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The Rediff Special

'It is very insensitive'

Pass to his friend, Mohan Joshi, perhaps the VHP's oldest anti-conversion campaigner and overseer of its paravartan (reconversion) programme. He lives and works out of a first-floor room at the VHP's R K Puram office crammed with steel almirahs. In one long fiery burst, he passes on all known prejudices against Christians to you.

"They came here by cheating, trade or invasion," he begins. "They represent the Pope's armies... The population of Christians is double of what appears in the Census because dalit Christians do not write they are Christians. They brainwash Hindus in convent schools. In their city schools they cannot do that but they ensure that their students have a permanent soft corner for them. They encourage picnics with Hindu boys and girls so they can be converted. "

Where are the conversions taking place, you ask to contain the calumnies. He rattles off the names of 95 cities, towns and districts.

"They want to make a vote-bank and rule," he says.

Has he proof? Joshi bristles like Khatima's Bhuvan Bhatt did or Gujarat's Pravin Togadiya would.

"You are looking for proof? What proof can I give?" He passes on a newspaper cutting of former Orissa chief minister Nandini Sathpathy's assembly statement alleging conversions in some districts.

He sits hunched behind his desk, glowering at you, looking ill and irritable, and then walks to one of the cupboards and brings up a pile of books and documents. "See them for yourself," he says, and walks over to the living section of his room.

The Thailand report on Hindus is a 25-page June 1980 document of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation. An introductory paragraph says, "We are conscious that god longs for the whole Hindu people to know Jesus Christ and live under his Lordship."

A controversial section says: "Harijan slumdwellers, young people in schools and universities and unemployed young people desperately in search of jobs have an open response to Christ."

Another advises that "high priority should be given to ministry among Hindu women, since they are the custodians of the faith."

Elsewhere, it reports, "Students from traditional Hindu homes appear open to gospel due to the breakdown of their religiosity while in the secular atmosphere of the college/university; students coming from a rural background to study in a city are lonely, and open to Christian influence; and the students from other language areas studying in linguistically strange areas are open for friendship from Christian youth."

In a section, 'Suggested strategy', it's written, "Train Christian students to develop close friendships with Hindu students." "Avoid the danger of making 'rice converts'" and "Do not give room for suspicion on the part of the government or the public."

Later, there is a class stratification of the Hindu society with evangelical target groups. And just before an exhortation for "personal and corporate intercession" for evangelising Hindus is a paragraph that says, "The Hindu quest for peace (shanti) and bliss is so overwhelming that he is willing to exert extreme effort in a relentless search to find this. Christ, as the author and giver of peace, with the promise of heavenly bliss, provides supple incentive for the Hindu."

There's more.

Ashis Nandy is perturbed by the section called 'Theological blocks'. "This is a very stupid document," he says, sucking on his pipe and puffing out angry clouds of smoke.

In most other ways, it isn't. It is well-written and researched and encapsulates considerable sociological, political and historical scholarship. And it's explosive. P Sathkeerthi Rao, who was then a member of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, was the chairman of the committee that produced the report..

EFI's current chief Richard Howell's first reaction is to distance his organisation from the report. "Rao would have done that in his individual capacity," he says.

Does that mean Rao wasn't from the EFI? "No, no, he was," says Howell.

What does he think of it? He flips the pages, pauses over underlined paragraphs and remarks:

"It is very insensitive."

To be fair, the Thailand document is nearly 20 years old. Howell says the Church had little to do with it. In his knowledge, many of its writers have revised their opinion. This is possible. After all, if the early missionary writers labelled Indians heathens, later German scholars gave Vedic philosophy top billing.

Besides, Delhi's Archbiship Alan de Lastic, who is also the president of the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India, says forced conversions are a 'square circle'. The Church of North India is committed against proselytisation. And James Massey avers that local governments didn't report of conversions to him in any of the four current Christian-Hindu flashpoints (Gujarat, Dumka, Jhabua and Ludhiana) during his Minority Commission investigations.

That will barely satisfy troublemakers, however, who have acted so far on suspicions. Try convincing Khatima's Bhuvan Bhatt or Raju Bhandari or Gujarat's Pravin Togadiya otherwise. And a document like the Thailand report could translate into many jerrycans of anti-Christian motor spirit in Ahwa Dang or Rajkot or Amau.

The point may be not to give room for doubt. But this is not so much of a problem with the established Catholic and Protestant churches that have disavowed proselytisation as with the smaller, newer ones that haven't. Some of the healing services that VHP activists have targeted in Gujarat, in Ludhiana, and elsewhere, saying they were a cover for conversions, and the mass baptism ceremonies, that Mohan Joshi rants against, are inspired by such sects as the Indian Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses, says Father T K John of the Vidhya Jyoti Theological College in north Delhi. He admits to the difficulties of reining them in.

"We have no interaction with them at all," he says.

Until that happens, and until the churches unitedly ban forced conversions, no effective, Hindu counterforce to the terrorism of small, defenceless Christian communities may emerge. Ashis Nandy and Richard Howell foresee the Catholic and Protestant churches forbidding evangelisation at the start of the next millennium. The sooner the better.

Mahatma Gandhi told Christian missionaries to first try and convert him before they turned to illiterate, ignorant Harijans. In deference, largely, to Gandhi, missionaries dropped the grandiose evangelisation plans made for Dr B R Ambedkar and his dalit followers when he decided to quit Hinduism.

"If a person," he wrote, "through fear, compulsion, starvation, or for material gain or consideration goes over to another faith, it is a misnomer to call it conversion. Real conversion springs from the heart and at the prompting of god, not of a stranger. The voice of god can always be distinguished from the voice of man."

It will be a fitting repetition of history if future faith-changing is put through Mahatma Gandhi's stringent test. It may just deflect Bhuvan Bhatt and his band from violent undertakings. And, perhaps, it may add to the purpose of Father Thomas, the late liberation theologist.

Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

The Rediff Specials

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