Madhu Kishwar’s personal account and compelling editorial on the devastating effects of evangelism in India and the complex politics involved
By Madhu Purnima Kishwar, New Delhi
As someone who studied in a con- vent school, I grew up believing Christians were sincerely committed to the spread of education and healthcare. However, I resented the subtle indoctrination inflicted on us by converting the “Moral Science” class into a Bible study class. There was no mention of Hindu faith traditions, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas or the Ramayana. The majority of Hindu or Sikh students were made to say the Lord’s Prayer before morning assembly and before each class, and another Christian prayer after each class with due reverence, including crossing our hearts after each prayer.
Anyone who topped the class in monthly or weekly tests got beautiful Vatican-produced pictures of Lord Jesus, Mother Mary, the Holy Trinity and a whole range of Christian saints. Since I routinely topped my class, I owned the largest collection of holy pictures in the entire school.
It is noteworthy that Hindu and Sikh parents never objected to this daily dose of Christianization and systematic attempt to inculcate “love of Jesus” in our impressionable minds. For the record, no pressure was ever exerted on us to “convert” because the school authorities knew that trying the conversion game with middle and upper-middle-class/caste families was bound to backfire. However, the same order of nuns ran special schools in Punjab villages and in urban shantytowns targeting children of the poor and “lower castes.” These schools had been established mainly for the purpose of getting converts and “harvesting souls” for the Church. But in those innocent days, nobody seemed to mind or care, leave alone sense any sinister agenda.
The Blindness of Hindu Liberalism
Despite the horrors of colonial rule and the religion-based Partition, most Hindus still believed in Gandhi’s sarva dharma sam bhav, “all religions lead to the same destination,” and that if Christians gave good education to the deprived classes, they were performing samaj sewa (social service). Nobody paid much heed to the fact that for Christians and Islamists, their entire strategy of conversion was based on defaming and demonizing Hindu faith traditions, because that is a core mandate of Abrahamic religions, for whom dharma, as Hindus understand it, has no value, and their open agenda is to crush the dharmic civilization of India.
Even as a schoolgirl, what bugged me most was that we were punished for speaking in mother tongues, Hindi or Punjabi. I kept defying the ban, because even at that age I found it offensive to my national pride, though I understood its far-reaching implications only much later. It is through one’s mother tongue or native language that we stay rooted in our culture and early impressions. By forcing us to become monolingual and English-dependent, we were being systematically deracinated. English inevitably brings with it disdain for Indic cultures and faith traditions and harbors the tendency to view the world through lenses of the imperial West, which is deeply rooted in Christian ethos. Sadly, this enslavement to English was made state policy under Nehruvian influence. Not surprisingly, elite schools founded and run by the brown sahibs of India are following the same pattern of intellectual enslavement set in motion by missionary schools.
No surprise, then, that a vast majority of India’s English-educated elite act as the intellectual warriors for Christian missions. They defend the right of evangelical organizations to convert Hindus to Christianity even while they use questionable means and rabid hate-Hindu propaganda to bring in converts. But they go ballistic when Hindu organizations try winning back Christian converts to their original faith. Abusing and demonizing Hindu faith traditions is treated as proof of “liberalism” and defended as “freedom of expression,” but even modest questions raised against the means and methods adopted by evangelical groups and consequences of large-scale conversions to Christianity is treated as proof of a person being a obscurantist “Hindutvavadi”— with Hindutva (its plain meaning is “essence of Hindu faith”) being projected as synonymous with fascism.
The Tide Changes in the West
In the initial years of Manushi, the human rights, women’s rights journal I founded in 1978-79, I naively believed that the Church-led “Liberation Theologists” were leading movements in defence of human rights in India. But I was disabused of this notion when I found that when Manushi started defending Indic faith traditions from malicious attacks, Christian organizations—including those wearing the secular mask—began to not only distance themselves from Manushi but also started to work against it.
