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Comment

Freedom of Belief

2 June 2023

6 min read

The month of May(hem) in Manipur

On the 27th May, Archbishop Justin Welby tweeted about the violence unfolding in Manipur. Belle Tindall re-winds the clock to May 3rd and tracks the events that led to his tweet.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A church interior glowing red as parts of its furniture burn. A man walks down the aisel

A video still of a church interior on fire, during violent clashes in Manipur, India.

Open Doors.

A note to our readers: this article includes reports that some readers may find particularly distressing.

On 27th May, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, tweeted about his concern at what has been, and still is, unfolding in Manipur in India. He wrote,

‘I’ve been distressed to hear about the attacks on the indigenous tribal Christians of Manipur, India, and of the churches that have been destroyed in recent weeks.

Kailean Khongsai is training for ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England, and is from Manipur. I join him in praying regional authorities would protect all minority groups, including Christians and their places of worship, and that justice and peace would prevail.’

In doing so, Archbishop Justin pointed the world in the direction of those who are facing extreme pressure, discrimination, and violence in their home of Manipur. Therefore, allow me to paint a fuller picture of what has been happening (largely unnoticed) for weeks now – let’s rewind to May 3rd.

May 3rd

On the streets of Manipur, a state in the northeast of India, indigenous communities protested the (apparent) impending accreditation of Scheduled Tribe status to the Meiti community. Let me provide some context as to why this would be a development to protest about.

Manipur is a self-governed state. A state that is home to the Meiti community, who make up around 53 per cent of the population, and other indigenous communities – the largest of which are the Kuki community, to the south, and the Naga community to the north. There is, and has long been, friction between these neighbouring people groups. The Kuki and Naga communities, being minority groups, have Scheduled Tribal status, thus ensuring that they have a right to protection (particularly regarding the reservations they call home) and representation. The Meiti people, being the state’s majority demographic, do not have such a status… yet.

Despite their legal protection, the Kuki people, in particular, have already faced ongoing evictions from their homes in the hill regions that they have inhabited for hundreds of years. Their expectation is that this is only the beginning. The fear is that, if the Meiti people were to be granted a similar Tribe status, it would result in the Kuki people further losing the right to keep and protect their spaces in both the hills and the forests. It would also pave the way for the Meiti people to assert more societal dominance, as they would be entitled to increased governmental representation; the imbalance would no longer be countered.

And so, on May 3rd, people from both the Kuki and Naga communities took to the streets and marched for ‘tribal solidarity’.

Within a matter of hours, a peaceful protest was transformed into riotous violence as the people marching were met with a wall of resistance. Since that Wednesday afternoon, whole villages have been burnt down, around 15,000 people have been made homeless, hundreds have been injured, the price of essentials has risen to unprecedented levels, schools and public facilities have been closed, internet has been suspended, and although numbers are proving a challenge to confirm, it is thought that anywhere between thirty to seventy people have been killed. Some media outlets are perceiving this violence as the rumblings of an impending civil war; while the Kuki and Naga communities are placing the entirety of the blame upon the Meiti people, The Meiti community are directing all blame toward the tribal communities. And the violence continues to rage on.

May 4th

Recent footage has emerged of a particularly heinous incident taking place on 4th May, one that has re-caught the world's attention and thus prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his silence, declaring that the attack has 'shamed India'.

Two women, both of whom belonging to the Kuki community, were taken from a police van, stripped, publicly paraded and sexually assaulted in broad daylight. Two men, the younger woman's brother and father, were killed while trying to protect them. It is now being reported that this attack was carried out by armed Meiti men, none of which were arrested until astonishingly recently, more than two months after the attack took place.

Manipur is imploding, and the violent ramifications are devastating.

But there is just one more piece of context that undergirds the Archbishop’s tweet, one more thing to note about the societal dynamics at play in Manipur: while the Meiti community are a majority Hindu people group, the various indigenous groups are almost entirely Christian. As such, Open Doors have reported that the women who were subjected to to the afore-mentioned attack were Christian women.

A complex ethno-religious conflict

The goings-on in Manipur are anything but simple; and so, it is not my intention to reduce the geographic, political, and historic complexities of this conflict, nor to wholly define it as a war between religions. Following Archbishop Justin’s lead, it is with particular caution that I speak of violence being inflicted particularly on Christians in Manipur, acknowledging that it is not the only identity marker that is proving to be targetable.

Nevertheless, it is being widely reported that Christians are being singled out; their Christianity used as a target to aim at, their identity wielded as a weapon against them. Whether it be as the means or the end, as the goal or merely the tactic: it is happening.

According to further Open Doors’ reports, derived from their partners in Manipur, around three hundred churches have been burnt down thus far, one of which still had people in it when it was set alight. A further one hundred public Christian buildings have been destroyed, while one thousand homes which were owned/inhabited by Christian people were ruined, while neighbouring properties remained untouched.

And it isn’t only the Kuki Christians who are facing such discrimination, the (very few) Meiti Christians are also facing particular difficulties as a result of their unusual ethno-religious identity. Noticing this, one Indian news publication is reporting that from the perspective of the Meiti Hindus, Meiti Christians are somewhat of an oxymoron, personified. It is believed that to be Christian is to have converted to a tribal way of living (assimilating the Kuki and Naga people), and therefore comes with assumptions of deep betrayal. And yet, the publication also observes that ‘if their [Christian] faith is making them feel insecure in the valley, it has not come to their rescue in the hills either. The Kukis have made no distinction between them and other Meiteis’. They are, subsequently, a community that are ‘sandwiched’ in conflict.

