Goanet Reader
2018-06-08 20:23:14 UTC
Why Christian Missionaries Hate Modi And RSS So Much
by Madhu Purnima Kishwar
Jun 01, 2018, 11:45 am
The Sangh parivar and Narendra
Modi in particular are not
willing to go out of their way
to assist Christian
missionaries in harvesting
souls -- and that irks the
missionaries.
As someone who studied in a convent school and whose mother
also studied in a school run by Irish nuns in Peshawar, one
could not help but have a benign view of the Christian
community. Most middle-class people of our generation grew up
believing that the Christian missions were sincerely
committed to the spread of education and healthcare. However,
even as a schoolgirl, I resented the subtle indoctrination
inflicted on us by converting the "Moral Science" class into
a Bible study class. Our Moral Science book had stories only
from the Bible. There was no mention of Hindu faith
traditions, leave alone study of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas
or the Ramayana.
Though the overwhelming majority of students in our school
were from Hindu or Sikh families, we were made to say the
lord's prayer not only during the morning assembly but also
before each class and another Christian prayer after each
class with due reverence, including crossing our hearts after
each prayer.
Anyone who topped the class in monthly or weekly tests, got
"holy pictures" by way of reward. Not surprisingly,
possessing a large collection of beautiful Vatican-produced
pictures of Lord Jesus, Mother Mary, the Holy Trinity and a
whole range of Christian saints came to be seen as a prized
possession. Since I routinely topped my class in every
subject and won all the school competitions in debating,
dramatics etc, I owned the largest collection of holy
pictures in the entire school.
It is noteworthy that Hindu and Sikh parents, whose children
studied in that or countless other missionary schools never
objected to this daily dose of Christianisation and
systematic attempt to inculcate "love of Jesus" in our
impressionable minds. For the record, no pressure was ever
exerted on us to "convert" because the school authorities
knew that trying the conversion game with middle and upper
middle class/caste families was bound to backfire. However,
it was well-known that the same order of nuns ran special
schools in Punjab villages and in urban bastis, targeting
children of the poor and "lower castes". These schools had
been established mainly for the purpose of getting converts
and "harvesting souls" for the Church. But in those innocent
days, nobody seemed to mind or care, leave alone sense any
sinister agenda.
Despite the horrors of colonial rule and the religion-based
Partition, most Hindus still continued to chant the pious
mantra of sarva dharma sam bhav. We were taught to believe
that all religions lead to the same path and that if
Christians gave good education to the deprived classes, they
were performing samaj sewa (social service). Nobody paid much
heed to the fact that the Christians and Islamists never
reciprocated sarva dharma sam bhav. Instead, their entire
strategy of conversion was based on defaming and demonising
Hindu faith traditions because that is a core mandate of
Abrahamic religions, for whom dharma, as Hindus understand
it, has no value and their open agenda is to crush the
dharmic civilisation of India.
Even as a schoolgirl, what bugged me most was that we were
not only discouraged from speaking in Hindi or Punjabi -- the
mother tongues of most students in our school -- but also
punished for doing so. The punishment was of course not
corporal. Every classroom had a chart with the name of all
the students to rank the weekly and monthly performances.
Those who excelled in various subjects and extra-curricular
competitions got gold stars for each accomplishment, followed
by red star, yellow star, green star. The dreaded black star
proclaimed that you belonged to the bottom rung.
As an all-round topper, I invariably got gold stars for
everything else but continually got black stars for speaking
in Hindi, despite prohibition on the language even during
lunch break. I kept defying the ban because even at that age
I found it offensive to my national pride, though I
understood its far-reaching implications only much later.
It is through one's mother tongue or native language that we
stay rooted in our culture and sanskars. By forcing us to
become monolingual and English-dependent, we were being
systematically deracinated. English inevitably brings with it
disdain for Indic cultures and faith traditions and harbours
the tendency to view the world through lenses of the imperial
West, which is deeply rooted in Christian ethos. Sadly, this
enslavement to English was made state policy under Nehruvian
influence. Not surprisingly, elite schools founded and run by
the brown sahibs of India are following the same pattern of
intellectual enslavement set in motion by missionary schools.
No surprise then that a vast majority of India's
English-educated elite act as the intellectual warriors for
Christian missions. They defend the right of evangelical
organisations to convert Hindus to Christianity even while
they use questionable means and rabid hate-Hindu propaganda
to bring in converts. But they go ballistic when Hindu
organisations try winning back Christian converts to their
original faith. Abusing and demonising Hindu faith traditions
is treated as proof of "liberalism" and defended as "freedom
of expression", but even modest questions raised against the
means and methods adopted by evangelical groups and
consequences of large-scale conversions to Christianity is
treated as proof of a person being a obscurantist
"Hindutvavadi" -- with Hindutva (its plain meaning is
"essence of Hindu faith") being projected as synonymous with
fascism.
In the initial years of Manushi, the human rights,
women's rights journal I founded in 1978-79,
Christian organisations of all hues embraced it
warmly and came to constitute a large chunk of our
subscribers. I was often invited to speak at their
events in different parts of India. Many of them
translated reports from Manushi into regional
languages. At that stage, I naively believed that
just as the "Liberation Theologists" within the
Church-led "progressive" movements in defence of
human rights of black Africans, the Christian
organisations of India were carrying forward that
tradition by contributing their might to movements
for social justice and women's rights. But I was
disabused of this notion when I found that when
Manushi started defending Indic faith traditions
from malicious attacks, Christian organisations --
including those wearing the secular mask -- began
to not only distance themselves from Manushi but
also started to work against it.
It is not a coincidence that during that very phase, Kancha
Ilaiah came to be feted and celebrated by church leaders and
organisations and catapulted into international fame after he
converted to Christianity and wrote a rather pompous,
malicious hate tract against Hinduism titled Why I Am Not a
Hindu. It is based on willful distortions and clearly written
for the purpose of ingratiating himself with rabid
evangelicals. Before Ilaiah wrote this, he was neither an
avant-garde academic nor a celebrated public intellectual. As
soon as he published his hate tract, he was touted by
Christian organisations as a leading global intellectual and
radical reformer of the "decadent Hindu society".
Since Christian organisations carry a lot of influence in
Western universities, Ilaiah became a professional
globetrotter, lecturing at the most prestigious universities
in the West. Overnight he became a star speaker at
high-profile international conferences, including at the
United Nations. His views on India and Hinduism came to be
treated as gospel truth. If a person of his intellectual
mediocrity had said good things about Hinduism, he would not
have been invited as a speaker even by a small-town Rotary
Club. But abusing India and Hinduism brought him handsome
monetary rewards and celebrity stature.
Ilaiah's article "Disowning Hinduism" is likely to
have been inspired by my controversial article "Why
I do Not Call Myself a Feminist", in which I
explained how followers of all "isms", including
Indian feminists, ape the means and methods of
Christian missionaries out to harvest souls and
treat those who don't adopt their ideology as
sub-human species, who need to be saved from
ignorance and perdition. That sealed my fate with
Christian organisations and even foreign
universities.
Until then, I was a very sought after speaker in universities
abroad, especially universities in North America. But with
that article, I began to get blacklisted, even though mine
was far from a hate tract. It was a well-reasoned
carefully-worded piece analysing how all ideologies are
products of specific cultures, social contexts and historical
phases, and therefore cannot be blindly applied to altogether
different social contexts and timeframes.
Moral of the story: while I faced severe punishment for
distancing myself from copycat feminism and all proselytising
ideologies, Ilaiah became a global celebrity as a reward for
Hindu bashing and open conversion to Christianity.
Modi's Demonic Image
I personally woke up to the seriousness of the
danger posed by Christian missionaries during my
study of Narendra Modi's tenure as Gujarat chief
minister. As I explained in my book Modi, Muslims
and Media (MMM), I undertook that study only
because I wanted to check out for myself whether
the evil deeds attributed to Modi and the demonic
image painted of him by the Congress-Left combine
in cohorts with select foreign-funded
non-govermental organisations (NGOs), bore any
resemblance to chief minister Modi and the impact
his model of governance had on the ground. Since he
was being accused of a genocidal bent of mind
towards "religious minorities", I made Muslim and
Christian communities the focus of my study. A good
part of the material I gathered regarding the
Muslim community is already published in MMM, but I
could not give space in the book to the
interactions I had with the Christian community.
It all started with an hour-long phone conversation I had
with V V Augustine, a Malayali Christian based in
Thiruvananthapuram. During his tenure as a member of the
Minorities Commission, Augustine had interacted with Modi on
multiple occasions. This is what Augustine told me in our
very first phone chat.
"Contrary to the propaganda that Modiji is supposed to be
anti-minority, my experience is that Modi is a very
minority-friendly person. When I was member of the Minorities
Commission, the Christian community of Vapi district in
Gujarat brought a serious issue to my notice. They number
around 7,000. There are several churches in Vapi of different
Christian denominations that include Catholics, Protestants
and Syrian Christians.
"Since the last 40 years, they had been trying to get a piece
of land for a cemetery. They had even approached the central
government; and they were willing to pay for the land. But
the administration kept dragging the matter on for decades.
This caused enormous inconvenience because they had to take
dead bodies 40 miles from Vapi for burial [I found later the
distance was 18 km, not 40]. In order to lobby collectively,
they formed a Vapi Christian Association and approached me
for help as a member of the Minorities Commission.
"I asked them to write one more fresh application addressed
to the collector of the district. When I went to meet the
collector, he told me frankly, 'this has to be a government
decision because the local people have a problem with having
a graveyard in their midst. Please approach the appropriate
authority.'
"I therefore decided to talk straight to Modiji and explained
the matter to him. He listened with full attention and said,
'Yes, you have a genuine issue. Have you identified a piece
of land?' I told him that we have a place but the local
people are resisting our acquiring it. Modi said, 'that is
not your problem; that's mine. Just tell me where you want
the land and I will call for a report.' Within a matter of
hours, he had the full report from the collector, who told
him that since that particular piece of land was right in the
middle of the town, the local people were resisting having a
graveyard there.
"Modi then asked the collector to work in
coordination with the Vapi Christian Association
and identify another suitable piece of land. Within
no time, the land was identified on the outskirts
of the town and the Christian community was gifted
one-and-a-half acres of land by the state
government free of charge.
"I have interacted with him on numerous issues since then and
have always found him extremely helpful and responsive. For
instance, in the Dang tribal areas, there are settlements of
neo-Christians. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had become
very active in the area, resulting in a lot of tension. When
they planned to organise a big Shabari Kumbh Mela in that
area in 2006, the Christians became extremely nervous and
feared that they would be attacked. We went to Modi with our
apprehensions. Christian organisations demanded a ban on the
Shabari Mela.
"Modi did not ban the mela because that would have given the
VHP an excuse to create a ruckus that Hindus were being put
down at the behest of Christians, leading to more tension. He
assured us that nobody would be allowed to indulge in any
lawless behaviour and issued firm instructions to the police
commissioner of the area. Indeed, the mela passed off
peacefully, this despite the fact that, during 2002,
non-Christian tribals had attacked Christian settlements
leading to a great deal of mutual hostility and suspicion.
Not surprisingly, most Christians vote for Modi. They have
never complained against his regime.
"When I met Modi even on small matters, he supported all
genuine demands. In another incident, there was a problem
between Hindus and Muslims in a small village near Vadodara
in 2004. He gave me a free hand to act as an intermediary. I
called a joint meeting. A Muslim had killed a Hindu over a
business issue and Hindus retaliated. They were not even on
talking terms. We conducted peace meetings to bring in
communal harmony. The collector was given instructions by
Modiji to extend full cooperation.
"Gujarat newspapers gave prominent coverage to how the
'Augustine Mission' was successful. But the peace mission
could not have succeeded if the administration had not been
fully supportive. People who spread the canard that Modi is
against minorities are reflecting their own political biases.
My experience is entirely different.
"As a member of the Minorities Commission, I dealt with
several states. The governments of Odisha and Madhya Pradesh
have also been good. But no chief minister is as good, as
strong and determined as Modi. Once he takes up an issue, he
sees it through to its logical conclusion.
"Now, even Muslims realise that Modi is good for them because
a riot-free Gujarat and a resurgent economy with new
opportunities have provided them avenues of upward mobility.
