Dr. Manmohan Singh’s Government has done well to recognize aggressive evangelical activities by missionaries as the primary cause behind communal unrest in the country, particularly in sensitive states like Gujarat and Rajasthan. Despite opposition from prominent Christian activists, the UPA Government pressed ahead with the agenda paper for the recent meeting of the National Integration Council on 31 August 2005.
Attributing communal tensions to “conversions” of Hindus, a document prepared by the Ministry of Home Affairs cited instances such as the February 2005 assembly of the Emmanuel Bible Institute Samiti at Kota, Rajasthan, and the violence in Mangalore and Dakhina Kannada (Karnataka) in June 2005 over alleged attempts by a Muslim employer to forcibly convert Hindu girls. The terrorist attack on the Ram Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya was also mentioned as an issue with the potential to destabilize communal harmony. The Ministry recorded 485 communal incidents in the country till July 2005, in which 69 persons were killed and 1317 injured. It pointed out that states like Arunachal Pradesh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have had to enact laws to control conversions by coercive means.
The question that legitimately arises is whether these laws are adequate to protect the weaker sections of the population that are commonly the targets of missionaries. Experience suggests not. For instance, in remote Arunachal Pradesh in 2001, a Catholic priest from Nagaland promised 25 tribal families that he would provide their children a “good” education at a cost of Rs. 10,000/- per child for tuition, boarding and lodging at the St. Emmanuel Mission Convent in Rajasthan. The families paid up, but later when some went to visit their children, they found to their horror that the children were not enrolled in any school, but had been placed in an orphanage! The priest running the orphanage claimed he had paid Rs. 5,000/- per child to a fellow priest and demanded restitution of this sum before releasing the children to their families (Vishwanath, “Church as an Edifice of Fraud,” Breezy Meadows 2, No. 9, July 2001:3).
Threats of violence are fairly common in the remote north-east. A Protestant missionary had opened a primary school in Arunachal’s tribal village of New Tupi, bordering Nagaland. After failing to make progress in his evangelical mission, the pastor resorted to his “trump card,” warning villagers to “get converted within one and a half months” or “everybody will be in trouble.” The not-so-subtle hints accompanying this message were that the National Socialist Council of Nagaland’s gun-toting insurgents would otherwise visit the village.
The myth that missionary schools offer a good education lured many parents in the Rajkot town of Gujarat where, in a highly controversial case in 1998, the I.P. Mission Girls’ School distributed copies of the New Testament to Hindu schoolgirls and pressurized them to sign declarations adopting the Christian faith. The declaration, printed on the last page of each volume, said each signatory was a “sinner” and that she accepted Jesus as her “personal savior.” The parents were understandably outraged because the conversion of minors is illegal, and also because their wards reported that the school staff was intimidating them to sign the declaration. However, a huge public uproar compelled the school to take back the New Testaments and issue a public apology in the press that “such literature” would not be distributed again.
The National Human Rights Commission conducted a special investigation in the tribal district of Dangs (Gujarat) in 1999, following reports of tensions between converts and their Hindu neighbors. Secularists were shamed into silence by the testimony of the highly respected Gandhian social worker, Mr. Ghelubhai Nayak, who has devoted 50 years of his life to tribal welfare in the district. Mr. Nayak informed the NHRC that Christian missionaries were behind the tensions in Dangs. He said in the previous three years alone, there were at least 15 instances of Christian converts “under the influence of their preachers” desecrating the murtis of Hanuman ji, whom the tribals have venerated for generations. Mr. Nayak said that in one case the converts urinated on an image of Hanuman, while in another they smashed the image to pieces and threw it in the river. Converts also upset their Hindu neighbors by publicly denouncing Hindu saints and Gods as shaitans.
Given this approach – and most State Governments are reluctant to take the missionaries head on – where does the hope come from? Ironically, it comes from the underbelly of the Church – the corruption and lack of compassion that many of us have been brainwashed into believing does not contaminate that august body!
S.R. Welch’s marvellous expose, Their Other ‘Dirty’ Linen: Evangelism’s Quest to Conquer the World (The Secular Web – infidels.org), shows that according to the World Evangelization Research Center (WERC), there are over 4000 mission agencies worldwide, manned by nearly 434,000 foreign missionaries, and commanding a colossal annual global income of US $ 18 billion! The average cost invoked on each person baptized is reported at a staggering $359,000 (Rs. 1,50,7800/- person) and anybody can see that nothing near this reaches the intended beneficiaries of the gospel. Little wonder, then, that the returns in terms of harvested souls are poor, and that most evangelization plans fall desperately behind target. Church embezzlement, WERC concludes, equals the annual global income of the missionary enterprise. What a denouement!
At ground level, life remains unchanged and dismal for the majority of converts, who belong to the lower strata of society. Notwithstanding aggressive claims that Christianity brings social justice and equality to India’s erstwhile Untouchable groups, the fact remains that Dalits who convert soon discover that change of faith does not alter their ‘untouchable’ status. So it is unsurprising that while over 75% Catholics are Dalits, the latter constitute less than 5% of Indian priests.
Dalit Christian activists, who are currently being encouraged by the Church to canvass for privileges reserved for depressed sections of Hindu society (a tacit admission that there will be neither justice nor economic advancement through Christianity) are today the best advertisement against conversions. Hindu society, which felt the late Pope John Paul II had abused Indian hospitality by calling for the conversion of Asia during his 1998 visit to the country, can rest assured. In the absence of an absolutist power with which to bludgeon the populace, as was the case in Europe and the Americas, Christianity is unlikely to be a sunrise industry in India.
Organiser, 18 September 2005