**Christians don’t regard women as human: RSS **
NEW DELHI, Dec 5: The chief of India’s most powerful Hindu right-wing organization on Tuesday alleged that Christians did not
consider women to be human.
K. Sudarshan, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps), which has close links with Prime
Minister Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist party, made the attack at a women’s function here.
“Christians did not even consider women as human beings. Saint Peter had even stated that creation of women was not there in
God’s original plan. It was an afterthought,” Sudarshan said.
“As woman was created out of the first man (Adam’s) rib, they were treated as something in between man and animal,” the RSS
chief claimed. The “confusion,” he said, led to widespread debate in the sixth and seventh centuries over the status of woman and only in the 18th century 95 bishops finally decided to treat Christian women as “human” and women of other religions as animals.
Sudarshan claimed more than nine million women were burnt at the stake or killed in Europe between 1484 and 1784 after being
declared witches.
He said the women’s liberation movement in the West was an “outcome of the suppression of Christian women for centuries.”
“Only in 1930 did the British Privy Council accept women as a person whereas we in India treated them as goddesses. Man and woman are complementary to each other in this country,” he said.
Sudarshan’s views are not representative of the general Hindu mindset in India. He had earlier stirred controversy by demanding a
“national” Indian church on the lines of the Anglican church.
The RSS has spearheaded a movement against foreign Christian missionaries in India.-AFP
[This message has been edited by momin (edited December 06, 2000).]