HARVESTING
OUR SOULS
By
Arun Shourie ASA, Rs 450
God's
Own Conspiracy
Book Review: By The Indian Express
You have seen him, you have heard him, you have read him.
He, the left-liberal intellectual. Secular, anti-communal, antinuclear, he
colonises the seminar room, chews up the newsprint, quotes Edward Said,
misquotes Naipaul, toasts third worldism, jargonises redundant wisdom... he is
the self-chosen keeper of national conscience. And he, the left-liberal
intellectual, is a haunted man, haunted by that orphaned spectre of Europe.
The empire is gone, but the empire is there in his mind, an empire of dead
certainties. India happens to be one of his most favoured sanctuaries. India is
kind to troglodytes.
After all, what is India without him, what about India's conscience without him?
His India: such a wretched place where Christians are burned, churches are
stoned, mosques are demolished, Muslims are hated. Where nationalists are crazy
fanatics and bombs are murderous toys. In this wretched country with
zero-tolerance level, he stands there on the sidewalk and fumes dissent. On the
march before his eyes are trishul-wielding nationalists. What pierce his ears
are cries from the far fields of discrimination and deprivation. He says fascism
- such a loose word in his antique rhetoric. He invokes Hiroshima - just another
memory trivialised by his cause. He uses so many other words, like imperialism,
post-colonialism, discourse, paradigm, the Other, and he uses them in, well, the
discourse of dissent. He asks questions, and since questions are not banned in
this wretched country, he himself has become a question larger than his
relevance.
Where is the counter-question, the counterblast? The importance of Arun
Shourie's Harvesting Our Souls is that it is written by someone who is not
scared to ask unpleasant questions, unpopular, politically incorrect,
media-unfriendly questions. Right questions in the age of left-liberal consensus
and secular pretence. The questions Shourie asks in this provocative volume are
the kind of questions the average Indian intellectual is unlikely to ask. Who
would like to be less than human, less civilised, citizen of a savage nation?
Who would like to be identified with the barbarians, who would like to be a
paranoid apologist for a savage land? So you have the left-liberal pretence and
the right-wing inhibition. Shourie, with that rare right-wing panache hardly
seen in Indian political debate, breaks the ceiling of political correctness.
This is intellectual audacity.
And his subject is one on which exists a cosy, nationally comfortable consensus;
the missionary agenda in India. O, they are such benevolent charity workers,
God's own servants, least interested in conversion, only Hindu fanatics will
kill them. Shourie says that is nonsense, the missionaries have an agenda, a
clearly defined agenda: conversion. So what's wrong? Conversion is choice, an
expression of your right, goes that banal explanation. But Shourie argues that conversion is religious
exploitation, sanctioned by the Bible and implemented by the so-called charity
workers in the tribal lands of India. Shourie thought somebody had to speak up,
and that somebody should not be that stereotypical votary of the VHP or Bajrang
Dal. And he spoke up in the backdrop of those doomsday headlines. For a few
month in the late '98 and early '99, India was such a horrible place: a docile
community like the Christians was the chosen target of 'Hindu fascists'. There
was a consensus on the enormity of the savagery, and the only defendants were
Hindu savages or their benefactors. And almost every newspaper, in a display of
competitive nobility, went on punning on Staines. It was such a horrible act,
such a collective national shame – the murder of Graham Staines and his young
sons. Shourie, as a citizen, shares that shame. But Shourie doesn't let the
secularists monopolise the argument, the truth. Staines was not just a social
worker. He was a missionary, the Church's chosen instrument of conversion, and
Shourie has some documents to support his argument that Staines' missionary
activities were a source of tension. The tension authored his death, which
should not have happened, which should not be justified.
Why can't the missionary swear by God, and continue with the mission? The
mission of the Church is not steeped in secrecy Shourie travels in the Bible to
show that missionary agenda is justified by God Himself. "The right of the
Church, the divinely ordained duty of the Church, the very purpose of the Church
is to proclaim the Gospel to all men, to ensure that all things and all men are
restored in Christ". Shourie takes meticulous care to
make his provocative conclusions scholarly – and theologically - sound, thanks
to the scriptorium. He seeks out the Bible to repudiate the missionary excuse
that Christian social workers have no secret programme of social engineering.
His question is: Why is it that a divinely sanctioned mission of conversion is
being denied by the so-called
Christian social worker? Such denials only illuminate the politics of God, whose
subjects, as the scripture says, are defined by Him and Him alone. Perhaps the
missionary should have the honesty to admit that much. Why can't he swear by
God, and continue with the mission?
The mission of Church is not steeped in secrecy. Karol Wojtyla, the supreme
Vicar on earth, makes no excuses for his missionary activism, his theology of
conversion. How many divisions has the Pope? He can point his benevolent finger
to Eastern Europe, to the fallen idols of false gods. In Asia, his politics of
liberation is purely religious, there is no false faith to fight against. He
doesn't sound like and underground missionary when He puts forward his
evangelical position. On the eve of the Christian millennium, no 'pagan'
politician of Asia is offering cross to the Christ's worker. Still, the good
news of martyrdom seems to be a rhetorical pre-requisite for the missionary
no-no.
In India these are not subjects worth talking about. These are only subjects of
left-liberal, secular revulsion. The Vishwa Hindu rejoinder only aggravates the
secular nausea. Somebody has to redeem the debate. In the world of
intellectually challenged dinosaurs, you can be a Stalinist and preach social
conscience, but you can't be a socially acceptable right-winger. Arun Shourie
displays singular courage, deploys arguments that tear apart the pretence of the
liberal-left ventriloquists. By the way, what has Edward Said to say about
conversions?
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