I admire Modi and I want him to be the prime minister. I
always go by factual accounts. Those who are obsessed with
injustice done to minorities should ask: Who has given full
rights to the minorities? It is the Hindu majority! Who wrote
the Constitution? Mostly Hindus! We must appreciate Hindus
for this and give them their due credit."
This glowing tribute came as a very pleasant
surprise for me because for years one had heard
John Dayal, Teesta Setalvad, Aakar Patel, Father
Cedric Prakash and other Christian activists talk
of Narendra Modi as though he was the devil
incarnate out to cleanse Christians and Muslims
from the state of Gujarat. Cedric Prakash in
particular had been at the forefront of the
international campaign against Modi to get him
blacklisted "as a mass murderer" and denied visa to
America and European countries. What is worse,
Cedric Prakash along with Islamist groups had
lobbied with the US Commission for Religious
Freedom to get India blacklisted as a country which
crushes religious minorities -- notably Christians
and Muslims.
To quote from one of his interviews referring to Modi's
Gujarat at the Berkeley Centre for Religion, Peace and World
Affairs:
The people that follow Hindutva are fascists; they
are the equivalent from (sic) the American context
of the Ku Klux Klan, and they draw inspiration from
the apartheid of South Africa and Nazi ideology.
The basic ideology asks for one nation, one
language and one people. December 2, 2010
But Augustine had painted such a glowing picture that I
decided to go personally to the Christian pockets of Gujarat
in Dang and Vapi to check what the church leaders there had
to say about Modi.
I had expected that at least the Vapi Christians would
endorse Augustine's version and display goodwill towards
Modi. But I was taken aback when I found most of them
reluctant to utter even one good word about him. Since I had
informed them of my visit in advance, half a dozen pastors
from various Christian institutions had gathered in one
place. Since they knew that Augustine had given me his
firsthand account, they could not altogether deny the
sequence of events nor paint Modi in the demonic light that
Father Cedric Prakash, John Dayal and their associates among
the human rights NGOs routinely do. But their demeanour and
the hints one got from their guarded sentences and body
language spoke volumes about their innate hostility towards
the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi, which had nothing
to do with what Modi actually did or failed to do.
For instance, Father Jose Dali from Kerala, who has lived in
Gujarat for 36 years, attributed their success in getting
land for the graveyard to the "power of the lord", and the
fact that all Christians were "praying together". To quote
him, "we believe in a living god. We believe that he is a god
who is able to do miracles, even if the government is against
us. We believe in the power of the lord. It is a special
faith of the Christians. People all around the world prayed
together and because of that, the lord worked on the hearts
of the magistrate as well as the leaders." In other words,
they presented to their congregation the success in getting
the graveyard land as yet another miracle of Christ.
Their reluctance to give credit to the Modi
government either for securing free land for them
or for ensuring that even minor skirmishes don't
take place among Christians and non-Christians
tells its own story.
They also tried to convince me that the Modi government
discriminated against tribal areas with regard to development
programmes and that in the interior tribal villages, road and
other infrastructure was not as good as in non-tribal areas.
To quote Francis Fernandes: "in tribal areas, if they are
pockets of Christian faith, they will not get certain
facilities". When I asked to give him concrete examples, he
couldn't give me any.
I found that charge baseless because I had travelled to the
remotest tribal areas and had seen that the quality of roads
was no different. True, medical services in villages near big
cities were better than in interior villages. But there was
no difference between tribal and non-tribal villages in this
respect. The difference is more to do with doctors and nurses
not willing to work in villages far from major urban centres.
Thereafter, they complained that the sarpanch of that area
had refused to sanction a power connection for the graveyard.
Since burials don't take place at night, I was a bit
surprised that they needed a power connection for the open
ground. Even so I decided to check whether this charge had
any substance.
I met both the current as well as the previous
sarpanch of Paldi taluka panchayat. Both were
categorical that the pastors had never applied for
a power connection so there was no question of
refusal. I called the most voluble among of the
pastors from the sarpanch's house and put my mobile
phone on speaker mode. Now, the pastor, who had
claimed that he had personally gone and applied for
the power connection, came up with a lame story
that a long while ago he had gone very early
morning to the house of the sarpanch (not the
panchayat office) and since the sarpanch was not at
home, he left the application with an unknown
person who opened the door. I asked him whether he
had followed up on the matter. The answer was, "no,
we didn't follow up since we knew they would not
sanction the connection."
This was a clear case of building a victimhood narrative out
of a situation where the Modi government had gone out of its
way to help the Christian community in more ways than one.
The Truth Behind The Victimhood Narrative
Father Francis Macwan, one of the senior pastors of
a missionary school on Ahwa Road, where Shabari
Dham is situated, had told me that their school and
their mission had received all possible help from
the Modi government. When I asked him to provide
concrete examples of "help", he described how the
district administration had been instructed to
provide as many free school textbooks, children's
notebooks, stationery, school bags and uniforms as
demanded by missionary schools, even though as
privately-run schools, the state government is not
obliged to provide such support to church-run
institutions, especially considering that the
mission schools set up in tribal areas have the
express mandate to win over converts to
Christianity.
Thus, when any state government provides free books and other
educational materials to mission schools, it is in a way
furthering their conversion agenda since free education and
related benefits are one of the primary incentives offered by
the Church to tribals and other poor communities. And yet the
Modi government, as perhaps several other state governments
in India, provide this as a goodwill gesture towards the
Christian community.
But barring a few individuals like Augustine, the
hostility of church leaders, especially the
aggressive evangelical variety, towards the BJP in
particular, and Hinduism in general, has only
exacerbated instead of abating. The reason for this
came out through their own narrative. For the
Christian missions in India, "freedom of religion"
promised as a constitutional right means
essentially one thing -- unchecked right to convert
people to Christianity, through fair means or foul.
In my case study of Bishrampur village in Sasaram district of
Bihar published in Swarajya in February 2018, I have
described the blackmail tactics, including violence on
children used by Christian bigots to force children from poor
families to adopt Christianity.
But finally they let it out that the real issue bothering
them was with regard to government policy over conversions.
To quote Jose Dali: "actually, what the government feels
about conversion and what we believe are different.
Conversion will take place within the heart. We are not
converting anybody. Those who are truly believing and
personally accepting Christ as their saviour and after
confessing by themselves publicly, we will accept them.
Baptism is not a sign of the conversion. Baptism is a part of
the faith. Those who are converted will be baptised as per
the Bible, Gospel of Mathew."
Father Francis Fernandes added: "conversion and baptism are
not the same. What the pastor is explaining is that there is
a change of heart in a person. The change of heart is when
the person is ready and the person says, I want to join this
way of life. Then only we initiate him in the field. He is
saying 'yes' and we are acknowledging that 'yes', that is
baptism. By seeing the way of life, by seeing the faith of
the people around, by seeing that Jesus is there, god is
there, then this person comes and says, I want to receive
baptism. It is not that we are going and forcing people." He
justified Father Cedric Prakash's virulent opposition to the
Modi government on the ground that "we are not free in our
own country, in our own state. Why are our constitutional
rights being curtailed? I have the freedom to believe in any
god as per the Constitution and after my confession, any time
I can follow the principles of the faith." In other words,
the government not allowing support to conversions made them
feel India is not a free country.
Another charge made by these pastors was that there are
restrictions on building churches. To quote Father Francis
Fernandes: "this is our freedom curtailment. As an active
member of the Christian faith, we are not free in our own
country to call our own place of worship which is called
internationally a church." At the same meeting, Father Mathew
told me, "in South Gujarat alone, there are hundreds of
Christian institutions."
Several IAS officers, including those working as
district collectors, confirmed that there is no
blanket ban on building churches. But the problem
arises when evangelicals want to plant a church in
the middle of a Hindu settlement where there are no
Christians, or position it right next to an
important Hindu temple. That invariably gets
resisted by local communities. But evangelicals
have got used to the administration riding
roughshod over local sentiments under pressure from
Christian missions to give them endless special
concessions they claim as a "minority". They
succeed often because they have both the monetary
clout as well as political backing to get the
government to do their bidding. The fact that under
the Modi government, they could not bulldoze the
administration with unreasonable demands was
provocation enough to join not only with the
conversion-friendly Congress party but even rank
Islamists in running an international campaign to
present him as devil incarnate.
Jose Dali belongs to a Protestant group called Brethren
Assemblies, which is spread all over the world. In response
to his litany of complaints, I asked him if he had presented
the complaints to the district collector. His response was a
giveaway: "we don't want to make allegations. If there is
some problem, we won't go to the police station or outside.
We believe that maybe God's plan will work things out." But
that didn't prevent them from taking their imaginary
complaints against Narendra Modi to the US Senate, the
European Union and various UN platforms.
How do they justify the virulent campaign to get the US and
European governments to deny Modi visa for a whole decade? To
quote Father Francis Fernandes: "maybe when our Indian Penal
Code or Indian court is not giving you proper justice, you
appeal to the international level. That is how Cedric Prakash
must have gone to that extent. When my children are not fed
in my own house, they will go out to beg, borrow and eat. So
that is what is happening. If they have taken this step, that
means something is wrong with my own house."
Father Francis Macwan, the most reasonable and
straightforward of all the pastors I met, from the
Jesuit order, summed up the nature of the conflict
candidly: "Father Cedric Prakash is a social
scientist and an activist. His view is different
from ours because we are staying in the midst of
people. So my experience is different. Cedric is
also in touch with Protestant groups, who go for
conversion and faith formation. I have a very
positive experience in working in Gujarat under
Modi. We Catholics are not directly aggressive in
conversions. But for Protestants, the main activity
is conversion. So their experience is different."
It is noteworthy that he could speak his mind,
though very diffidently, mainly because I chanced
to meet him alone while all others met me as a
group.
Meanwhile, the Church has tried to adopt Hindu
nomenclature, rituals and vocabulary for Christian
myths and church rituals, to make Christianity
appear less alien. As elsewhere, so also in the
Vapi church, the statue of Mother Mary was dressed
in a Gujarati-style saree. Father Francis Fernandes
explained they have named her "Our Lady of
Velankanni" after a place in Tamil Nadu where
Mother Mary allegedly "appeared" to several persons
in her bodily form. That place has become a
Christian "pilgrimage centre". Such miracle
mongering is a standard technique of evangelicals
to attract converts. Adopting local Hindu names,
rituals, aarti, bhajans are also part of the
strategy to make Christianity appear rooted in the
soil of India instead of being an alien imported
religion.
PHOTO: Mother Mary dressed in a Gujarati-style saree.
I also saw for myself how the local Hindu population,
especially the youngsters, routinely visited the big church
compound in Vapi for relaxing in its vast garden and often
went and prayed inside because they found the atmosphere
peaceful. For some youngsters, it has become the most
convenient dating place because Vapi does not have many such
pleasant gardens with beautiful shaded trees.
The lack of hostility of the Hindu population to
Christian institutions is evident from the fact
that out of 1,800 students in Father Mathew's
school, the vast majority are Hindu. Only 1 per
cent of children are avowedly Christian, and only
10 per cent are tribals. However, they run a
separate residential school only for tribal
children, which is where there is a heavy dose of
evangelical brainwashing to convert them to
Christianity.
For the benefit of "secular Hindus", the pastors describe
their evangelical agenda in highly sanitised terms: "we
propagate the love of Jesus Christ, we propagate the gospel,
and we are teaching everyone to become a good human being so
we propagate Jesus Christ and his love. We never try to
convert anybody. Message of Christ is the message of love. It
is a very open message."
However, the Joshua Project, of which all these Protestant
missions are a part, makes no secret of the communities it
has targeted for conversion. This is what it says about
communities that are the soft targets in the tribal-dominated
Dang district:
Almost all of the Central Bhil practise ethnic
religions that have been highly influenced by
Hinduism. Shiva is considered the supreme god.
Ancestor worship (praying to deceased ancestors) is
also quite popular. Shamans (priests) are also
called upon to offer sacrifices to the many gods
and mud idols.
In spite of their traditional beliefs, there have been
interesting manifestations of god's spirit among the upper
caste Bhagat gurus. They now worship light and 'the word',
singing prophecies of the future, such as the coming sinless
incarnation. At the turn of the century, one guru warned his
disciples that there would be a great famine, after which
they should look for teachers from the north and west who
would teach them the true way of salvation from a book, free
of cost. They would teach about the true god, and about a
sinless incarnation, who was born of a virgin. The guru also
said that they should worship this sinless, invisible god,
turn away from stones and idols, and live blameless lives. A
famine occurred in 1899-1900, soon after the guru's death.
The Joshua Project thus admits that the Bhils are steeped in
Hindu faith and that their agenda is to wean them away from
attachment to their "false gods" and adopt the "true god" but
they also admit to using devious strategies including natural
calamities as a way of making in-roads among the unsuspecting
tribals.
Modi And Conversions
The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
in general and Narendra Modi in particular become
objects of hate and are perceived as threats not
because they want to smash churches and attack or
kill Christians or shut down schools. They are
hated because, unlike the Congress and Communist
parties, the Sangh parivar is not willing to go out
of its way to assist Christian missionaries in
harvesting souls. Modi became the bête noire of the
Christian community despite being very liberal in
yielding to the reasonable demands of Christian
organisations, and seeking a relationship of
cooperation with them and not confrontation. In the
very first year of his tenure, his government
passed a law entitled Gujarat Freedom of Religion
Act, 2003. As per this law, anyone who wants to
change his/her religion has to first report to the
civil authority, namely the deputy commissioner of
the district.
This provision is meant to prevent conversions through fraud.
Even though seven states in India already had such a law, the
Gujarat law came to rankle the Christian community all over
India because Modi took its enforcement somewhat more
seriously, whereas almost all Congress governments either
turned a blind eye to conversions -- whether fair or foul --
or even actively assisted in the planting of churches in
areas favoured by Christians through free land grants and
other overt and covert forms of assistance.
During British times, churches of various
denominations came to occupy the best and the most
premium tracts of real estate in every state of
India. But even after Independence, the Indian
State has been generous in patronising missionary
activities, making available countless stretches of
prime land as virtual gifts, or at best charging a
token amount. In that sense, the combined real
estate of various churches in India may well place
them among the biggest land owners in India. The
growth in planting of churches has also proceeded
at frenetic pace in recent decades, especially
after the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to
power and Sonia Gandhi became the all-powerful
authority figure at the Centre as well as for state
governments under the rule of the Congress and/or
its allies.
To quote Dr Ralph F Wilson, writing on the website of the
Joyful Heart Renewal Ministries: "The truly exciting thing is
that the percentage of Christians has increased substantially
from 2.5 per cent a decade ago to about 5.8 per cent today.
That represents a huge increase in the growth rate. Something
is happening!
"Mycologist and church growth expert C Peter Wagner has been
receiving reports that the percentage may actually be 25 per
cent Christian -- at least in parts of this large country --
most of the growth coming in the past 10 to 15 years. And the
growth may not all be in traditional churches. A substantial
part may come from Jesus-follower groups within the Hindu
culture.
"In this huge and very diverse country, it's difficult to get
accurate statistics regarding religion, but anecdotal stories
indicate exciting changes. According to Christianity Today,
Operation Mobilisation, one of India's largest missionary
groups, has grown to include 3,000 congregations in India, up
from 300 in less than a decade. A hospital-based ministry in
north India has seen 8,000 baptisms over the past five years
after a decade of only a handful.
"Everybody knows about the massive scale of growth
among Dalits,' says Operation World's Jason
Mandryk. Somewhere between 70 per cent and 90 per
cent of Christians in India are Dalits, low-caste
groups, so that many higher-caste Hindus view
Christianity as a low-class religion, worthy of
contempt.
"'Now we see signs of growth in the middling castes and among
the under-35s,' Mandryk says. 'There's a new dynamic for the
urban, educated generation….' Wagner writes, 'it is becoming
more and more common for whole villages or other people
groups to all decide to follow Jesus Christ together at one
time.' There are reports of both new churches and traditional
denominational churches seeing signs and wonders in the
spirit."
Church organisations also manage to secure a big chunk of
corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds as well as grants
from various central government ministries and departments
and state governments for their activities.
As described in my article on Bihar, it is not as
if tribals and Dalits are desperate to convert. In
most instances, missionaries use fairly dubious
means to bring people into the Christian fold.
Missionaries are also not just content with Hindus
accepting Jesus as their saviour. An essential
requirement is that they begin hating their
original faith, disown their ancestral culture and
break off ties with relatives who refuse to
convert.
During Modi's regime in Gujarat, the district
administration had been advised to keep a close
watch over conversions, not because Modi hated
Christians but because the virulent hate campaigns
against Hinduism and the indigenous faith
traditions of tribal communities often led to
clashes between Christian and non-Christian
tribals, leading to law and order problems in areas
targeted by evangelicals.
Missionaries also seemed resentful of the fact that the Modi
government took on the task of improving road connectivity
and provision of civic infrastructure to backward regions,
including tribal pockets, on a war footing. With high quality
all-weather roads reaching the remotest regions, along with
24x7 power supply, internet and mobile phone connectivity,
safe drinking water, functional primary health centres,
systemic improvements in state-run schools and one of the
best ambulance services in the country just a phone call away
-- the space for missionary work began shrinking.
Christian missions and evangelical activists thrive
only so long as communities remain poor, illiterate
and deprived of means of social and economic
advancement. Congress, during its long tenures as
the ruling party, had not only left the field free
for conversions by its callous neglect of tribal
areas but also by facilitating the activities of
the church. But the Modi government made a special
effort to mainstream neglected tribal communities.
This appeared as a palpable threat to the
evangelicals.
During Modi's tenure as chief minister, Hindu groups also
felt emboldened to report to the district administration all
those meetings where tribals were invited for baptism even
while the pastors decribed those meetings as community
gatherings, not conversion melas. But they gave the game away
by repeatedly asserting that the Modi government was
tampering with the freedom of religion of tribal communities
to accept Jesus as their lord and saviour. The logic is
bizarre. Tribals are most comfortable continuing with their
ancestral belief system. It is the evangelicals who tamper
with their religious freedom by pressuring them to convert --
that too through hate propaganda against the native faiths.
The Modi government merely kept a vigil over conversion
activities. And yet these pastors termed it as a crackdown on
Christianity even though they were free to practise their
religion and run Christian schools and hospitals. This is how
they tried covering up their real agenda: "The xyz gathering
we planned was only meant for baptism, not conversion. If
people come to us after an inner awakening of the love of
Jesus, how can we turn them away? We don't ask them to
convert, it is they who came to embrace Christ. So how can
they charge us with conversions?"
They had no answer when I asked how they could say
"baptism" was not conversion and whether as per
law, they provided the list of those seeking
baptism to the district administration. If seeking
baptism was a genuine individual choice, why hide
it from the deputy commissioner?
The Story Of Shabari Dham
That Christian leaders of Gujarat had got used to the
government of India bending over backwards to keep them happy
becomes evident when we consider how aggressively they
responded to the presence of the Ramakrishana Mission, social
workers of the freedom movement, Hindu sanyasis and Vanvasi
Kalyan Ashram social workers in the tribal areas of Gujarat.
This aggression was more pronounced in the pre-Modi era, and
extended even towards Gandhian social workers sent by Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel in the late 1940s to undertake the work of
tribal uplift through spread of education and to set up
village industries.
This was narrated to me by 1924-born Gelubhai Gulabbhai, a
devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He described to me his
first-hand experience with Christian missionaries when he
moved to Dang in 1948 after completing his education and made
it his home and karmabhoomi. Sardar Patel had handpicked him
and his brother for social work among Bhil and other tribal
communities of Dang. He settled down in Ahwa.
At that time, the area was considered the backwaters of
civilisation. Since they had no place to stay, the district
collector helped him and his brother to rent a small dwelling
within the local mission compound. Since they had come on
behalf of the Mahatma Gandhi-initiated Khadi Gramodyog Board
with the aim of introducing craft industries among the
tribals to enhance their economic status, within no time the
news spread by word of mouth that "Gandhi manas (men), the
men of swaraj" had come to Dang. Within days, thanks to the
magic of Gandhi's name, people started visiting their khadi
centre from all over the district. Apart from promoting
spinning and khadi production, the two brothers began moving
from village to village helping people resolve their problems
with the administration in addition to starting educational
work in tribal villages. They set up student hostels and
elementary health services. As a result of their selfless
work, the brothers became fairly popular.
As per Gulabbhai's account, since local communities
began to gravitate towards Gandhi-inspired social
work, the Spanish missionaries of the time became
resentful and tried to get the two brothers thrown
out of the area. They first asked them to vacate
the rented premises and pressured the
administration to banish them, alleging that the
presence of these social workers was inimical to
tribal welfare.
Gulabbhai and his team refused to buckle under this pressure
and the local administration also supported them, since khadi
promotion was part of state policy of that period. However,
in order to escape harassment by missionaries, they set up
their own "Dang Swaraj Ashram" so that they did not have to
live as tenants of the mission. The two brothers have devoted
their entire life to the Gandhi mission. Even for this, they
faced strong opposition from Christian leaders.
Gulabbhai recounted how during the 1980s, Modi, as
an RSS pracharak, used to move around in this area
on a bicycle. He tried cultivating good relations
with the church leaders, saying, "if your aim is to
uplift the status of tribal communities and our
mission is also the same, why can't we work
together towards our common goal?" As per
Gulabbhai, this was obviously not acceptable to the
missionaries whose real agenda was conversions with
education and health services used as mere baits.
"They were hostile to the Gandhi ideology because they felt
that Gandhi was himself rooted in the Hindu faith. Therefore,
spread of Gandhi's ideas would only strengthen the Hindu
ethos. Faced with such hostility, we too decided to
strengthen our ecosystem by inviting prominent Hindu saints
like Murari Bapu and sadhus of Swami Narayan sect for
discourses in this area." Murari Bapu is known for promoting
communal harmony and bridging divides. He did stellar work to
heal the wounds of the 2002 riots. Similarly, the Swami
Narayan sect is also not known for violent or aggressive
activities involving counter proselytisation.
But the presence of even these peaceful Hindu preachers upset
the missionaries, because Hindu faith leaders were able to
establish easy rapport with local people speaking to them in
their very own idioms and built on their local faith
traditions instead of asking them to disown their own
ancestral faith. Gulabbhai describes the absurd tricks used
by missionaries to convince tribals that they were
worshipping false and evil deities:
These missionaries would try to convince Bhils that
Hindu gods are weak and fake whereas the Christian
god is true and all-powerful. To demonstrate this,
they would take a metal plate with the name of Ram
written on it. They would put that plate in water.
It would naturally sink. Then they would take a
similar looking plate of wood with the name of
Jesus written on it. Naturally, it would float. The
missionaries would then gleefully offer it as proof
that Jesus alone could save their souls while Hindu
gods condemn them to perdition.
In order to blast their devious narrative, we started
challenging them in their meetings. We would insist that they
write the name of Ram on the wooden plate instead of putting
it on metal. Everybody could see that the wooden plate
floated, no matter whose name you wrote on it, and the metal
plate sank even if you wrote the name of Christ on it. We had
no choice but to expose their lies because they were creating
religious strife. Our mission was tribal development, not
conversion. We spoke to tribals in their own idiom, therefore
they took to us. The Bhil tribals have an age-old tradition
of Ram bhakti because of the iconic story in the Ramayana
where Lord Ram, Lakshman and Sita rested in the hut of a Bhil
woman named Shabari during their 14-year exile from Ayodhya.
Shabari was so overjoyed at the presence of Ram that she
gathered wild berries (ber) from the jungle to feed her
beloved Ram. In her anxiety to ensure that Ram ate only sweet
and ripe bers, she tasted each fruit before offering it to
Ram who ate them with joy and respect as an offering of love.
This loving encounter between the Raghuvanshi Ram and a
humble bhilni explodes many of the deftly crafted prejudices
against the "evils of the caste" system and the "the curse of
untouchability" associated with Hinduism through
two-and-a-half centuries of missionary propaganda.
The Shabari-Ram connection has stayed an integral part of the
cultural and spiritual ethos of the Bhils; the stones on
which the two sat have since time immemorial been objects of
worship in Dang. Morari Bapu proposed a grand memorial be
built to honour the memory of Shabari. Consequently, a
picturesque temple named Shabari Dham was constructed in 2004
on a hill named Chamak Dungar, near Subir village on
Ahwa-Navapur Road. This is believed to be the spot where Lord
Ram met Shabari.
