CHRISTIANITY’S COMPULSIVE NEED TO

HOMOGENIZE THE WORLD

PART I: THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF POWER
Hindu intellectuals (as distinct from Marxist and liberal-secular establishment intellectuals) have
once again brought to the fore, what is being termed bitterly by their opponents, a contentious
issue. This time round, it is the issue of religious conversion within the Indian civilization; and the
Christian establishment has been forced to participate in the debate just as the Muslims were
forced to participate in the debate on the issue of secularism in the context of Indian civilization
nearly a decade ago. Both now and then, the so-called liberal, secular intellectual elite of this
nation and all major political parties including the BJP, in greater or lesser degree have felt
compelled to assume positions alongside the Muslims and the Christians and perceivably against
the Hindus.

It has therefore become necessary for all Hindu nationalists to fight resolutely and relentlessly all
ideologies and positions that weaken Hinduism on its soil and consequently weaken the national
fibre by erasing the civilizational identity from the national consciousness. The Christian
establishment’s claim that it is their religious mandate and constitutional right to convert non-
Christians of this country to Christianity should also be fought on the same grounds. Their claims
for a religious and constitutional right to convert has to be fought as seriously as a war because
organized conversion on the basis of a religious mandate and some twisted interpretation of the
Constitution, with the specious and ubiquitous arguments of human rights and freedom of religion
being thrown in for good measure, has very serious religious, political and demographic
consequences for this nation besides posing grave threats to national security and national
character. Witness the North-East, where, according to the Chief Minister of Tripura, the Christian
terrorists are supported by the American Baptist Church. Also witness Mallapuram in Kerala and
Hyderabad and Gujarat. In the case of Gujarat, we have problems associated with the rapidly
changing religious demography with regard to both Muslims and Christians.

In this war it may help us to better understand the psyche of the Christians in general and that of
the West in particular if we can understand first the theological positions of the Church and the
ideological positions of the West and why both suffer from the malady of this compulsive urge to
force all peoples of the globe to accept their vision of God and Life. It is important to understand
the psyche of both the West and the Church because the two have always acted in tandem to
share in the spoils of war, when it came to conquering the rest of the world with the intention of
homogenizing it and forcing the world (always violently) to owe allegiance to them. It is in this
context that we must examine the creation of East-Timor as a nation-state with the active help,
both overt and covert of Australia. Australia, (like the Pope with regard to Christ), is beginning to
claim it is Asian. And the white/Christian Australia and the Vatican cherish the same ambitions
towards Asia.

Like Plato’s hermaphrodites who were physically separated into man and woman, the Church and
the West ( the secular State of the Americas, and Europe) too were forcibly separated by events
in European political history (Henry VIII, Enlightenment, and Liberalism). But their congenital ties
are still strong and the two need each other to become whole so that they can work together to
realise their goal of converting the rest of the world to their way of life and thinking. Both the
Church and the West have either made extinct or exterminated all opposition to their ideology and
challenges to their power. The Roman empire, the Mayan and Inca civilizations, the natives of the
Caribbean, the indigenous peoples of North, Central and South America, Australia, Tasmania and
New-Zealand and recently the Soviet Union, Serbia, and Iraq are telling examples of what the
Church and the West are capable of doing when they are challenged or opposed.

To understand better the Church we must first understand the persona of Jesus Christ. Jesus
Christ as he is presented to the world through the Bible, solely through the New Testament, is a
European and Western construct. Because the New Testament, while as a religious book is
claimed to be a sequel to the Old Testament, is however the first brick in the Christian theological
structure which the West laid to build and sustain in turn, the body and spirit of the Church. Just
as Muslims are forbidden to doubt that God spoke repeatedly to Muhammed through Gabriel the
archangel and anointed him the last prophet, Christians are forbidden to doubt that Jesus was the
son of God and also that he passed on the mantle of his spiritual and temporal authority to Simon
the fisherman - turned - St.Peter, the vicar of Christ, who in turn passed it on to his successor, the
first Pope. The very survival of these religions as organized and structured faiths and the absolute
inviolability of the Koran and the Bible depends entirely on the unquestioning acceptance of the
historicity and veracity of these personae.

To understand the most basic characteristic of the western civilization and that of the Church, it is
important to understand the basic characteristic of their God. There is no doubt that the western
man has indeed been made in the image of his God. Not just man, but also the Church which he
built, is a faithful image of the God of Abraham. The God of the Abrahamic faiths is an
authoritarian God, a power-wielding God. And because He wields power, he jealously guards His
territory and will not permit poaching. And because the God of Abrahamic faiths is POWER, pure
and simple, with a territory over which He demands absolute jurisdiction, He will not tolerate an
alternate power-centre and so the God of Abraham can only be ONE. There can be no other. - It
is this basic animal instinct of jealously guarding one’s territory and not permitting competitors to
power, which has been elevated as the supreme virtue of these faiths - the virtue of monotheism.
Only one God. (This monotheism of the Abrahamic faiths should however not be equated with the
realization of the Truth of non-dualism in Hinduism or with Brahman.)

This overarching drive for power and the ‘only one’ complex which is characteristic of all power-
mongers, pervasively afflicts all of Christian theology too - the concept of hell, the nature of man,
the nature of human birth after the Fall, the nature of the Church and finally the nature of
Christianity and its ultimate purpose. “Urged by faith we are obliged to believe and to maintain
that the Church is one, holy, catholic and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess
with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor remission of sins.... and she
represents one sole mystical body whose head is Christ and the head of Christ is God. In her
then is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. There had been at the time of the deluge only one ark,
which ark having been finished to a single cubit, had only one pilot and guide,i.e.,Noah, and we
read that outside of this ark, all that subsisted on this earth was destroyed”.

Look at this obsession of being only one. Everything about Christianity is only one. The last line is
telling because of the interpretation being given to the deluge and the ark. Pope Boniface VIII is
implying that those who want to be saved (those who seek salvation) must climb into Noah’s ark
(the Church which is the physical structure of the Christian faith) and that those who stay outside
this ark are condemned by God for the sin of worshipping ‘false gods’ and rejecting Him. As the
‘Catholic Encyclopaedia’ puts it, “Truth is one and absolute; The Catholic Church and she only
has all the truth of religion. All religions whatsoever have varying amounts of truth in them, but the
Catholic Church alone has all”.

Much of Christian theology is only a saga of power - quest for power, challenges to power, and
retribution; retribution for disobedience as in the case of Adam and Eve or eternal damnation as
in the case of archangel Nicholos, (also known as Lucifer), who challenged God’s totalitarianism
in Heaven. Archangel Nicholos who was banished from Heaven by God for daring to question
and challenge God’s absolute authority, went on to establish the parallel kingdom of Hell which
he rules in his capacity as Satan. So Heaven and Hell are mutually exclusive kingdoms with
mutually antagonistic, exclusive and all-powerful rulers. The battlelines are drawn and the truimph
or otherwise of christianity depends on numbers - who manages to get more than the other into
his camp - God or Satan, and the expanse of territory under their jurisdiction.

This numbers game is played not just between good and evil as broad categories but also
between those individuals and nations which accept the God of Abraham as the only God and
those which believe in other Gods; who, the Church tells the faithful, are ‘false gods’. The
believers in false Gods are also of the camp of Satan, living in spiritual darkness and have to be
won over into the camp of the ‘only God’ as are followers of ideologies that reject God and
propagate atheism. Therein lies the raison d’etre for erecting this colossal and martial structure of
the Church. Christianity is an ‘either/or’ religion where the faithful have to choose only one in
every pair of dualism - God/Satan, Heaven/Hell, Matter/Spirit, Good/Evil and lastly Salvation/Sin.
The West too suffers from the same malaise. It claims that its political and economic ideology is
the only good and acceptable model for all peoples of all civilizations and like the Church, will go
to any lengths to force the rest of the world to convert to its ideology - Liberal Democracy, civil
rights, human rights and the WTO being the colossal and martial structures erected for this
purpose.

