The Constitution of independent India adopted in January 1950 made things quite smooth for Christian missions. They surged forward with renewed vigour. Nationalist resistance to what had been viewed as an imperialist incubus during the Struggle for Freedom from British rule, broke down when the very leaders who had frowned upon it started speaking in its favour. Voices which still remained 'recalcitrant' were sought to be silencsed by being branded as those of 'Hindu communalism'. Nehruvian Secularism had stolen a march under the smokescreen of Mahatma Gandhi's sarva-dharma-samabhava. The Christian missionary orchestra in India after independence has continued to rise from one crescendo to another with applause from the Nehruvian establishment manned by a brood of self-alienated Hindus spawned by missionary-macaulayite education. The only rift in the lute has been K.M. Panikkar's Asia and Western Dominance published in 1953, the Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Committee Madhya Pradesh published in 1956, Om Prakash Tyagi's Bill on Freedom of Religion introduced in the Lok Sabha in 1978, Arun Shourie's Missionaries in India published in 1994, and the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Bill introduced in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly by Mangal Prabhat Lodha on 20 December 1996. Panikkar's study was primarily aimed at providing a survey of Western imperialism in Asia from CE 1498 to 1945. Christian missions came into the picture simply because he found them arrayed always and everywhere alongside Western gunboats, diplomatic pressures, extraterritorial rights and plain gangsterism. Contemporary records consulted by him could not but cut to size the inflated images of Christian heroes such as Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci. They were found to be not much more than minions employed by European kings and princes scheming to carve out empires in the East. Their methods of trying to convert kings and commoners in Asia, said Panikkar, were force or fraud or conspiracy and morally questionable in every instance. The Niyogi Committee Report was far more perceptive. Evangelisation in India, it said, appears to be part of the uniform world policy to revive Christendom for re-establishing Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives . The objective is to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, and the mass conversion of a considerable section of Adivasis with this ulterior motive is fraught with danger to the security of the State. The Christian missions are making a deliberate and determined attempt to alienate Indian Christian Community from their nation. Evangelization is not a religious philosophy but a force for politicisation. The Church in India is not independent but accountable to those who paid for its upkeep. The concept of 'Partnership in Obedience' which covers the flow of foreign finances to the Church is of a piece with the strategy of Subsidiary Alliances which the East India Company had employed earlier for furthering and consolidating its conquests. And conversions are nothing but politics by other means. Those who have studied the working of Christian missions in India at present are left in no doubt that the Niyogi Committee Report has been, in the words of Arun Shourie, Vindicated By Time.

ISBN 13: 9789385485121

ISBN 10: 9385485121

Year: 2020

Language: ENGLISH

Pages etc.: Reprint of 1956: xvi,1026p., (2)col. maps(10/9 inches), 25cm.

Binding: Hardbound

Subject(s): Religion, Voice of India