Hinduism in double trouble
February 11, 2009
One of my Indian friends
sent me a very interesting analysis of the situation in Orissa where Christians
have been killed and persecuted recently. I have posted the entire article
titled: Hinduism in Double Trouble: Mao & Christ Come Together in Orissa.
Hinduism in Double Trouble:
Mao & Christ Come Together in Orissa
By Vishal Mangalwadi (1949-) an international
lecturer, social reformer, political columnist, and author of thirteen
books. Born and raised in India, he studied philosophy at universities, in
Hindu ashrams, and at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. In 1976 he
turned down several job offers in the West to return to India where he and
his wife, Ruth, founded a community to serve the rural poor. Vishal
continued his involvement in community development serving at the
headquarters of two national political parties, where he worked for the
empowerment and liberation of peasants and the lower castes.
A
consistent theme in Vishal's writing is the importance that the Bible must
play in transforming not only individual lives, but also entire societies.
The great challenge of every civilization and culture throughout world
history has been to find a source of meaning, a ground from which it can
act. Some societies have looked to many local and regional gods. Others
have postulated that life's goal is to achieve oneness with the absolute nothingness
that constitutes ultimate reality. Still others have looked to esoteric
philosophic and religious mysteries. However, each of these has failed to
provide the basis for a lasting and ascendant civilization. But the only
civilization that has looked largely to the Bible for its inspiration, the
West, has been able to conquer human cruelty, hopelessness and degradation
with such success that it has become the envy of the rest of the world.
However,
as the West has become complacent in its success, it has looked away from
the Bible to philosophy, science, and the mystical arts to explain its
unprecedented ascendancy in the world. As its biblical center has ceased to
hold, it has begun to look ever more urgently outside of itself—to Indian,
Chinese, and African religious traditions—to find the center of meaning and
action that Westerners perceive to be lacking in their lives. As Vishal
argues in the books you can read here, the secret for which the West is
looking can be found in the book that catapulted the West to the forefront
of world economics, politics, and culture. While many have looked to the
New Age, to money, to consumption, and to helping other people (without
knowing why it is important), Vishal has argued again and again throughout
his corpus that only the Bible can provide the answers for which the West
is looking.
* On 18 May
2006, the Maoist in Nepal (who practice the precept of China's late
Chairman Mao Zedong that political power comes from bullets, not ballots)
forced the world's only "Hindu" nation to discard its Hindu
identity in favor of a "secular" one.
* On August 23, 2008, in India's eastern state of Orissa, a group of
18-20 pro-Christian Maoists armed with AK 47 rifles gunned down revered
Hindu leader Swami Laxamananda Saraswati along with his four associates.
The Swami had been forcing lower caste Christians to reconvert to Hinduism
and had instigated large scale violence against them during December 2007
and January 2008.
* Militant Hindus
retaliated to the Swami's ghastly murder by killing over 40 Christians,
injuring hundreds, raping a nun, burning hundreds of homes and churches,
and driving approximately 50,000 Christians into jungles and refugee camps.
* Those in the
refugee camps pray, but Intelligence Officers suspect that some of those in
the jungles are also learning the art of using a rifle. The Maoists had
trained 20,000 guerillas before these Christians were driven to the
forests. Now, the Maoist ranks may swell with Christian youth who have lost
everything at the hands of Hindu arsonists. They have nothing more to lose
but much to gain from learning how to get money from officials (who
extracts bribes from everyone) and eventually to rob banks (owned by a
government which did not prevent the arsonists from looting their homes,
businesses and whole villages).
* Pro-Christian Maoists in Orissa have already warned a number of specific
Hindu leaders responsible for anti-Christian violence that they are next on
their hit list.
* A few hundred "Christian-Maoist" guerillas will change the
power-equation in Orissa. By refusing to defend their families the
government gives to the Maoists the ethical right to self-defense. However,
once they move beyond defense to revenge they destroy the image
Christianity has built up by two centuries of humanitarian service and
developing democratic institutions of civilized life. For the next
generation of Indians, Christian guerillas may define what Christianity
means just as terrorists now define Islam.
* Today (on October 31, 2008) the ten million strong women's wing of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist - not Maoists) has made public its
decision to support the Catholic nun raped by the Hindus.
* (Why would a political party in need of Hindu majority vote stand up for
a despised, persecuted minority? It is a principled stand but it is also
possible that the Communists are seeing that a social revolution is taking
place in Orissa: 50,000 people have chosen to live in jungles and refugee
camps rather than reconvert to Hinduism! The Communists may be agreeing
with Mahanta Krushna Charan Dash Goswami, President of the Matha Mandir
Surakhsya Parishad that Hinduism is being reduced to a minority religion in
some pockets of Orissa.)