It is not surprising therefore that Eschatology, as per Christian theology is not so much the end of
time as the end of history. History does not end when Time ends; on the contrary, Time ends
when History ends. And History (as per Christian theology), ends with the Second Coming of
Christ, when this time round, he will successfully establish the kingdom of God. It is important to
understand the helplessness underpinning the concept of eschatology or the ending of history.
Christ’s mission on earth was to establish the kingdom of God. He had to reinstate the supremacy
of this only God by establishing his kingdom on all earth. But this Christ was unable to do
because he was helpless before the might of the Roman empire. This time, by passing on his
mission to his followers, the clergy and the laity alike, Christ’s mission would be facilitated by
these ‘warriors’. The faithful will prepare the way for Christ’s second coming by converting the
whole world to Christianity, by ridding this world of all other faiths, beliefs and ideologies so that
there are no more competitors for power, no more threats to Jesus’ life.

It is a similar thought that Francis Fukuyama expresses when he says that with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, and by implication, the collapse of the ideology of communism, all competitors
to the USA for power have been successfully eliminated and the USA will now, like Christ,
establish the kingdom of God on Earth through liberal-democracy and market economy - the very
ultimate and the best that any nation can aspire for in its socio-economic-political life. Not
surprisingly, Fukuyama titled his book ‘The End Of History’.

This power-hungry God of the Abrahamic faiths will wax wroth not only when His power is
challenged, but also when He is disobeyed. In effect it means He will not brook independent
thinking or thinking influenced by any alternate centre of power. Such thinking and any action
derived from it, is construed as challenge to His totalitarian authority and calls for the severest
retribution. Even at the risk of sounding polemical it has to be said that ‘knowledge’ is a pre-
requisite for any action based on thinking and freedom. Free thinking and free will besides
knowledge, therefore constitute a challenge to any totalitarian power structure. Which is why
successive popes in the critical years of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries felt compelled to write
strongly worded encyclicals condemning political revolutions that deposed kings, condemning the
Enlightenment for advocating free and independent thinking, for introducing secular education, for
banning religious instruction in schools, and also condemning , in no uncertain terms, liberalism
and the fledgling signs of democracy and republicanism.

And which is why long, long before these popes, God Himself forbade Adam and Eve to eat of
the tree of knowledge; but the fruit of the tree of life was not forbidden. The logic is childishly
simple. Adam and Eve (or Man) were blessed with immortality as long as they lived in a state of
ignorance and implicit obedience to the will of God. But once they had violated His command and
eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they were equal to God in their possession of all
knowledge and sooner or later could pose a challenge to His authority as Satan had done earlier.
So retribution is swift and terrible. First God damns the soil and the earth (in fact, all Earth) on
which stood this fateful tree. God then lays the ‘curse’ of death upon all men for the crime of
disobedience; and because Eve was guilty of the first and basic and unpardonable sin of
venturing to question God’s dictat, she and all women henceforth were ‘cursed’ to suffer the
ignominy of menstruation and deliver children only in intense pain. Therefore all humans born of
‘accursed’ women were thus born in ‘original sin’. This, continuing to the present day, relentless
insistence on unconditional obedience which rejects and negates the light of knowledge and
experience, and which rejects the intellect, is best illustrated by the oath that all Jesuits take at
the time of entering the ministry.

(Tomorrow, The Jesuit Oath)

THE JESUIT OATH

"Go ye, then, into all the world and take possession of all lands in the name of the Pope. He who
will not accept him as the Vicar of Jesus and his Vice-Regent on earth, let him be accursed and
exterminated."

Professor Arthur Noble

[The following is the text of the Jesuit Extreme Oath of Induction as recorded in the Journals of
the 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, of the United States Congressional Record (House Calendar
No. 397, Report No. 1523, 15 February, 1913, pp. 3215-3216), from which it was subsequently
torn out. The Oath is also quoted by Charles Didier in his book Subterranean Rome (New York,
1843), translated from the French original. Dr. Alberto Rivera, who escaped from the Jesuit Order
in 1967, confirms that the induction ceremony and the text of the Jesuit Oath which he took were
identical to what we have cited below. – A. N.]

When a Jesuit of the minor rank is to be elevated to command, he is conducted into the Chapel of
the Convent of the Order, where there are only three others present, the principal or Superior
standing in front of the altar. On either side stands a monk, one of whom holds a banner of yellow
and white, which are the Papal colours, and the other a black banner with a dagger and red cross
above a skull and crossbones, with the word INRI, and below them the words IUSTUM NECAR
REGES IMPIUS. The meaning of which is: It is just to exterminate or annihilate impious or
heretical Kings, Governments, or Rulers.

Upon the floor is a red cross at which the postulant or candidate kneels. The Superior hands him
a small black crucifix, which he takes in his left hand and presses to his heart, and the Superior at
the same time presents to him a dagger, which he grasps by the blade and holds the point
against his heart, the Superior still holding it by the hilt, and thus addresses the postulant:

(The Superior speaks:)

“My son, heretofore you have been taught to act the dissembler: among Roman Catholics to be a
Roman Catholic, and to be a spy even among your own brethren; to believe no man, to trust no
man. Among the Reformers, to be a Reformer; among the Huguenots, to be a Huguenot; among
the Calvinists, to be a Calvinist; among other Protestants, generally to be a Protestant; and
obtaining their confidence, to seek even to preach from their pulpits, and to denounce with all the
vehemence in your nature our Holy Religion and the Pope; and even to descend so low as to
become a Jew among Jews, that you might be enabled to gather together all information for the
benefit of your Order as a faithful soldier of the Pope. You have been taught to plant insidiously
the seeds of jealousy and hatred between communities, provinces, states that were at peace, and
to incite them to deeds of blood, involving them in war with each other, and to create revolutions
and civil wars in countries that were independent and prosperous, cultivating the arts and the
sciences and enjoying the blessings of peace; to take sides with the combatants and to act
secretly with your brother Jesuit, who might be engaged on the other side, but openly opposed to
that with which you might be connected, only that the Church might be the gainer in the end, in
the conditions fixed in the treaties for peace and that the end justifies the means. You have been
taught your duty as a spy, to gather all statistics, facts and information in your power from every
source; to ingratiate yourself into the confidence of the family circle of Protestants and heretics of
every class and character, as well as that of the merchant, the banker, the lawyer, among the
schools and universities, in parliaments and legislatures, and the judiciaries and councils of state,
and to be all things to all men, for the Pope's sake, whose servants we are unto death. You have
received all your instructions heretofore as a novice, a neophyte, and have served as co-adjurer,
confessor and priest, but you have not yet been invested with all that is necessary to command in
the Army of Loyola in the service of the Pope. You must serve the proper time as the instrument
and executioner as directed by your superiors; for none can command here who has not
consecrated his labours with the blood of the heretic; for "without the shedding of blood no man
can be saved". Therefore, to fit yourself for your work and make your own salvation sure, you will,
in addition to your former oath of obedience to your order and allegiance to the Pope, repeat after
me:

(Readers please note, a person could rise to the position of a Commander in the Jesuit sect only
if he had killed a heretic, only if his labours had been stained with the blood of the enemy of the
Church and the Pope.)

