasthan, whose home minister has often in the past shown a Sangh streak in his political demeanour, has yet to give solid assurances to a traumatised community.

There has, of course, been no public statement out of the National Commission for Minorities. It does not often take suo motu cognisance of anti Christian violence, whether it is in BJP–ruled Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, Congress ruled Rajasthan, or Biju Lok Dal–BJP coalition in Orissa where the sensitive Phulbani district is again rumbling with anti-Christian sentiment blatantly stoked by the sangh parivar.

Nonetheless, there is reason to congratulate at least one member of the minorities commission, the tall Tarlochan Singh who served Giani Zail Singh as a public relations man in his tenures as Union home minister and later President of India, and then worked in the state government of Delhi before being nominated to the commission as its vice–chairman. Tarlochan has been signatory to the commission’s earlier reports which trivialised violence against Christians. But of all the members, he has shown at least a sense of history in the alacrity with which he has challenged the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s shenanigans in the Punjab.

In fact the RSS–Sikh confrontation is unique in the response it has begotten — a singular unity between the commission, the Akali Dal as a political party and all its rival Dal factions, the Sikh intelligentsia and the religious hierarchy of the Akali Takht and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee.

It will be good to recall that the Akali Dal, a constituent of the ruling central coalition and which is in government in the state of Punjab, has moved the Justice Venkatachaliah national commission reviewing the Constitution of India, to ensure that the Sikh identity as a separate religion is reaffirmed in the statutes, and no attempt is made to rob the community of its distinctive identity by branding it as a sect or cult within the larger Hindu fold.

It was on June 30 last year that RSS boss Kupahalli Sudarshan again joined issue with Sikh organisations and asserted that Sikhism was a part of Hinduism. He had added that after accusing the RSS of being anti–Muslim and anti–Christian, some "forces" had launched a propaganda to dub the RSS as anti-Sikh.

The minorities commission immediately conveyed its concern to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee over the "anti–Sikh" remarks of the RSS leaders. The RSS brass has been called on January 16 for its first encounter with the commission. Commission’s vice–chairman, Tarlochan Singh, who says the RSS’s attempt to amalgamate the Hindu and Sikh religions could pose a "serious threat" to peace in Punjab, in fact personally met with Vajpayee on the issue after writing to him saying Sudarshan had not withdrawn his inflammatory statements.

Singh told the PM an "uncalled for" controversy has been generated by the RSS statements that the Sikhs were a part of Hindu religion. "The hard–liners amongst the Sikhs were lying low after peace prevailed in Punjab. Now these groups have got an agenda and are going on organising meetings and protests in the state," Tarlochan told Vajpayee. "Such pronouncements are interpreted by the Sikhs as being hostile to the Sikh religion and identity.

Everyone is aware of what happened in Punjab in the eighties and nobody should try and create bad blood again. Sudarshan should withdraw the statement he made earlier and recognise that Sikhism is a separate religion and Sikhs a separate identity." It remains to be seen if the RSS will respond to a commission summon to be available for a discussion next weak. Happily, Tarlochan has not suggested a ‘dialogue" between the Akal Takht and the RSS to resolve the issue.

The sangh parivar has never really hidden its agenda against the Sikh community. The Congress may have been the main guilty party in the chaos and trauma of Punjab, and its terrible repercussions during the 1984 anti Sikh riots. But the Sangh hand has also been clearly visible in the troubles, up to and including the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur and several other cities.

People have not forgotten the anti-Sikh rhetoric of grassroots Sangh workers and their leaders in Punjab and Delhi at the height of the extremist movement in the border state. If the spotlight after the massacres focused only on the Congress, it had much to do with the desire to indict the goons of the then ruling party’s Delhi unit. Later, it was too late to enlarge the scope of he inquiries and the public debate to also indict the sangh parivar. Many guilty have gone away scot free because of this lapse.

So what is the lesson in this ‘sporadic unconnected incidents’ — as the Prime Minister may perhaps style them? What is the common thread that connects the physical and psychological wounds of the Christian in Udaipur, Phulbani and Gorakhpur, the anxiety of the Muslims as they await the Dharma Sansad’s decision in the Kumbh at Allahabad on the date for the launch of the construction of the Ram Temple on the rubble of the Babri masjid, and the Sikh fear that it is being robbed at political gun point of its very identity?

Kupahalli Sudarshan keeps no one in any doubt about what his Sangh wants in the country.