* At least one good American Christian (presumably, unaware of the
Christian-Maoist nexus) has asked his Congressman if he should help Christians
in Orissa buy guns.
* In the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh, the Government and the upper
caste Hindus tried to create an armed force called "Peace
Mission" (Salwa Judum) to counter Maoist insurgency. In March 2007,
three hundred armed Maoists retaliated by invading the Police camp with
rifles, grenades and petrol bombs. They killed 55 of the 79
"Security" forces, without losing even one of their members.
* Consequently, the Prime Minister of India acknowledged that this growing
Maoist revolt has become the "single biggest internal security
challenge ever faced by our country."
* The Maoists have established a significant presence in at least 13 of
India's 28 states. They are recruiting guerillas and terrorizing entire
regions to establish a safe haven called "Revolutionary Compact
Zone" from Nepal in the north all the way down to Andhra Pradesh in
the south. The goal is to build a base for launching a full-scale revolt
against India Inc. - the custodian of a corrupt democracy.
Is Armed Revolt
against "Shining" India Inevitable?
A democratic India
that can send a rocket to the moon is certainly shining. It makes me proud.
However, our corrupt culture of bribery in government, courts, police,
education, employment and business makes it incapable of providing equality
of opportunity. Upper caste Hindus are the primary perpetrators and
beneficiaries of corruption. Hindu asceticism renounces wealth but it
espouses a moral philosophy that cannot fight corruption. Intellectuals
such as the late Oxford don Nirad Chaudhuri have charged that Hinduism's
venal gods that require appeasement are an important reason why upper caste
Hindus corrupted clean institutions built up by British Christians.
In 2004, the BJP led "Hindutva" Government became so proud of
India's sudden economic boom that it tried to fight the General Election on
the slogan "India Shining." But many peasant farmers were
committing suicide, because unable to repay their debts they were harassed
by banks and money lenders. The peasants shocked the pundits by defeating
the BJP-led government and entrusting their future to Sonia Gandhi - an
Italian born, Roman Catholic widow of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Mrs. Gandhi
did focus some of her attention on the plight of the rural poor, but failed
because she had to rely on corrupt bureaucracy and creaky political
machinery to implement her welfare programs. So far she has not exhibited
the strength needed to build a new party that has moral nerves to match her
vision.
What do you think
the children of a harassed farmer do after he commits suicide? My guess is
that in many cases the son accepts the offer of a gun which comes with a
promise to change the rotten religio-social "system" responsible
for his father's death. The daughter becomes her brother's trusted
informer.
Journalists have
gone into the jungles to meet with the Maoists that killed the Hindu Swami,
but the police cannot get to them. India Inc has become so bankrupt
(morally and intellectually) that soon it will have to send in the army to
crush it's downtrodden, but it knows that the army's use would be
democracy's ultimate moral defeat. An imported political system that offers
no hope to the poor will lose its right to remain.
From the perspective
of the hopelessly poor, India's secular democracy has already failed. . .
But . . . at least some poor think that it is not democracy that needs
discarding but Hindu culture that provides no spiritual basis to make
democracy work.
The Conversion
Controversy
The initial conflict
in Orissa was ethnic, not religious. Swami Laxamananda Saraswati succeeded
in instigating Tribals to kill Scheduled Caste (Untouchable/Dalit)
Christians because the Christians were demanding to be reclassified as
Tribals. This would make them eligible for special quotas in educational
institutions, jobs, loans, and political office. The Tribals feared that if
the Government conceded the Scheduled Castes' demand then their children
would have to compete against better educated Christian children. The Hindu
government was insensitive to poor Christians and the Christians were
insensitive to the needs of the Tribals who were poorer than them. A
Christian leadership confused by a secular sense of social justice and
Marxist-leaning Dalit Liberation Theology precipitated the political
(non-violent) conflict.
In this non-violent
conflict over affirmative action programs, the Swami saw an opportunity to
mobilize the Tribals against the Dalit converts to Christ. His agenda was
to stop conversions. His motivation was hatred and his method was force. If
he were a saint he would have won poor Christians by empathizing with their
poverty and need. He would have used his position to reconcile the two
groups and fight their common enemy - poverty. He could have championed
poor Christians by asking the Government to consider their plight. But
blinded by Hindutva ideology he complicated the conflict by injecting the
issue of conversion in a battle against poverty. The Western Church
supports missionaries to serve poor Hindus but many rich Hindus pay their
leaders to harass the poor who convert to Islam and Christianity.
Gandhi,
Untouchability and Conversions
When he was a child
Mahatma Gandhi's mother taught him that Uka - the boy who cleaned their
lavatories - was "untouchable". Any accidental contact with him
required a cleansing bath. While studying in England, Gandhi experienced
the beauty of a different culture, one built on the biblical assumption
that human beings were created equal. He was liberated by white families
affirming his human dignity.
