Christians Under Coronavirus Lockdown in India ‘Forgotten,’ Facing Starvation

Local politicians, typically catering to the majority Hindu population, have left Christians in rural areas without the means of attaining food and risking starvation. In some cases, the officials deny the food outright, while in others they refuse to offer food to needy Christian families before serving all Hindu residents in an area.

India is facing the worst’s most severe acceleration of Chinese coronavirus contamination in the world, reaching a milestone of 400,000 documented cases a day this week. India has documented over 20 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began and over 226,000 deaths as of Wednesday, a toll rapidly increasing in the most affected communities.

The rapid rise in cases has increased called for a national lockdown, potentially worsening the situations putting minority Christians at risk of starvation.

“With the whole surge in Covid [coronavirus] cases, there’s a whole new huge need for aid and for vaccines, and on the aid component, that’s where we’re seeing some of the more horrific stories,” Six explained to Breitbart News, “not just discrimination but just a lack of aid getting to a lot of these communities.”

“Our partners on the ground are reporting that they are finding Christians in home where they’ve just been forgotten and they aren’t getting food or anything like that. It’s happened not just to Christians, but there’s a huge need to make sure that people aren’t starving under these lockdown orders,” he explained. “A lot of Indians are subsistence farmers and they live on day wages. If they don’t get wages in a day, it can be a matter of hours or a few days before they run out of food.”

Discrimination against Christians is rampant in some parts of India, where Hindu nationalists — who believe that Hinduism is the only legitimate religion for ethnic Indian people to embrace — have long targeted churches and pressured local officials to exclude Christians from society. Christians, many of whom come from lower castes, also face ill treatment in the form of being deprived jobs they are competent in and forced into “dirty” or more dangerous jobs. Last year, Open Doors documented evidence of Indian hospitals forcing Christian nurses to take shifts caring for coronavirus patients to protect Hindu nurses, exposing them sometimes without adequate protection.

“We have reports of Christian nurses who are being scheduled to work with the most contagious because they are considered dispensable and lower than people of other faiths,” David Curry, the CEO of Open Doors, told Breitbart News in April 2020. “These kinds of reports are flooding in and that’s why we want to draw attention to it because I think it yet again highlights the issues around persecution and how difficult it is for Christians and for other religious minorities in other kinds of circumstances.” “I don’t think that’s stopped at all,”

That’s part of a pattern of having Christians work in whatever the more perceived dangerous jobs are, whether that’s sewage clean up or street cleaner or perhaps it’s working with a lot of Covid-positive individuals… often this is intermixed with discrimination against Dalits and untouchable communities,” he added. “Many of the Christians we work with come from Dalit communities and so there’s an effort to put them in jobs no one else wants to do or that are perceived as dangerous or dirty.”

Six urged Indian leaders to “respond quickly when there are reports of discrimination and handing out aid or vaccines. That needs to be addressed really quickly.” He added that generalized, nationwide lockdown provisions may do tremendous harm to communities and true protection comes from “policies are tailored to the circumstances on the ground so you’re not ending up with trying to stop a virus and starving a bunch of people to death in the process. There has to be a balance there that recognizes the realities of, especially, a lot of rural India when addressing this.”

https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/05/05/exclusive-christians-under-coronavirus-lockdown-in-india-forgotten-facing-starvation/