This memorial became a matter of great pride for the tribals
while Hindu leaders began promoting it as a pilgrimage site
by planning the first Shabari Kumbh in February 2006. Lakhs
of tribals and members of Scheduled Castes were brought for
puja at Shabari Dham, which has a murti of Shabari offering
juthe ber to Ram in the sanctum sanctorum. Another important
ritual connected to Shabari Kumbh involves a dip in the
nearby Purna river as a symbol of equality and oneness of all
within the Hindu faith, irrespective of caste, class, tribe
or creed. However, at the very inaugural day of Shabari Dham,
Hindu leaders, as well as chief minister Modi made no secret
of the fact that this temple was a symbol of their commitment
to combat conversions by evangelicals.
With the construction of Shabari Dham, the
Christian leaders felt so aggravated at Hindu
leaders embracing tribals and setting up
residential schools and other facilities for them
to counter conversions to Christianity that they
began a systematic slander campaign against Hindu
saints and social workers, accusing them of
promoting religious strife and bringing in
"fascist" terror to crush Christians. As a result,
Hindu organisations started becoming more militant,
especially after VHP and Bajrang Dal entered the
scene and Swami Aseemanand of RSS became a leading
presence in Dang. They were not inhibited by
Gandhian civilities and unconditional commitment to
non-violence. They had come ready to battle in
order to stop conversions and prevent the
missionaries from making the Dang region into a
"Nagaland of Western India", meaning a call for
total Christianisation. Consequently, attacks and
counter-attacks and ethno-religious conflicts
became fairly common. In a few instances, Christian
churches were attacked by Hindu tribals who took to
militant resistance once they found support from
Hindu organisations.
It is not as if missionaries were merely hapless victims.
Their methods of conversion had always been questionable and
wherever strong, they too did not hesitate to use outright
violence and vandalism against their opponents. Moreover,
their very ideology of treating non-Christian faiths as
satanic amounts to a declaration of war against Indic faiths.
They use all manners of subterfuges to convince people that
Jesus alone can save them and that by rejecting Jesus they
would be inviting permanent perdition and roast in hell fires
for all eternity. I have experienced this first-hand how
Christianised tribal girls from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh,
Odisha, etc are taught by church leaders that they should
refuse to participate in Hindu pujas and rituals while
working and living with Hindu families.
They are indoctrinated into believing that if they
participate in the traditional pujas of their
ancestral faith organised by their own close
relatives, demonic forces would overpower them and
they would be stricken with fatal diseases. Their
exclusionist ideology leads to breaking up not just
village and community solidarity among the Bhils of
Dang (as they do everywhere they plant their
churches) but also tearing asunder families. This
had led to plenty of strife among tribals because
most of those who gravitated towards Christianity
did so to avail of educational opportunities and
not to disown their culture and family bonds.
Faced with militant resistance from Hindu Bhils, the
missionaries unleashed a national and international campaign
to project the VHP and RSS presence in the area as evidence
of rising "Hindu fascism". Shabari Dham was demonised and
defamed as an assertion of Hindu aggression. While in the
Hindu imagination, Shabari is a revered figure, the
missionaries gave it a bizarre twist to project it as a
misogynist story. To quote the foremost "intellectual leader"
of Christians in India, Cedric Prakash, who set up an NGO
with a Hindu name "Prashant" to project church activists as
defenders of "human rights" in the international arena with
frenetic lobbying against Hindu organisations in the UN and
with the US government:
Many Hindu groups take some kind of religious sanction to
negate the girl child, as well as women. For example, in our
textbooks there is a myth about Lord Rama. It says that when
Rama came to Gujarat, he found a place that was very clean.
He wondered who was cleaning this area and then he realised
that there was a tribal woman called Shabari who was working
to keep the place clean. Lord Rama looks to her as an ideal
woman and a great disciple because she kept this place so
clean in case he decided to visit. This story then becomes a
trope about the place of women in society. The boys are
taught this type of stereotyping in school, that their
mothers and sisters should be at home and clean the house...
Now there is group in India, a council formed by community
elders called Khap that belongs to a certain feudal mindset.
They have passed a law in Gujarat that unmarried girls cannot
have a telephone. The mischievous intent behind the narrative
is evident from not just willful caricature of the Shabari
story but also gratuitous reference to Khaps which exist only
in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh; Gujarat had no
acquaintance with Khap panchayats. Moreover, no Khap has the
power to enact laws. They can at best pass resolutions on
issues of common concern, that too if there is total
consensus. And nowhere in India have girls been prohibited by
law from carrying mobile phones.
The Christians not only defamed Shabari Dham
through church networks but also used "secular"
NGOs, many of whom are secretly funded by the
church (and now even by Islamist groups), to
declare war on Shabari Dham and the annual Shabari
Mela simply because it resonated well with tribals.
The War Over Shabari
So long as the Bhils and other tribals remain poor and
marginalised, they remain easy targets of conversion drives.
But the moment they feel part of mainstream Indian society,
missionaries can't prey on their isolation. The Christians
therefore began frantic efforts to pressure the central
government to ban the Shabari Mela, with secular NGOs and
Left-leaning mediapersons leading a concerted attack against
Hindu organisations embracing the work of tribal welfare to
wean them away from Christianity and its divisive agenda. The
Christians argued that since there were no historical
antecedents for this mela, Hindus should be prohibited from
holding it.
With the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre,
they got full backing and support in demonising
Hindu organisations. Missionary-backed secular
fronts such as Indian Social Institute, Medha
Patkar-led National Alliance of People's Movements
and even People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL)
and People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)
acted as foot soldiers for evangelicals in opposing
Shabari Mela and endeavours of Hindu organisations
to persuade tribals to assert their own faith
traditions. Despite their democratic pretence, both
PUCL and PUDR have been for long used as proxy
fronts by Maoists.
The PUCL, which started off as a save-democracy organisation
following the Emergency, turned into an obedient ally of
evangelical groups and went so far as to file an intervention
petition in the Supreme Court in 2006, supporting the
Christian demand to ban Shabari Mela and put restrictions on
ghar wapsi endeavours of Hindu organisations. This, when the
Shabari Kumbh was being attended by lakhs of people from
different parts of India of their own volition. Fortunately,
the court refused to yield and the Shabari Mela was not banned.
But this campaign clearly revealed that Christian
missionaries and the self-appointed guardians of
civil liberties -- PUCL and PUDR -- joined hands to
clamp down on the religious freedom of Hindus in
their own homeland. They argued that Shabari Mela
was being used as a platform for "communal
propaganda to Hinduise or Brahmanise" adivasis. The
charge is bizarre beyond belief. On the one hand,
Christian missionaries don't tire of attacking
Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular of
being exclusivist. On the other hand, any signs of
inclusiveness is condemned as "Brahmanising" or
Hinduising them, as though both these represent an
intrinsically evil force. To Christianise tribals
is "progressive", even though it means making them
disown and hate their ancestral faiths and
cultures. But bringing them closer to upper-caste
Hindu culture is dubbed "fascism".
The missionaries have worked with zeal to drive a wedge
between Hindu society and various groups erroneously
designated as "tribals" simply because they were forest
dwellers and therefore remained outside the varna vyavastha.
The core belief system of groups designated as tribals
consists of ancestor worship and nature worship. Hence they
are termed animists. But both these are core beliefs of Hindu
faith traditions as well, even while rituals involving these
two beliefs might differ from one group to another. The big
chink in the tribal armour exploited by missionaries is that
they don't have a written history or literary tradition
because most of their languages did not have well-developed
scripts. Therefore, missionaries have used that vulnerability
to invent a whole new history for them on the lines of the
Aryan-Dravidian divide theory used with fair degree of
success in the South.
Two men were specially targeted by church leaders
-- Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat and
Swami Aseemanand of the VHP.
The work of Hindu organisations suffered a major
setback when Aseemanand, the prime mover behind
Shabari Kumbh, was arrested by the UPA government
on the charge of being part of "Hindu terror"
groups engaged in the Ajmer Sharif bomb case in
2007, and the Samjhauta Express blasts.
Recently, the entire bogey of "Hindu terror" has been exposed
to have been invented as a counter-blast strategy by the
Congress leaders to deflect attention from Pakistan's
ISI-backed terrorist groups mushrooming all over India.
Assemanand was acquitted of all charges on 18 April 2018.
During my long interviews with Narendra Modi in
2013, he provided me valuable insights into the
games being played by missionaries in crafting a
narrative of victimhood in order to defame India
globally and put the Indian government and
political leaders on the defensive, so that they
dare not challenge even the patently illegal and
subversive activities of missionaries.
Right from the inception of Shabari Dham temple, Modi as
Gujarat chief minister was put under pressure to ban the
entry of Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and VHP preachers in the area.
Modi told me that he assured the Christian leaders who met
him that he was willing to guarantee their safety and ensure
that no attacks would take place on any church or any
Christian home but that he could not possibly shut down the
Shabari Dham or ban the Shabari Kumbh since that would amount
to depriving Hindus of their religious freedom. Thereafter,
Modi instructed the deputy commissioner and senior police
officers of the area to ensure that not even a pebble was
thrown at any Christian home or church nor any tiff allowed
to flare up.
In the process, Modi invited the wrath of the
radical fringe of Hindu preachers because they too
were put on close watch. Modi told me he took a
firm stand not just out of concern for the safety
of Christians -- which he took seriously as his
constitutional duty -- but also because he was well
aware of the intent of a section of the
missionaries, especially those who belong to the
bigoted Baptist sects.
Often, they themselves would provoke a fight with
the well-thought-out purpose of blowing it up out
of proportion -- even a minor skirmish which would
be made the basis of an international smear
campaign that the government of Gujarat was on a
genocidal mission vis a vis Christians. He added
that after his firm instructions, the district
administration ensured that no group was allowed to
take liberties with law and order.
Modi's explanation sounds logical: "the fact that
not a single Christian needed even first aid at a
local dispensary on account of inter-faith violence
indicates how Christian leaders had exaggerated the
threat of violence from Hindu organisations. Had
there been serious attacks, at least some persons
would have suffered injuries worth an FIR to the
police or gone for medical treatment."
I too got the impression that the missionaries didn't seem
happy with the administration becoming firm about ensuring
law and order. Modi could see clearly that missionaries
thrived in a situation of conflict because that enabled them
to unleash campaigns defaming Gujarat as a fascist,
intolerant state that endangers the rights of minorities. If
they are deprived of the opportunity to create even small
skirmishes that can be exaggerated beyond recognition through
friendly media, they get more desperate. That is why, despite
cessation of attacks and counter attacks in the Christian
tribal belt, the church leaders remained in the forefront of
the anti-Modi brigade, backed by the Congress and Left
parties. Father Cedric Prakash, John Dayal and other
Christian activists addressed countless meetings in the UN,
in the European Parliament as well as in leading universities
of the West to ensure that the international communities
treated Modi and BJP as untouchables.
It is ironic that liberal educated people in India
go ballistic and hyperventilate their outrage
towards ghar wapsi but take a very benign stand
when successive Popes openly proclaim their wish to
"witness a great harvest of faith" in India.
Imagine the Left liberal outrage in India if a
Hindu leader expressed something close to what Pope
Paul Francis declared in 15 March 2013 while
addressing the College of Cardinals:
Let us never yield to pessimism, to that bitterness
that the devil offers us every day; let us not
yield to pessimism or discouragement: let us be
quite certain that the Holy Spirit bestows upon the
Church, with his powerful breath, the courage to
persevere and also to seek new methods of
evangelisation, so as to bring the Gospel to the
uttermost ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8).
Christian truth is attractive and persuasive
because it responds to the profound need of human
life, proclaiming convincingly that Christ is the
one Saviour of the whole man and of all men. This
proclamation remains as valid today as it was at
the origin of Christianity, when the first great
missionary expansion of the Gospel took place. [To
be continued]
Madhu Purnima Kishwar is Maulana Azad National Professor,
ICSSR, and the founder of human rights organisation, MANUSHI.
https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/the-gujarat-agenda-why-christian-missionaries-hate-modi-and-rss-so-much
by Madhu Purnima Kishwar
Jun 01, 2018, 11:45 am
The Sangh parivar and Narendra
Modi in particular are not
willing to go out of their way
to assist Christian
missionaries in harvesting
souls -- and that irks the
missionaries.
