Christ and the
Northeast
By Francois
Gautier
http://www.indian-express.com/ie/daily/20001120/ied20030.html
Jesus Christ
was a great avatar of Love and his message of compassion, charity, of caring
for one and other, is even more relevant today, in these fast and merciless
times of ours, than it was 20 centuries ago. Indeed, there are Christians
today who try quietly and unobtrusively to put into practice Christ's precepts
-- and you can find missionaries in India, such as Father Ceyrac, a Jesuit who
has lived for more than 60 years in Chennai, tending to the poorest sections
of society, while respecting their culture.
Unfortunately,
there has crept into the purity of early Christianity an exclusiveness, a
feeling of sole ownership of the Copyright of God. This exclusiveness, this
feeling amongst Christians that "we are the only true religion, all other
gods are false gods", has had the most catastrophic and bloody
consequences: millions have been killed in the name of Christ, entire
civilisations, such as the Atzecs and Incas, have been wiped out, in order
"to bring them the word of Jesus" and Christians have even savagely
murdered each other, whether in France or England.
One would
hope this intolerance, this fanatical drive to convert, forcibly or otherwise,
pagans to the "true" God could cease in this new millennium of
"enlightenment". Unfortunately it is not so. For nearly three
centuries, India has been the target of a massive conversion drive. It is even
more so today, as Christianity is dwindling in the West -- there are less and
less people going to church and very few youth willing to become priests and
nuns. The church is thus looking for new converts in the Third World,
particularly India, where people have an innate aspiration to spirituality.
Indeed, the
Pope has earmarked the new millennium for "the evangelisation of
Asia". And it is in the Northeast that this evangelisation is meeting
with the most success, as it is peopled with simple, poor and uneducated
tribals, who make easy targets. In Tripura, for instance, there were no
Christians at Independence, the maharaja was a Hindu and there were
innumerable temples all over the state. But from 1950, Christian missionaries
(with Nehru's blessings) went into the deep forests of Tripura and started
converting the Kukis. Today, according to official figures, there are 120,000
Christians in Tripura, a 90 per cent increase since 1991. The figures are even
more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there were only 1,710 Christians in
1961, but 115,000 today, as well as 700 churches! What to say of Mizoram and
Nagaland, where the entire local population is Christian!
The amount of
money being poured by Christians into the Northeast is staggering: Saint
Paul's school of Tripura, for instance, gets a Rs 80 lakh endowment per
semester. Which Hindu school can match this? No country in the world would
allow this. France, for instance, has a full-blown minister who is in charge
of hunting down "sects". And by sects, it is meant anything which
does not belong to the great Christian family.
Isn't it also
strange that many of the Northeast's separatist movements are not only
Christian dominated but also sometimes have the covert backing of
missionaries? The Don Bosco schools, for example, which are everywhere in the
Northeast, are known by the Tripura Intelligence Bureau to sometimes harbour
extremists at night. But the Tripura Marxist government chooses to close its
eyes, because in India Communists often walk -- for their own selfish purpose
- hand in hand with Christians. Does the common man in India know that the
nexus between the separatists and the Church is so strong in Tripura and Assam
that temples are being demolished, that people are scared to hold pujas except
in strongholds like Agartala, that Hindu social workers do not dare go in the
interior? On the other hand, every other day a new church springs up in the
Northeast, every week a new Christian school is opened without facing the
threat of any extremist attack. Is this the way to treat a country, which from
early times, gave hospitality to Christians -- indeed, the first Christian
community in the world, that of the Syrian Christians, was established in
Kerala in the first century AD?
It's not only
that conversion is an unethical custom, but also that it threatens a whole way
of life, erasing centuries of tradition, customs, wisdom, teaching people to
despise their own religion and look westwards to a culture which is alien to
them, with disastrous results. Look how the biggest drug problems in India are
found in the Northeast, or how Third World countries which have been totally
Christianised have lost all moorings and bearing and are drifting away without
nationalism and self-pride.
It is time
that Indians awoke to the threat of Christian conversions here. The argument
(mostly put forward by "secular" thinkers) that Christians are only
3 per cent of the population in India, and therefore cannot be a threat, is
totally fallacious: the influence Christians exercise in this country through
their schools, hospitals and the enormous amount of money being poured in by
western countries for the purpose of converting Hindus, is totally
disproportionate. The message of Christ is one of Love, of respecting other's
cultures and creed -- not of utilising devious and unethical means for
converting people.
The influence
Christians exercise in India is totally disproportionate to their numbers.
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