Faith accomplice
Arvind Kala
February 20
Is the Catholic Church a threat to Hinduism? The answer lies in whether one looks at religious conversions as succumbing to ‘bribes’ or as a matter of personal belief.
Considering that India is home to over 90 per cent of the world’s Hindus, should the Catholic Church be allowed the freedom to convert Hindus to Christianity on a regular basis? The VHP says no on the ground that religious conversions threaten Hindu culture, its reasoning being that when a person surrenders his faith, he surrenders his cultural heritage. Jewish Israel thinks on similar lines. It has an anti-proselytisation law which prohibits anyone from offering or receiving material benefits as an inducement to conversion. A predominantly Buddhist Sri Lanka also forbids a person from seeking religious conversions. The island nation’s Supreme Court has ruled that propagating a faith isn’t a person’s fundamental right. China also outlaws the Christian Church which regards the Vatican as its head.
Contrast these restrictions, however, with the US, which offers unlimited religious freedom. The US has around 5.78 million Muslims and Islam, according to the US Department of State, is one of the fastest growing religions in America. And 17-30 per cent of American Muslims are not Muslims by birth but by conversion. Yet no one in the US raises an alarm. Western Europe is similarly self-secure despite its 15 million increasingly assertive Muslims of Arab descent. In America or Europe, religion is considered a person’s private affair. But India’s anti-conversion laws in three states require that the local administration be informed of every conversion so it can check if a person has been ‘bribed’ to change his faith.
Why is India so suspicious of Christian proselytisation? The chief reason is the Catholic Church’s spectacular success in the North-east. Its evangelical zeal and charitable work there proved so effective that Mizoram is 83 per cent Christian, Nagaland 80 per cent, Meghalaya 52 per cent and Manipur 28 per cent. And most of these Christian conversions have occurred after 1947 when a newly-independent India attracted tens of thousands of Christian foreign missionaries. India’s two other regions with Christian populations are south India plus Goa, and Chotanagpur’s tribal belt, comprising 28 districts of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. These three regions account for 90 per cent of India’s 23 million Christians.
India is cited by the Catholic Church as a region where it has met with ‘failure’. Only 2.3 per cent of India is Christian despite 200 years of British rule. Yet, missionary work in India is so well-organised that the BBC reported in December 2002 that the Evangelical Church of India intended to set up a church in every Indian village. Facts like this worry the VHP. History shows that the poor in India are receptive to the pull of Christianity. Forty per cent of India’s Christians come from scheduled castes, 30 per cent from scheduled tribes, 20 per cent from backward castes and only 10 per cent from the upper castes.
Christianity’s pull among India’s poor stems from its incomparable work in education and charity. Even VHP ideologues concede that the Church accounts for some 30-40 per cent of all educational and philanthropic work done in India.
But a complication sets in here. The VHP labels the Church’s philanthropic work as an ‘allurement’ to get the poor to embrace Christianity. It’s a charge impossible to prove or disprove. If a starving Hindu family admits an elder into a Church-run home for the aged and subsequently embraces Christianity out of gratitude, was the Church’s care of the elder a ‘material inducement’ to get the family to convert? Yes, it is, believes the VHP, to which the Church responds: “You don’t help that starving family, but when we do, you say we want to make them Christians. So for us it’s a heads-we-lose, tails-you-win situation.”
Take another example. For decades, admission to India’s best Christian-run schools has been automatic for Christian students. Most Chinese families in India have embraced Christianity only to get their children into these schools. Have they also been ‘bribed’ by the Church to change their faith? By that logic, Delhi’s St Stephen’s College also ‘tempts’ students to embrace Christianity. As a minority college, it’s allowed to admit up to 50 per cent Christian students.
Different societies respond to the Catholic Church in different ways. Missionary work has turned 49 per cent of South Korea’s population into Christians and they outnumber the 47 per cent Buddhist population. But South Korean society doesn’t talk of a ‘sinister Christian conspiracy’ to undermine the nation.
India’s resistance to Church missionaries stems from one fundamental difference between Hinduism and Christianity. Unlike Christianity or Islam, Hinduism has never been a missionary religion. It believes that different people realise God in different ways. This is why Hinduism is an all-inclusive religion which allows people to worship the sun, moon, stones, snakes, mice, whatever. But Christianity and Islam believe that only their path is the right one and it’s their religious duty to spread their faith. It is this ‘clash’ that produces the opposition to the Church we see in India.