As someone who studied in a convent school and whose mother
also studied in a school run by Irish nuns in Peshawar, one
could not help but have a benign view of the Christian
community. Most middle-class people of our generation grew up
believing that the Christian missions were sincerely
committed to the spread of education and healthcare. However,
even as a schoolgirl, I resented the subtle indoctrination
inflicted on us by converting the "Moral Science" class into
a Bible study class. Our Moral Science book had stories only
from the Bible. There was no mention of Hindu faith
traditions, leave alone study of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas
or the Ramayana.
Though the overwhelming majority of students in our school
were from Hindu or Sikh families, we were made to say the
lord's prayer not only during the morning assembly but also
before each class and another Christian prayer after each
class with due reverence, including crossing our hearts after
each prayer.
Anyone who topped the class in monthly or weekly tests, got
"holy pictures" by way of reward. Not surprisingly,
possessing a large collection of beautiful Vatican-produced
pictures of Lord Jesus, Mother Mary, the Holy Trinity and a
whole range of Christian saints came to be seen as a prized
possession. Since I routinely topped my class in every
subject and won all the school competitions in debating,
dramatics etc, I owned the largest collection of holy
pictures in the entire school.
It is noteworthy that Hindu and Sikh parents, whose children
studied in that or countless other missionary schools never
objected to this daily dose of Christianisation and
systematic attempt to inculcate "love of Jesus" in our
impressionable minds. For the record, no pressure was ever
exerted on us to "convert" because the school authorities
knew that trying the conversion game with middle and upper
middle class/caste families was bound to backfire. However,
it was well-known that the same order of nuns ran special
schools in Punjab villages and in urban bastis, targeting
children of the poor and "lower castes". These schools had
been established mainly for the purpose of getting converts
and "harvesting souls" for the Church. But in those innocent
days, nobody seemed to mind or care, leave alone sense any
sinister agenda.
Despite the horrors of colonial rule and the religion-based
Partition, most Hindus still continued to chant the pious
mantra of sarva dharma sam bhav. We were taught to believe
that all religions lead to the same path and that if
Christians gave good education to the deprived classes, they
were performing samaj sewa (social service). Nobody paid much
heed to the fact that the Christians and Islamists never
reciprocated sarva dharma sam bhav. Instead, their entire
strategy of conversion was based on defaming and demonising
Hindu faith traditions because that is a core mandate of
Abrahamic religions, for whom dharma, as Hindus understand
it, has no value and their open agenda is to crush the
dharmic civilisation of India.
Even as a schoolgirl, what bugged me most was that we were
not only discouraged from speaking in Hindi or Punjabi -- the
mother tongues of most students in our school -- but also
punished for doing so. The punishment was of course not
corporal. Every classroom had a chart with the name of all
the students to rank the weekly and monthly performances.
Those who excelled in various subjects and extra-curricular
competitions got gold stars for each accomplishment, followed
by red star, yellow star, green star. The dreaded black star
proclaimed that you belonged to the bottom rung.
As an all-round topper, I invariably got gold stars for
everything else but continually got black stars for speaking
in Hindi, despite prohibition on the language even during
lunch break. I kept defying the ban because even at that age
I found it offensive to my national pride, though I
understood its far-reaching implications only much later.
It is through one's mother tongue or native language that we
stay rooted in our culture and sanskars. By forcing us to
become monolingual and English-dependent, we were being
systematically deracinated. English inevitably brings with it
disdain for Indic cultures and faith traditions and harbours
the tendency to view the world through lenses of the imperial
West, which is deeply rooted in Christian ethos. Sadly, this
enslavement to English was made state policy under Nehruvian
influence. Not surprisingly, elite schools founded and run by
the brown sahibs of India are following the same pattern of
intellectual enslavement set in motion by missionary schools.
No surprise then that a vast majority of India's
English-educated elite act as the intellectual warriors for
Christian missions. They defend the right of evangelical
organisations to convert Hindus to Christianity even while
they use questionable means and rabid hate-Hindu propaganda
to bring in converts. But they go ballistic when Hindu
organisations try winning back Christian converts to their
original faith. Abusing and demonising Hindu faith traditions
is treated as proof of "liberalism" and defended as "freedom
of expression", but even modest questions raised against the
means and methods adopted by evangelical groups and
consequences of large-scale conversions to Christianity is
treated as proof of a person being a obscurantist
"Hindutvavadi" -- with Hindutva (its plain meaning is
"essence of Hindu faith") being projected as synonymous with
fascism.
In the initial years of Manushi, the human rights,
women's rights journal I founded in 1978-79,
Christian organisations of all hues embraced it
warmly and came to constitute a large chunk of our
subscribers. I was often invited to speak at their
events in different parts of India. Many of them
translated reports from Manushi into regional
languages. At that stage, I naively believed that
just as the "Liberation Theologists" within the
Church-led "progressive" movements in defence of
human rights of black Africans, the Christian
organisations of India were carrying forward that
tradition by contributing their might to movements
for social justice and women's rights. But I was
disabused of this notion when I found that when
Manushi started defending Indic faith traditions
from malicious attacks, Christian organisations --
including those wearing the secular mask -- began
to not only distance themselves from Manushi but
also started to work against it.
It is not a coincidence that during that very phase, Kancha
Ilaiah came to be feted and celebrated by church leaders and
organisations and catapulted into international fame after he
converted to Christianity and wrote a rather pompous,
malicious hate tract against Hinduism titled Why I Am Not a
Hindu. It is based on willful distortions and clearly written
for the purpose of ingratiating himself with rabid
evangelicals. Before Ilaiah wrote this, he was neither an
avant-garde academic nor a celebrated public intellectual. As
soon as he published his hate tract, he was touted by
Christian organisations as a leading global intellectual and
radical reformer of the "decadent Hindu society".
Since Christian organisations carry a lot of influence in
Western universities, Ilaiah became a professional
globetrotter, lecturing at the most prestigious universities
in the West. Overnight he became a star speaker at
high-profile international conferences, including at the
United Nations. His views on India and Hinduism came to be
treated as gospel truth. If a person of his intellectual
mediocrity had said good things about Hinduism, he would not
have been invited as a speaker even by a small-town Rotary
Club. But abusing India and Hinduism brought him handsome
monetary rewards and celebrity stature.
Ilaiah's article "Disowning Hinduism" is likely to
have been inspired by my controversial article "Why
I do Not Call Myself a Feminist", in which I
explained how followers of all "isms", including
Indian feminists, ape the means and methods of
Christian missionaries out to harvest souls and
treat those who don't adopt their ideology as
sub-human species, who need to be saved from
ignorance and perdition. That sealed my fate with
Christian organisations and even foreign
universities.
Until then, I was a very sought after speaker in universities
abroad, especially universities in North America. But with
that article, I began to get blacklisted, even though mine
was far from a hate tract. It was a well-reasoned
carefully-worded piece analysing how all ideologies are
products of specific cultures, social contexts and historical
phases, and therefore cannot be blindly applied to altogether
different social contexts and timeframes.
Moral of the story: while I faced severe punishment for
distancing myself from copycat feminism and all proselytising
ideologies, Ilaiah became a global celebrity as a reward for
Hindu bashing and open conversion to Christianity.
Modi's Demonic Image
I personally woke up to the seriousness of the
danger posed by Christian missionaries during my
study of Narendra Modi's tenure as Gujarat chief
minister. As I explained in my book Modi, Muslims
and Media (MMM), I undertook that study only
because I wanted to check out for myself whether
the evil deeds attributed to Modi and the demonic
image painted of him by the Congress-Left combine
in cohorts with select foreign-funded
non-govermental organisations (NGOs), bore any
resemblance to chief minister Modi and the impact
his model of governance had on the ground. Since he
was being accused of a genocidal bent of mind
towards "religious minorities", I made Muslim and
Christian communities the focus of my study. A good
part of the material I gathered regarding the
Muslim community is already published in MMM, but I
could not give space in the book to the
interactions I had with the Christian community.
It all started with an hour-long phone conversation I had
with V V Augustine, a Malayali Christian based in
Thiruvananthapuram. During his tenure as a member of the
Minorities Commission, Augustine had interacted with Modi on
multiple occasions. This is what Augustine told me in our
very first phone chat.
"Contrary to the propaganda that Modiji is supposed to be
anti-minority, my experience is that Modi is a very
minority-friendly person. When I was member of the Minorities
Commission, the Christian community of Vapi district in
Gujarat brought a serious issue to my notice. They number
around 7,000. There are several churches in Vapi of different
Christian denominations that include Catholics, Protestants
and Syrian Christians.
"Since the last 40 years, they had been trying to get a piece
of land for a cemetery. They had even approached the central
government; and they were willing to pay for the land. But
the administration kept dragging the matter on for decades.
This caused enormous inconvenience because they had to take
dead bodies 40 miles from Vapi for burial [I found later the
distance was 18 km, not 40]. In order to lobby collectively,
they formed a Vapi Christian Association and approached me
for help as a member of the Minorities Commission.
"I asked them to write one more fresh application addressed
to the collector of the district. When I went to meet the
collector, he told me frankly, 'this has to be a government
decision because the local people have a problem with having
a graveyard in their midst. Please approach the appropriate
authority.'
"I therefore decided to talk straight to Modiji and explained
the matter to him. He listened with full attention and said,
'Yes, you have a genuine issue. Have you identified a piece
of land?' I told him that we have a place but the local
people are resisting our acquiring it. Modi said, 'that is
not your problem; that's mine. Just tell me where you want
the land and I will call for a report.' Within a matter of
hours, he had the full report from the collector, who told
him that since that particular piece of land was right in the
middle of the town, the local people were resisting having a
graveyard there.
"Modi then asked the collector to work in
coordination with the Vapi Christian Association
and identify another suitable piece of land. Within
no time, the land was identified on the outskirts
of the town and the Christian community was gifted
one-and-a-half acres of land by the state
government free of charge.
"I have interacted with him on numerous issues since then and
have always found him extremely helpful and responsive. For
instance, in the Dang tribal areas, there are settlements of
neo-Christians. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had become
very active in the area, resulting in a lot of tension. When
they planned to organise a big Shabari Kumbh Mela in that
area in 2006, the Christians became extremely nervous and
feared that they would be attacked. We went to Modi with our
apprehensions. Christian organisations demanded a ban on the
Shabari Mela.
"Modi did not ban the mela because that would have given the
VHP an excuse to create a ruckus that Hindus were being put
down at the behest of Christians, leading to more tension. He
assured us that nobody would be allowed to indulge in any
lawless behaviour and issued firm instructions to the police
commissioner of the area. Indeed, the mela passed off
peacefully, this despite the fact that, during 2002,
non-Christian tribals had attacked Christian settlements
leading to a great deal of mutual hostility and suspicion.
Not surprisingly, most Christians vote for Modi. They have
never complained against his regime.
"When I met Modi even on small matters, he supported all
genuine demands. In another incident, there was a problem
between Hindus and Muslims in a small village near Vadodara
in 2004. He gave me a free hand to act as an intermediary. I
called a joint meeting. A Muslim had killed a Hindu over a
business issue and Hindus retaliated. They were not even on
talking terms. We conducted peace meetings to bring in
communal harmony. The collector was given instructions by
Modiji to extend full cooperation.
"Gujarat newspapers gave prominent coverage to how the
'Augustine Mission' was successful. But the peace mission
could not have succeeded if the administration had not been
fully supportive. People who spread the canard that Modi is
against minorities are reflecting their own political biases.
My experience is entirely different.
"As a member of the Minorities Commission, I dealt with
several states. The governments of Odisha and Madhya Pradesh
have also been good. But no chief minister is as good, as
strong and determined as Modi. Once he takes up an issue, he
sees it through to its logical conclusion.
"Now, even Muslims realise that Modi is good for them because
a riot-free Gujarat and a resurgent economy with new
opportunities have provided them avenues of upward mobility.
