Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 22, 2006
Archbishop Mar Varkey Vithayathil recently
startled India's intellectual elite with his call for more babies to arrest
the decline of Kerala's Catholic community. Perturbed at the toll taken by
abortion and the small family norm on the Syro-Malabar Church, he insisted
the burgeoning national population is no problem and that the State should
not try to curb family size.
Kerala's rich and large Christian community
constitutes nearly 20 percent of the votebank, and the Archbishop's call is
intensely political. It is reportedly inspired by the fear that the Sons of
Ismail may soon surpass the Sons of Isaac in god's own country. In the monotheistic
world, allegiance to the Abrahamic cult is not enough; what matters is sectarian
affiliation. Naturally our secular media, a subordinate ally of the Church,
spared the Archbishop the encomiums heaped upon RSS chief KS Sudarshan last
year when he asked Hindu families to have at least three children.
Kerala's Christian population registered a
22.6 percent growth rate in the decade 1991-2001. Christianity's second highest
growth rate was in Gujarat, nearly 56 percent, and Mr. Narendra Modi's sympathy
for Hindu alarm in the matter explains the antipathy towards him. Ms. Sonia
Gandhi's ascent as UPA supremo, coupled with America's muscular espousal of
evangelism, has given the Christian community the daring to make Governor
Balram Jakhar stall amendments to the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act,
2006, which require church officials to pre-notify district authorities before
conducting conversions, thus effectively restraining them. Evangelical anger
is growing as Chattisgarh has also moved to toughen conversion by force or
allurement, while exempting those returning to their natal faith from the
ambit of 'conversion'.
It needs to be stated unequivocally that proselytisation
has nothing to do with freedom of religion, conscience, or choice. Like the
so-called borderless terrorism plaguing the world, evangelists have territorial
ambitions, which they seek to fulfill through domination and control of the
human mind and body. Akin to the autonomous jihadi cells, evangelists have
a grand design, an international network, and an overarching high command.
At least since 1974, the blueprint to evangelize the non-Christian world,
known as the Joshua Project, has been conducted under the auspices of the
International Congress on World Evangelization (ICWE). The international network
is funded and controlled by Western Christian nations, led by the United States,
and is typically insensitive to the physical and emotional violence inflicted
on the poor and defenseless when free food, medical aid, money, employment,
or outright violence are used to compel conversions.
Prof. Arvind Sharma has often argued that
the academic discourse on conversions is biased in favour of faiths that convert,
as opposed to those that do not. Hindu dharma and the Hindu people respect
the religious freedom and choices of non-Hindus. Yet they are subjected to
the depredations of theologies committed to their own annihilation through
conversions. This, as Swami Dayanand Saraswati contends, is a conscious aggressive
intrusion into the religious life of the individual, into his religious core.
Worse, the clan and community of the converted
person are deeply wounded. In fact, the convert himself suffers secret hurt,
wondering if he has acted correctly in alienating himself from the community
to which he belonged for generations, thus sundering ties with his ancestors.
Religious conversion is violence; that is why it breeds communal violence.
In the Hindu tradition, religion and culture are inseparable and hence the
loss of religion invariably amounts to loss of cultural heritage. This can
be readily seen in the case of the Greek, Mayan, Roman and other civilizations
lost to the sword of Christian soldiers.
Ironically, protests against conversions are
dubbed as persecution or the denial of religious freedom. This untruth veils
the fact that the intended victim of the evangelist is being denied the freedom
to observe his natal faith without physical or cultural assault. It is in
fact an intentional insult to the faith sought to be annihilated, and is a
cognizable offence. In no civilized society is freedom of religion co-terminus
with a planned programme of conversion.
In the post-World War II era, evangelists
have benefited from Article 18 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR), which permits violence against human dignity, reason and conscience,
and violates the fundamental declaration in Article 1 that all human beings
are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Since its adoption in December
1948, the UDHR has been perceived as a Christian-centric text with pretensions
to universalism. It is, in a sense, the twentieth century version of Emperor
Akbar's Islam-centric Din-i-Ilahi, a high-sounding doctrine that failed to
make the grade with his Hindu courtiers and subjects.
The world needs a genuine Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Religious scholars at McGill University have made a credible
effort to prepare a wholistic document titled, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights by the World's Religions, which is now set to be discussed at the forthcoming
global congress on World's Religions after September 11 at Montreal (September
11-15, 2006).
Some clauses are exemplary, such as "Everyone
has the right to freedom from violence, in any of its forms, individual or
collective; whether based on race, religion, gender, caste or class, or arising
from any other cause" (Article 2). Interestingly, Article 9 (1) equates
proselytisation against the will of a person with arbitrary detention. There
is also the right "not to have one's religion denigrated in the media
or the academia" (Article 12, 4), along with the corresponding duty of
adherents of every religion to ensure that no religion is so denigrated (Article
12, 5).
Article 18 (1) explicitly bars compulsion
in religion, giving everyone the right to retain his religion or change it
(2). The right to retain one's religion has thus for the first time been brought
into the international arena on an equal footing with the freedom to change
one's faith. Finally, the document enshrines the right to protect one's cultural
heritage and accords world heritage status to everyone's cultural heritage
(Article 27, 3).
If adopted by the UN, this document could
mitigate the burgeoning civilizational strife and blunt conversion as a foreign
policy tool of many Western nations. It could facilitate respect for the natural
geographical borders of myriad faiths, and check the expansionist drives of
crusading monotheisms.
