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The Rediff Interview/ N S Rajaram

'Christian institutions in India are not producing national leaders'

Are you trying to say that Christian educational institutions are brainwashing their students into serving foreign masters?

I am saying that elite Christian institutions in India are not producing national leaders. They are only producing people who can serve others. Doon School and St Stephens, for example, were definitely not set up to produce national leaders. Have you seen one elected national leader from these kind of places? Would a Doon School product be able to stand for election from Kanakapura, for example? The best schools in India are really colonial institutions, set up to produce servants for colonial rulers, and they have not changed in outlook at all. I am not, of course, talking about engineering or medical colleges, but purely about schools and colleges that teach the humanities. What is St Stephens other than a copy of King's College, Cambridge as it was, maybe 100 years ago: not as Cambridge College is today. We just have a series of copies of mission schools.

We don't even have an Indian school of thought in the humanities. Why do we still teach Jung and Freud in our psychology departments? I'm not saying reject them outright, but why not the Patanjali Yogasutra or the Upanishads also? In linguistics, do they teach Panini?

In a nutshell, your basic premise is that the Catholic Church is dying in the West, especially in Europe, and that its future lies in countries like India.

The survival of the Catholic Church is at stake today worldwide. Church attendance in Rome is 3 per cent. They could produce only 5 to 7 priests a year. And if you want to buy real estate in Europe today, you buy an old, abandoned church. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in West Kensington, London, is a former church.

Then, there is the problem of the evangelical churches, which are not at all a part of the Catholic Church. These missionaries go into the houses of sick people and promise to cure them. I have so many documented case histories like this.

There too, we must recognise the simple fact that when you have thousands of missionaries scrambling for conversions, they are not here to save souls -- I mean, you may find one or two saints in a century. There must be some economic motive as far as the rest is concerned.

Come on, I think even the concept of a heathen is at least 50 years old!

Oh no, that terminology is used even now: I can show you documentary evidence to that effect. I have been told to my face repeatedly in the West that I am a heathen. (Frankly, I no longer find that term offensive.) But what about the tribals, who are converts? Conversion is very good for selling goods for Christmas or Valentine's Day.

But Hindu festivals outnumber Christian festivals any day and are definitely far more pro-consumerism. And where would poor tribals be able to afford Valentine's day cards or Christmas gifts?

The West does not know that. Besides, I don't believe that anyone would support this level of activity without some economic benefit. Saving souls takes money, you know. The evangelical churches simply do not generate enough money internally to support so much activity. They obviously have some money coming from outside. A good deal of that is misused.

You once said that Church institutions should be regarded as multinational corporations.

I think the evangelical churches in particular are like MNCs that are still enjoying the benefits of colonialism. These institutions are international institutions. Yet, they are exempt from tax, which Hindu institutions are not.

The Indian government is subsidising their activities as they are minority institutions. This is exactly what happened during the British rule. Goods coming from Britain were exempt from tariffs and currency rates were manipulated so that they would be cheaper. The special privileges they were given during British rule still continues. I say that as long as they are controlled from and financed by people outside India, they should be treated as MNCs.

The Catholic Church today is thriving on money plundered from the colonies. The places colonised by the British and French became secular as the French Revolution and Henry the Eighth broke the power of the Church in those respective countries. However, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were part of the Catholic empires of those countries.

You say that Christian institutions in India are receiving a lot of money from abroad?

A single institutional bank account of a single Christian institution in Bangalore received Rs 150 million from abroad. However, tax evasion is not unique to India.

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