(Text of the Oath:)

“I_______________ , now in the presence of Almighty God, the blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed
St. John the Baptist, the Holy Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, and all the saints, sacred host of
Heaven, and to you, my Ghostly Father, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, founded by
St. Ignatius Loyola, in the pontification of Paul the Third, and continued to the present, do by the
womb of the Virgin, the matrix of God, and the rod of Jesus Christ, declare and swear that His
Holiness, the Pope, is Christ's Vice-Regent and is the true and only head of the Catholic or
Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by the virtue of the keys of binding and loosing
given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical Kings,
Princes, States, Commonwealths, and Governments, and they may be safely destroyed.
Therefore to the utmost of my power I will defend this doctrine and His Holiness's right and
custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the
Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended
authority and Churches of England and Scotland, and the branches of same now established in
Ireland and on the continent of America and elsewhere and all adherents in regard that they may
be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome. I do now denounce and
disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal,
or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. I do further declare the doctrine of the
Churches of England and Scotland of the Calvinists, Huguenots, and others of the name of
Protestants or Masons to be damnable, and they themselves to be damned who will not forsake
the same. I do further declare that I will help, assist, and advise all or any of His Holiness's
agents, in any place where I should be, in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Ireland or America, or
in any other kingdom or territory I shall come to, and do my utmost to extirpate the heretical
Protestant or Masonic doctrines and to destroy all their pretended powers, legal or otherwise. I do
further promise and declare that, notwithstanding, I am dispensed with to assume any religion
heretical for the propagation of the Mother Church's interest; to keep secret and private all her
agents' counsels from time to time, as they entrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by
word, writing or circumstances whatever; but to execute all that should be proposed, given in
charge, or discovered unto me by you, my Ghostly Father, or any of this sacred order. I do further
promise and declare that I will have no opinion or will of my own or any mental reservation
whatever, even as a corpse or cadaver (perinde ac cadaver), but will unhesitatingly obey each
and every command that I may receive from my superiors in the militia of the Pope and of Jesus
Christ. That I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, to the frozen regions
north, jungles of India, to the centres of civilisation of Europe, or to the wild haunts of the
barbarous savages of America without murmuring or repining, and will be submissive in all things,
whatsoever is communicated to me. I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity
presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants
and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I
will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and
bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush
their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the
same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the
steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honour, rank, dignity or authority of the
persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be
directed so to do by any agents of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Father of
the Society of Jesus. In confirmation of which I hereby dedicate my life, soul, and all corporal
powers, and with the dagger which I now receive I will subscribe my name written in my blood in
testimony thereof; and should I prove false, or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and
fellow soldiers of the militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet and my throat from ear to ear,
my belly be opened and sulphur burned therein with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon
me on earth, and my soul shall be tortured by demons in eternal hell forever. That I will in voting
always vote for a Knight of Columbus in preference to a Protestant, especially a Mason, and that I
will leave my party so to do; that if two Catholics are on the ticket I will satisfy myself which is the
better supporter of Mother Church and vote accordingly. That I will not deal with or employ a
Protestant if in my power to deal with or employ a Catholic. That I will place Catholic girls in
Protestant families that a weekly report may be made of the inner movements of the heretics.
That I will provide myself with arms and ammunition that I may be in readiness when the word is
passed, or I am commanded to defend the Church either as an individual or with the militia of the
Pope. All of which I,_______________, do swear by the blessed Trinity and blessed sacrament
which I am now to receive to perform and on part to keep this my oath. In testimony hereof, I take
this most holy and blessed sacrament of the Eucharist and witness the same further with my
name written with the point of this dagger dipped in my own blood and seal in the face of this holy
sacrament”.

(He receives the wafer from the Superior and writes his name with the point of his dagger dipped
in his own blood taken from over his heart.)

(Superior speaks:)

“You will now rise to your feet and I will instruct you in the Catechism necessary to make yourself
known to any member of the Society of Jesus belonging to this rank. In the first place, you, as a
Brother Jesuit, will with another mutually make the ordinary sign of the cross as any ordinary
Roman Catholic would; then one crosses his wrists, the palms of his hands open, and the other in
answer crosses his feet, one above the other; the first points with forefinger of the right hand to
the centre of the palm of the left, the other with the forefinger of the left hand points to the centre
of the palm of the right; the first then with his right hand makes a circle around his head, touching
it; the other then with the forefinger of his left hand touches the left side of his body just below his
heart; the first then with his right hand draws it across the throat of the other, and the latter then
with a dagger down the stomach and abdomen of the first. The first then says Iustum; and the
other answers Necar; the first Reges; the other answers Impious. The first will then present a
small piece of paper folded in a peculiar manner, four times, which the other will cut longitudinally
and on opening the name Jesu will be found written upon the head and arms of a cross three
times. You will then give and receive with him the following questions and answers:

From whither do you come?

Answer: The Holy faith.

Whom do you serve?

Answer: The Holy Father at Rome, the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church Universal
throughout the world.

Who commands you?

Answer: The Successor of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus or the Soldiers
of Jesus Christ.

Who received you?

Answer: A venerable man in white hair.
How?
Answer: With a naked dagger, I kneeling upon the cross beneath the banners of the Pope and of
our sacred order.

Did you take an oath?

Answer: I did, to destroy heretics and their governments and rulers, and to spare neither age, nor
sex, nor condition; to be as a corpse without any opinion or will of my own, but to implicitly obey
my Superiors in all things without hesitation or murmuring.

Will you do that?

Answer: I will.

How do you travel?

Answer: In the bark of Peter the fisherman.

Whither do you travel?

Answer: To the four quarters of the globe.

For what purpose?

Answer: To obey the orders of my General and Superiors and execute the will of the Pope and
faithfully fulfil the conditions of my oaths.

Go ye, then, into all the world and take possession of all lands in the name of the Pope. He who
will not accept him as the Vicar of Jesus and his Vice-Regent on earth, let him be accursed and
exterminated”.

We take the example of the Jesuits because they are closely connected with the strengthening of
papal authority in the world. Indeed, the primary cause for the creation of the Order was the need
for special soldiers and defenders of the absolute theocracy of the Papacy. Ignatius Loyola, an
ex-soldier of fortune, imparted the military spirit to the new order. He made of it a fighting
company and called it the Company of Jesus, just as a company of soldiers sometimes takes the
name of its General.

“Of the various vows, that of obedience was considered the most important: complete, absolute,
unquestionable, blind, non-critical obedience to the orders of the society, a complete surrender of
thought and judgement, an absolute abandonment of freedom.......that any obedience which falls
short of making the superior’s will one’s own, in inward affection as well as outward effect, is lax
and imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly good and
praiseworthy, is disobedience, and that the sacrifice of the intellect is the third and greatest grade
of obedience, well pleasing to God.” (VATICAN IN WORLD POLITICS BY AVRO MANHATTAN
quoting H.G.WELLS, CRUX ANSATA).

That such an obedience which sacrifices the intellect is pleasing to the God of Abraham is no
surprise because He started it all by exhorting Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge; and the Church and the Catholic Hierarchy, because they wear the mantle of Jesus,
(who also reveals shades of the despot in unguarded moments), cannot be anything less than
relentlessly despotic in their content and style of functioning.

The Christian God’s paradise on earth, the garden of eden, closely resembles totalitarian regimes
where one is granted the right to live as long as one does not pose a threat to the ruling power.
And like all dictators who control knowledge and information, this God enjoined upon man to live
in ignorance. Adam and Eve, and earlier, archangel Nicholos had to suffer exemplary
punishment, in order to terrorise humanity into never challenging and disobeying the will of God
and by implication God’s representative on earth, be it the King or the Pope. God’s totalitarian
authority had been badly eroded both in Heaven ( resulting in the Fall of the Angel )and on Earth
(resulting in the Fall of Man ). And this jealous God continued to smart under the insult. The saga
of the death of Christ and the theology of His resurruction has to be thus seen in the light of this
insult. God’s authority had to be restored totally and His will exemplified. And Christ was the
instrument. And because he was the instrument of God, he had to be conceived pure, without the
taint of the original sin of disobedience and knowledge which also included the knowledge of
physical intimacy as the means of procreation. And so Jesus was conceived by Mary through
immaculate conception. As the New Testament testifies.

