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November      Last updated: Nov 20,  5:00 p.m.

Cabbages & Kings

The Pope lets down secularists

V.P. Bhatia

By brazenly proclaiming India as the launching pad for Christianity in Asia, the Pope has exposed himself as a Wolf in Sheep's clothing.

"HE CAME, HE SAW, HE CONQUERED the secular State". Or at least so he imagined. This should be the apt description of the last week's imperialist invasion of India by the Roman Catholic Supremo who heads a totalitarian organisation as bigoted and insidious as the once mighty Soviet Union, which is supposed to have disintegrated by the crusading buffeting of the Polish pontiff himself. It is another matter, that he proved to the hilt the VHP charges regarding the contents of the 140-page offensive agenda presented to his slavish frock at St. Thomas' Cathedral in New Delhi on Saturday, November 6.

In any case, taking full advantage of the customary hospitality due to the head of a state, the puffed up religious crusader lost no time in casting off his deceptive mask and went ahead with his real business of exhorting his flock in unambiguous strident tones to get ready to wage a decisive war of conversions on the Asian people. Which made most thinking people wonder why at all he was permitted to make secular India a launching pad for his offensive campaign of establishing Christian hegemony over the native faiths of Asia. Or, why in God's name was he allowed to hold the concluding session of the Asian Synod of Bishops from the Indian soil. For, that was the real Unsecular aim for which he chose to come here. 

Abuse of Indian hospitality

His evangelical offensive was of course accompanied by left-handed compliments to Indian tolerance and condescending character certificates to Indian secularism, valid only so long as the Indian soft state facilitates his mission of undermining itself by allowing the missionary predators to carry on the old heinous game of preying on its unwary populace.

Obviously, the Pope's religious regalia and the panoply and the attendant deceptive noises of promoting peace and amity through religious dialogue did disarm a section of the media, experts in ever-obliging and soft pedalling all anti-Hindu causes, so that some of them were too motivated or confused to call a spade a spade. But the Popish militancy was so overt in emphasising the supreme evangelical mission even by branding the new millenium as the millenium of ‘Christian conquest of Asia’, that some of them did perforce report a mailed warrior behind the lily white cassock, a veritable wolf in sheep's clothing. As The Statesman's headline put it, "Conversion is a basic Christian tenet", said the Pope, as he even went to the extent of appealing for unity of all Christian sects to achieve this object.

Take a few other newspaper headlines of November 7 which did report the Pope's true intent while some unsuccessfully tried to put a gloss over his anti-secular thrust under a secular veneer, to cover up their embarrassment at the Pope's shock therapy to perfidious secularists.

"Spread Christianity in Asia" said a frontpage headline of The Pioneer, reporting the Pope's blunt message. "Affirming superiority of the Christian faith, the Vatican head asked the Bishops in India to spread Christianity across Asia even as he demanded that freedom of belief and worship be respected everywhere in the continent", said the body of the same paper's report. Of course, he had China and Taiwan in mind who had refused to let him in to broadcast the sinister message. The Indian Express made up for its lukewarm report about the Pope's ‘between the lines’ message by a powerful editorial two days later (November 9) entitled "Christ in Asia--Motivated dialogue is no dialogue Your Holiness".

Secularist Chicanery

The Asian Age had a rather more pointed report elaborating its banner headline of "CONVERT ASIA NEXT : POPE". However, while the Muslim editor of the same paper went on to peddle learned arguments in defence of individual conversion in his Sunday column in the same issue, in an editorial two days later, it excelled its part record in pouring vicious abuse on the ‘saffron brigade’ to hide its discomfiture and frustration at the fact that the Pope had destroyed the secular argument that not the Hindus but the Christians had been at the receiving end in India since Vasco da Gama's days. This while even the body of the front page report on this Popish Plot said : "Evangelism had to be an ‘absolute priority’ for the church in Asia, the Pope said."

Obviously, such secularists consider mass missionary invasions for mass conversion as an individual human right. Whereas the Vatican sermon from the land of Machiavelli, beats even the most dare-devil, hard-boiled politicians in chicanery. As even the Hindustan Times recognised that the Pope had been insensitive to Indian sentiments by viewing to reap ‘the harvest of faith’. The fall-out, as the Star TV commentator said, is bound to be highly controversial.

