Francois Gautier The Sunday Indian 14 Oct 2008
http://www.thesundayindian.com/14092008/storyd.asp?sid=5571&pageno=1
Innocent and gullible Hindus are being lured into conversion
When I see what is happening in Orissa, I am very confused. I remember when Graham Staines and his sons were murdered and the scandal it created in India: for weeks, nay months, both the Indian and foreign Press went on about the dastardly murder and its blot on Hindu India. But when an 84-year-old Hindu swami and his Mataji are slaughtered in equally horrible circumstances, all the Press can do is to speak about the 'persecution of Christians'. Is it not a pure case of biased reporting?
Yes, I am a westerner and a born Christian. I was mainly brought up in Catholic schools, my uncle Father Guy Gautier a gem of a man, was the parish head of the beautiful Saint Jean de Montmartre church in Paris. My father Jacques Gautier, a famous artist in France, and a truly good person if there ever was one, was a fervent Catholic all his life, went to church nearly every day and lived by his Christian values.
There are certain concepts in Christianity I am proud of: charity for others, the equality of social systems in many western countries, Christ's message of love and compassion.
Still, I find too that it is wrong to convert people from one religion to another by using financial baits. And this has been going on for quite some time in the tribal belts of Orissa; Dalits and tribals, innocent, poor and gullible, are enticed to convert to Christianity by financial gains: free loans, free medical care, free schooling for children. Inevitably, it creates social tension between converts, who have more, and non converts, who resent it.
Nothing much to do about communal disharmony.
Yes, I agree that there are still unforgivable atrocities committed against Dalits, although very often they are done by backward castes themselves. I remember during the tsunami in Pondichery, how the Vanniars, an OBC caste, stopped the Dalits from a coastal hamlet from crossing the Vanniars' part of the village to bury their dead, as the Dalits' cremation ground had been submerged. At the same time, my 30 years in India have taught me that nowhere in the world has there been so much effort to rectify a wrong – from 1947 onwards. This resulted in a Dalit, the late K R Narayanan, born in a poor village of Kerala, to be elected President of India, one of the highest posts in this nation.
Has a black man ever been President of the United States? Reservations for Dalits have made it possible for them to access education and jobs regardless of their merits – and this is a unique feature of India today.
I have seen with my own eyes how conversions in India are not only highly unethical – that is, using unethical means of conversion – but also that they threaten 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 at what happened to countries like Hawaii, or to the extraordinary Aztec culture in South America, after Portuguese and Spanish missionaries took over.
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.
I also think that Indian Christians show very little gratitude to that Hindu ethos which has seeped into Indian Christian consciousness. It is because of that Hindu ethos, which accepts that God may manifest himself at different times in different names, that Christians were welcomed in India in the first century. Indeed, the Syrian Christians of Kerala constituted the first Christian community in the world.
It is because of this inbred tolerance in Hinduism that Christianity and many other persecuted minorities in the world flourished and practiced their religion in peace in India throughout the centuries.
But how do Christians thank the Hindus? When the Jesuits arrived in India with Vasco de Gama, they committed terrible persecutions, particularly in Goa, crucifying Brahmins, marrying local girls forcibly to Portuguese soldiers, razing temples to build churches and splitting the Kerala Christian community in two. The Goa Inquisition was most merciless and cruel.
And today, Christian priests, particularly the Indian ones, continue ranting against Hindus and promoting unethical conversions, using the massive power of the dollars donated by ignorant Westerners.
Furthermore, they use false statistics, saying that Christians are only 2 per cent in India, so why fear them? But in Tamil Nadu, from Chennai to Pondichery on the coast, at least 10 to 15 per cent Dalits have been converted to Christianity. The figures of conversion have to be revised.
