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RSS chief wants Christians to set up 'swadeshi' church

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief K C Sudershan said on Saturday that a majority of the Christians in the country are patriotic and exhorted them to dissociate themselves from the stranglehold of foreign churches by setting up a 'swadeshi' church.

Sudershan, addressing the annual Vijayadashami gathering of the RSS in Nagpur, launched a scathing attack on foreign churches and accused them of conspiring to destabilise the country.

"Why are these foreign churches allowed to carry on their activities on our soil," he asked and urged Indian Christians to set up a 'swadeshi' church on the lines of the Orthodox Syrian Church and the Mar Thoma Church of Kerala.

He said India should follow China's example, which drove away all foreign churches from its soil and set up its own church.

Sudershan accused the Baptist Church of playing havoc in Tripura where he claimed that Hindus have been driven out and tribals are being harassed in the name of Christianity.

Tribal Hindus are being terrorised to stop them from worshipping their gods while women are prevented from applying the vermilion mark or even wearing bangles, he said.

Four RSS activists were kidnapped in Tripura at the behest of the church, a Hindu sadhu Baba Shantikali was killed, and a hostel for tribal youths run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Anand Bazar was set afire by Christians, he alleged.

The church did not stop there, but wanted the entire mountainous Tripura region to be declared a sovereign state, he added.

The Sangh was being projected as anti-Christian and anti-Islamic, he said, though no Hindu organisation had been found guilty in the criminal assault on nuns in Jhabua (Madhya Pradesh) or the killing of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa or the attack on missionary schools in Agra.

On the contrary, "terrorist outfit" Deendar Anjuman was behind the bomb blasts in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa, he said.

Sudershan flayed the "so-called national English press" for criticising the Sangh Parivar in its editorials.

He urged Muslims to keep a watch on the anti-national activities of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and inform the authorities about them.

The RSS chief said the ISI had spread its activities and was indulging in bomb blasts, smuggling of arms and transporting of RDX in the country.

He called for the complete "Indianisation of Islam" in the country and urged Muslims to join the cultural mainstream.

"When Indonesian Muslims can acknowledge Lord Ram and Krishna as their ancestors and describe the Ramayana and Mahabharata as their cultural books and remain Muslims, why can Indian Muslims not follow the same? Indonesia even has the picture of Lord Ganesh on its currency notes," he pointed out.

Muslims from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia have neither deserted their loyalty to their motherland nor their ancestors, he said. But the situation here is entirely different and the clergy does not want the faithful to associate with Ram and Krishna, but to follow invaders like Mahmood Ghaznavi, Taimoor Lang, Babar and Aurangzeb.

Learned Muslims in India disagree with the views of their clergy because they know that no other Islamic country will accept them simply because of their religion, Sudershan said. Saudi Arabia, an Islamic country, drove out 22,000 Bangladeshi Muslims because they could not be integrated there, he said.

Sudershan revealed that the RSS has 11 units in Surinam, four in Guyana, 18 in Trinidad, 60 in the United States, 70 in England and 11 in Holland. The VHP and the Hindu Sevika Samiti too have branches in these countries, he said.

In his presidential speech, Gayatri Parivar head Pranav Pandya called for a fight against the cultural invasion by foreign satellite channels, which were bent upon "humiliating" youth and women.

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