“Check conversion by Christian missionaries”

Guwahati: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Rajnath Singh said on Sunday that he had asked the Chief Ministers of all BJP-ruled states to stop `conversion attempts’ by Christian missionaries at any cost.

Kicking off the party’s election campaign in Assam, Mr. Singh demanded the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to frame legislation to prevent Christian missionaries from `proselytisation.’

He said the BJP had no objection to missionaries implementing welfare measures for people. “However, in the name of welfare missions, they have been luring people, particularly the tribals and Adivasis, to convert to Christianity. This needs to be checked,” he added.

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9 thoughts on ““Check conversion by Christian missionaries””

  1. This assertion of Hindu dominance over India is at odds with the Mahatma Gandhi’s benevolent vision of religious pluralism and the founding ideals of that country. Gandhi himself remarked:

    “It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others’ religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world’s religions is a sacred duty.”

    India has always been a nation with a diversity of religions, languages and cultures. India has no state religion. Although 80.5% of the people are Hindus, India is also home to the third-largest population of Muslims in the world (13.4%), after Indonesia and Pakistan. Other religious groups include Christians (2.3%; 30 million), Sikhs (1.84%), Buddhists (0.76%), Jains (0.40%), Jews, Zoroastrians, Ahmadi-muslims, and Bahá’ís.

    During the last years of Gandhi’s life, India was wracked by terrible religious violence and rioting, eventually culminating in Gandhi’s own assasination. Now resurgent Hindu nationalism in India, directed not only at Christianity but all of India’s religious minorities and particularly Islam, threatens to bring about a repeat of that violence.

    One would hope that the leaders of that nation realize that allowing the government to assert the dominance of one religion over another in a nation as diverse as India is an invitation to strife, violence and civil war. With Indian cities like Bangalore increasingly becoming important centers of the new electronically integrated global economy, India would also have much to lose economically from such violence.

  2. Hindu Dominance? They were there first in 6,000 B.C.

    The Hindus of India can document a continuous history going back as long as 8,000 years in the rich Indus Valley. Yes, 8,000 years. Archeologists have confirmed the presence of a Hindu civilization in India that long ago. This civilization left writing and engineered buildings. Ancient Hindu mathematicians are rivaled only by the Greeks in their sophistication. “Arabic numerals” were in fact developed by the Hindus and appropriated by Arabs as they returned from India to the Middle East. Ancient Hindu mathematicians arrived at a sophisticated understanding of the concept of “zero.” long before the birth of Mohammed. This is a foundational concept in a field of mathematics known as “number theory.” It is not a simplistic idea, as non-matheticians might think.

    The Muslims referred to by Dean arrived in the Indus Valley much, much later in history. The Muslims arrived as a distinct and alien culture that was bent on destroying the existing Hindu culture. Will Durant describes the Muslim invasion of India as “THE bloodiest episode” in world history. Muslims used castrated African slave soldiers are part of their armies. These male slaves were captured in Africa and forced to fight Hindus in India.

    The partition of the Indian subcontinent between Muslim and Hindu nations was made necessary because of the Muslims refused to live as a minority among India’s Hindu majority. History makes clear that the Hindu leader, Gandhi made repeated overtures to Muslim leaders seeking to keep them in a unified India. They left to create their own countries, now Pakistan and Bangladesh. While Hindu India has had its difficulties it is now coming into its own as a great country. Pakistan and Bangladesh remain in abject poverty and, in fact, have gone backwards economically since the partition of the Indian subcontinent.

    Hindus has every historical right to regard the Indus Valley as their primeval home and Muslims as invaders bringing a hostile and alien culture.

  3. JBL, Here is the Durant Citation

    The Story of Civilization, Volume I, Chapter XVI, Section VI: The Moslem Conquest, page 459

    The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.

    It is a discouraging tale, for its evident normal is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus has allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their force for the protection of their frontiers and capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes…..

    India invited conquest and at last it came……

    Durant describes the tactics. Daring raids into Hindu territory that left the population terrified and that demonstrated that their Hindue rulers could not or would not protect them properly. Sounds like today doesn’t it.

    There are Hindus today that allege that the real history of the Muslim conquest of northern India has been withwashed due to political correctness and the need of current society to co-exist with its Muslim population.

  4. Some Multi-cultural Highlights from the Muslim Invasion of India

    Page 462
    The usual policy of the [Muslim] Sultans was clearly sketched by alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Half othe gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu” says a Muslim historian, “could hold up his head and in their houses no sign of gold or silver.. or of any superfluity was to be seen… Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains were all employed to enforce payment.”

    Page 461
    The first of the bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind-fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, :were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise was by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.” Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigans by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din …. had all them males–from fifteen to thirty thousand of them–slaughtered in the same day.

    Notice how you have to go to much older books, definitely pre-1980’s book to get straightforward descriptions of Muslim history. Notice that Durant calls Muslims Mohamedans, something you rarely hear today. Time to bring it back, remember Islam teaches that Mohammed was the perfect man, so it is proper to call them Mohammedans.