According to the New Testament, Jesus was punished with death on the cross by the Roman
government on charges of sedition and subversion. Jesus, as per Christian theology was sent by
God to earth to proclaim His authority and establish His supremacy throughout the length and
breadth of the earth. Therefore when Jesus spoke of his Father, the God of Abraham, to the
people at large, he spoke in the temporal and political idiom of king and kingdom. He could not
have chosen another idiom because this God wanted absolute power - power in both the spiritual
and temporal arena. Jesus spoke in the idiom of establishing another power centre in the
territories under Roman rule - the Kingdom Of God. The Romans like the Greeks, worshipped
several gods and goddesses and because the chosen people were under the rule of the Roman
empire, the opportunity to challenge the power structure was too good to miss. The language and
idiom was not religious or spiritual. The subject was God but the language and idiom was that of
power, of authority. The Son of God wanted the most powerful empire of the times to subordinate
itself to an alien ‘only one God’ who demanded that both religious and temporal power be vested
in Him. And it was because Pontius Pilate the Roman procurator of Judaea believed that Jesus
was speaking the language of sedition, that he ordered Jesus to be crucified - the maximum
punishment for sedition and treachery, for rajadroham. It is no accident but the calculated act of a
humiliated and enraged God that the Church set up its headquarters in Rome, the kingdom which
had thwarted Christ’s mission to establish the kingdom of God in Jesus’ own lifetime - and
established an alternate centre for power, an alternate kingdom in enemy territory.

It is ironical that the Son of God suffered the same punishment for subversion as that suffered by
all humankind as per God’s decree, for Eve’s perceived act of subversion when she persuaded
Adam to disobey the will of God. As per God’s plan and as per Christian theology, by dying for
the supreme cause of establishing God’s ultimate and inviolable authority, and by submitting
Himself to God’s will - to strive to establish His kingdom no matter what the sacrifice - Jesus’
death (the beginning of the glorified tradition of martyrdom of missionaries (who have all been
killed by enraged victims of evangelism and conversion in the cause of the Church, faithfully
imitated by Peter who is also alleged to have been crucified in Rome) redeems humanity from the
original sin of disobedience and subversion. So the world is saved (salvation is possible) only
through faith in Jesus Christ and implicit faith in and obedience to, the Church and her Hierarchy.
And after the lifetime of Christ, the mandate to save the world from eternal damnation has been
passed on to the Church; Because, says the Church, the Church is the bride of Christ, His body.
So there is salvation only through baptism, only through the Church. So if the Church has to
sustain its existence, it has to be continuously engaged in the task of finding lost or condemned
souls for salvation.

The Church’s insistence that it is its existential right and mandate to convert the world to
Christianity and gather all nations into Christ and His Father must be understood in this context.
The New Testament and the Church (let us not forget, both are European constructs) would have
us believe that Christ ordered the apostles to go forth into the world to make of all nations His
disciples so that all people may be gathered into the fold of this only God. And because the
Father of Jesus wanted absolute power, the Church can want no less. By the will of God, says
the Church, our power is absolute and total. There can be no division of power between the
spiritual and temporal areas of life. “We are informed by the texts of the Gospels that in this
Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal. For when the
Apostles say, ‘behold, here are two swords..........both therefore are in the power of the Church,
that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the
Church but the latter by the Church (emphasis mine); the former in the hands of the priest; the
latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.” This desire
for absolute power is thus characteristic not only of the ‘only one God of Abraham’ but also of
Jesus Christ, his successor Simon turned Peter and his successors, the popes of the Catholic
faith and of the USA and its satellite white/christian european allies, collectively known as the
‘WEST’.

PART II: THE COURSE OF POWER

In this all-consuming desire for total power, both sacerdotal and royal, the Church was propelled
on a course of ruthless conquest and subjugation that was to have irreparable and tragic
consequences for the rest of the world when entire civilizations were wiped out, peoples were
exterminated and cultures destroyed - all in the name of this ‘only one God’. To understand the
phenomenal growth of Christianity in the first three centuries after the death of Jesus Christ,
culminating in the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, we must first disabuse
ourselves of the myth that Jesus Christ obeyed the will of God and chose to die for the
redemption of humans. Jesus Christ did indeed obey the will of God and died for it; but he was
sentenced to death for sedition and like all astute politicians who aspire for power, Peter chose to
make the tragic death of his leader into something profound and spiritual, into something nobler,
in order that his own ambitions for temporal and religious power may be coated with the
protective veneer of Christ’s ‘martyrdom’.

Whatever the world knows of Jesus Christ the man, is through the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke
and Paul. The New Testament (in spite of the Church’s new strategy to emphasise Jesus’ ‘Asian’
origin) is a non-Asian construct and there is no historical data or evidence that the four apostles
were Asian, African or natives of the Americas, Carribean or Oceania. Jesus Christ, in the words
of these apostles, was born on earth to establish the kingdom of God. He could not do it in his
lifetime and so he is reported to have commanded the apostles, “Go, therefore, and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit; teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt.28:19ff.). Jesus also said
“Go into the whole world, preach the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized
shall be saved; but he who does not believe, shall be condemned”. And thus were condemned to
die through ruthless extermination by the Christian pioneer fathers the natives of the Caribbean
and the New World and thus were condemned to abject slavery and loss of freedom and life, the
peoples of Asia and Africa - peoples professing non-Christian faiths, peoples with a different
vision and way of life.

This is the sentiment that was expressed by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302 when in one of his
encyclicals, ‘Unam Sanctum’ he declared that no one who is outside the Ark is saved. Note
Jesus’ words, he who does not believe is condemned; but conversely, he who believes is not
saved. He must not only believe but also be baptized. Just as Muslims must accept Allah and the
‘last prophet’ as a package, true Christians must accept Christ and the Church as a package.
Civilizations, nations and communities which were wiped out entirely or subjugated by the West
and the Church, had no comprehensive civilizational defense against this compulsive and violent
desire to conquer, convert or kill. Religion, in the West, and its polity and economy, its institutions,
its science and technology, and all ideologies - whether of democracy, totalitarianism, capitalism
or communism - they are all suffused by desire for power, by expansionist ambitions, by the
desire to homogenize - that all peoples and all nations must be converted or compelled to accept
their worldview. They are all competing with each other for space, they are all competing for
numbers and they are all designed to conquer something. And it is this same compulsive desire
for power that informs Christ’s exhortation to his Apostles to “make disciples of all nations”. It is
interesting that he says ‘nations’ and not ‘people’. God wants Jesus to establish a kingdom, so it
has to be nations, not merely random individuals or people. Organized conversions to conquer
territory, random conversions to collect numbers. This has been the consistent strategy of
Christianity, the Church and all Christian missionaries for the last 2000 years. They are all frozen
in time.
Having converted Emperor Constantine to Christianity on his deathbed in AD 374 (or so she
claims) , and having successfully converted the Roman Empire into a Christian kingdom, the
Church embarked upon the course of strengthening its hold on the Roman empire, to expand its
influence and to conquer other nations. To this end, it set about structuring itself by establishing a
rigid clerical Hierarchy which would henceforth not only control and administer all properties and
all activities of the Church but would also assume political and temporal authority in nations which
had converted to Catholicism and even in nations which were neither Christian nor catholic, but
where there were catholics. The Church’s mission was martial and notwithstanding Jesus’ pious
professions of the virtues of poverty, the Church set itself the task of acquiring wealth which
would give it a status on par with nations and empires and which would accord the pope the
status of a King and that of his cardinals the status of ‘princes of the Church’; and those cardinals
who are deputed by the pope on diplomatic tasks even today in some republics of the world retain
their position of princes of the blood and occupy, in the diplomatic hierarchy of these republics, a
place above that of ambassadors.

