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Dayal also conveniently forgets the maligning of the Hindus and Hinduism by U.S. based Church groups. For example, Pat Robertson, in a March 23rd, 1995 television broadcast said that “Of all India’s problems, one stands out from the rest. That problem is idol worship. It is said there are hundreds of millions of Hindu deities. All this has put a nation in bondage to spiritual forces that have deceived many for thousands of years”. His son, Gordon Robertson followed that comment up with, “Wherever you find this type of idolatry, you’ll find a grinding poverty. The land has been cursed”. And the Christian Broadcast Network reporter at the discussion chimed in with “At the religious services the Reverend conducted in India they came by the hundreds, even thousands, to a makeshift altar to confess their faith in Christ and receive a touch from heaven, and be set free from a lifetime of fear and demonic oppression”.
Last year the Southern Baptists accused Hindus of devil worship. Last week, after a Hindu priest was invited to offer prayers before Vajpayee spoke to the joint session of Congress, the Family Research Council, a Washington D.C. based advocacy group posted a highly inflammatory editorial on its web page answering the question: “Does the Constitution allow a Hindu priest to give the opening prayer before Congress?” It is revealing that Dayal is ignorant of such hateful and demeaning attacks against Hinduism by the members of his faith. Also, the latest Vatican edict that “If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the church, have the fullness of the means of salvation” should have made Dayal, the National Vice-President of the All India Catholic Union, a little circumspect about the Christian role and presence in India.
Dayal’s statistics about Christians in India is not just incomplete but couched to draw the full sympathy of the suspect Commission: India’s population at the time of independence was about 330 million. So, a 2.9 percent of that 330 million would work out to about nine million Christians. At 2.34 percent of 850 million people, Christians numbered about twenty million in 1991. Let us see what next year’s census will reveal. Some Church organisations themselves claim it is about four percent of the population. At the present one billion mark, it would mean that there are forty million Christians in India now as compared to nine million at the time of independence.
Dayal also does not focus on the more “interesting” features of the spread of Christianity and Christian populations in India. For example, the Christian population in Nagaland which was 46 percent in 1951 increased to 88 percent in 1991; in Meghalaya it increased from 35 percent to 65 percent; in Manipur from 12 percent to 34 percent, in Mizoram from 46 percent to 86 percent, and in Arunachal Pradesh from nothing to 10.3 percent. And Dayal quietly forgot to mention that the Northeast is a major hub of terrorist activity and secessionist demands.
Dayal says that “Muslims and Christians are the main targets of a very focused, deeply organised (sic) and well-funded hate campaign throughout India. Islam and Christianity are branded as alien religions, and Hindus and Buddhists are constantly exhorted to give a united ‘Asian’ challenge to these faiths. It is forgotten that both Islam and Christianity were born on
the soil of Asia. The patriotism and loyalty to the motherland of minority groups is constantly being questioned. Muslims are branded as agents of Pakistan, a country with India has fought four wars since Independence. Their Babri mosque was demolished in 1992 in a symbolic gesture of ‘correcting historical wrongs’. The demolition has seared the psyche of the nation, and brought death, destruction and pain in its aftermath. The wounds are yet to heal”.
This kind of demagoguery in India is par for course, but for the Commission it should have come across as the evidence they needed to justify their verdict arrived at before the hearings. Dayal nimbly includes the Muslims as “victims” in his indictment of the “parivar”, and shows that he is willing to ignore the world-wide Muslim-Christian conflict to push his thesis of “minority” oppression in India. This strategy, age old, is the attempt to make “my enemy’s enemy my friend”. That he also ignores those leaders who do not belong to the RSS or the VHP who have challenged and criticised the proselytization efforts goes to show Dayal’s continued machinations to demonise the “parivar” and indirectly attack Hinduism and Hindus.
Leaders who have vehemently opposed the Church’s proselytization efforts include Gandhi and Vivekananda, and present day religious leaders like Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Gandhi’s advice was fivefold: the best thing is to give up conversion, he said; if you really must, he told the missionaries, direct your efforts to those who are in a position to assess these matters; he also wished that non-Indian missionaries should return to their countries and attend to the problems there; in doing any kind of work among the people, Gandhi counselled that missionaries should complement the faith of the people, not undermine it; and finally, he asked them to live the life of Jesus, of piety, and of the Sermon on the Mount, and not the life of the Church. Wonder why Dayal didn’t mention this to the Commission.
Prof. Arvind Sharma of McGill University who also spoke to the Commission said this about conversion and proselytization: “It is well-known that most modern Hindus do not regard the various religions of Indian origin — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism — as mutually exclusive religions. If the Indian census-takers did not insist that one can only belong to one religion — significantly a British and therefore Western legacy — I would not be at all surprised if the Indian religious statistical reality began to resemble the Japanese”. This, he explained, in the Indian context would imply “the idea of multiple religious participation rather than the idea of religious conversion”. He told the Commission that when Gandhi was asked, “What if a Hindu comes to feel that he can only be saved by Jesus Christ?” Gandhi replied: “So be it, but why should he cease to be a Hindu?” Prof. Sharma felt that in the Eastern cultural context, freedom of religion meant that the person was left free to explore his or her religious life without being challenged to change his or her religion.
Dayal ignored, during his turn in front of the Commission, the continued efforts by Church organisations to brainwash young children in India. The India Bible Literature, a publishing house in Chennai (Madras), publishes a series of students’ work books for Bible schools in India. In those books the children are told that since the Christian population in India is only four percent, ninety six percent of India’s peoples do not know the true God. In those books you will find a picture with a caption: “Paul is preaching about the real God to those who are worshipping artificial Gods”. The picture shows “Paul” with a group of tribals, and the artificial Gods are all Hindu Gods.
What are the real reasons for Dayal’s ire against the BJP and its affiliates? As one friend put it, the real reason for the opposition to the BJP is because the BJP does not want to appease any group, and that it wants to make secularism in India real, not the pseudo variety that has been practised the past fifty years. The distorted versions of secularism the Congress, the Communists, and other parties have implemented in India have sapped the country of scarce resources, and made people conspire against each other. Another friend pointed out that there are Church leaders in India who don’t consider the BJP or the VHP or the RSS as problems or threats. Unfortunately, the media does not publicise their views or their efforts at bridging differences.
Even more unfortunate, the likes of Dayal get hosted and exploited by vested interests like the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom. That Dayal has been able to convince many Indian-American Christians of the necessity of his anti-national, anti-Hindu tirade this past week shows that the forces of false propaganda are winning over the forces of goodwill and inter-religious dialogue. Dayal did not bring to the notice of the Commission the fact that recent church bombings in South India were carried out by some Muslim groups with the backing of Pakistan. Dayal did not point out that the rape of nuns in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh was not the work of members of the “parivar” but perpetrated by Christian tribals. Dayal did not point out to the Commission that the National Minorities Commission in India found, after investigation, that the crimes against Christians in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana were not acts of communal hate, and that those crimes had more local and commonplace reasons.
By appearing before the Commission and twisting the truth about communal conflict in India, Dayal stands discredited in front of his Indian audience. As to the Americans, there are many here who wish to grind their Christian axes with the help of the John Dayals of the world.
Post script: The Commission claims that it will make available statements made by the various presenters on their website soon. Another commentary on HamaraShehar may be necessary if those statements so warrant.
Ramesh N. Rao Disclaimer |
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