sandhya jain: religion as currency

aug 25th, 2006

sandhya is awesome as usual. what a family of patriots -- her father girilal jain, her sister meenakshi jain (history professor at delhi univ). we need more like them.

Religion as currency

Sandhya Jain, Aug. 22, 2006 Pioneer

Archbishop Mar Varkey Vithayathil recently startled India's
intellectual elite with his call for more babies to arrest the decline
of Kerala's Catholic community. Perturbed at the toll taken by
abortion and the small family norm on the Syro-Malabar Church, he
insisted the burgeoning national population is no problem and that the
State should not try to curb family size

Kerala's rich and large Christian community constitutes nearly 20 per
cent of the votebank, and the Archbishop's call is intensely
political. It is reportedly inspired by the fear that the Sons of
Ismail may soon surpass the Sons of Isaac in god's own country. In the
monotheistic world, allegiance to the Abrahamic cult is not enough;
what matters is sectarian affiliation. Naturally our secular media, a
subordinate ally of the Church, spared the Archbishop the encomiums
heaped upon RSS chief KS Sudarshan last year when he asked Hindu
families to have at least three children.

Kerala's Christian population registered a 22.6 per cent growth rate
in the decade 1991-2001. Christianity's second highest growth rate was
in Gujarat, nearly 56 per cent, and Mr Narendra Modi's sympathy for
Hindu alarm in the matter explains the antipathy towards him. Ms Sonia
Gandhi's ascent as UPA supremo, coupled with America's muscular
espousal of evangelism, has given the Christian community the daring
to make Governor Balram Jakhar stall amendments to the Madhya Pradesh
Freedom of Religion Act, 2006, which require church officials to
pre-notify district authorities before conducting conversions, thus
effectively restraining them. Evangelical anger is growing as
Chhattisgarh has also moved to toughen conversion by force or
allurement, while exempting those returning to their natal faith from
the ambit of 'conversion'.

It needs to be stated unequivocally that proselytisation has nothing
to do with freedom of religion, conscience, or choice. Like the
so-called borderless terrorism plaguing the world, evangelists have
territorial ambitions, which they seek to fulfil through domination
and control of the human mind and body. Akin to the autonomous jihadi
cells, evangelists have a grand design, an international network, and
an overarching high command. At least since 1974, the blueprint to
evangelise the non-Christian world, known as the Joshua Project, has
been conducted under the auspices of the International Congress on
World Evangelisation (ICWE). The international network is funded and
controlled by Western Christian nations, led by the United States, and
is typically insensitive to the physical and emotional violence
inflicted on the poor and defenceless when free food, medical aid,
money, employment, or outright violence are used to compel
conversions.

Prof Arvind Sharma has often argued that the academic discourse on
conversions is biased in favour of faiths that convert, as opposed to
those that do not. Hindu dharma and the Hindu people respect the
religious freedom and choices of non-Hindus. Yet they are subjected to
the depredations of theologies committed to their own annihilation
through conversions. This, as Swami Dayanand Saraswati contends, is a
conscious aggressive intrusion into the religious life of the
individual, into his religious core.

Worse, the clan and community of the converted person are deeply
wounded. In fact, the convert himself suffers secret hurt, wondering
if he has acted correctly in alienating himself from the community to
which he belonged for generations, thus sundering ties with his
ancestors. Religious conversion is violence; that is why it breeds
communal violence. In the Hindu tradition, religion and culture are
inseparable and hence the loss of religion invariably amounts to loss
of cultural heritage. This can be readily seen in the case of the
Greek, Mayan, Roman and other civilisations lost to the sword of
Christian soldiers.

Ironically, protests against conversions are dubbed as persecution or
the denial of religious freedom. This untruth veils the fact that the
intended victim of the evangelist is being denied the freedom to
observe his natal faith without physical or cultural assault. It is in
fact an intentional insult to the faith sought to be annihilated, and
is a cognisable offence. In no civilised society is freedom of
religion co-terminus with a planned programme of conversion.

In the post-World War II era, evangelists have benefited from Article
18 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which
permits violence against human dignity, reason and conscience, and
violates the fundamental declaration in Article 1 that all human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Since its
adoption in December 1948, the UDHR has been perceived as a
Christian-centric text with pretensions to universalism. It is, in a
sense, the twentieth century version of Emperor Akbar's Islam-centric
Din-i-Ilahi, a high-sounding doctrine that failed to make the grade
with his Hindu courtiers and subjects.

The world needs a genuine Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Religious scholars at McGill University have made a credible effort to
prepare a wholistic document titled, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights by the World's Religions, which is now set to be discussed at
the forthcoming global congress on World's Religions after September
11 at Montreal (September 11-15, 2006).

Some clauses are exemplary, such as "Everyone has the right to freedom
from violence, in any of its forms, individual or collective; whether
based on race, religion, gender, caste or class, or arising from any
other cause" (Article 2). Interestingly, Article 9 (1) equates
proselytisation against the will of a person with arbitrary detention.
There is also the right "not to have one's religion denigrated in the
media or the academia" (Article 12, 4), along with the corresponding
duty of adherents of every religion to ensure that no religion is so
denigrated (Article 12, 5).

Article 18 (1) explicitly bars compulsion in religion, giving everyone
the right to retain his religion or change it (2). The right to retain
one's religion has thus for the first time been brought into the
international arena on an equal footing with the freedom to change
one's faith. Finally, the document enshrines the right to protect
one's cultural heritage and accords world heritage status to
everyone's cultural heritage (Article 27, 3).

If adopted by the United Nations, this document could mitigate the
burgeoning civilisational strife and blunt conversion as a foreign
policy tool of many Western nations. It could facilitate respect for
the natural geographical borders of myriad faiths, and check the
expansionist drives of crusading monotheisms.

http://dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&c\
ounter_img=3