The BJP has done well to slam the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2003, which dubs the party as a Hindu nationalist party and links it with militant organizations that indulge in violence against religious minorities. Pointing out that the BJP membership embraces all minority groups, spokesman VK Malhotra aptly remarked that the American Government should stop bringing out such reports as it is “not the boss of the world.”
What the BJP has failed to realize, however, is the fairly blatant extent to which official US policy favours Christian evangelization and resents obstacles to the same. The impugned International Religious Freedom Report 2003 makes this amply clear through its hostility to the recent anti-conversion laws passed by the Tamil Nadu and Gujarat governments, the expulsion of the illegal American missionary Joseph Cooper, and the open admission that “U.S. officials have continued to engage state officials on the implementation and reversal of anti-conversion laws.”
The report is critical of the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act as it requires those involved in evangelizing to seek the permission of the District Collector before and after the conversion ceremony, and provides for police investigation of cases of forced or induced conversions. It notes that both the Gujarat and Tamil Nadu anti-conversion laws provide stringent punishments for conversion of women, scheduled castes, and tribals. The State Department also took note of Chhattisgarh’s first conviction, on 18 July 2003, of Sister Brishi Ekka for not reporting the 1996 conversion of 95 families to Christianity. Sentenced to six months imprisonment, Sister Ekka was later released on bail. The US report also alleged that the Gujarat government survey of Christian families and Christian agencies, especially the number of converts in a household or parish, the circumstances of conversion, and sources of funding from abroad, was a prelude to the introduction of the State’s anti-conversion law.
What gives the game away is the critique of India’s Foreigners Act, which prohibits visitors on tourist visas from religious preaching without first obtaining permission from the Home Ministry. Pointing out that the Indian Government discourages foreign missionaries from entering the country, the American Government officially admits: “New missionaries currently enter as tourists on short-term visas. US citizens accused of religious preaching while visiting India as tourists have faced difficulties obtaining permission to return to the country for up to a decade after the event.”
The report then documents attacks on illicit foreign missionaries. It claims that in September 2002, suspected Bajrang Dal activists attacked South Koreans suspected of evangelism in Orissa. In January 2003, militant Hindus are said to have attacked American missionary Joseph Cooper in Kerala. Noting that Cooper was ordered to leave the country “because his tourist visa was incompatible with his work in the country,” the report shows no regret at this deliberate violation of the laws of a friendly democratic country by a US national. Similarly, the enquiry ordered by the Pondicherry Government in April 2002 into charges of alleged forced conversions of prisoners to Christianity by the superintendent of Pondicherry Central Prison, is documented with equanimity.
There is throughout the US document a refrain that Christian conversions are tantamount to freedom of religion, and that local resistance to the same is unacceptable. The bias against the Hindu faith is unmistakable in the discussion on the banning of the Deendar Anjuman in May 2001. Noting that this group was found to be responsible for the bombings of churches in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in 2000, the State Department observed: “the fact that a Muslim group was responsible for the bombings of Christian churches was unusual; most attacks against Christians are perpetrated by Hindu extremist groups or by mobs.” This unacceptable slur on the nation’s majority community and civilizational ethos deserves outright condemnation.
A positive side of the report, however, is the admission of Christian oppression in Christian-majority areas such as Tripura, where non-Christians are being harassed by the armed National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), which has an evangelical bent. The NLFT insurgents have prohibited Hindu and Muslim festivals in areas under their control; forbidden women from wearing traditional Hindu attire; and prohibited indigenous forms of worship.
Finally, however, the US supports the position of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, that even though Christianity does not recognize caste, Dalit Christians are disadvantaged by not receiving jobs and educational seats under Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes quotas. Noting the Dalit claim that caste discrimination against them continues even within the Christian community, the US however, does not admonish the community for this state of affairs.
It is thus hardly surprising that following the Union Government’s 18 December 2003 decision not to include Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians in the list of Scheduled Castes, Christian activists have threatened to approach the Supreme Court with the plea that “refusal of reservation of Dalit converts to other faiths is an infringement of the freedom of faith.” Alleging that denial of reservation benefits was aimed at keeping Dalits in the Hindu fold, All India Christian Council secretary-general John Dayal said the court will be urged that the “vagaries of caste transcend the religions.”
Literally justifying Indian Christian maltreatment of their Dalit brethren, the All India Christian Council is demanding that the traditional definition of caste being a salient feature of Hindu society be amended and accepted as “a reality of the Indian society of which every faith is a part,” in the words of Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese. Emmanuel admitted that conversion does not end discrimination against Dalits. But neither he nor his friends in the State Department can tell us why Dalits should escape the oppression of Hindu society to enjoy unmitigated humiliation in a caste-ridden Indian Christian community that has decided – at the level of its religious preceptors themselves – that this so-called liberating creed will do nothing to help them overcome caste discrimination within its own ranks. A classic case of out of the frying pan into the fire!
Sahara Time, 11 January 2004