  5. I thought the point was glaringly clear, but apparently not, so I will restate it:

    It may be tempting to view Hindu religious intolerance and violence towards Muslims as well earned and justly deserved given the Muslim’s past history of violence and intoerance towards other religious groups.

    However, as the statements by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Rajnath Singh make clear, Hindu religious intolerance against Muslims can easily be redirected against Christians or any other minority. Once you establish the precedent that one religion is legally privileged and predominant, all other religions are placed at risk.

    The only true protection for India’s Christian minority is through Gandhi’s benevolent vision of religious pluralism and understanding. We do not diminish our own religion when we recognize and acknowlege that other religions have their own noble and benevolent teachings. We confer respect on people of other faiths so that they in return will extend respect back to us.

    Luke 6:31

    “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. “

  6. Dean, my response was to the following:

    First paragraph:
    India has always been a nation with a diversity of religions, languages and cultures. India has no state religion. Although 80.5% of the people are Hindus, India is also home to the third-largest population of Muslims in the world (13.4%), after Indonesia and Pakistan. Other religious groups include Christians (2.3%; 30 million), Sikhs (1.84%), Buddhists (0.76%), Jains (0.40%), Jews, Zoroastrians, Ahmadi-muslims, and Bahá’ís.

    Response: The average reader might not know that Hindus have proof of a continuous civilization going back 8,000 and that Islam appeared only about 1200 years ago. Given those facts the sentence “India has always been a nation with a diversity of religions” is seriously misleading.

    Second paragraph:
    During the last years of Gandhi’s life, India was wracked by terrible religious violence and rioting, eventually culminating in Gandhi’s own assasination. Now resurgent Hindu nationalism in India, directed not only at Christianity but all of India’s religious minorities and particularly Islam, threatens to bring about a repeat of that violence.

    Comment: This is a misleading paragraph as you fail to mention that it was the Hindu leader, Gandhi who expressly invited Muslims to REMAIN in a united India. It was the Muslims who EXPRESSLY refused to live as a minority population in India and who insisted on their own country. As it typical with political upheavals involving Muslims, Hindus were almost completely driven from Pakistan and Bangladesh, while Muslims were allowed to stay in India if they chose. In short, it was the Muslim refusal and inability to live with others, a hallmark of their civilization, that caused the religious strife after the end of English rule.

    Third paragraph:
    One would hope that the leaders of that nation realize that allowing the government to assert the dominance of one religion over another in a nation as diverse as India is an invitation to strife, violence and civil war. With Indian cities like Bangalore increasingly becoming important centers of the new electronically integrated global economy, India would also have much to lose economically from such violence.

    Comment. India has already accommodated Muslims by allowing them separate domestic relations laws. Typically for Muslims they insist on all the rights granted to Indian citizens, then, reject Indian law and insist on a set of special rules for themselves. Islam is supremicist. May I remind you of the Koranic injunction “Islam shall dominate it will not be dominated.” This is literal and it has held sway wherever Muslims accumulate enough political or military power.

    I don’t approve of much of that BNP is doing and I do care about the Christian minority, however, I submit, that the vast bulk of religious strife occurs between Hindus and Muslims.

    As far as India goes, Muslims wouldn’t stay, then they wouldn’t leave, then they wanted their own laws.

    .

  7. Islam is not a religion, it is a theocratic system that has never and will never demonstrate tolerance of any other way of life.

  8. Michael: I think you raise an excellent question. At what point do the actions and beliefs of a sect depart so much from accepted norms and values, that the sect no longer deserves to be called a religion.

    The Islamic holy book, the Quran contains many fine and noble teaching, such as charity towards the poor and reverence to God. On the basis of these we would say, yes, Islam is a religion. But we aso have to look at the actions of it’s adeherents.

    Instead of focusing on these fine and noble teachings however, the religious beliefs of many Muslims have metamorphosized into a cult of hate and anger. Life is not revered, but has become cheap, Enemies are to be killed, beheadings and bombings celebrated.

    I can’t think of any religion or value system that could justify or rationalize the frightful and horrific concept of suicide bombing. In Christianity the martyr accepts death, to spare others from death, not to inflict death on others.

    Paul Berman writes about the Eqyptian Islamic writer and philosopher Sayyid Qutb whose writings have guided and influenced the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Qutb saw Islam as “totality” and modern western liberalism as the enemy, much the way Hitler in 1931 idealized Nazi ideology and saw the Weimar Republic as a symbol of all the was weak, corrupt and debauched.

    “The heart of Berman’s argument is that the violence of al Qaeda is neither simply the extreme response of an oppressed group nor the alien and unknowable product of a religion and culture fundamentally different from our own. Much of the book’s first half is taken up with an effort to show that Islamism is ideologically and historically tied to the extremisms that rocked Europe and most of the rest of the world through much of the 20th century. Berman’s most powerful passages are those that show the deep similarities between radical, martyrdom-obsessed Islam and the nihilist, irrationalist totalitarian movements of the early and middle 20th century.”

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0305.marshall.html

    Are the fanatics who call for martyrdom and death representative of Islam or a deviant unrepresenative branch? I think it’s up to mainstream Islam to speak up loudly and condemn them or else we have the answer to our question.

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