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IN ANY CASE, the most disconcerting feature of the Pope Paul II's recent, Diwali-eve visit to India has been to reveal the enormous clout that the foreign missionary class of the ‘miniscule’ Christian community enjoys over our ultra-secular State even after the departure of the Christian-British rulers. It is obvious that the Pope's imperial-style visit was planned to coincide with the expected defeat of Vajpayee Government and installation of Vatican transplant Sonia Gandhi after the polls. It is another matter that the conspiracy went awry, despite the unprecedented hate campaign against BJP, joined in by all the overt and covert anti-Hindutva forces with massive input by the secularist media.

Arrogant Bishops

Thus while the imperious Pope proclaimed the Christian right to conversion from the country's capital itself, there were quite a few other assertions of an arrogant and impudent stance of the highly organised totalitarian Roman Catholic Church's big and small fry towards the BJP-led dispensation at the Centre. This was pointed out at a Star TV panel discussion which included a Christian bishop, a VHP leader and the Union Minister, Shri R. Kumaramangalam.

Kumaramangalam, in fact, had to pull up the bishop, flaunting a white frock of his religious order, for the latter's ‘sarcastic’ reference to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Another sarcastic remark reported in Indian Express and India Today was made in full media view by the Archbishop of Delhi who ‘mimicked’ Advani while reporting to the press his meeting with the Home Minister.

In the Star TV discussion Kumaramangalam had in fact to warn the Bishop not to go too far in deriding the Hindus' anti-conversion concern or to scoff at it as some of the bishop's co-religionists had been doing even in Parliament. For such provocative bid to assert their special claim to superior fundamental right of conversion through social service in selected poverty-ridden areas could lead to more severe backlash. This appalling poverty, incidentally, is a consequence of two pre-1947 predatory imperialisms--the Islamic and the British--followed by the post-independence dynastic one founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, aptly nicknamed as the Last Viceroy of India.

However, the tragedy is that even after independence, the British type of ‘secularism’, which while professing a neutral attitude towards all religious communities, exposed its heavy tilt towards the ‘minorities’, still reigns supreme. As everybody knows, this British tilt had horrendous consequences, culminating inevitably in the Partition of the hoary country. The irony is that it continues to play havoc even in the post-Partition.

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British policy of making North-East special preserve of Christian missionaries continued by Pt. Nehru

IN HIS celebrated book India--From Curzon to Nehru (Collins, 1969) embodying memoirs of 50 years of his pioneering journalistic work and intimate contacts with almost all leaders of the freedom movement, including Jinnah and the British Viceroys, the late Durga Das, a former editor of The Hindustan Times makes two significant observations throwing a flood of light on the insidious nature of Christian missionary activities and their powerful clout in India both before and after independence in India.

The first relates to the stormy year of 1942 after the Cripps mission had failed to enlist the Congress support to set up a national government in lieu of its active cooperation in the war effort, as the Japanese were virtually knocking at the gates of India.

Consequently, one of the various formulas advanced for the breakup of India trotted out at that time to punish the ‘Hindu Congress’ was that of Sir Reginald Coupland, a Professor of Oxford University who had spent the winter of 1941-42 in India at the instance of the die-hard Tory establishment and was later attached to Cripps Mission as unofficial adviser in March 1942.

Coupland's ingenious scheme consisted of break-up of the country into four broad geographical regions: the Indus basin, the Gangetic basin, the delta of Brahmaputra and the Deccan. Two of these were to have Hindu majority and two Muslim majority. The princely states were to have either a separate single dominion or several dominions of viable units. However, as Durga Das puts it,

"It is interesting to note that Coupland wanted a statutory guarantee for the continuance of the work of the Christian missions in the hill tracts of Assam (constituting present Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram etc. which were all part of Assam at that time)." This stipulation, says Durga Das, "lends weight to the suspicion that the present day movement for independence among a section of the Nagas and Mizos on the Assam borders is inspired by the missionaries". (P. 207)

The second observation in this context relates to Pt Nehru's continuation of the licence given to the missionaries by the British in framing of the Constitution of India. Says the eminent know-all journalist who was permitted daily evening meetings with Sardar Patel and weekly ones with Maulana Azad to exchange information, in this context :

"The Constitution-makers swept under the carpet the important matter relating to the scheduled tribes in the Assam hills in the North-east. They adopted a formula virtually placing the region outside the pale of normal union laws and administrative apparatus. Nehru did this on the advice of Christian missionaries. His colleagues in the top echelons let it pass, treating the matter, in the words of Maulana Azad, as ‘a Nehru fad’."

Thus like in Kashmir, Pt Nehru laid the foundation of secessionism in the North-east as well, by his pronounced pro-minority tilt at the cost of the national interests handed down by the British-brand of secularism.