a contextual missiology of the spirit - eTheses Repository ...

Another Pentecostal leader said, ‘We have no foreign connection, no foreign
money and no foreign leadership, and all our pastors are local people from
Rajasthan. Ours is an Indian church, by Indian leadership, run by Indian money,
and we work among our own people, and then who has the problem.’ 58 Although
this argument is true in their case, it may be wrong to assume that all Pentecostal
churches are completely free of foreign influence. There may be at least a few
churches that maintain foreign connections in terms of financial dependency,
training and administrative structure. All this clearly shows that the Pentecostal
minority in the state, like other Christians, are experiencing more religious
tensions today than in the past.
4.3. Hindutva and Religio-Cultural Nationalism
It seems that Hindutva ideology has been taking the form of a religio-cultural
nationalism. However, such nationalism is to be understood not as a sudden
development, but as the achievement of long term efforts by Hindu extremists
influenced by this ideology. Hindutva (literally, Hindu-ness) is a fundamentalist
ideology of militant Hinduism, and this concept was developed by V.D.
Savarkar. 59 M.T. Cherian’s recent research on Hindutva Agenda and Minority
Rights 60 reveals the religious, cultural, ethnic and political ideology of Hindutva
movements. According to him, Hindu fundamentalism is by nature,
reactionary, exclusive, separatistic, intolerant, oppositional, politically motivated,
claiming to be custodians of truth …, claiming to be agents of a true community,
58
Chinnu (pseudonym), interview by author, 25 May 2006.
59 th
V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu, 6 edn. (New Delhi, India: Bharti Sahitya Sadan,
1989), xi.
60
M.T. Cherian, Hindutva Agenda and Minority Rights: A Christian Response (Bangalore: Centre
for Contemporary Christianity, 2007).
190