It is not a coincidence that during that very phase, Kancha Ilaiah came to be feted and celebrated by church leaders and organizations and catapulted into international fame after he converted to Christianity and wrote a rather pompous, malicious hate tract against Hinduism titled Why I Am Not a Hindu. It is based on willful distortions and clearly written for the purpose of ingratiating himself with rabid evangelicals. Before Ilaiah wrote this, he was neither an avant-garde academic nor a celebrated public intellectual. As soon as he published his hate tract, he was touted by Christian organizations as a leading global intellectual and radical reformer of the “decadent Hindu society.”
Since Christian organizations carry a lot of influence in Western universities, Ilaiah became a professional globetrotter, lecturing at the most prestigious universities in the West. Overnight he became a star speaker at high-profile international conferences, including at the United Nations. His views on India and Hinduism came to be treated as gospel truth. If a person of his intellectual mediocrity had said good things about Hinduism, he would not have been invited as a speaker even by a small-town Rotary Club. But abusing India and Hinduism brought him handsome monetary rewards and celebrity stature.
Ilaiah’s article disowning Hinduism is likely to have been inspired by my controversial article “Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist,” in which I explained how followers of all “isms,” including Indian feminists, ape the means and methods of Christian missionaries out to harvest souls and treat those who don’t adopt their ideology as sub-human species who need to be saved from ignorance and perdition. That sealed my fate with Christian organizations and foreign universities that once sought me out. I began to get blacklisted, even though mine was far from a hate tract. Moral of the story: while I faced severe punishment for distancing myself from copycat feminism and all proselytizing ideologies, Ilaiah became a global celebrity as a reward for his Hindu bashing and open conversion to Christianity.
Modi’s Demonic Image
I personally woke up to the seriousness of the danger posed by Christian missionaries during my study of Narendra Modi’s tenure as Gujarat chief minister. As I explained in my book Modi, Muslims and Media (MMM), I undertook that study only because I wanted to check out for myself whether the evil deeds attributed to Modi and the demonic image painted of him by the Congress-Left combine, in cohorts with select foreign-funded nongovermental organizations (NGOs), bore any resemblance to chief minister Modi and the impact his model of governance had on the ground. Since he was being accused of a genocidal bent of mind towards “religious minorities,” I made Muslim and Christian communities the focus of my study.
It all started with an hour-long phone conversation I had with V. V. Augustine, a Malayali Christian based in Thiruvananthapuram. Here are major excerpts:
“Contrary to the propaganda that Modiji is supposed to be anti-minority, my experience is that Modi is a very minority-friendly person. When I was member of the Minorities Commission, the Christian community of Vapi district in Gujarat brought a serious issue to my notice. For the last 40 years, they had been trying to get a piece of land for a cemetery. They had even approached the central government; and they were willing to pay for the land. But the administration kept dragging the matter on for decades. On approaching Modi, within no time the land was identified on the outskirts of the town and the Christian community was gifted one-and-a-half acres of land by the state government, free of charge.
“I have interacted with him on numerous issues since then. During the 2006 Shabari Kumbh Mela, there was fear Christians would be attacked. But Modi issued firm instructions to the police commissioner of the area. The mela passed off peacefully. Not surprisingly, most Christians vote for Modi. They have never complained against his regime.
“In 2004, in Vadodara, a Muslim had killed a Hindu over a business issue and Hindus retaliated. They were not even on talking terms. I successfully conducted peace meetings. But they could not have succeeded without Modi’s support. People who spread the canard that Modi is against minorities are reflecting their own political biases. My experience is entirely different.
“Now, even Muslims realize that Modi is good for them, because a riot-free Gujarat and a resurgent economy with new opportunities have provided them avenues of upward mobility. Who has given full rights to the minorities? It is the Hindu majority! Who wrote the Constitution? Mostly Hindus! We must appreciate Hindus for this and give them their due credit.”