It will help us better to understand the political content of the Church and the Pope by paying
close attention to the role of the Church in the crucial years at the end of the nineteenth century
up until the first half of the twentieth century. I would like to go into some detail here on the call by
the RSS chief Shri K.S.Sudarshan for the need to create national churches as in China and
Vietnam.

Here I would like to refer to the article by Shri S.Gurumurthy in the New Indian Express dated
21st October, 2000 in which Shri Gurumurthy has emphasised the need to debate the idea of
establishing national churches irrespective of Shri Sudarshan’s exhortations to the Christian
community in India to do so. To this end, Shri Gurumurthy has described the origin and growth in
history of denominational and national churches in Europe and Africa. While he is right for the
most part (he has relied on the Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion for his facts), in tracing the
course of the history of these national churches, I am not sure of the accuracy of his definition of
the term ‘concordat’ with respect to the Vatican particularly because he says, “Under the
concordats, the national churches became independent of the Vatican.” And to substantiate his
claim he cites the examples of France (in 1905), Italy (in 1894), and Spain (in 1978). It is quite
possible that Shri Gurumurthy may have misunderstood the significance of the events concerning
the Vatican and these countries in 1905, 1894 and 1978.

A concordat is an agreement which is negotiated and concluded by the Vatican with other nation-
states to define the relationship of the Vatican and the catholic Hierarchy in that State with the
Government and also to define the status of the catholic religion and its institutions in that State.
Once the concordat is concluded, the Vatican sends its representative, usually of the rank of
cardinal or even archbishop, as the papal nuncio to head the Hierarchy in that State and also to
deal with the Government on issues relating to the interests of the catholic religion and its
adherents. When it is not possible to conclude a concordat, the nuncio strives to reach a
compromise which becomes a modus vivendi.

Before I come to the countries specified by Shri Gurumurthy as having established national
churches through the signing of concordats, (which is not the case), I think it is pertinent to
present in brief the reasons behind Shri Sudarshan’s call to establish national catholic churches
in India independent of the Vatican.

The task of the papal representative is to further the diplomatic and political interests of the
Vatican and above all the spiritual interests of the Catholic Church as a religious institution. His
mission therefore serves a dual purpose. The papal representative has at his disposal not only
the vast diplomatic machinery but also the religious machinery of the Vatican of both the country
to which he has been accredited as well as that outside it. He will have at his disposal the
Hierarchy of a given country – from cardinals, archbishops, and bishops down to the village priest
or the local parish priest. Moreover, the Catholic organizations of a social, cultural or political
character would obey his instructions. The result is that a nuncio can exercise formidable
pressure upon a government – pressure of a religious-political nature that is denied to any other
diplomat. And it is this danger, which Shri Sudarshan perceives so clearly, and which can
interfere with and even impede sovereign decisions taken by our government with regard to our
social, political and religious arrangements, which probably caused him to call upon the
Christians of our country to establish national churches.

The Catholic Church, more than any other denomination, does not confine itself merely to the
religious sphere. It has always held that with her and her alone is vested absolute power – both
royal/temporal and sacerdotal with all the accompanying wealth, pomp and privileges such power
implies. This has brought the Vatican directly in contact and conflict with monarchs and other
Heads of State of the Christian nations of Europe on several occasions. A good catholic owes
blind obedience to his Church and puts his Church’s interests before any social or political matter
concerning his country. Since this body comprises millions of Catholics living all over the world
who are bound implicitly to follow the dictates of the Vatican and obediently honour every word of
the pope, it is easy to see the long-range power that the catholic Church can exercise in the
affairs of these countries. The Catholic Church therefore cannot and will not avoid interfering in
the social and political affairs of these countries.

Thus it happens that in catholic countries where the affairs of the state are conducted according
to the principles of the catholic Church, the State is in harmony with the Church or the Vatican.
But when the Church is confronted by a hostile State or parliament (as has happened repeatedly
in the nations of Europe), then conflict becomes inevitable and the Church and State declare war
on each other. The State may pass such legislation as it may deem necessary, regardless of the
Church. The Church, whenever this has happened (and it happened in Italy, France and Spain
during the years of republicanism, as also in the fledgling State of Yugoslavia which came into
being after the dismantling of the Hapsburg empire), has ordered its clergy to preach against
such laws and advised Catholics to oppose them and the government that passed them. All
sections of the press owned by Catholics have always taken a stand against such governments
and the war declared by the Church against the State is so relentless that individual catholic
members of the government have even voted against the government on these issues. All
religious, social and political organizations formed by Catholics publicly and unitedly oppose such
policies and boycott such laws. The Church then instructs her Hierarchy to use all the institutional
power in its control to align with any force opposed to the hostile government, to bring it down and
bring in a government which would be in line and harmony with the Church and her policies (as it
happened in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Croatia in the years at the close of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and in the years between the First
and Second World War).

It was to neutralize the Church and stop her Hierarchy from interfering in social and political
affairs of a nation, that several countries of Europe, despite the fact that they have always been
nominally ‘catholic’ countries, had shorn the catholic Church of her power and the catholic religion
of its privileged position as the State religion and also confiscated her wealth and property. The
Enlightenment, which gave to Europe the philosophies and ideologies of socialism, liberalism,
republicanism, democracy, and communism, had severely eroded the moral authority and the
temporal and religious power of the Catholic Church beginning with the era of the French
Revolution and this erosion touched the nadir in the closing years of the nineteenth century and
lasted well into the middle of the twentieth century when the Church lost six-sevenths of her
adherents first to liberalism and then to socialism and communism.

I will now very briefly narrate the history of the relationship of the Catholic Church with the
countries that Shri Gurumurthy has cited as examples of concordats, which supposedly
established national churches in these countries. My point is, a concordat does exactly the
opposite of what is claimed by Shri Gurumurthy. A concordat between the Vatican and a country
establishes whenever possible, the supremacy of the catholic religion in that country and accords
the Church and her Hierarchy high status within that country. Implicitly, and more importantly, this
means that the catholic Church of the country which signs a concordat with the Vatican, shares
umbilical ties with the Vatican. There would be no point in the Vatican signing a concordat with a
country if the Catholic Church of that country were to sever its ties with the Vatican and establish
a national Church. This has never been known to happen and it is inconceivable that Italy, France
and Spain, which have always been ‘catholic nations’ would ever sign a concordat with the
Vatican to establish national churches, which would be independent of the Vatican. Let us start
with France.

The Catholic Church in France had always exercised an enormous influence on the social and
political life of France. The Church had always supported the monarchy and the monarchs in turn
had conferred high honour and privileges on the Church. But all this came to an end with the
French Revolution. Church and State separated, the status of the clergy disappeared and Church
lands were declared to be national property. But the Church recovered from this setback to regain
some of her former privileges when she concluded a concordat with Napoleon Bonaparte, a
staunch critic of the Revolution and as much of a dictator as the pope or any other monarch. But
once again, after the fall of Bonaparte, the Church began to lose ground and never recovered its
position until the years between the first and second world wars. The Third Republic was
established in France in 1870 and this was the beginning of the protracted war that the Catholic
Church would wage against all popular movements inspired by the ideologies of republicanism,
socialism and communism. Indeed from then on, successive popes (popes Leo XIII, Pius XI and
Pius XII) wrote blistering encyclicals roundly condemning liberalism, socialism, republicanism and
communism.