I admire Modi and I want him to be the prime minister. I
always go by factual accounts. Those who are obsessed with
injustice done to minorities should ask: Who has given full
rights to the minorities? It is the Hindu majority! Who wrote
the Constitution? Mostly Hindus! We must appreciate Hindus
for this and give them their due credit."
This glowing tribute came as a very pleasant
surprise for me because for years one had heard
John Dayal, Teesta Setalvad, Aakar Patel, Father
Cedric Prakash and other Christian activists talk
of Narendra Modi as though he was the devil
incarnate out to cleanse Christians and Muslims
from the state of Gujarat. Cedric Prakash in
particular had been at the forefront of the
international campaign against Modi to get him
blacklisted "as a mass murderer" and denied visa to
America and European countries. What is worse,
Cedric Prakash along with Islamist groups had
lobbied with the US Commission for Religious
Freedom to get India blacklisted as a country which
crushes religious minorities -- notably Christians
and Muslims.
To quote from one of his interviews referring to Modi's
Gujarat at the Berkeley Centre for Religion, Peace and World
Affairs:
The people that follow Hindutva are fascists; they
are the equivalent from (sic) the American context
of the Ku Klux Klan, and they draw inspiration from
the apartheid of South Africa and Nazi ideology.
The basic ideology asks for one nation, one
language and one people. December 2, 2010
But Augustine had painted such a glowing picture that I
decided to go personally to the Christian pockets of Gujarat
in Dang and Vapi to check what the church leaders there had
to say about Modi.
I had expected that at least the Vapi Christians would
endorse Augustine's version and display goodwill towards
Modi. But I was taken aback when I found most of them
reluctant to utter even one good word about him. Since I had
informed them of my visit in advance, half a dozen pastors
from various Christian institutions had gathered in one
place. Since they knew that Augustine had given me his
firsthand account, they could not altogether deny the
sequence of events nor paint Modi in the demonic light that
Father Cedric Prakash, John Dayal and their associates among
the human rights NGOs routinely do. But their demeanour and
the hints one got from their guarded sentences and body
language spoke volumes about their innate hostility towards
the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi, which had nothing
to do with what Modi actually did or failed to do.
For instance, Father Jose Dali from Kerala, who has lived in
Gujarat for 36 years, attributed their success in getting
land for the graveyard to the "power of the lord", and the
fact that all Christians were "praying together". To quote
him, "we believe in a living god. We believe that he is a god
who is able to do miracles, even if the government is against
us. We believe in the power of the lord. It is a special
faith of the Christians. People all around the world prayed
together and because of that, the lord worked on the hearts
of the magistrate as well as the leaders." In other words,
they presented to their congregation the success in getting
the graveyard land as yet another miracle of Christ.
Their reluctance to give credit to the Modi
government either for securing free land for them
or for ensuring that even minor skirmishes don't
take place among Christians and non-Christians
tells its own story.
They also tried to convince me that the Modi government
discriminated against tribal areas with regard to development
programmes and that in the interior tribal villages, road and
other infrastructure was not as good as in non-tribal areas.
To quote Francis Fernandes: "in tribal areas, if they are
pockets of Christian faith, they will not get certain
facilities". When I asked to give him concrete examples, he
couldn't give me any.
I found that charge baseless because I had travelled to the
remotest tribal areas and had seen that the quality of roads
was no different. True, medical services in villages near big
cities were better than in interior villages. But there was
no difference between tribal and non-tribal villages in this
respect. The difference is more to do with doctors and nurses
not willing to work in villages far from major urban centres.
Thereafter, they complained that the sarpanch of that area
had refused to sanction a power connection for the graveyard.
Since burials don't take place at night, I was a bit
surprised that they needed a power connection for the open
ground. Even so I decided to check whether this charge had
any substance.
I met both the current as well as the previous
sarpanch of Paldi taluka panchayat. Both were
categorical that the pastors had never applied for
a power connection so there was no question of
refusal. I called the most voluble among of the
pastors from the sarpanch's house and put my mobile
phone on speaker mode. Now, the pastor, who had
claimed that he had personally gone and applied for
the power connection, came up with a lame story
that a long while ago he had gone very early
morning to the house of the sarpanch (not the
panchayat office) and since the sarpanch was not at
home, he left the application with an unknown
person who opened the door. I asked him whether he
had followed up on the matter. The answer was, "no,
we didn't follow up since we knew they would not
sanction the connection."
This was a clear case of building a victimhood narrative out
of a situation where the Modi government had gone out of its
way to help the Christian community in more ways than one.
The Truth Behind The Victimhood Narrative
Father Francis Macwan, one of the senior pastors of
a missionary school on Ahwa Road, where Shabari
Dham is situated, had told me that their school and
their mission had received all possible help from
the Modi government. When I asked him to provide
concrete examples of "help", he described how the
district administration had been instructed to
provide as many free school textbooks, children's
notebooks, stationery, school bags and uniforms as
demanded by missionary schools, even though as
privately-run schools, the state government is not
obliged to provide such support to church-run
institutions, especially considering that the
mission schools set up in tribal areas have the
express mandate to win over converts to
Christianity.
Thus, when any state government provides free books and other
educational materials to mission schools, it is in a way
furthering their conversion agenda since free education and
related benefits are one of the primary incentives offered by
the Church to tribals and other poor communities. And yet the
Modi government, as perhaps several other state governments
in India, provide this as a goodwill gesture towards the
Christian community.
But barring a few individuals like Augustine, the
hostility of church leaders, especially the
aggressive evangelical variety, towards the BJP in
particular, and Hinduism in general, has only
exacerbated instead of abating. The reason for this
came out through their own narrative. For the
Christian missions in India, "freedom of religion"
promised as a constitutional right means
essentially one thing -- unchecked right to convert
people to Christianity, through fair means or foul.
In my case study of Bishrampur village in Sasaram district of
Bihar published in Swarajya in February 2018, I have
described the blackmail tactics, including violence on
children used by Christian bigots to force children from poor
families to adopt Christianity.
But finally they let it out that the real issue bothering
them was with regard to government policy over conversions.
To quote Jose Dali: "actually, what the government feels
about conversion and what we believe are different.
Conversion will take place within the heart. We are not
converting anybody. Those who are truly believing and
personally accepting Christ as their saviour and after
confessing by themselves publicly, we will accept them.
Baptism is not a sign of the conversion. Baptism is a part of
the faith. Those who are converted will be baptised as per
the Bible, Gospel of Mathew."
Father Francis Fernandes added: "conversion and baptism are
not the same. What the pastor is explaining is that there is
a change of heart in a person. The change of heart is when
the person is ready and the person says, I want to join this
way of life. Then only we initiate him in the field. He is
saying 'yes' and we are acknowledging that 'yes', that is
baptism. By seeing the way of life, by seeing the faith of
the people around, by seeing that Jesus is there, god is
there, then this person comes and says, I want to receive
baptism. It is not that we are going and forcing people." He
justified Father Cedric Prakash's virulent opposition to the
Modi government on the ground that "we are not free in our
own country, in our own state. Why are our constitutional
rights being curtailed? I have the freedom to believe in any
god as per the Constitution and after my confession, any time
I can follow the principles of the faith." In other words,
the government not allowing support to conversions made them
feel India is not a free country.
Another charge made by these pastors was that there are
restrictions on building churches. To quote Father Francis
Fernandes: "this is our freedom curtailment. As an active
member of the Christian faith, we are not free in our own
country to call our own place of worship which is called
internationally a church." At the same meeting, Father Mathew
told me, "in South Gujarat alone, there are hundreds of
Christian institutions."
Several IAS officers, including those working as
district collectors, confirmed that there is no
blanket ban on building churches. But the problem
arises when evangelicals want to plant a church in
the middle of a Hindu settlement where there are no
Christians, or position it right next to an
important Hindu temple. That invariably gets
resisted by local communities. But evangelicals
have got used to the administration riding
roughshod over local sentiments under pressure from
Christian missions to give them endless special
concessions they claim as a "minority". They
succeed often because they have both the monetary
clout as well as political backing to get the
government to do their bidding. The fact that under
the Modi government, they could not bulldoze the
administration with unreasonable demands was
provocation enough to join not only with the
conversion-friendly Congress party but even rank
Islamists in running an international campaign to
present him as devil incarnate.
Jose Dali belongs to a Protestant group called Brethren
Assemblies, which is spread all over the world. In response
to his litany of complaints, I asked him if he had presented
the complaints to the district collector. His response was a
giveaway: "we don't want to make allegations. If there is
some problem, we won't go to the police station or outside.
We believe that maybe God's plan will work things out." But
that didn't prevent them from taking their imaginary
complaints against Narendra Modi to the US Senate, the
European Union and various UN platforms.
How do they justify the virulent campaign to get the US and
European governments to deny Modi visa for a whole decade? To
quote Father Francis Fernandes: "maybe when our Indian Penal
Code or Indian court is not giving you proper justice, you
appeal to the international level. That is how Cedric Prakash
must have gone to that extent. When my children are not fed
in my own house, they will go out to beg, borrow and eat. So
that is what is happening. If they have taken this step, that
means something is wrong with my own house."
Father Francis Macwan, the most reasonable and
straightforward of all the pastors I met, from the
Jesuit order, summed up the nature of the conflict
candidly: "Father Cedric Prakash is a social
scientist and an activist. His view is different
from ours because we are staying in the midst of
people. So my experience is different. Cedric is
also in touch with Protestant groups, who go for
conversion and faith formation. I have a very
positive experience in working in Gujarat under
Modi. We Catholics are not directly aggressive in
conversions. But for Protestants, the main activity
is conversion. So their experience is different."
It is noteworthy that he could speak his mind,
though very diffidently, mainly because I chanced
to meet him alone while all others met me as a
group.
Meanwhile, the Church has tried to adopt Hindu
nomenclature, rituals and vocabulary for Christian
myths and church rituals, to make Christianity
appear less alien. As elsewhere, so also in the
Vapi church, the statue of Mother Mary was dressed
in a Gujarati-style saree. Father Francis Fernandes
explained they have named her "Our Lady of
Velankanni" after a place in Tamil Nadu where
Mother Mary allegedly "appeared" to several persons
in her bodily form. That place has become a
Christian "pilgrimage centre". Such miracle
mongering is a standard technique of evangelicals
to attract converts. Adopting local Hindu names,
rituals, aarti, bhajans are also part of the
strategy to make Christianity appear rooted in the
soil of India instead of being an alien imported
religion.
PHOTO: Mother Mary dressed in a Gujarati-style saree.
I also saw for myself how the local Hindu population,
especially the youngsters, routinely visited the big church
compound in Vapi for relaxing in its vast garden and often
went and prayed inside because they found the atmosphere
peaceful. For some youngsters, it has become the most
convenient dating place because Vapi does not have many such
pleasant gardens with beautiful shaded trees.
The lack of hostility of the Hindu population to
Christian institutions is evident from the fact
that out of 1,800 students in Father Mathew's
school, the vast majority are Hindu. Only 1 per
cent of children are avowedly Christian, and only
10 per cent are tribals. However, they run a
separate residential school only for tribal
children, which is where there is a heavy dose of
evangelical brainwashing to convert them to
Christianity.
For the benefit of "secular Hindus", the pastors describe
their evangelical agenda in highly sanitised terms: "we
propagate the love of Jesus Christ, we propagate the gospel,
and we are teaching everyone to become a good human being so
we propagate Jesus Christ and his love. We never try to
convert anybody. Message of Christ is the message of love. It
is a very open message."
However, the Joshua Project, of which all these Protestant
missions are a part, makes no secret of the communities it
has targeted for conversion. This is what it says about
communities that are the soft targets in the tribal-dominated
Dang district:
Almost all of the Central Bhil practise ethnic
religions that have been highly influenced by
Hinduism. Shiva is considered the supreme god.
Ancestor worship (praying to deceased ancestors) is
also quite popular. Shamans (priests) are also
called upon to offer sacrifices to the many gods
and mud idols.
