Gandhiji
regarded Christ as a great teacher but not the only son of God
From Our Correspondent
http://www.organiser.org/21nov99/colors.html
Eminent
Gandhian and Padmashri Ishwarbhai Patel today called for positive steps to
counter the designs of the Christian missionaries whose conversion activity, he
said, had been decried by no less a person than Mahatma Gandhi on umpteen
occasions.
Addressing
a select gathering of city intellectuals at a function on October 31 organised
at Karnavati by a Trust, Vishwa Samvad Kendra, to mark the release of the
Gujarati translation of a Hindi book titled Gandhiji Ane Khristi Panth
(Gandhiji and Christianity), Ishwarbhai remarked that Gandhiji
believed in true Sarvadharma Sambhaav and therefore regarded conversion as an
attack on another religion. Condemning the missionaries for their claim that
theirs was the only true God, he asked "If theirs is the only true God then
who are our (Hindus) 33 crore Gods and goddesses?"
The original
Hindi book Gandhi Aur Isaiyat authored by Rameshwar Mishra and
Kusumlata Kedia, is a collection of Gandhiji’s thoughts and views about the
Christian Missionaries and vividly captures the essence of the fight that
Gandhiji waged against the conversion activity of the Church at the intellectual
level.
Expressing
concern over the proselytising activity of the missionaries in the north-eastern
States Ishwarbhai, who has carved out a name for himself across the country for
evolving and popularising a cost-efficient sanitary and hygienic model for the
slum dwellers and poorer sections, however, pointed out the need for analysing
as to why the missionaries had penetrated so deep.
Addressing
the gathering, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's International General Secretary
Dr.Pravinbhai Togadia, who was the chief guest on the occassion, quoted a series
of statements from Gandhiji’s collected works condemning the missionaries’
conversion activity including the one in which Gandhiji described them as
"vendors of goods". Narrating how some missionaries had tried to
convert Gandhiji, he reminded the Church leaders that Gandhiji had himself said
that if he had the power to legislate, he would have banned conversion
altogether.
Dr.Togadia said
that Gandhiji had developed a dislike for the missionaries from his childhood
when he saw a missionary using offensive language against Hindu religion outside
his school in Rajkot.
What offended
Gandhiji most was the missionaries’ claim that Christ was the only son of the
God, he said, and added that Gandhiji was not prepared to accept that prophets
like Buddha and Mahavir were not the sons of God. Gandhiji regarded Christ as a
great teacher but not the only son of God, Dr.Togadia pointed out.
Exposing the
double standards of the missionaries, Dr. Togadia said that the Pope had
recently labelled the Protestants as rapacious wolfs when he was told that the
Protestants had converted six lakh Roman Catholics in South America by their
aggressive proselytisation and then asked, "If the Pope calls the
Protestants rapacious wolfs for converting the Roman Catholics then the
Christian Missionaries operating in this country should tell as to what should
we call them?"
Charging
the Christian missionaries with violating the Constitution of India, he revealed
that a Supreme Court judgment in 1977 had clearly declared conversion as an
unconstitutional activity holding that the right to propagate religion didn’t
constitute the right to convert people of one religion to another. Throwing
light on the opposition to the conversion activity of the missionaries in other
countries, Dr.Togadia said that in Israel the missionaries had to apologise to
the Government recently when they were caught converting the Jews and even in
China there is a total ban on conversion.
Decrying the
theological claim of the missionaries that salvation was only possible through
the Church, Dr. Togadia asked as to whether in a civilised society it was proper
for the missionaries to say that the 370 crore people on this earth who profess
other religions would go to hell. Quoting the report of the 1954 Niyogi
Commission, which went into the activities of the Church in the then Madhya
Bharat at the behest of the Congress Government, he revealed that the
missionaries has repeatedly insulted Hindu Gods using the foulest language and
asked whether these acts were in the realm of secularism.
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