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HARVESTING OUR SOULS
By Arun Shourie ASA, Rs 450

God's Own Conspiracy
Book Review: By The Indian Express 

You have seen him, you have heard him, you have read him.
He, the left-liberal intellectual. Secular, anti-communal, antinuclear, he colonises the seminar room, chews up the newsprint, quotes Edward Said, misquotes Naipaul, toasts third worldism, jargonises redundant wisdom... he is the self-chosen keeper of national conscience. And he, the left-liberal intellectual, is a haunted man, haunted by that orphaned spectre of Europe.
The empire is gone, but the empire is there in his mind, an empire of dead certainties. India happens to be one of his most favoured sanctuaries. India is kind to troglodytes.

After all, what is India without him, what about India's conscience without him? His India: such a wretched place where Christians are burned, churches are stoned, mosques are demolished, Muslims are hated. Where nationalists are crazy fanatics and bombs are murderous toys. In this wretched country with zero-tolerance level, he stands there on the sidewalk and fumes dissent. On the march before his eyes are trishul-wielding nationalists. What pierce his ears are cries from the far fields of discrimination and deprivation. He says fascism - such a loose word in his antique rhetoric. He invokes Hiroshima - just another memory trivialised by his cause. He uses so many other words, like imperialism, post-colonialism, discourse, paradigm, the Other, and he uses them in, well, the discourse of dissent. He asks questions, and since questions are not banned in this wretched country, he himself has become a question larger than his relevance.

Where is the counter-question, the counterblast? The importance of Arun Shourie's Harvesting Our Souls is that it is written by someone who is not scared to ask unpleasant questions, unpopular, politically incorrect, media-unfriendly questions. Right questions in the age of left-liberal consensus and secular pretence. The questions Shourie asks in this provocative volume are the kind of questions the average Indian intellectual is unlikely to ask. Who would like to be less than human, less civilised, citizen of a savage nation? Who would like to be identified with the barbarians, who would like to be a paranoid apologist for a savage land? So you have the left-liberal pretence and the right-wing inhibition. Shourie, with that rare right-wing panache hardly seen in Indian political debate, breaks the ceiling of political correctness. This is intellectual audacity.

 And his subject is one on which exists a cosy, nationally comfortable consensus; the missionary agenda in India. O, they are such benevolent charity workers, God's own servants, least interested in conversion, only Hindu fanatics will kill them. Shourie says that is nonsense, the missionaries have an agenda, a clearly defined agenda: conversion. So what's wrong? Conversion is choice, an expression of your right, goes that banal  explanation. But Shourie argues that conversion is religious exploitation, sanctioned by the Bible and implemented by the so-called charity workers in the tribal lands of India. Shourie thought somebody had to speak up, and that somebody should not be that stereotypical votary of the VHP or Bajrang Dal. And he spoke up in the backdrop of those doomsday headlines. For a few month in the late '98 and early '99, India was such a horrible place: a docile community like the Christians was the chosen target of 'Hindu fascists'. There was a consensus on the enormity of the savagery, and the only defendants were Hindu savages or their benefactors. And almost every newspaper, in a display of competitive nobility, went on punning on Staines. It was such a horrible act, such a collective national shame – the murder of Graham Staines and his young sons. Shourie, as a citizen, shares that shame. But Shourie doesn't let the secularists monopolise the argument, the truth. Staines was not just a social worker. He was a missionary, the Church's chosen instrument of conversion, and Shourie has some documents to support his argument that Staines' missionary activities were a source of tension. The tension authored his death, which should not have happened, which should not be justified.

Why can't the missionary swear by God, and continue with the mission? The mission of the Church is not steeped in secrecy Shourie travels in the Bible to show that missionary agenda is justified by God Himself. "The right of the Church, the divinely ordained duty of the Church, the very purpose of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel to all men, to ensure that all things and all men are restored in Christ". Shourie takes meticulous care to
make his provocative conclusions scholarly – and theologically - sound, thanks to the scriptorium. He seeks out the Bible to repudiate the missionary excuse that Christian social workers have no secret programme of social engineering. His question is: Why is it that a divinely sanctioned mission of conversion is being denied  by the so-called Christian social worker? Such denials only illuminate the politics of God, whose subjects, as the scripture says, are defined by Him and Him alone. Perhaps the missionary should have the honesty to admit that much. Why can't he swear by God, and continue with the mission?

The mission of Church is not steeped in secrecy. Karol Wojtyla, the supreme Vicar on earth, makes no excuses for his missionary activism, his theology of conversion. How many divisions has the Pope? He can point his benevolent finger to Eastern Europe, to the fallen idols of false gods. In Asia, his politics of liberation is purely religious, there is no false faith to fight against. He doesn't sound like and underground missionary when He puts forward his evangelical position. On the eve of the Christian millennium, no 'pagan' politician of Asia is offering cross to the Christ's worker. Still, the good news of martyrdom seems to be a rhetorical pre-requisite for the missionary no-no.

 In India these are not subjects worth talking about. These are only subjects of left-liberal, secular revulsion. The Vishwa Hindu rejoinder only aggravates the secular nausea. Somebody has to redeem the debate. In the world of intellectually challenged dinosaurs, you can be a Stalinist and preach social conscience, but you can't be a socially acceptable right-winger. Arun Shourie displays singular courage, deploys arguments that tear apart the pretence of the liberal-left ventriloquists. By the way, what has Edward Said to say about conversions?

 

 

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