This glowing tribute came as a very pleasant surprise for me, because for years one had heard John Dayal, Teesta Setalvad, Aakar Patel, Father Cedric Prakash (a Jesuit) and other Christian activists talk of Narendra Modi as though he was the devil incarnate out to cleanse Christians and Muslims from the state of Gujarat. Cedric Prakash in particular had been at the forefront of the international campaign against Modi to get him blacklisted “as a mass murderer” and denied a visa to America and European countries. To quote from one of his mythical interviews about Gujarat at the Berkeley Centre for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, December 2, 2010: “The people that follow Hindutva are fascists; they are the equivalent from (sic) the American context of the Ku Klux Klan, and they draw inspiration from the apartheid of South Africa and Nazi ideology. The basic ideology asks for one nation, one language and one people.” What is worse, Cedric Prakash along with Islamist groups had lobbied with the US Commission for Religious Freedom to get India blacklisted as a country that crushes religious minorities—notably Christians and Muslims.
The Truth Behind the “Victimhood”
I decided to go personally to the Christian pockets of Gujarat. I met with half a dozen pastors. Since they knew I had Augustine’s briefing of the real events, they could not complain about what Modi actually did or failed to do. Father Francis Macwan, one of the senior pastors of a missionary school on Ahwa Road had told me that their school and their mission had received all possible help from the Modi government. When I asked him to provide concrete examples of help, he described how the district administration had been instructed to provide as many free school textbooks, children’s notebooks, stationery, school bags and uniforms as demanded by missionary schools, even though the state government is not obliged to provide such support to private, church-run institutions, especially considering that the mission schools set up in tribal areas have the express mandate to win over converts to Christianity.
Thus, when any state government provides free books and other educational materials to mission schools, it is in a way furthering their conversion agenda, since free education and related benefits are one of the primary incentives offered by the Church to tribals and other poor communities. And yet the Modi government, as perhaps several other state governments in India, provides this as a goodwill gesture towards the Christian community.
Despite the support of Modi’s administration, Father Jose Dali from Kerala, who has lived in Gujarat for 36 years, attributed their success in getting graveyard land to the “power of the Lord”—yet another miracle of Christ. They also tried to convince me that the Modi government discriminated with regard to development programs.
Thereafter, they complained that the sarpanch (government official) of that area had refused to sanction a power connection for the graveyard. Since burials don’t take place at night, I was a bit surprised that they needed a power connection for the open ground. Even so, I decided to check whether this charge had any substance. I met both the current and the previous government official of Paldi Village panchayat (village council). Both were categorical that the pastors had never applied for a power connection so there was no question of refusal. I called the most voluble among the pastors from the sarpanch’s house and put my mobile phone on speaker mode. Now, the pastor, who had claimed that he had personally gone and applied for the power connection, came up with a lame story that a long while ago he had gone very early morning to the house of the sarpanch (not the panchayat office) and since the sarpanch was not at home, he left the application with an unknown person who opened the door. I asked him whether he had followed up on the matter. The answer was, “No, we didn’t follow up since we knew they would not sanction the connection.”
This was a clear case of building a victimhood narrative out of a situation where the Modi government had gone out of its way to help the Christian community in more ways than one. And the resistance has only exacerbated instead of abating.
Christians Want Unlimited
Freedom to “Harvest Souls”
The innate hostility towards the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi actually came from a deeper place—resentment for thwarting their agenda. The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS) in general, and Narendra Modi in particular become objects of hate and are perceived as threats not because they want to smash churches and attack or kill Christians or shut down schools. They are hated because, unlike the Congress and Communist parties, the RSS is not willing to go out of its way to assist Christian missionaries in harvesting souls. Modi became the bête noire of the Christian community despite being very liberal in yielding to the reasonable demands of Christian organizations and seeking a relationship of cooperation with them and not confrontation. In the first year of his tenure, his government passed a law entitled Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003. As per this law, anyone who wants to change his/her religion has to first report to the civil authority, namely the deputy commissioner of the district.
This provision is meant to prevent conversions through fraud. Even though seven states in India already had such a law, the Gujarat law came to rankle the Christian community all over India because Modi took its enforcement somewhat more seriously, whereas almost all Congress governments either turned a blind eye to conversions—whether fair or foul—or actively assisted in the planting of churches in areas favored by Christians through free land grants and other overt and covert forms of assistance.