The Church proclaimed “a holy crusade against the godless Republic” and bitterly opposed the
‘atheist government’ for seeking to deprive the Church of her inalienable rights. At every hostile
measure, the Church and the Vatican invoked the curse of God and called upon all Catholics to
do everything to destroy the Republic for daring to give free education to the people, for insisting
on civil marriage and for confining the teaching in State schools to State-classified teachers.
Things grew from bad to worse and finally in July 1904, diplomatic relations between France and
the Vatican were finally broken and the Act of Separation in 1905 brought the conflict to a climax.
The Act guaranteed freedom of conscience and the exercise of public worship but religion was
not to be recognized by, nor to receive financial support from the State.

The Vatican pronounced anathema on the Republic for denying supremacy to the catholic religion
and for putting all religions on an equal footing. It called upon all Catholics in France and the
hierarchy to do everything in their power to destroy the Republic. The Church regained much of
its lost ground when the Republic surrendered to Germany and when a catholic dictator, General
Petain assumed control of France with the active support of the Vatican, Hitler and Mussolini – all
of whom had collaborated to destroy the Republic and to install a fascist dictatorship in France as
in Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria. These dictatorships through concordats signed with the
Vatican, granted the Vatican special privileges, restored the catholic religion and the Church to
their former status of supremacy because the Vatican pledged its considerable strength and
power to support these dictators, all of whom had one goal – to wipe out communism and to
establish catholic nation-states in all of Europe.

It is probably to this Act of Separation in France, in 1905, that Shri Gurumurthy is referring to. Far
from being a concordat, which is an agreement or a treaty, it was an estrangement of the Church
from the State, and while the Church suffered a terrible blow to its status, France still did not
establish a national catholic church that year, as is being claimed by Shri Gurumurthy. The
catholic establishment as I have just illustrated, was firmly under the control of the Vatican and
the Vatican was doing everything in its power to destroy the Republic. The same is true of Italy
and Spain. Liberalism, republicanism and communism began to spread fast in these countries
and the Vatican supported and brought into government terrible dictators like Dolfuss in Austria,
Hitler in Germany, Gen. Miguel de Rivera and later Gen. Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy.
The Church suffered great erosion in numbers in all these countries from about the last three
decades in the nineteenth century until the First World War, a period during which the Catholic
Church was greatly debilitated in power and influence. But in the years between the two world
wars, Popes Pius XI and XII encouraged and even actively co-operated with these dictators to
violently overthrow popular governments in their respective countries to assume power. As in
France, so too in Italy and Spain, some governments denied supremacy to the Catholic Church
during this period. But in a few years, in post-world war Europe, the Vatican had no problems
shrugging off any sense of guilt or shame for having colluded with fascist dictators and
established concordats with democratic governments in Europe which allowed the Church total
control of the catholic establishment in these countries.

Fear of a total take-over of Europe by communism bound together the Vatican and these western
governments all of whom now had only one stated objective – to destroy communism (and the
Orthodox Church of the Soviet bloc, in the process). The Vatican lost its privileged position in
Spain after the death of Gen. Franco but the Vatican came to terms with the democratic
government in Spain as it had elsewhere in Europe. The State in Spain refused patronage to the
Catholic Church. Spain had a new constitution in 1978 and as per that constitution, far from
establishing a national Church as Shri Gurumurthy is saying, the government signed a concordat
with the Vatican, an agreement by which not only did the Spanish government come to some
financial arrangements with the Vatican, but by which the Vatican was also allowed to retain
control of all catholic educational institutions in Spain and the Church was allowed total freedom
in administering her affairs and institutions.

I have gone into this issue in this detail because I had to correct the impression that concordats
are signed by the Vatican to establish national churches independent of the Vatican. Except for
the national catholic Church in China and the catholic church in England which comes under the
jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, all other catholic churches, in India as in the rest of Asia,
Mexico and in Europe, are still under the direct control of the Vatican and adopt the Vatican’s
agenda as their own even if the agenda causes social, political and religious friction and even
turmoil in these countries.

The Vatican’s agenda has never changed nor has it metamorphosed into anything else. The
Catholic Church has always declared that she is missionary by her very nature and as such her
task, indeed her religious mandate is to evangelize, and plant the cross in every part of the world.
The Vatican, indeed all Christian denominations have set themselves the task of converting to
Christianity, those professing non-Abrahamic, non-aggressive religions like Hinduism, Buddhism,
Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism and other great faiths of South and South-east Asia. To this end
she now speaks intensely of the right to freedom of worship and conscience – a right that she
opposed barely a 100 years ago. Then it was because she did not want other religions to be
given a standing equal to the catholic faith. But today she wants the right to freedom of religion
and worship because she wants the right to plant the cross among people who worship other
Gods. The Vatican insists on political pluralism wherever Christians are in the minority, which
gives her the right to exist along with other religions to operate her agenda. But she denies
religious pluralism and insists that in the end only the Catholic faith ought to prevail because only
the Vatican is the sole repository of the Ultimate Religious Truth. And Christians in India and the
establishment intellectuals and vote bank politicians, while they are adamantly and deafeningly
silent about what the pope said on our own soil last November and want to pretend that the
Vatican declaration ‘Dominus Jesus’ never happened, yet are raucous in their protests against
Shri Sudarshan’s call for establishing national churches.

The incumbent pope of the Catholic Church, has in the last decade, been talking of the virtues of
democracy, freedom of conscience and religion, and human dignity; and how totalitarian and non-
democratic political regimes violate these basic ‘human rights’. We must realize that this pope like
all his predecessors is referring to non-catholic and anti-religious totalitarian and/or communist
regimes. It is ironic that the world listens to him with total respect and a willing suspension of
disbelief; because it was not so long ago in history that other Vicars of Christ had declared
through encyclicals and letters apostolic that these concepts and ideologies were anathema to
the Church and were intended primarily and solely to rob the Church of temporal power besides
seriously eroding catholicism. And it was not long ago (during the period between the 1st and the
2nd world wars) that the Church actively encouraged catholic totalitarian regimes in Mussolini’s
Italy, Gen.Franco’s Spain, Dolfuss’Austria, Hitler’s Germany, Pavelic’s Croatia and later, Diem’s
South Vietnam - regimes with some of the worst records in human rights - and collaborated with
them actively in several countries across the world for the sole purpose of annihilating
communism which was spreading to every nook and corner of the hitherto Christian nations. In
the context of human rights, human dignity and freedom of conscience and religion too, the world
seems disinclined to reminding the Church that it was the Church and her Hierarchy which
presided over the inquisition for over 500 years against christians and non-christians alike ( and
as recently as in South Vietnam in the ‘60s ), presided over the destruction of the cultures of the
natives of the Americas, eulogised Christopher Columbus and his murderous politico-economic-
religious mission of looking for new worlds to be ‘civilized’ and brought under the Church, silently
watched for over two centuries European Christians carry on the inhuman and horrific trading of
slaves now known as the Atlantic slave trade, and proactively encouraged colonialism as the only
means of civilizing barbaric natives steeped in Satan worship and evil rituals. Not that alone, it
eulogised Hitler and Mussolini as crusaders against bolshevism and exhorted the Hierarchy in
these countries to extend all possible help and support to these and other fascist dictators.

It is important for non-christian peoples and civilizations never to forget that Columbus’ discovery
of America, the advent of Vasco da Gama and Ignatius Loyola to India, the Atlantic slave trade
and the resulting large-scale migration of europeans to America and the Carribean, and the
colonising of Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand with the resulting extermination of the
native peoples and destruction of their religions and culture - all of this was done in the name of
christian missionary zeal and was motivated by religion alone. These ventures had the blessings
of the catholic Church and several popes have not only issued encyclicals and letters apostolic
extolling the deeds but have justified the inhumanity of it all by commemorating anniversaries in
their honour. The catholic Church grew upon the ashes of this colossal destruction - destruction
and extermination of peoples, whole cultures, communities, religions and ways of life. Its religious
and temporal power grew in scope and might and so did its wealth. The Church owes its
phenomenal growth in no small measure to its devoted Hierarchy and to the Hierarchy’s
incomparable capacity to co-opt Kings, nations and States in their mission to evangelize, ‘civilize’
and homogenize the world.

THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH AND ITS HIERARCHY

“The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature” declares the document ‘DECREE ON THE
MISSION ACTIVITY OF THE CHURCH - AD GENTES’ . This guiding principle on re-affirming the
nature of the catholic Church was enunciated by Pope Paul VI in December 1965, at the
conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. And the Church defines its ‘missionary’ nature thus: “
Missions is the term usually given to those particular undertakings by which the heralds of the
Gospel, sent out by the Church and going forth into the whole world, carry out the task of
preaching the Gospel and planting the Church among peoples or groups who do not yet believe
in Christ. These undertakings are brought to completion by missionary activity and are mostly
exercised in certain territories recognized by the Holy See. The proper purpose of this missionary
activity is evangelization, and the planting of the Church among those peoples and groups where
it has not yet taken root”.

The Church is thus consumed by this compulsive and relentless pursuit of finding more and more
nations to convert and more and more souls to save. Because the Church derives its mandate
from Christ’s order to the apostles to go and make disciples of all nations who will have to owe
allegiance to this ‘only one God’, the nature of the Church too is both political and religious - in
that order. The Church believes that all humans are born with the terrible taint of the ‘original sin’
and are in a state of damnation from which they can be saved only through Christ; and since
Christ is dead, the propaganda of the fairy tale of the possibility of redemption can be sustained
only through the living institution of the Church which is variously believed to be the body and the
bride of Christ and through strident and impassioned promises of Christ’s ‘second coming’.

The Church has come to the arrogant conclusion that all peoples of the world are born in sin and
that they all need to be saved. The concept of salvation (which even Hindus ignorantly use as
being interchangeable with ‘moksha’) thus hinges on the concept of being born in sin and the
resulting destiny of Man being damnation and therefore the need to be ‘saved’. Hindus’ concept
of ‘paapa’ is not sin and Hindus do not believe any part of creation to be damned. For us, all
creation is sacred and all beings in Creation, an expression of the Divine. Therefore there is no
religious or theological context for being saved or the need for salvation. As for ‘paapa’, no matter
what the reparation that Hindus may choose to make to atone for their guilt, there is no escape
from Karma or the fruits of all actions. The driving force of life, the law of Karma makes Hindus
solely responsible for their thoughts, words and deeds. And it is the individual alone (if he has the
grace of the Divine ) who can break the chain and cycle of Karma.

But because the Church believes that it is the sole repository of Truth (or Truth as it perceives it
to be), the Church declares that it is a Christ-given mandate for this ‘truth’ to be made known to
all and not that alone - it also declared that it is its mandate to rid this world of ‘error’ and
‘falsehood’ with regard to beliefs about ‘God’ and ‘after life’. This latter mandate has to be
repeatedly emphasised by the Church if the faithful have to accept that the Church and the
Hierarchy to be the sole repositories of Truth, and consequently, the pope as God’s
representative on earth, to be infallible and above reproach. The Church, down the ages rid
society and nations of what she considered to be ‘errors and falsehoods’ through various punitive
measures - the most horrendous of which was 500 years of merciless and murderous Church
inquisition and the burning of tens of thousands of women on the stakes after having branded
them witches. Very soon in the course of history, the Church expanded its mandate, and the
jurisdiction of the Inquisition was not merely God and after-life but now included the nature and
purpose of the Church and her Hierarchy, the activities of the priests and the clergy and the
missionaries. The Goa Inquisition which the English-educated in this country and the majority of
the Christians in India want us to believe never happened, is testimony to the soulless and
merciless nature of the Church and her Hierarchy.

The Vatican exercises inordinate influence on national and international affairs and at no time in
its history was it so true as in the 20th century. It is true even now, in the much touted and much
awaited 21st century. The power of the Church rests on the following:

1.

There are Christians and Catholics in particular, in every continent of the world.
2.

Wherever there is the Church, there is the Hierarchy.

3.

The Hierarchy controls not only the local church and its activities but also all the medical,
educational, social and charitable institutions either owned by or run in the name of the Church
and managed and administered by Christians.

This translates into influence over the people who avail of their services (potential lost souls
for conversion or fertile minds to be Christianised and Westernised) which translates into
institutional influence over several governments, local and national.
4.

The military and economic might of the West including the institutions of the West like the UN,
world Human Rights organizations and the NATO are solidly with and behind the Vatican and the
pope, for both the West and the Vatican have a common goal and common raison-d’etre - to
perpetuate their power and their view of life at the cost of non-white and non-Christian peoples of
the world.

The faithful are exhorted to owe ultimate allegiance, not to their locality, community or their nation
but only to their religion and consequently to the Church. The Hierarchy and all Catholics in
general are fanatically committed to protecting and furthering the cause of the Church; which is -
to expand its religious control over all the world. The Church is committed to saving the souls of
not only all Christians but also all peoples of all nations. The Church uses its political power and
influence to further its religious mandate and uses its religious power and influence to strengthen
and expand its political power. Politics and religion, in so far as they coexist within the body of the
Church, are symbiotic in their relationship.

The nature of God, the nature of Christ’s mission on Earth of establishing the kingdom of God,
and the nature of the Church are all defined by one thing only - religion through power and power
through religion. The power of the Pope and the Vatican can be gauged from the fact that the
Prime Minister of India was forced to go to the Vatican to pay obeisance to the pope and to
explain to him that India was committed to protecting the Christians That the pope didn’t pay any
heed nor believe a word of what our Prime Minister told him was emphasised when the next day,
the pope expressed grave concern about the state of affairs in India and pulled India’s ears for
not permitting to the full, Freedom of Religion and Conscience in spite of being a democratic
country.

There is no doubt that the West and the Church exert enormous pressures on national
governments to protect their interests and demand explanations of Heads of Governments when
Christians, the Church and missionaries or Macdonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken or Monsanto
are attacked. There is no parallel of the Vatican or any other Church or the Heads of any white
nation going to any part of the world to pay obeisance to any religious leader or meet with any
Head of State to explain away systemic and sustained racist discrimination and attacks against
non-whites and non-Christians in their countries. The Head of the Indian State submitted an
account of himself and his government vis-a vis the Christians of India to God’s representative on
earth. India is now officially, and well and truly a part of the kingdom of God.

The power of the pope derives not only from his vast and astronomically rich empire but also from
all the white, developed nations, which use aid to developing, non-Christian nations as the stick to
beat them to submission. They also use organizational and institutional clout to Christianise and
Westernise the minds of the influential in these countries - the English print and electronic media,
academia, free-wheeling intellectuals who are nevertheless Christian in the values they espouse.
Thus condemnation of the Hindus in India and support for all the nefarious activities of the Church
and the priests within India comes from these very quarters - from Indians themselves who have
sold their soul to the West and to Western values.

We have seen this from very close quarters in recent days in their response to the ordinance
brought in by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu banning forcible religious conversion.

THE TAMIL NADU ORDINANCE AND THE REACTION OF THE SECULAR

‘The defenders of the faith’ are hysterical again. The same groups - the same editorialists, the
same NGOs, the same ‘eminent scholars’, and the same news commentators – who are anti-
Ayodhya movement, anti-Pokharan II, anti- NCERT syllabus, anti-changes-in the ICHR set up –
simply put, the anti-Hindutva groups or Anti-Hindutva coalition. The groups that do not, at any
cost, want the Hindus to organize themselves or assert their political and religious identity – they
are all having another wonderful, self-indulgent attack of hysterics yet again. This time it is to
protest the ordinance banning religious conversions in Tamil Nadu.