This
"English" Gandhi revolted against inequality when the racial
arrogance of white South Africans violated his dignity. He devised his
weapon of Satyagraha - passive, non-violent resistance - to use his opponents'
biblical view of human equality against their routine violation of the
Bible. The "African" Gandhi did not champion the dignity of
the black Africans. To this day Indians in Africa are considered more
racists then the whites.
Gandhi liked the
biblical ideas of human equality and the dignity of a sweeper, but he could
not bring himself to reject the Hindu faith that people were either born
unequal due to their karma in previous lives or because Brahma created them
unequal to begin with. His ambivalence expressed itself vividly in
controversy over conversion:
In 1935, Newspapers
reported that in village Kavitha in Ahmedabad (in Gandhi's native state of
Gujarat) the upper caste Hindus had committed horrible atrocities against
some "untouchables". Columbia University educated Untouchable
leader, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, had been thinking about conversion for a
while. In a Depressed Classes conference in Yeoli in Maharashtra, on
October 14, 1935, he made his famous announcement that he was born a Hindu
and had no choice, but he will not die a Hindu because he does have a
choice. Ambedkar's resolve initiated a national debate on conversion.
John R. Mott, the American founder of
the YMCA, asked Mahatma Gandhi if he thought it was wrong to "preach
the Gospel with reference to its acceptance." The Mahatma responded in
his paper Harijan (19 & 26 December, 1936):
Would you, Dr. Mott, preach the Gospel
to a cow? Well, some of the 'untouchables' . . . can no more distinguish
between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a
cow . . . If you must share [the Gospel] with the Harijans, why don't you
share it with Thakkar Bapa and Mahadev? Why should you go to the
'untouchables' and try to exploit this upheaval?
Dr. Ambedkar was not the only one
enraged by Mahatma Gandhi's view of the Dalits. His own follower Jagjivan
Ram - a gifted, young, 'untouchable' Congressman from Bihar - registered
his protest. Gandhi had demonstrated that Hinduism's caste arrogance was
worse than the racial arrogance of white South Africans: It assumes that
most of the "untouchable" Hindus are an inherently lower species
- like animals. Indeed the Hindu Law of Manu classifies Untouchables
as "talking animals"!
This prejudice that marred Mahatma
Gandhi's legacy not only continues to this day, but is reinforced each time
an educated, upper caste, "secular" Hindu argues that
missionaries should not attempt to convert the "Lower Castes."
This condescending attitude drives militant Hindus such as Swami Laxamananda
Saraswati to try and save the lower castes from Christian missionaries, if
necessary by force. Why should anyone follow a Swami who believes that they
are stupid animals, incapable of thinking for themselves and therefore have
to be herded into the Hindu fold with a stick?
Why is Christ Losing to Mao?
Chances are that you have never heard
that at least some of the "persecuted Christians" in Orissa are
Maoists. Some of them killed Hindus and burned their homes in December
2007. You have not been given this information because India's
Christian leadership has presented a simplistic picture which happens to be
untrue. That is not to suggest that Christian spokespersons lack integrity.
They have misled the world because
(a) Like secular journalists,
most Christian leaders have not taken the time to understand poverty, the
poor and the growing appeal of Maoism. Therefore, they cannot make sense of
what is happening. They describe what they understand.
(b) Some of them are motivated
purely by their compassion for the sufferings of fellow-Christians. They do
not have the time or the tools to diagnose the deeper disease.
(c) Some, who know better,
talk only about "persecution" either because they are afraid of
acknowledging growing Maoist-Christian connection or because they are out
to raise money for the victims and their own organizations. (The Western
Church is unlikely to donate money if it knows that Christians have been
killing Hindus or that the primary conflict between Dalit Christians and
"Hindu" Tribals is not over religion or conversion but over
benefits of affirmative action.) Relief workers do need to remain neutral
in such crises. But then, like the Red Cross, they must serve both the
warring groups. Relief work loses its nobility if it serves one side and
misleads donors.
(d) Regrettably, some Christian
spokespersons who understand the issues choose not to present the full
picture because some of them are also driven by a spirituality of hatred
taught by Dalit Liberation Theology. Others may have personal agendas: Some
seem to want to promote themselves as champions of "human
rights," and they choose to condemn the "fascist" Hindutva
BJP even when it is not responsible in order to please Mrs. Sonia Gandhi to
find appointments in national and international forums for Minority Rights.
The cumulative result of these
tendencies is that:
* Christian leadership has shown no
interest in developing understanding. It prefers relief dollars and
preaches the socialist idea of "Reservations" (affirmative
action) without any discussion of its negative consequences or
consideration of better alternatives.