For the Christian missions in India, “freedom of religion,” promised as a constitutional right, means essentially one thing—unchecked right to convert people to Christianity. But Modi made them face the law of reporting conversions.
Reasons for the animosity came out through the pastors’ own narrative—the real issue bothering them was the government policy over conversions. To quote Jose Dali: “Actually, what the government feels about conversion and what we believe are different. Conversion will take place within the heart. We are not converting anybody. Those who are truly believing and personally accepting Christ as their savior and after confessing by themselves publicly, we will accept them. Baptism is not a sign of the conversion. Baptism is a part of the faith. Those who are converted will be baptized as per the Bible, Gospel of Matthew.”
Father Francis Fernandes added: “Conversion and baptism are not the same. The pastor is explaining is there is a change of heart in a person. The change of heart is when the person is ready and the person says, I want to join this way of life. Then only we initiate him in the field. He is saying ‘yes’ and we are acknowledging that ‘yes;’ that is baptism. By seeing the way of life, by seeing the faith of the people around, by seeing that Jesus is there, God is there, then this person comes and says, I want to receive baptism. It is not that we are going and forcing people.” He justified Father Cedric Prakash’s virulent opposition to the Modi government on the grounds that “We are not free in our own country, in our own state. Why are our constitutional rights being curtailed? I have the freedom to believe in any God as per the Constitution and after my confession, any time I can follow the principles of the faith.” In other words, the government not allowing support to conversions made them feel India is not a free country.
Their “rights are curtailed” for a very good reason. In my own case study of Bishrampur village in Sasaram district of Bihar, published in Swarajya in February 2018, I have described the blackmail tactics, including violence on children, used by Christian bigots to force children from poor families to adopt Christianity.
Mother Mary in a Gujarati-Style Sari
Meanwhile, the Church has tried to adopt Hindu nomenclature, rituals and vocabulary for Christian myths and church rituals, to make Christianity appear less alien. As elsewhere, so also in the Vapi church, the statue of Mother Mary was dressed in a Gujarati-style sari. Father Francis Fernandes explained they have named her “Our Lady of Velankanni” after a place in Tamil Nadu where Mother Mary allegedly appeared to several persons in her bodily form. That place has become a Christian “pilgrimage center.” Such miracle mongering is a standard technique of evangelicals to attract converts. Adopting local Hindu names, rituals, aarti and bhajans are also part of the strategy to make Christianity appear rooted in the soil of India instead of being an alien, imported religion.
The lack of hostility of the Hindu population toward Christian institutions is evident from the fact that out of 1,800 students in Father Mathew’s school, the vast majority are Hindu. Only one percent of children are avowedly Christian, and only ten percent are tribals. However, they run a separate residential school only for tribal children, where there is a heavy dose of evangelical brainwashing to convert them to Christianity.
The Hindu parents and their youngers seem oblivious to the situation. I also saw for myself how the local Hindu population, especially the youngsters, routinely visited the big church compound in Vapi for relaxing in its vast garden and often went and prayed inside because they found the atmosphere peaceful. For some youngsters, it has become the most convenient dating place, because Vapi has many such pleasant gardens with beautiful shaded trees.
For the benefit of “secular Hindus,” the pastors describe their evangelical agenda in highly sanitized terms: “We propagate the love of Jesus Christ, we propagate the gospel, and we are teaching everyone to become a good human being so we propagate Jesus Christ and his love. We never try to convert anybody. Message of Christ is the message of love. It is a very open message.”
Restraining Church Enchroachment
Another charge made by these pastors was that there are restrictions on building churches. To quote Father Francis Fernandes: “This is our freedom curtailment. As an active member of the Christian faith, we are not free in our own country to call our own place of worship which is called internationally a church.” At the same meeting, Father Mathew told me, “In South Gujarat alone, there are hundreds of Christian institutions.”