In spite of their traditional beliefs, there have been
interesting manifestations of god's spirit among the upper
caste Bhagat gurus. They now worship light and 'the word',
singing prophecies of the future, such as the coming sinless
incarnation. At the turn of the century, one guru warned his
disciples that there would be a great famine, after which
they should look for teachers from the north and west who
would teach them the true way of salvation from a book, free
of cost. They would teach about the true god, and about a
sinless incarnation, who was born of a virgin. The guru also
said that they should worship this sinless, invisible god,
turn away from stones and idols, and live blameless lives. A
famine occurred in 1899-1900, soon after the guru's death.
The Joshua Project thus admits that the Bhils are steeped in
Hindu faith and that their agenda is to wean them away from
attachment to their "false gods" and adopt the "true god" but
they also admit to using devious strategies including natural
calamities as a way of making in-roads among the unsuspecting
tribals.
Modi And Conversions
The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
in general and Narendra Modi in particular become
objects of hate and are perceived as threats not
because they want to smash churches and attack or
kill Christians or shut down schools. They are
hated because, unlike the Congress and Communist
parties, the Sangh parivar is not willing to go out
of its way to assist Christian missionaries in
harvesting souls. Modi became the bête noire of the
Christian community despite being very liberal in
yielding to the reasonable demands of Christian
organisations, and seeking a relationship of
cooperation with them and not confrontation. In the
very first year of his tenure, his government
passed a law entitled Gujarat Freedom of Religion
Act, 2003. As per this law, anyone who wants to
change his/her religion has to first report to the
civil authority, namely the deputy commissioner of
the district.
This provision is meant to prevent conversions through fraud.
Even though seven states in India already had such a law, the
Gujarat law came to rankle the Christian community all over
India because Modi took its enforcement somewhat more
seriously, whereas almost all Congress governments either
turned a blind eye to conversions -- whether fair or foul --
or even actively assisted in the planting of churches in
areas favoured by Christians through free land grants and
other overt and covert forms of assistance.
During British times, churches of various
denominations came to occupy the best and the most
premium tracts of real estate in every state of
India. But even after Independence, the Indian
State has been generous in patronising missionary
activities, making available countless stretches of
prime land as virtual gifts, or at best charging a
token amount. In that sense, the combined real
estate of various churches in India may well place
them among the biggest land owners in India. The
growth in planting of churches has also proceeded
at frenetic pace in recent decades, especially
after the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to
power and Sonia Gandhi became the all-powerful
authority figure at the Centre as well as for state
governments under the rule of the Congress and/or
its allies.
To quote Dr Ralph F Wilson, writing on the website of the
Joyful Heart Renewal Ministries: "The truly exciting thing is
that the percentage of Christians has increased substantially
from 2.5 per cent a decade ago to about 5.8 per cent today.
That represents a huge increase in the growth rate. Something
is happening!
"Mycologist and church growth expert C Peter Wagner has been
receiving reports that the percentage may actually be 25 per
cent Christian -- at least in parts of this large country --
most of the growth coming in the past 10 to 15 years. And the
growth may not all be in traditional churches. A substantial
part may come from Jesus-follower groups within the Hindu
culture.
"In this huge and very diverse country, it's difficult to get
accurate statistics regarding religion, but anecdotal stories
indicate exciting changes. According to Christianity Today,
Operation Mobilisation, one of India's largest missionary
groups, has grown to include 3,000 congregations in India, up
from 300 in less than a decade. A hospital-based ministry in
north India has seen 8,000 baptisms over the past five years
after a decade of only a handful.
"Everybody knows about the massive scale of growth
among Dalits,' says Operation World's Jason
Mandryk. Somewhere between 70 per cent and 90 per
cent of Christians in India are Dalits, low-caste
groups, so that many higher-caste Hindus view
Christianity as a low-class religion, worthy of
contempt.
"'Now we see signs of growth in the middling castes and among
the under-35s,' Mandryk says. 'There's a new dynamic for the
urban, educated generation….' Wagner writes, 'it is becoming
more and more common for whole villages or other people
groups to all decide to follow Jesus Christ together at one
time.' There are reports of both new churches and traditional
denominational churches seeing signs and wonders in the
spirit."
Church organisations also manage to secure a big chunk of
corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds as well as grants
from various central government ministries and departments
and state governments for their activities.
As described in my article on Bihar, it is not as
if tribals and Dalits are desperate to convert. In
most instances, missionaries use fairly dubious
means to bring people into the Christian fold.
Missionaries are also not just content with Hindus
accepting Jesus as their saviour. An essential
requirement is that they begin hating their
original faith, disown their ancestral culture and
break off ties with relatives who refuse to
convert.
During Modi's regime in Gujarat, the district
administration had been advised to keep a close
watch over conversions, not because Modi hated
Christians but because the virulent hate campaigns
against Hinduism and the indigenous faith
traditions of tribal communities often led to
clashes between Christian and non-Christian
tribals, leading to law and order problems in areas
targeted by evangelicals.
Missionaries also seemed resentful of the fact that the Modi
government took on the task of improving road connectivity
and provision of civic infrastructure to backward regions,
including tribal pockets, on a war footing. With high quality
all-weather roads reaching the remotest regions, along with
24x7 power supply, internet and mobile phone connectivity,
safe drinking water, functional primary health centres,
systemic improvements in state-run schools and one of the
best ambulance services in the country just a phone call away
-- the space for missionary work began shrinking.
Christian missions and evangelical activists thrive
only so long as communities remain poor, illiterate
and deprived of means of social and economic
advancement. Congress, during its long tenures as
the ruling party, had not only left the field free
for conversions by its callous neglect of tribal
areas but also by facilitating the activities of
the church. But the Modi government made a special
effort to mainstream neglected tribal communities.
This appeared as a palpable threat to the
evangelicals.
During Modi's tenure as chief minister, Hindu groups also
felt emboldened to report to the district administration all
those meetings where tribals were invited for baptism even
while the pastors decribed those meetings as community
gatherings, not conversion melas. But they gave the game away
by repeatedly asserting that the Modi government was
tampering with the freedom of religion of tribal communities
to accept Jesus as their lord and saviour. The logic is
bizarre. Tribals are most comfortable continuing with their
ancestral belief system. It is the evangelicals who tamper
with their religious freedom by pressuring them to convert --
that too through hate propaganda against the native faiths.
The Modi government merely kept a vigil over conversion
activities. And yet these pastors termed it as a crackdown on
Christianity even though they were free to practise their
religion and run Christian schools and hospitals. This is how
they tried covering up their real agenda: "The xyz gathering
we planned was only meant for baptism, not conversion. If
people come to us after an inner awakening of the love of
Jesus, how can we turn them away? We don't ask them to
convert, it is they who came to embrace Christ. So how can
they charge us with conversions?"
They had no answer when I asked how they could say
"baptism" was not conversion and whether as per
law, they provided the list of those seeking
baptism to the district administration. If seeking
baptism was a genuine individual choice, why hide
it from the deputy commissioner?
The Story Of Shabari Dham
That Christian leaders of Gujarat had got used to the
government of India bending over backwards to keep them happy
becomes evident when we consider how aggressively they
responded to the presence of the Ramakrishana Mission, social
workers of the freedom movement, Hindu sanyasis and Vanvasi
Kalyan Ashram social workers in the tribal areas of Gujarat.
This aggression was more pronounced in the pre-Modi era, and
extended even towards Gandhian social workers sent by Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel in the late 1940s to undertake the work of
tribal uplift through spread of education and to set up
village industries.
This was narrated to me by 1924-born Gelubhai Gulabbhai, a
devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He described to me his
first-hand experience with Christian missionaries when he
moved to Dang in 1948 after completing his education and made
it his home and karmabhoomi. Sardar Patel had handpicked him
and his brother for social work among Bhil and other tribal
communities of Dang. He settled down in Ahwa.
At that time, the area was considered the backwaters of
civilisation. Since they had no place to stay, the district
collector helped him and his brother to rent a small dwelling
within the local mission compound. Since they had come on
behalf of the Mahatma Gandhi-initiated Khadi Gramodyog Board
with the aim of introducing craft industries among the
tribals to enhance their economic status, within no time the
news spread by word of mouth that "Gandhi manas (men), the
men of swaraj" had come to Dang. Within days, thanks to the
magic of Gandhi's name, people started visiting their khadi
centre from all over the district. Apart from promoting
spinning and khadi production, the two brothers began moving
from village to village helping people resolve their problems
with the administration in addition to starting educational
work in tribal villages. They set up student hostels and
elementary health services. As a result of their selfless
work, the brothers became fairly popular.
As per Gulabbhai's account, since local communities
began to gravitate towards Gandhi-inspired social
work, the Spanish missionaries of the time became
resentful and tried to get the two brothers thrown
out of the area. They first asked them to vacate
the rented premises and pressured the
administration to banish them, alleging that the
presence of these social workers was inimical to
tribal welfare.
Gulabbhai and his team refused to buckle under this pressure
and the local administration also supported them, since khadi
promotion was part of state policy of that period. However,
in order to escape harassment by missionaries, they set up
their own "Dang Swaraj Ashram" so that they did not have to
live as tenants of the mission. The two brothers have devoted
their entire life to the Gandhi mission. Even for this, they
faced strong opposition from Christian leaders.
Gulabbhai recounted how during the 1980s, Modi, as
an RSS pracharak, used to move around in this area
on a bicycle. He tried cultivating good relations
with the church leaders, saying, "if your aim is to
uplift the status of tribal communities and our
mission is also the same, why can't we work
together towards our common goal?" As per
Gulabbhai, this was obviously not acceptable to the
missionaries whose real agenda was conversions with
education and health services used as mere baits.
"They were hostile to the Gandhi ideology because they felt
that Gandhi was himself rooted in the Hindu faith. Therefore,
spread of Gandhi's ideas would only strengthen the Hindu
ethos. Faced with such hostility, we too decided to
strengthen our ecosystem by inviting prominent Hindu saints
like Murari Bapu and sadhus of Swami Narayan sect for
discourses in this area." Murari Bapu is known for promoting
communal harmony and bridging divides. He did stellar work to
heal the wounds of the 2002 riots. Similarly, the Swami
Narayan sect is also not known for violent or aggressive
activities involving counter proselytisation.
But the presence of even these peaceful Hindu preachers upset
the missionaries, because Hindu faith leaders were able to
establish easy rapport with local people speaking to them in
their very own idioms and built on their local faith
traditions instead of asking them to disown their own
ancestral faith. Gulabbhai describes the absurd tricks used
by missionaries to convince tribals that they were
worshipping false and evil deities:
These missionaries would try to convince Bhils that
Hindu gods are weak and fake whereas the Christian
god is true and all-powerful. To demonstrate this,
they would take a metal plate with the name of Ram
written on it. They would put that plate in water.
It would naturally sink. Then they would take a
similar looking plate of wood with the name of
Jesus written on it. Naturally, it would float. The
missionaries would then gleefully offer it as proof
that Jesus alone could save their souls while Hindu
gods condemn them to perdition.
In order to blast their devious narrative, we started
challenging them in their meetings. We would insist that they
write the name of Ram on the wooden plate instead of putting
it on metal. Everybody could see that the wooden plate
floated, no matter whose name you wrote on it, and the metal
plate sank even if you wrote the name of Christ on it. We had
no choice but to expose their lies because they were creating
religious strife. Our mission was tribal development, not
conversion. We spoke to tribals in their own idiom, therefore
they took to us. The Bhil tribals have an age-old tradition
of Ram bhakti because of the iconic story in the Ramayana
where Lord Ram, Lakshman and Sita rested in the hut of a Bhil
woman named Shabari during their 14-year exile from Ayodhya.
Shabari was so overjoyed at the presence of Ram that she
gathered wild berries (ber) from the jungle to feed her
beloved Ram. In her anxiety to ensure that Ram ate only sweet
and ripe bers, she tasted each fruit before offering it to
Ram who ate them with joy and respect as an offering of love.
This loving encounter between the Raghuvanshi Ram and a
humble bhilni explodes many of the deftly crafted prejudices
against the "evils of the caste" system and the "the curse of
untouchability" associated with Hinduism through
two-and-a-half centuries of missionary propaganda.
The Shabari-Ram connection has stayed an integral part of the
cultural and spiritual ethos of the Bhils; the stones on
which the two sat have since time immemorial been objects of
worship in Dang. Morari Bapu proposed a grand memorial be
built to honour the memory of Shabari. Consequently, a
picturesque temple named Shabari Dham was constructed in 2004
on a hill named Chamak Dungar, near Subir village on
Ahwa-Navapur Road. This is believed to be the spot where Lord
Ram met Shabari.