* Christian leaders refuse to debate and defend conversions even when
invited to do so by national leaders. They see no need to educate the voters
that individual liberty has little meaning if it does not include the right
to choose one's beliefs.
* Christians show no concern for reconciliation: In January 2008, when we
discovered that some Christians in Orissa had burnt down some Hindu homes, I
suggested to a well-known Christian leader that the relief money that his
group was raising should be used for reconciliation: (i) Local Christians
should be encouraged to go to the Hindus, apologize, and rebuild their
homes with Christian money before rebuilding their own homes. (ii) His
organization should consider building a school and a hostel which admits
equal number of Hindu Tribals and Christian "Dalits." The
gentleman got so mad at me that he went to some of my supporters
instigating them against me. Some leaders from his group project themselves
as spokesmen for Indian Christians and they have taken a public stand that
they will not meet even with sane Hindu leaders. They slander the BJP as a
"fascist" party, which has not been true at least since
1977.
Unfortunately, the failure of
Christian leadership goes much deeper: Christ is losing at least some of
his followers to Mao because the Church no longer preaches "the Good
News to the poor" Their Gospel aims to take souls to heaven but is not
bothered whether or not God's will is being done in India. Some
missionaries do specialize in subjects such as elementary education,
health, micro-financing and linguistics, but no one seems to know anything
about the biblical worldview that liberated Western nations out of poverty,
oppression and corruption, giving them relatively just, clean and sensitive
governments.
Perhaps the most tragic fact is that
at a time like this when Indians are killing and dying in search of human
equality, there is a growing group of American missionaries teaching the
upper caste followers of Christ not to worship with lower caste converts.
These missionaries are importing historical American racism into the modern
Indian Church. They believe in segregating churches along caste lines
because they think that the Great Command to love our neighbors as
ourselves can be superseded by the obligation to make disciples of the
Brahmin nation (people-group).
Secular democracy has failed but there
is no forum in India that teaches biblical economic and political thought.
The Maoists overtook Nepal because several decades ago the Government of
North Korea donated libraries to every school. No one bothered to see what
those books were teaching. In as much as Marxism is a Christian heresy, it
does do some good. But just as the Chinese Marxists are searching for a
satisfying world and life view, India needs literature that will expound a
reforming worldview and spirituality. Then our universities, colleges,
seminaries, pulpits, radios and television will communicate a message that
makes sense even to the Maoists.
The fact that militant Hinduism is
giving birth to Christian Maoists will thrill the proponents of Dalit
Liberation Theology. But is this something to celebrate? Medieval Europe
had plenty of "Christian" knights who dedicated their weapons and
skills to the Church. Most of them became such nuisance that Popes sent
them away on Crusades to kill and die away from their homelands. It took
Europe centuries to bring physical might under moral right. India inherited
a professional army, police and bureaucracy from the British. These
institutions have degenerated. The Maoists killed the Swami only because
the Orissa Government did not bring him under the rule of law. In choosing
not to protect innocent Christians the Government failed again. That
deserves condemnation and a resolve to transform. But is government's
failure good enough reason to exchange civil government and rule of law
with the rule of guns and gangs? A civil war could be justified when the
Government itself kills the poor who agitate for affirmative actions or for
their right to convert. But under present circumstances, it is foolish to
destroy the magnificent institutions that the Christian political thought,
spirituality and wisdom gave us through the British. The Church should be
training its youth to reform and run the institutions of justice that Hindu
secularism has corrupted.
Christ and Mao have come together in
Orissa because people oppressed for thousands of years have decided to
stand up against Hindu socio-economic system. One brother is choosing
Christ, the other Mao. The Maoist brother gets angry when Hindus persecute
his brother who chose Christ. The Christian should love his Maoist
brother, but cannot follow his brother in hating his oppressor. He has to
follow Christ and find supernatural power to repay good for evil. The
Church has to equip a Christian to love both the Hindu oppressor as well as
his Maoist brother and help them both to find the true Savior of the world.
The Maoists are not fools. They know
that in the short run their violence will drive investors and
industrialists away from Eastern India and in the long run they will have
no option but to join the democratic mainstream. Bullets do give political
power, but they also take it away, quickly and abruptly. In the long run
they establish either chaos or authoritarianism as the order of the day.
That precludes the possibility of establishing peace - the pre-requisite to
prosperity. The Maoists need to know how they can help build a culture of
human equality and dignity, freedom and justice, honesty and service,
education and development, science and technology, peace and prosperity
where guns remains under the authority of moral law. India will seek the
Kingdom of God when it sees that the historical track record points to
Christ, not Mao.
© Vishal Mangalwadi
Reformation Day, October 31, 2008
[email protected]
P.S. The sources for this essay will be sent upon request.
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