While the conflict is undoubtedly spilling over ethnic and religious lines, Manipur has just become one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a Christian. In yet another part of the world, it is now a hazardous faith.

And so, back to Archbishop Justin’s tweet.

The need to be seen

One only needs to spend thirty or so seconds tracking the comments generated by this particular tweet to get a sense of how powerful it is to be seen. To be noticed when in distress, to be acknowledged when in chaos, to be advocated for when in danger.

In many ways, social media is a genie that we wish we were able to squeeze back into the bottle. And as justified as such feelings often are, in this case, as in many others in our recent history, it has proved to be a way in which our eyes are opened to what is happening in the most remote corners of our world. Archbishop Justin has publically called for protection, justice, and peace, and in doing so, has made it difficult for the conflict to continue to rumble on unnoticed.

It is now on all of us to refuse to look away. The people of Manipur, Christian and otherwise, need us to continue to look in their direction.

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Conspiracy theory

Death & life

29 August 2024

4 min read

A Bayesian theory of death

The sinking of the superyacht displays the probability, and banality, of death.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Rescue workers look at the plan of a yacht.

The search for the Bayesian.

Vigili del Fuoco.

On any statistical calculation, the probability of dying by drowning when your luxury yacht suddenly and inexplicably sinks at anchor in the Mediterranean has to be extremely low.

So it’s the cruellest of ironies that tech tycoon Mike Lynch should so die, along with his daughter and five others, having devoted his commercial life to the application of such statistical probabilities. He had named his yacht Bayesian after the 18th-century theorem that introduced the idea that probability expresses a degree of belief in an event.

That doesn’t expressly mean religious belief. But, intriguingly, it doesn’t exclude it either. According to Thomas Bayes, who published his theorem in 1763, the calculable degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about an event, such as the results of previous experiments, or on personal beliefs about it.

In essence, you don’t believe your yacht will capsize in the night and sink in seconds, because your experience tells you so. That belief can mathematically be included in the probability of it happening.

We can transfer the method into religious praxis. Christian belief in the event of resurrection, for instance, can be calculated in the probability that the deaths of the Lynches and others aboard the Bayesian are not the end of their existence.

It’s an intriguing legacy of Lynch’s work for theologians. But it’s the sheer lack of probability of the lethal event occurring at all that lends it its random banality. It’s that death visited those asleep on a yacht in the small hours that lends this news story such tireless legs, not just that these were super-rich masters and mistresses of the universe.

There have been bitter observations on social media that the Bayesian’s victims have commanded limitlessly greater attention than the many thousands of refugees who die in small-boat crossings of the Mediterranean every year.

This is a category mistake. And again, Bayesian theory can be deployed. Experience supports our belief that crossing the sea in overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels can all too often lead to tragically terminal events. The probability of death is plain. Again, it’s the sheer randomness of the Bayesian yacht event that sets it apart.

If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

That randomness brings us back to the banality of sudden death among us, almost its ordinariness, something that just happens, often entirely out of the blue. The prayer book has the funeral words “in the midst of life we are in death”, meaning that death is our constant living companion. But that doesn’t quite cut it for me, because it tells us it’s there, but nothing of its true significance.

The tenets of Christian faith are regularly said to be those of a death cult; that it’s a deep-seated fear of death that leads us to avoid it with assurances of eternal life. But it’s the sheer banality of death, as displayed in the randomness of the Bayesian event, that seems to knock down that idea. In its randomness, death looks ridiculous rather than evil.

Conspiracy theories around the sinking of the Bayesian are a kind of denial of the reality of death too. We want there to be more to it than the utterly banal.

Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” when covering the trial of Nazi holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’d want to suggest that it’s that same banality, that basic human ordinariness, that is the real nature of the supposed grim reaper, rather than his evil.

None of this can comfort the Lynch family, who mourn the loss of a much-loved father and his young daughter, or the families of the others who lost their lives on the Bayesian. But it is meant to go some way towards an explanation of what we mean in Christian theology when we bandy about phrases such as “the defeat of death”. Because it’s not a wicked serpent that’s been defeated, more of a pointless clown.

There is something especially painful about the death of the young, such as that of 18-year-old Hannah Lynch on the Bayesian that night, a young woman on the threshold of life. And – God knows – the even younger lives we’ve read about being taken lately.

But the concept of banality may lead us to another tenet of faith: The completeness of every life. If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

A poem, often ascribed to a former dean of St Paul’s cathedral, begins with the line: “Death is nothing at all.” That’s wrong, as an idea. Death is as significant an event as birth. But its defeat is in keeping it in its place.

The dignity in simplicity with which football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson greeted his final illness is a masterclass in this tactic for life. Death isn’t to be negotiated, it’s just there.

In the end, death isn’t a Bayesian probability, it’s a certainty, for all of us. The difference, in Bayesian theory, must be the belief we bring to our personal calculations of the probability of the event.