Bharatiya Pragna - Dr. Th Chowdary

sections of society. There is resentment in Assam
against World Vision’s flood-relief operations in
Majuli, a large island in the Brahmaputra and a
sacred seat of the Vaishnava monastery of
Sankara Deva, the great reformist saint.
Tripura is one of the Indian states
where, as the CPI(M) Chief Minister Manik
Sarkar has himself acknowledged, the foreignfunded
Baptist church supports subversive activities,
including the conversion of tribals. The
church-backed separatist outfit, National Liberation
Front of Tripura
(NLFT), gunned
down 16 Hindus at a
marketplace in West
Tripura district on
January 13, 2002, on
the eve of Makar
Sankranti, an incident
that went largely
uncommented by the national media.
The Internet has many reports about
Buddhist resentment against World Vision and
other evangelical bodies operating in Mongolia,
Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar and even
Tibet, “using unethical methods, under the guise
of being charitable organisations, to buy converts
in Asia”. The Australian, a leading newspaper of
Australia, reported on December 24, 2005: “Tensions
between Muslims and Western aid workers
have begun to erupt in Aceh as the tsunami-devastated
Indonesian province (where 170,000
people died) slowly recovers. Islamic activists
have claimed that aid workers are secretly attempting
to convert Muslims to Christianity, pointing
particularly to World Vision, the International
Catholic Mission and Church World Service.”
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“Freedom of religion enjoins
upon all of us the equally non-negotiable
responsibility to respect faiths other than
our own, and never to denigrate, vilify or
misrepresent them for the purpose of affirming
superiority of our faith.”
Lt Col A.S. Amarasekera, a Sri Lankan
Buddhist activist, has expressed the following fear:
“While everyone is focusing their minds on the
LTTE problem, we Sinhalese Buddhists are pitted
against another force as dangerous: the dangers
that the Sinhalese Buddhist way of life will
have to face due to conversions in the near future.
What happened in South Korea, where the
80 per cent Buddhist population was reduced to
18 per cent in five decades, will be repeated here¿
It (is) proved beyond reasonable doubt that World
Vision, an American-funded
Christian evangelical
organisation, was surreptitiously
trying to convert Sinhalese
Buddhists into Christianity.”
The recent attacks
on churches in Orissa and
elsewhere have been justifiably
condemned by all patriotic individuals. However,
as I stated in my column last week, a distinction
must be made between a violent campaign
against our Christian brethren and a nonviolent,
democratic campaign against organised
conversions using foreign funds. I happened to
participate in a remarkable inter-religion conference
on conversions organised by the Vatican in
collaboration with the World Council of Churches,
Geneva, a Protestant body, in Lariano (Italy) in
May 2006. Let me mention here some of the recommendations
in a report unanimously adopted
by the conference.
“While everyone has a right to invite
others to an understanding of their faith, it should
not be exercised by violating other’s rights and
religious sensibilities. At the same time, all should
November & December 2008 Bharatiya Pragna