Tying up loose ends; Vital statistics

[Koenraad Elst]

Resubscribe: Dr. Zydenbos' latest comment which I read in the archive
reminds me that I
should tie up some loose ends before leaving.  So, I am posting two mails I
had prepared last winter and withheld because I thought they would deviate
too much into politics (this one) or exacerbate tensions on the list further
(the second one, starring Dr. Zydenbos).  So, this is really the last--
unsubscribe.  Here
goes:

    Prof. Karp reminds us of the conversion debate, where "ugly motives and
hidden interests (were) suspected".  That Hindus consider the destruction of
Hinduism in village after village "ugly" is a matter of opinion.  Maybe it
is the other way around: Hinduism is ugly and should be destroyed to make
the world more beautiful; that at least is one of the things openly declared
by the Southern Baptists in their notorious recent booklet on Hinduism.
But there were no "hidden interests" and the real interests had no need of
being "suspected", since they were stated quite openly: from the Baptist
mission to the Pope in his speech in Delhi, all authoritative spokesmen for
the mission in India are quite open about their objective of converting the
whole of India, indeed Asia, to Christianity.  On that, the RSS and the Pope
were in perfect agreement.
    It is only in the Orwellian world of Indian "secularism" that this could
become a matter of controversy.  If you shout from the rooftops that a
common civil code, with equality before the law of all citizens regardless
of religion (a long-standing demand of the BJP) is "anti-secular" eventhough
it is a defining trait of all secular states, then anything becomes
possible.  In logical terms: "if both A and non-A are true, then any B is
true".  So then, it is no longer surprising that secularists take up the
defence of the theocratic Papacy (the number one enemy of Western
secularists for generations), or that they deny the conversion designs of
the Churches, stated so openly in the Church literature itself, as "RSS hate
propaganda".  Concerning hate propaganda, the RSS could learn a few things
from the secularists themselves, vide Arun Shourie's latest, "Harvesting our
souls", which starts out with a few chapters of the crass disinformation by
the English-language media during the conversion crisis.
    It so happens that the mission strategy has a linguistic component too,
e.g. the Summer Institute of Linguistics which produces Bible translations
for
use in the conversion of even the remotest tribes.  It is here on this list
that I learn (from Yashwant Malaiya) that behind Ethnologue, so eager to
break up Hindi into its dialects, is a religious organization with specific
objectives.  Those who seek to fragment an entity, whether a language
or a nation or a state, usually do so all the better to subdue it or keep it
down or gobble it up fragment after fragment.  That is why
angreziwallahs and their Western loudspeakers generally prefer a fragmented
view of Hindi.  There is indeed a comparison with Church policy of promoting
a fragmented view of Hinduism.  Regardless of whether that fragmented view
is right or wrong (and i would readily admit that in important respects, it
may
be right to classify e.g. Jainism as a separate religion), there is just no
denying that political motive.
    In the conversion controversy, the issue was whether tribals are Hindus
or not.  Under the original definition of the Persian-Muslim term "Hindu",
meaning any Indian non-Abrahamite, they obviously are.  But here again,
something can be said for the opposite view, e.g. that most tribals eat
beef.  But whichever is true, the Churches' preferred definition of the
religious identity of the tribals is guided purely by strategic
considerations, as is obvious from their systematic double-speak.  When
something good is said about the tribals (new variations on the "noble
savage" theme, e.g. tribal culture is feminist and egalitarian), or when
they are targeted for conversion and Hindus are told not to interfere, then
"tribals are not Hindus".  However, when something bad is said about
tribals, e.g. when they resist Christian conversion work, or when they
become violent, then suddenly "Hindus" are the culprits.
    Thus, in 1964, when Christian Garo tribals were butchered in East
Pakistan, their Christian tribals cousins in Chhotanagpur started attacking
Muslims,
and in the process, they killed the Flemish Jesuit Herman Rasschaert, who
tried to
dissuade them from killing Muslims.  As Mani Shankar Aiyar (who was then
embassy secretary in Brussels charged with conveying condolences to the
family) has written in one of his Sunday columns, Rasschaert was killed by
the very people to whom he had brought the Gospel.  Yet, in all Christian
accounts, Rasschaert gets killed by "Hindus", eventhough the killers were
probably Christians and even if they were not, they were at any rate tribals
of whom the same sources otherwise insist that they are not Hindus.  In the
list of "Hindu atrocities against Christians" which circulated last year,
the Rasschaert murder was still included as number 2.
    This Christian doublespeak has strange implications.  Tribals and
Westerners are told that tribal religion is fairly good (except for Jesus
missing),
monotheistic, peaceful, egalitarian etc., while Hinduism is demonic,
idolatrous, oppressive and unspeakably ugly.  Yet, when missionaries are
converting tribals to Christianity, the religion which they are thereby
destroying is not this ugly Satanic Hinduism, but that good and noble
non-Hindu tribal
religion...
    Incidentally, Prof. Karp, it is incorrect that in the conversion debate,
any "ugly motives" were "suspected".  I leave it as a matter of taste
whether
the motive of destroying other religions in favour of Christianity is
"ugly", but at least there was a perfect consensus between the Sangh and the
Churches about what the motives of the missions are.  When the Sangh
"alleged", or accurately reported, that the Churches intend to convert India
and indeed Asia to Christianity, they could and did quote a good many
statements from Christian sources to that effect.  The Southern Baptists had
hardly published their booklet describing Hinduism as demonic darkness, when
the Pope came to Delhi itself to repeat in so many words that the target is
the conversion of Asia, no less.  Nothing to "suspect" there, it was all out
in the open.  We may disagree on how to evaluate that fact, but fact it is:
the Churches want to convert as many non-Christians to Christianity as they
can get.  It is only in the Orwellian world of Indian secularism (where the
Sharia counts as secular while a uniform civil code, a defining trait of all
secular states and also a BJP demand, is dubbed "communal"), that the
conversion designs of the Churches could be dismissed as a figment of the
Sangh's evil imagination.
    Does the Church also have a position on India's linguistic landscape?
Yes, but it is not a single nor an unchangeable position.  While especially
the
American missions still promote English wherever this is viable (most of all
in Nagaland where English even became the state language), many others, and
esp. the Catholics, use and sometimes actively promote the native languages.
Some Christian theorists also promote the fragmentation of Hindi, but by no
means all of them.  In Chhotanagpur, the influential Flemish Jesuit mission
mostly uses Hindi as medium of instruction in its schools, rather than
Santali or Munda.  Most tribals there are already functionally bilingual
(Hindi or Bengali apart from their mother tongue), and if Congress or BJP
were as aggressively pro-Hindi as some angreziwallahs and Dravidianists
allege, they could easily devise a policy to wipe Mundari and
Santali out in fifty years or so.  This is fortunately not done.  If I
had a say, I would include Santali as the largest tribal and Austro-Asiatic
language in the language schedule of the Constitution.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst