|
Christian
provocation
By Jon Stock
The Spectator, February 6, 1999
(The author is India correspondent (New Delhi) of
the Daily Telegraph)
Put simply, the Indian subcontinent has become the principal target for a wide range of
Western Christian missions which are determined to spread the gospel to India’s
‘unreached’ people before the year 2000.This they call their ‘Great
Commission’. The more extreme among them are motivated by an eschatological
belief, that the new millennium will herald Christ’s Second Coming, and by a sense of
frustration that a country of almost 980 million people can boast barely 20 million
Christians...
***
The recent spate of attacks on Christians
in India, culminating in the grotesque incineration of an Australian missionary and his
two sons in their jeep in the eastern state of Orissa, has led many Western observer to
believe that in has finally abandoned its constitutionally enshrined policy of
secularism. Certainly the Hindu militants who are behind the attacks have little
truck with Mahatma Gandhi’s once sacred traditions of religious tolerance and
pluralism. Anyone who could stand and watch two boys under ten and their father
fight to get out of a burning vehicle, only to push them back into the flames every time
they tried to escape, is as far removed from the Mahatma as is humanly possible. But
what seems to have been ignored by Western governments and their missions in New Delhi, as
they bleat about India’s growing religious intolerance, is the extreme intolerance of
the evangelical, mostly American, missionaries who are now working in India.
It should first be stated that India’s various Hindu fundamentalist organisations,
known collectively as the Sangh Parivar, or right-wing family, are not a pretty
bunch. At the semi-respectable political end is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
which heads the coalition government in India. But at the other there are some
fanatical, sinister pressure groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which means
‘World Council of Hindus’, many of whose members are little more than thugs.
But one is forced to sympathise with the
fundamentalist’s view, if not his tactics, in the current dispute with the Christian
Church. The Sangh Parivar’s principal objection is to the conversion of
India’s tribal, mostly Hindu, population by foreign-funded Christian missionaries
who, they say, bribe it with promises of better education, health and an escape from the
bottom of the caste system. The Sangh Parivar has its own particular, somewhat
skewed objections to these conversions - it sees them as a direct challenge to its radical
goal of a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation - but Western governments should also be
concerned about them and what exactly these missionaries are doing in India. One suspects
they have no idea.
Put simply, the Indian subcontinent has become the principal target for a wide range of
Western Christian missions which are determined to spread the gospel to India’s
‘unreached’ people before the year 2000.This they call their ‘Great
Commission’. The more extreme among them are motivated by an eschatological
belief, that the new millennium will herald Christ’s Second Coming, and by a sense of
frustration that a country of almost 980 million people can boast barely 20 million
Christians. Consider the following statement from a Colorado-based group of
worldwide Christian missions calling itself AD 2000 and Beyond:
‘Flashes of light’ seen all around the North India-Hindi Belt, particularly
among the tribal groups, are encouraging us to believe that the Sun of Righteousness is
indeed ready to rise upon these unreached peoples. The hundreds of strategies
leading to the year 2000, the rise of national ministries in India, the increase in
church-planting efforts and the focus on reaching every people groups all lead us to
believe that something wonderful is indeed looming on the horizon for India.
Less
obsessed with the millennium., the Gospel Missions of India, in Michigan, talks of
‘winning India for Christ’. The Washington-based Mission of Joy, which
claims to have helped more than 13,000 Hindus and Muslims commit to Christ, says,
‘India is ripe for harvest.’
Evangelising India for Christ, in South Carolina, says it all in its name.
All these organisation s have learnt to accommodate post-independence India’s
uneasiness about Western missionaries. The government in Delhi no longer issues them with
long-term visas, so they focus instead on training and supporting indigenous pastors, on
channelling funds and resources to India, and on prayer. The last of these might
sound the most innocuous but the sort of prayers that are currently being mouthed in
America go a long way to explain why Hindu fundamentalist s in India feel threatened.
Take the Bethany Wo rld Prayer Center in Louisiana, which has produced ‘prayer
profiles’ for the numerous different ethic groupings of non-believers that exist in
India. These profiles help members world-wide to concentrate on something more
tangible that just a name. Anyone who wants to pray for the Ho tribals of south Bihar and
northern Orissa, for example, is given a photo, a detailed map and a description of their
day-to-day lives and beliefs (30 per cent Hindu, 60 per cent animist). They are then
told to do the following: ‘Pray against the spirits of animism and Hinduism that have
kept, the Ho in spiritual darkness for centuries.’
At the
heart of India’s cherished secularism - and indeed at the heart of Hinduism - lies a
respect for other people’s religions. Bethany’s exhortation to pray
‘against animism and Hinduism’ is hardly a mark of respect. In its
information package about India, it goes on to describe the four states of India’s
tribal belt as the heartland of Hinduism and the home of India’s most deprived
people. ‘Interestingly, the acronym of their names - BI for Bihar, MA for
Madhya Pradesh, R for Rajasthan and U for Uttar Pradesh - is the Hindi word for
‘bimaru’, which actually
means “sick”.’ The message is implicit but clear. Hinduism is
as sick as its impoverished followers. The Native Missionary Movement of India,
based in Tennessee, is more explicit in its description of Orissa:
‘Satan has successfully camouflaged his grip on the people of Orissa with a thin
veneer of religion.’ As for AD 2000 and Beyond, it points out that
Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, is full of temples dedicated to Shiva, ‘an
idol whose symbol is a phallus. Many consider the city the very seat of Satan.’
There is
little doubt that the current communal tension in India would not be se serious of
foreign-funded missionaries had been content with giving Indians the choice of
Christianity and left it at that. Instead,many of them (though not all) have
declared war against Hinduism in their desire to convert the nation to Christianity.
It is this that has so piqued the Hindu militants. Speaking about Mother Teresa, Mr.
Ashok Singhal, leader of the VHP, recently accused her of being part of an international
conspiracy to eliminate Hinduism from India. (He accused ‘Teresa’ - he
can’t bring herself to call her Mother - of threatening Hindus with lethal injections
if they did not convert.) Talk of conspiracies it far-fetched, but this otherwise
unhinged man has a point.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being
channeled into
India through well-organised, American-based evangelical missions. The meticulously
researched ethnographic data that they are compiling on the region ensures that funds (as
well as prayers) are being directed with military precision to the right area, even to
specific pin codes in remote tribal districts. ‘God is allowing us to “spy
out the land” that we might go in and claim both it and its inhabitants for
Him,’ says AD 2000 and Beyond.
Sadly,
Hindu militants have not helped their own cause. They have responded to the
missionaries’ zeal with conversions of their own, most notably among the Adivasi
tribals of Gujarat, and now also with sickening violence. The crusading instinct
does not sit easily with Hinduism. (Once, in the 9th century, Hinduism dedicated
itself to forced conversions, when Shankara Acharya led a militant assault on Buddhism in
the south of India, but such instances are rare.) Nor does the burning alive of an
Australian missionary, Graham Staines, who had spent more than 30 years trying to
eliminate leprosy from Orissa. Those who say that the more extreme members of the
Sangh Parivar have little to do with genuine Hinduism have a point. But then, it
could be equally argued that America’s evangelical missionaries have little to do
with religious tolerance.
|
