An evangelical agenda abroad

By Prakash Shah

India’s decision to not give visas to the members of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is in line with Indian policy that predates the current BJP-led Government. However, for anyone to employ the spectre of Hindu nationalism as a reason behind the denial of visa, condemnation by journalists, including British foreign correspondents, is off the mark.

Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj should maintain the same stance despite any pressure, which the Western media is likely to ratchet up, to reverse the decision.

The USCIRF represents the interests of evangelicals and wants to spread of Christian gospel throughout the world. The USCIRF was created in 1998, through the International Religious Freedom Act and refers to religious freedom as encoded in international law. It is not religiously neutral. As Jakob de Roover has said in his book, Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism, the notion is tied to the earliest idea of Christian freedom in the writings of the church fathers, becoming significantly charged during the Protestant Reformation movement.

Reformers claimed that the church violated that very freedom by passing off human works as godly, chaining the human conscience, and leading it to idolatry. As Roover says, the Protestant idea of religious freedom eventually became secularised further, informing the accounts of enlightenment and contemporary liberal thinkers. However, religious freedom is unintelligible without the core Protestant notions animating it.

International instruments globalising religious freedom in secular guise are, therefore, an exercise in universalising Protestant theological claims. Reports by the USCIRF implicitly use such loaded benchmarks to judge records of other nations, and thereby build in an asymmetrical evaluation of other cultures and traditions.

It is not surprising, therefore, that a 2015 report by the USCIRF places India in the tier two list of countries where religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by the Government are considered serious. The US is not alone in this. Canada has its own Office of Religious Freedom to judge compliance with religious freedom norms, and the UK has its All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief. The UN also has its Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief.

More is at stake when Governmental bodies take religious freedom as their core value. Conversion activity ties in with Western foreign policy interests which can be more easily promoted with compliant Christian populations. Nagaland has a huge population of christians, and Christianity has spread deep into the North-Eastern States of our country.

Astonishingly, the British Ambassador in Nepal recently spoke of effectively allowing Nepal to turn into a Christian country. After the recent earthquake in Nepal, evangelists quickly identified the Bible as an urgent need. Officially declared funds channelled to India by religious interests abroad reveal a preponderance of Christian organisations and the amounts they receive. The funding trace also shows a pincer movement, with conversion activity most concentrated in the North-Eastern and southern part of India.

Western bodies involved in campaigns for religious freedom are most exercised when proselytising activity is regulated or prevented. Legislation preventing proselytisation by force, fraud or allurement exists in many Indian States. Besides a potential compromise to the national security, untrammelled proselytisation is a threat to local tradition and culture, castigated by evangelists as false religions and devil worship.

Families are often broken after conversion and converts tend to rubbish their ancestral practices. All India legislation has been mooted by the Government to prevent proselytisation, but existing laws and visa violations by missionaries need tighter enforcement. Legislation on the existing model will probably pass muster with the Supreme Court which has upheld the existing State level legislation. The European Court of Human Rights too recognises the right of States to place restrictions on proselytisation.

The rush by Western journalists to condemn the denial of visas to USCIRF members is tantamount to support for such activities. Quite aside from the tie with foreign policy interests of Euro American nations, the slide to christianisation poses a mortal threat to the continuance of Indian traditions. Evidence for what lies in what can be seen in the hardly reported stories of tortures that Indian school children suffer in Christian-run schools when they display adherence to their ancestral practices such as wearing a bindi, putting on henna, or celebrating traditional festivals. Such children are often bullied by teachers or simply prevented from such displays.

It was USCIRF that engineered the humiliating visa denial against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2005 when he intended a visit to the US as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Although schadenfreude is of no value in this context, now that the shoe is on the other foot, it is difficult not to take notice of this poetic justice.

(The writer is a Reader in Culture and Law and Director of GLOCUL: Centre for Culture and Law at the Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London)

Source : Daily Pioneer