Author:
Publication: India Abroad
Date: September 20, 2002
Fringe church groups are converting
scores of Hindus to Christianity across South India, reports, George
Iype
In many villages across South India,
religion is turning out to be a question of money. Flush with funds
from their headquarters in the United States, a number of evangelical
and Pentecoastal church groups are converting hundreds of Hindus,
especially belonging to the low castes, to Christianity. Similarly,
Muslim scholars are touring villages in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka
to lure locals to Islam.
Hindu nationalists leaders claim
that despite the hue and cry they have raised against conversion
all these years, `forced conversions are taking place at a brisk
pace in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
"Christianity has firm roots in
these southern states, which may be why some church groups have seized
forced conversion as their mission," says K. Radharkrishnan, a Vishwa
Hindu Parishad activist in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
Last week VHP leaders from South
India sent an urgent appeal to the federal government asking to prevent
appeal to the federal government asking it to prevent Christian and
Islamic missionaries from indulging in forced conversions. "These
missionaries are spending dollars to convert people here. We want
the government to arrest them for creating social and religious upheaval."
Radhakrishnan said.
Church and Muslim leaders concede
that his charge is not entirely baseless.
Consider the following:
August 22, some 250 villagers -
all of them poor Dalits - in Madurai underwent baptism by water and
converted to Christianity. The ceremony was conducted by the Seventh-Day
Adventists, a U.S. based Pentecostal church, which has missionaries
working across India. Over the last six months, reports say, Seventh-Day
pastors have converted as many as 2,00 Hindus to Christianity in
the Madurai region.
In July, the Covenant and High Land
Trinity, an evangelical church group working in Andhra Pradesh's
Guntur district, converted 70 Hindu villagers to Christianity. Reports
said that all the converts were paid money and given jobs for changing
their religion. Last fortnight, two dozen Hindus in a poor mason's
colony outside Pathanamthitta town in Kerala were converted to Christianity
allegedly under the influence of a charismatic Christian prayer group
called Master Ministry of Jesus. `I did not have any work and I could
not feed my three children and wife. Now I go for Bible teaching
and we are living as a happy family,' says P K Krishnankutty, who
has since changed his name to Joshua Davis. Intelligence reports
sent to the A B Vajpayee government reveal that the Deendar Anjuman,
an Islamic sect that follows an eclectic theology, has been converting
poor Hindu villagers to Islam in the rural areas of Hubli and Gulbarga
in Karnataka and Vijaywada in Andhra Pradesh. The Deendar Anjuman
was outlawed two years ago after it masterminded a series of bomb
blasts in churches across Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
Church insiders admit that evangelist
groups with plenty of foreign money have mushroomed all across South
India with conversion as their main agenda. "They have exotic names
like Exodus Church, New Life Evangelists, Covenant and High Land
Trinity, Master Ministry of Jesus etc. They reject church rituals.
They are very Westernized and fundamentalist," a senior Syro-Malabar
Church official revealed.