Several IAS officers, including those working as district collectors, confirmed that there is no blanket ban on building churches. But the problem arises when evangelicals want to plant a church in the middle of a Hindu settlement where there are no Christians, or position it right next to an important Hindu temple. That is invariably resisted by local communities. But evangelicals have become used to the administration riding roughshod over local sentiments under pressure from Christian missions to give them endless special concessions they claim as a “minority.” They succeed often because they have monetary clout as well as political backing to get the government to do their bidding. The fact that under the Modi government they could not bulldoze the administration with unreasonable demands was provocation enough to join not only with the conversion-friendly Congress party, but even rank Islamists, in running an international campaign to present him as devil incarnate.
Jose Dali belongs to a Protestant group called Brethren Assemblies, which is spread all over the world. In response to his litany of complaints, I asked him if he had presented the complaints to the district collector. His response was a giveaway: “We don’t want to make allegations. If there is some problem, we won’t go to the police station or outside. We believe that maybe God’s plan will work things out.” But that didn’t prevent them from taking their imaginary complaints against Narendra Modi to the US Senate, the European Union and various UN platforms.
How do they justify the virulent campaign to get the US and European governments to deny Modi a visa for a whole decade? To quote Father Francis Fernandes: “Maybe when our Indian Penal Code or Indian court is not giving you proper justice, you appeal to the international level. That is how Cedric Prakash must have gone to that extent. When my children are not fed in my own house, they will go out to beg, borrow and eat. So that is what is happening. If they have taken this step, that means something is wrong with my own house.”
Father Francis Macwan, the most reasonable and straightforward of all the pastors I met, from the Jesuit order, summed up the nature of the conflict candidly: “Father Cedric Prakash is a social scientist and an activist. His view is different from ours because we are staying in the midst of people. So my experience is different. Cedric is also in touch with Protestant groups, who go for conversion and faith formation. I have a very positive experience in working in Gujarat under Modi. We Catholics are not directly aggressive in conversions. But for Protestants, the main activity is conversion. So their experience is different.” It is noteworthy that he could speak his mind, though very diffidently, mainly because I chanced to meet him alone while all others met me as a group.
Support from California
However, the Joshua Project, of which all these Protestant missions are a part, is funded by multi-million dollar Frontier Ventures, in Pasadena, California. It makes no secret of the communities it has targeted for conversion. This is what it says about communities that are the soft targets in the tribal-dominated Dang district:
“Almost all of the Central Bhil practice ethnic religions that have been highly influenced by Hinduism. Shiva is considered the supreme god. Ancestor worship (praying to deceased ancestors) is also quite popular. Shamans (priests) are also called upon to offer sacrifices to the many gods and mud idols.
“In spite of their traditional beliefs, there have been interesting manifestations of god’s spirit among the upper caste Bhagat gurus. They now worship light and ‘the word,’ singing prophecies of the future, such as the coming sinless incarnation. At the turn of the century, one guru warned his disciples that there would be a great famine, after which they should look for teachers from the north and west who would teach them the true way of salvation from a book, free of cost. They would teach about the true god, and about a sinless incarnation, who was born of a virgin. The guru also said that they should worship this sinless, invisible God, turn away from stones and idols, and live blameless lives. A famine occurred in 1899-1900, soon after the guru’s death.”
The Joshua Project thus admits that the Bhils are steeped in Hindu faith and that their agenda is to wean them away from attachment to their “false gods” and adopt the “true god,” but they also admit to using devious strategies, including natural calamities, as a way of making inroads among the unsuspecting tribals.
During British times, churches of various denominations came to occupy the best and the most premium tracts of real estate in every state of India. But even after Independence, the Indian State has been generous in patronizing missionary activities, making available countless stretches of prime land as virtual gifts, or at best charging a token amount. In that sense, the combined real estate of various churches in India may well place them among the biggest landowners in the country. The growth in planting of churches has also proceeded at frenetic pace in recent decades, especially after the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power and Sonia Gandhi became the all-powerful authority figure at the Centre as well as for state governments under the rule of the Congress and/or its allies. To quote Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, writing on the website of the Joyful Heart Renewal Ministries:
“The truly exciting thing is that the percentage of Christians has increased substantially from 2.5 per cent a decade ago to about 5.8 per cent today. That represents a huge increase in the growth rate. Something is happening!