This memorial became a matter of great pride for the tribals
while Hindu leaders began promoting it as a pilgrimage site
by planning the first Shabari Kumbh in February 2006. Lakhs
of tribals and members of Scheduled Castes were brought for
puja at Shabari Dham, which has a murti of Shabari offering
juthe ber to Ram in the sanctum sanctorum. Another important
ritual connected to Shabari Kumbh involves a dip in the
nearby Purna river as a symbol of equality and oneness of all
within the Hindu faith, irrespective of caste, class, tribe
or creed. However, at the very inaugural day of Shabari Dham,
Hindu leaders, as well as chief minister Modi made no secret
of the fact that this temple was a symbol of their commitment
to combat conversions by evangelicals.
With the construction of Shabari Dham, the
Christian leaders felt so aggravated at Hindu
leaders embracing tribals and setting up
residential schools and other facilities for them
to counter conversions to Christianity that they
began a systematic slander campaign against Hindu
saints and social workers, accusing them of
promoting religious strife and bringing in
"fascist" terror to crush Christians. As a result,
Hindu organisations started becoming more militant,
especially after VHP and Bajrang Dal entered the
scene and Swami Aseemanand of RSS became a leading
presence in Dang. They were not inhibited by
Gandhian civilities and unconditional commitment to
non-violence. They had come ready to battle in
order to stop conversions and prevent the
missionaries from making the Dang region into a
"Nagaland of Western India", meaning a call for
total Christianisation. Consequently, attacks and
counter-attacks and ethno-religious conflicts
became fairly common. In a few instances, Christian
churches were attacked by Hindu tribals who took to
militant resistance once they found support from
Hindu organisations.
It is not as if missionaries were merely hapless victims.
Their methods of conversion had always been questionable and
wherever strong, they too did not hesitate to use outright
violence and vandalism against their opponents. Moreover,
their very ideology of treating non-Christian faiths as
satanic amounts to a declaration of war against Indic faiths.
They use all manners of subterfuges to convince people that
Jesus alone can save them and that by rejecting Jesus they
would be inviting permanent perdition and roast in hell fires
for all eternity. I have experienced this first-hand how
Christianised tribal girls from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh,
Odisha, etc are taught by church leaders that they should
refuse to participate in Hindu pujas and rituals while
working and living with Hindu families.
They are indoctrinated into believing that if they
participate in the traditional pujas of their
ancestral faith organised by their own close
relatives, demonic forces would overpower them and
they would be stricken with fatal diseases. Their
exclusionist ideology leads to breaking up not just
village and community solidarity among the Bhils of
Dang (as they do everywhere they plant their
churches) but also tearing asunder families. This
had led to plenty of strife among tribals because
most of those who gravitated towards Christianity
did so to avail of educational opportunities and
not to disown their culture and family bonds.
Faced with militant resistance from Hindu Bhils, the
missionaries unleashed a national and international campaign
to project the VHP and RSS presence in the area as evidence
of rising "Hindu fascism". Shabari Dham was demonised and
defamed as an assertion of Hindu aggression. While in the
Hindu imagination, Shabari is a revered figure, the
missionaries gave it a bizarre twist to project it as a
misogynist story. To quote the foremost "intellectual leader"
of Christians in India, Cedric Prakash, who set up an NGO
with a Hindu name "Prashant" to project church activists as
defenders of "human rights" in the international arena with
frenetic lobbying against Hindu organisations in the UN and
with the US government:
Many Hindu groups take some kind of religious sanction to
negate the girl child, as well as women. For example, in our
textbooks there is a myth about Lord Rama. It says that when
Rama came to Gujarat, he found a place that was very clean.
He wondered who was cleaning this area and then he realised
that there was a tribal woman called Shabari who was working
to keep the place clean. Lord Rama looks to her as an ideal
woman and a great disciple because she kept this place so
clean in case he decided to visit. This story then becomes a
trope about the place of women in society. The boys are
taught this type of stereotyping in school, that their
mothers and sisters should be at home and clean the house...
Now there is group in India, a council formed by community
elders called Khap that belongs to a certain feudal mindset.
They have passed a law in Gujarat that unmarried girls cannot
have a telephone. The mischievous intent behind the narrative
is evident from not just willful caricature of the Shabari
story but also gratuitous reference to Khaps which exist only
in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh; Gujarat had no
acquaintance with Khap panchayats. Moreover, no Khap has the
power to enact laws. They can at best pass resolutions on
issues of common concern, that too if there is total
consensus. And nowhere in India have girls been prohibited by
law from carrying mobile phones.
The Christians not only defamed Shabari Dham
through church networks but also used "secular"
NGOs, many of whom are secretly funded by the
church (and now even by Islamist groups), to
declare war on Shabari Dham and the annual Shabari
Mela simply because it resonated well with tribals.
The War Over Shabari
So long as the Bhils and other tribals remain poor and
marginalised, they remain easy targets of conversion drives.
But the moment they feel part of mainstream Indian society,
missionaries can't prey on their isolation. The Christians
therefore began frantic efforts to pressure the central
government to ban the Shabari Mela, with secular NGOs and
Left-leaning mediapersons leading a concerted attack against
Hindu organisations embracing the work of tribal welfare to
wean them away from Christianity and its divisive agenda. The
Christians argued that since there were no historical
antecedents for this mela, Hindus should be prohibited from
holding it.
With the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre,
they got full backing and support in demonising
Hindu organisations. Missionary-backed secular
fronts such as Indian Social Institute, Medha
Patkar-led National Alliance of People's Movements
and even People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL)
and People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)
acted as foot soldiers for evangelicals in opposing
Shabari Mela and endeavours of Hindu organisations
to persuade tribals to assert their own faith
traditions. Despite their democratic pretence, both
PUCL and PUDR have been for long used as proxy
fronts by Maoists.
The PUCL, which started off as a save-democracy organisation
following the Emergency, turned into an obedient ally of
evangelical groups and went so far as to file an intervention
petition in the Supreme Court in 2006, supporting the
Christian demand to ban Shabari Mela and put restrictions on
ghar wapsi endeavours of Hindu organisations. This, when the
Shabari Kumbh was being attended by lakhs of people from
different parts of India of their own volition. Fortunately,
the court refused to yield and the Shabari Mela was not banned.
But this campaign clearly revealed that Christian
missionaries and the self-appointed guardians of
civil liberties -- PUCL and PUDR -- joined hands to
clamp down on the religious freedom of Hindus in
their own homeland. They argued that Shabari Mela
was being used as a platform for "communal
propaganda to Hinduise or Brahmanise" adivasis. The
charge is bizarre beyond belief. On the one hand,
Christian missionaries don't tire of attacking
Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular of
being exclusivist. On the other hand, any signs of
inclusiveness is condemned as "Brahmanising" or
Hinduising them, as though both these represent an
intrinsically evil force. To Christianise tribals
is "progressive", even though it means making them
disown and hate their ancestral faiths and
cultures. But bringing them closer to upper-caste
Hindu culture is dubbed "fascism".
The missionaries have worked with zeal to drive a wedge
between Hindu society and various groups erroneously
designated as "tribals" simply because they were forest
dwellers and therefore remained outside the varna vyavastha.
The core belief system of groups designated as tribals
consists of ancestor worship and nature worship. Hence they
are termed animists. But both these are core beliefs of Hindu
faith traditions as well, even while rituals involving these
two beliefs might differ from one group to another. The big
chink in the tribal armour exploited by missionaries is that
they don't have a written history or literary tradition
because most of their languages did not have well-developed
scripts. Therefore, missionaries have used that vulnerability
to invent a whole new history for them on the lines of the
Aryan-Dravidian divide theory used with fair degree of
success in the South.
Two men were specially targeted by church leaders
-- Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat and
Swami Aseemanand of the VHP.
The work of Hindu organisations suffered a major
setback when Aseemanand, the prime mover behind
Shabari Kumbh, was arrested by the UPA government
on the charge of being part of "Hindu terror"
groups engaged in the Ajmer Sharif bomb case in
2007, and the Samjhauta Express blasts.
Recently, the entire bogey of "Hindu terror" has been exposed
to have been invented as a counter-blast strategy by the
Congress leaders to deflect attention from Pakistan's
ISI-backed terrorist groups mushrooming all over India.
Assemanand was acquitted of all charges on 18 April 2018.
During my long interviews with Narendra Modi in
2013, he provided me valuable insights into the
games being played by missionaries in crafting a
narrative of victimhood in order to defame India
globally and put the Indian government and
political leaders on the defensive, so that they
dare not challenge even the patently illegal and
subversive activities of missionaries.
Right from the inception of Shabari Dham temple, Modi as
Gujarat chief minister was put under pressure to ban the
entry of Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and VHP preachers in the area.
Modi told me that he assured the Christian leaders who met
him that he was willing to guarantee their safety and ensure
that no attacks would take place on any church or any
Christian home but that he could not possibly shut down the
Shabari Dham or ban the Shabari Kumbh since that would amount
to depriving Hindus of their religious freedom. Thereafter,
Modi instructed the deputy commissioner and senior police
officers of the area to ensure that not even a pebble was
thrown at any Christian home or church nor any tiff allowed
to flare up.
In the process, Modi invited the wrath of the
radical fringe of Hindu preachers because they too
were put on close watch. Modi told me he took a
firm stand not just out of concern for the safety
of Christians -- which he took seriously as his
constitutional duty -- but also because he was well
aware of the intent of a section of the
missionaries, especially those who belong to the
bigoted Baptist sects.
Often, they themselves would provoke a fight with
the well-thought-out purpose of blowing it up out
of proportion -- even a minor skirmish which would
be made the basis of an international smear
campaign that the government of Gujarat was on a
genocidal mission vis a vis Christians. He added
that after his firm instructions, the district
administration ensured that no group was allowed to
take liberties with law and order.
Modi's explanation sounds logical: "the fact that
not a single Christian needed even first aid at a
local dispensary on account of inter-faith violence
indicates how Christian leaders had exaggerated the
threat of violence from Hindu organisations. Had
there been serious attacks, at least some persons
would have suffered injuries worth an FIR to the
police or gone for medical treatment."
I too got the impression that the missionaries didn't seem
happy with the administration becoming firm about ensuring
law and order. Modi could see clearly that missionaries
thrived in a situation of conflict because that enabled them
to unleash campaigns defaming Gujarat as a fascist,
intolerant state that endangers the rights of minorities. If
they are deprived of the opportunity to create even small
skirmishes that can be exaggerated beyond recognition through
friendly media, they get more desperate. That is why, despite
cessation of attacks and counter attacks in the Christian
tribal belt, the church leaders remained in the forefront of
the anti-Modi brigade, backed by the Congress and Left
parties. Father Cedric Prakash, John Dayal and other
Christian activists addressed countless meetings in the UN,
in the European Parliament as well as in leading universities
of the West to ensure that the international communities
treated Modi and BJP as untouchables.
It is ironic that liberal educated people in India
go ballistic and hyperventilate their outrage
towards ghar wapsi but take a very benign stand
when successive Popes openly proclaim their wish to
"witness a great harvest of faith" in India.
Imagine the Left liberal outrage in India if a
Hindu leader expressed something close to what Pope
Paul Francis declared in 15 March 2013 while
addressing the College of Cardinals:
Let us never yield to pessimism, to that bitterness
that the devil offers us every day; let us not
yield to pessimism or discouragement: let us be
quite certain that the Holy Spirit bestows upon the
Church, with his powerful breath, the courage to
persevere and also to seek new methods of
evangelisation, so as to bring the Gospel to the
uttermost ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8).
Christian truth is attractive and persuasive
because it responds to the profound need of human
life, proclaiming convincingly that Christ is the
one Saviour of the whole man and of all men. This
proclamation remains as valid today as it was at
the origin of Christianity, when the first great
missionary expansion of the Gospel took place. [To
be continued]
Madhu Purnima Kishwar is Maulana Azad National Professor,
ICSSR, and the founder of human rights organisation, MANUSHI.
https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/the-gujarat-agenda-why-christian-missionaries-hate-modi-and-rss-so-much