"All people are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion".

Article 25, Constitution of India

On January 24, 1999, the nation woke up to read of the brutal killing of an Australian missionary, Graham Stewart Staines, and his two sons, Philip (9) and Timothy (7), by a mob that torched the station wagon in which they were sleeping at Manoharpur in Keonjhar district of Orissa. Though Staines and his wife were doing excellent work among leprosy patients, he was allegedly killed because of his missionary work as an evangelist.

The world's biggest democracy, India, is officially a secular country. It's a land of many languages, castes, cultures and religions, where temples, churches, mosques, Sikh gurdwaras and Buddhist monasteries co-exist. Its democratic traditions, secularism and respect for human rights are largely upheld. But this tolerant co-existence is threatened from time to time, and when it is, the media report it with some force.

The brutal killing of the Staines shook the nation and the world. A fact-finding team of the National Commission for Minorities said the gruesome burning was "pre-planned" and could be linked with disturbances taking part in other parts of the country.

The prime accused, Dara Singh, a pro-Hindu Bajrang Dal activist, and 13 others have been charge-sheeted by the Central Bureau of Investigations. But close to two years after the murders, punishment is still awaited. Only one person has been convicted - a 13-year-old who was part of the mob of arsonists. The jail sentence of 14 years passed on a minor by the special court shocked child rights activists and the public at large.

Within a week of the conviction of the minor for the killing of Graham Staines, several national newspapers reported the RSS (Hindu nationalist) chief, Mr K S Sudershan's statement to Christians to free themselves from the clutches of foreign churches and set up a 'swadeshi' (indigenous) church. Mr Sudershan also called on the Muslims to go for an apt Indianisation of Islam that would enable them to be a part of the national mainstream.

Statements like these and the spurt in attacks on Christians in the last two years have heightened the insecurity of these two communities. The Christian missionaries have been running some of the best educational institutes in the country and the elite of the country have been educated in them. The missionaries have also extended schooling and health facilities to remote interiors of the country and the poor and the tribals have benefitted from these services. But the number of foreign missionaries has been falling, and in 1999 was down to just 1,060.

Ever since the partition of India in 1947 there have been periodic fights between Hindus and Muslims. Very often, these bouts of violence were triggered politically. For several years there was tension and friction over the mosque built by the Moghul Emperor Babar in the 15th century at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, where it is said a temple once stood. It culminated on December 6, 1992, when the mosque was pulled down by Hindu fundamentalists even while a huge rally was being held at the site.

Every nuance of the build-up of tension was reported in the media. When the mosque was demolished, rioting broke out in different parts of the country and hundreds were killed. The demolition and the riots that broke out were reported extensively all over the world. A picture of the demolition of the mosque even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

The Hindus and Sikhs have lived in harmony and marriages between them are quite common. But after the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi in October 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards, Sikhs were brutally killed in the riots that broke out in Delhi and some other parts of the country. The assassination followed an army attack on the Golden Temple at Amritsar to flush out Sikh militants, ordered by Mrs Gandhi as the Prime Minister.

The 1991 census showed that Hindus account for over 80 per cent of India's population. Muslims form 12.12 per cent of the population, Christians 2.34 per cent, Sikhs 1.94 per cent and Buddhists 0.71 per cent. The number of Zoroastrians or Parsees is down to just 76,000.

The National Commission for Minorities was set up in 1978, at the same time that the Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was set up, to look into the grievances of minority communities. It was made a statutory body in 1992, with powers to summon records and people. It has the powers of a civil court. Thousands of complaints of deprivation of religious rights and individual rights are received and resolved by the Commission.

After the attack on Christians at Agra and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh in 2000, members of the Commission visited these cities for an on-the-spot study. They summoned the Chief Secretary of UP before them and he then issued guidelines to the police and the district magistrate on how these cases should be dealt with. The Station House Officer of the police post, who had locked up the Christian principal of a school for not giving admission to his son, was transferred.

Isolated complaints are also received from the Sikhs. These vary from not getting compensation after the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 to not being allowed to carry a kripan (sword worn by religious Sikhs) on an aircraft.

In his presentation to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom on September 18, John Dayal said there were 100 cases of hate crime and physical violence against Christians between January and September 2000. The population of Christians, he said, has actually fallen from 2.9 per cent of the national population in 1941 to just 2.3 per cent in 1991 because Christians tend to have smaller families.

Dayal maintains that Christians are not persecuted but subtle forms of discrimination are beginning to take their toll. Sixty per cent of the Christians are Dalits and 20 per cent tribals who have converted to Christianity. They are poor and disempowered. Relief for Dalits was communalised, says Dayal, with Dalit Christians being denied the quota of jobs and seats in educational institutions after a Presidential order of 1950 that earmarked these jobs/seats for only Dalit Hindus. Christians have been holding demonstrations demanding that these benefits be extended to all Dalits, irrespective of their religion. After a long struggle, these rights were restored to Buddhists and Sikh Dalits.