“Mycologist and church growth expert C. Peter Wagner has been receiving reports that the percentage may actually be 25 percent Christian—at least in parts of this large country—most of the growth coming in the past 10 to 15 years. And the growth may not all be in traditional churches. A substantial part may come from Jesus-follower groups within the Hindu culture.
“In this huge and very diverse country, it’s difficult to get accurate statistics regarding religion, but anecdotal stories indicate exciting changes. According to Christianity Today, Operation Mobilisation, one of India’s largest missionary groups, has grown to include 3,000 congregations in India, up from 300 in less than a decade. A hospital-based ministry in North India has seen 8,000 baptisms over the past five years after a decade of only a handful.
“‘Everybody knows about the massive scale of growth among Dalits,’ says Operation World’s Jason Mandryk. Somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of Christians in India are Dalits, low-caste groups, so that many higher-caste Hindus view Christianity as a low-class religion, worthy of contempt.
“‘Now we see signs of growth in the middling castes and among the under-35s,’ Mandryk says. ‘There’s a new dynamic for the urban, educated generation….’ Wagner writes, ‘It is becoming more and more common for whole villages or other people groups to all decide to follow Jesus Christ together at one time.’ There are reports of both new churches and traditional denominational churches seeing signs and wonders in the spirit.”
Church organizations also manage to secure a big chunk of corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds as well as grants from various central government ministries and departments and state governments for their activities.
As described in my article on Bihar, it is not as if tribals and Dalits are desperate to convert. In most instances, missionaries use fairly dubious means to bring people into the Christian fold. Missionaries are also not just content with Hindus accepting Jesus as their savior. An essential requirement is that they begin hating their original faith, disown their ancestral culture and break off ties with relatives who refuse to convert.
Modi Empowers the Tribals
During Modi’s regime in Gujarat, the district administration had been advised to keep a close watch over conversions, not because Modi hated Christians but because the virulent hate campaigns against Hinduism and the indigenous faith traditions of tribal communities often led to clashes between Christian and non-Christian tribals, leading to law-and-order problems in areas targeted by evangelicals.
Missionaries also seemed resentful of the fact that the Modi government took on the task of improving road connectivity and provision of civic infrastructure to backward regions, including tribal pockets, on a war footing. With high-quality, all-weather roads reaching the remotest regions, along with 24/7 power supply, internet and mobile phone connectivity, safe drinking water, functional primary health centers, systemic improvements in state-run schools and one of the best ambulance services in the country just a phone call away—the space for missionary work began shrinking.
Christian missions and evangelical activists thrive only so long as communities remain poor, illiterate and deprived of means of social and economic advancement. Congress, during its long tenures as the ruling party, had not only left the field free for conversions by its callous neglect of tribal areas but also by facilitating the activities of the church. But the Modi government made a special effort to mainstream neglected tribal communities. This appeared as a palpable threat to the evangelicals.
During Modi’s tenure as chief minister, Hindu groups felt emboldened to report to the administration all those meetings where tribals were invited for baptism even while the pastors described those meetings as community gatherings, not conversion melas. But they gave the game away by repeatedly asserting that the Modi government was tampering with the freedom of religion of tribal communities to accept Jesus as their lord and savior. The logic is bizarre. Tribals are most comfortable continuing with their ancestral belief system. It is the evangelicals who tamper with their religious freedom by pressuring them to convert—that too through hate propaganda against the native faiths.
The Modi government merely kept a vigil over conversion activities. And yet these pastors termed it as a crackdown on Christianity, even though they were free to practice their religion and run Christian schools and hospitals. This is how they tried covering up their real agenda: “The xyz gathering we planned was only meant for baptism, not conversion. If people come to us after an inner awakening of the love of Jesus, how can we turn them away? We don’t ask them to convert; it is they who came to embrace Christ. So how can they charge us with conversions?”
