Gandhiji regarded Christ as a great teacher but not the only son of God
From Our Correspondent
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Eminent Gandhian and Padmashri Ishwarbhai Patel today called for positive steps to counter the designs of the Christian missionaries whose conversion activity, he said, had been decried by no less a person than Mahatma Gandhi on umpteen occasions.

Addressing a select gathering of city intellectuals at a function on October 31 organised at Karnavati by a Trust, Vishwa Samvad Kendra, to mark the release of the Gujarati translation of a Hindi book titled Gandhiji Ane Khristi Panth (Gandhiji and Christianity), Ishwarbhai remarked that Gandhiji believed in true Sarvadharma Sambhaav and therefore regarded conversion as an attack on another religion. Condemning the missionaries for their claim that theirs was the only true God, he asked "If theirs is the only true God then who are our (Hindus) 33 crore Gods and goddesses?"

The original Hindi book Gandhi Aur Isaiyat authored by Rameshwar Mishra and Kusumlata Kedia, is a collection of Gandhiji’s thoughts and views about the Christian Missionaries and vividly captures the essence of the fight that Gandhiji waged against the conversion activity of the Church at the intellectual level.

Expressing concern over the proselytising activity of the missionaries in the north-eastern States Ishwarbhai, who has carved out a name for himself across the country for evolving and popularising a cost-efficient sanitary and hygienic model for the slum dwellers and poorer sections, however, pointed out the need for analysing as to why the missionaries had penetrated so deep.

Addressing the gathering, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's International General Secretary Dr.Pravinbhai Togadia, who was the chief guest on the occassion, quoted a series of statements from Gandhiji’s collected works condemning the missionaries’ conversion activity including the one in which Gandhiji described them as "vendors of goods". Narrating how some missionaries had tried to convert Gandhiji, he reminded the Church leaders that Gandhiji had himself said that if he had the power to legislate, he would have banned conversion altogether.

Dr.Togadia said that Gandhiji had developed a dislike for the missionaries from his childhood when he saw a missionary using offensive language against Hindu religion outside his school in Rajkot.

What offended Gandhiji most was the missionaries’ claim that Christ was the only son of the God, he said, and added that Gandhiji was not prepared to accept that prophets like Buddha and Mahavir were not the sons of God. Gandhiji regarded Christ as a great teacher but not the only son of God, Dr.Togadia pointed out.

Exposing the double standards of the missionaries, Dr. Togadia said that the Pope had recently labelled the Protestants as rapacious wolfs when he was told that the Protestants had converted six lakh Roman Catholics in South America by their aggressive proselytisation and then asked, "If the Pope calls the Protestants rapacious wolfs for converting the Roman Catholics then the Christian Missionaries operating in this country should tell as to what should we call them?"

Charging the Christian missionaries with violating the Constitution of India, he revealed that a Supreme Court judgment in 1977 had clearly declared conversion as an unconstitutional activity holding that the right to propagate religion didn’t constitute the right to convert people of one religion to another. Throwing light on the opposition to the conversion activity of the missionaries in other countries, Dr.Togadia said that in Israel the missionaries had to apologise to the Government recently when they were caught converting the Jews and even in China there is a total ban on conversion.

Decrying the theological claim of the missionaries that salvation was only possible through the Church, Dr. Togadia asked as to whether in a civilised society it was proper for the missionaries to say that the 370 crore people on this earth who profess other religions would go to hell. Quoting the report of the 1954 Niyogi Commission, which went into the activities of the Church in the then Madhya Bharat at the behest of the Congress Government, he revealed that the missionaries has repeatedly insulted Hindu Gods using the foulest language and asked whether these acts were in the realm of secularism.

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