They had no answer when I asked how they could say “baptism” was not conversion and whether as per law, they provided the list of those seeking baptism to the district administration. If seeking baptism was a genuine individual choice, why hide it from the deputy commissioner?
Fomenting Divisiveness
Their methods of conversion had always been questionable and wherever strong, they too did not hesitate to use outright violence and vandalism against their opponents. Moreover, their very ideology of treating non-Christian faiths as satanic amounts to a declaration of war against Indic faiths. They use all manner of subterfuge to convince people that Jesus alone can save them and that by rejecting Jesus they would be inviting permanent perdition and roast in hell fires for all eternity. I have experienced first-hand how Christianized tribal girls from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, etc., are taught by church leaders that they should refuse to participate in Hindu rituals while working and living with Hindu families.
They are indoctrinated into believing that if they participate in the traditional pujas of their ancestral faith organized by their own close relatives, demonic forces would overpower them and they would be stricken with fatal diseases. Their exclusionist ideology leads to breaking up not just village and community solidarity (as they do everywhere they plant their churches) but also tearing asunder families. This had led to plenty of strife among tribals, because most of those who gravitated towards Christianity did so to avail of educational opportunities and not to disown their culture and family bonds.
The missionaries have worked with zeal to drive a wedge between Hindu society and various groups erroneously designated as “tribals” simply because they were forest dwellers and therefore remained outside the varna vyavastha. The core belief system of groups designated as tribals consists of ancestor worship and nature worship. Hence they are termed animists. But both these are core beliefs of Hindu faith traditions as well, even while rituals involving these two beliefs might differ from one group to another. The big chink in the tribal armor exploited by missionaries is that they don’t have a written history or literary tradition, because most of their languages did not have well-developed scripts. Missionaries have used that vulnerability to invent a whole new history for them on the lines of the Aryan-Dravidian divide theory used with success in the South.
Global Campaign to Defame Hinduism and India
During my long interviews with Narendra Modi in 2013, he provided me valuable insights into the games being played by missionaries in crafting a narrative of victimhood in order to defame India globally and put the Indian government and political leaders on the defensive, so that they dare not challenge even the patently illegal and subversive activities of missionaries.
It is ironic that liberal, educated people in India go ballistic and hyperventilate their outrage towards ghar wapsi (“back-to-home” re-c0nversion programs and rituals by Hindu organizations which facilitate conversion of Muslims and Christian back to Hinduism) but take a very benign stand when successive Popes openly proclaim their wish to “witness a great harvest of faith” in India.
Imagine the left liberal outrage in India if a Hindu leader expressed something close to what Pope Paul Francis declared in 15 March 2013 while addressing the College of Cardinals:
“Let us never yield to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil offers us every day; let us not yield to pessimism or discouragement: let us be quite certain that the Holy Spirit bestows upon the Church, with his powerful breath, the courage to persevere and also to seek new methods of evangelization, so as to bring the Gospel to the uttermost ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8). Christian truth is attractive and persuasive because it responds to the profound need of human life, proclaiming convincingly that Christ is the one Savior of the whole man and of all men. This proclamation remains as valid today as it was at the origin of Christianity, when the first great missionary expansion of the Gospel took place.”
It is time that Hindus wake up to the fact that Abrahamic religions—both Islam and Christianity—do not believe in peaceful coexistence. For them “religious freedom” promised in the Indian constitution means the freedom to wipe out non-Christians from the surface of this Earth.
The noble and inclusive worldview intrinsic to uniquely Hindu worldview that proclaims Sarva Dharma Sambhav has become a death trap for our civilization because Christianity (and Islam) is not rooted in Dharma, which is the founding rock of our civilization. They wish to destroy this worldview to ensure supremacy of Christianity.
The Nehruvian elite that assumed power after Independence prevented us from not only studying Indic faith traditions but also kept us ignorant about the real agenda of Christianity and Islam. Therefore, we have let them run riot in India and even given them state patronage, including land grants and government plus corporate funds to wage war against Hindus. This can only be remedied by serious study of our own heritage and the value system of those out to destroy it so that we can take preemptive measures.