The substance of all their objections and abuse, as stated in three news reports and one editorial
in The Hindu dated October 8, 2002, and as reported in newspapers and news channels in the
first three days after the ordinance was brought in, can be summarized in the following points.
Even a prolonged hysterical attack compounded by temper tantrums is not going to add anything
more to the substance of this criticism, no matter how may more newspapers and news channels
carry reports of this ordinance. The abuse and threats by the various Christian groups and
churches and the defenders of the faith may get more strident, more violent and dramatic but this
is all the substance there is to their protests.

1.

The ordinance is a violation of religious freedom and aimed at curtailing the freedom of the
Christian minority. It amounts to imposing draconian curbs on an individual’s fundamental right to
religious freedom - objection
2.

The draconian ordinance militates against the secular spirit of the government of a party,
which swept to power especially with the minority vote bank – objection and abuse
3.

The Chief Minister is ‘appeasing the deputy Prime Minister and attempting to please the
Sangh Parivar, ‘the Hindutva brigade’ - abuse
4.

Rev. Valson Thampu on Star news at 10 p.m on Tuesday, the 8th October, with a phony
accent that is characteristic of most intellectuals parading their intellect on Star TV: The Chief
Minister is seeking to flaunt her religious identity. The more corrupt politicians are the more they
flaunt their religious identity. (Star News, thankfully cut him off even as he was halfway through
doing the Carl Jung act). abuse (with a phony accent, let me emphasise).
5.

The ordinance targets Christians engaged in poverty alleviation. It will sound a virtual death-
knell even to genuine activity of ministering to the poor, the sick, and the illiterate – areas where
the missionaries have a long and enviable record. objection
6.

The ordinance would destroy the secular, multi-religious fabric, and peaceful co-existence in
Tamil Nadu, the “Dravidian soul of India”. It is a slur on Tamil Nadu’s liberal traditions. Objection
bordering on abuse
7.

It violates Articles 25 and 12 (2) on which foundation the secular Indian democratic republic is
formed. It is a regressive and patently anti-minority legislation with serious constitutional
implications for a citizen’s fundamental right to personal freedoms affecting profession, practice
and propagation of religion (Article 25). The ordinance also violates Article 19. objection
8.

It violates article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that
everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – a pseudo-objection, a
long shot forced by desperation.

Even as I am writing this response to the shrill criticism of the ordinance, the news on a English
news channel is that the Christian groups in the state are threatening to shut down the 4000 odd
educational institutions in their control – “for fear that these institutions may be considered
allurement”, they simper coyly. The Christian priests are probably hoping that students and
parents of these institutions will bring similar pressure, (as happened with the relatives of those
held hostage on the airplane hijacked to Kandahar in December 1999), to bear on the Tamil Nadu
government and the state government too will succumb to mass hysteria and withdraw the
ordinance. Good luck. They should do the same with their hospitals too. There may well be
another ordinance allowing the state government to take over all these institutions and I am just
as sure that Hindu religious leaders will be more than willing to take over the administration of
their hospitals too.

“Genuine activity of ministering to the poor, the sick and the illiterate will be affected”, says The
Hindu editorial. It will affect poverty alleviation says another Christian group. But why? Why
should this ordinance banning religious conversion affect the Christians’ self-conscious, pious
desire to alleviate poverty and serve the poor, the sick and the illiterate? Unless they are fishing
in troubled waters, exploiting the vulnerability of the deprived and offering them bribes and
allurements, besides making false claims and promises of miracle cures and magical prayers, to
convert them to their faith? If the Christian groups were indeed offering selfless care for the needy
and the under-privileged, as they claim and as is being attested to by the editor of The Hindu, like
the Ramakrishna Mutt, the Sikhs, the Jains and the innumerable Hindu religious and other
charitable institutions, they would have no reason to fear this ordinance or its implementation. But
the very fact that they claim that it will indeed affect poverty alleviation work is proof enough that
these alleviation activities and religious conversion to Christianity, in their orphanages, old age
homes, schools, colleges and hospitals, form a package deal.

THE DALIT QUESTION

Now let us deal with their touching concern for the Dalits and the oppressed and their strident
criticism of some Hindu social practices. Should not the Christians and the Muslims be looking
into their own backyard first before becoming the noble scavengers of Hindu society? The
genocide of native Americans and the Atlantic Slave Trade were both committed in the name of
Christianity. Colonising the nations of Africa and Asia, impoverishing their societies, enslaving
their people was also sanctified and legitimised by the Christian faith, with the full support of the
Church. Trade and the Church have always worked in tandem. The white Christian missionaries
in Australia have been held guilty of separating aborigine children from their parents at birth,
transported to orphanages and foster homes run by the Church, so that they could be brought up
as ‘good’ Christians; this evil act was also perpetrated in the name of the Christian faith. And talk
to the feminists of the West. They will hold the Christian religion, the Genesis in the Bible
precisely, to be the basis of all abuse - of women, of animals and of all nature, as also the denial
of equal marital and political rights to women. And lest I forget, the USA and India have been
racked by scandals of priests sexually abusing and sodomising children in their care. The
Christians of India have still not dared to ask why was Graham Staines burnt alive with his two
young sons?

And more to the point, the dalits or harijans as Gandhiji called them, constitute 15% of the total
Indian population and 20% of the Hindu population. As per the 1991 census, there are 19.65
million Christians in India out of which the Christians of South India constitute 10.7 million and
those of the North-east, 3.6 million. The total population of Tamil Nadu Christians is 3.2 million, of
which the dalits constitute 65% of the total Christian population. Some Christian groups even
claim that dalits constitute 70% of the Christians of Tamil Nadu. But the secular intellectuals of
this country who are shouting themselves hoarse that this ordinance goes against the interests of
the dalits for whom conversion is a form of empowerment, and the Christians themselves, have
not cared to ask nor answer the most relevant question, in my view. Given the high percentage of
the dalits and tribals in the total Christian population, what is the power-sharing equation in the
Christian hierarchy between the priests belonging to the upper castes and the dalits? There are
134 Catholic bishops in India and 14 bishops in Tamil Nadu alone but until 1991 there was no
representation of the dalits or the tribals in this Hierarchy until the ordaining of Bishop Ezra
Sargunam – a dalit Christian. Except for Goa and Kerala, in the rest of India, the dalits and tribals
constitute the major percentage of Christians and yet the Christians who claim that the dalits are
voluntarily converting to the Christian faith have not told us how many dalits and tribals have been
elevated to the highest positions of Bishops, Vicars-general, priests, Directors, Professors in
seminaries, and surgeons and heads of departments in their hospitals and medical colleges.
What is the power-sharing equation of the positions held by upper-caste and dalit Christians in
the schools, colleges and hospitals run by the Christian missionaries in this country? How many
dalit or tribal Christians have risen to the highest positions in these Christian social, educational
and religious organizations? These intellectuals have not cared to research into this tricky issue.

Let us see what one of the highest-ranking members of the Vatican Hierarchy itself has to say in
this regard. Archbishop George Zus, apostolic pro-nuncio to India addressed the Catholic
Bishops’ Council in December 1991, in Pune. In his inaugural address to the catholic Bishops, he
stated, “The dalit Christians make 65% of the ten million Christians in the South, but less than 4%
of the parishes are entrusted to dalit priests. There are no dalits among the 13 Catholic Bishops’
Council of Tamil Nadu or among he Vicars-general and the Rectors of seminaries and Directors
of social assistance centres”. (Dalits in India by John Massey, Manohar Publications, New-Delhi,
1995, page 82.) John Massey is a Punjabi dalit Christian. The secular intellectual establishment
and the Christian community, it seems is ignorant about this simmering discontent among the
dalits who converted to the Christian faith hoping to be empowered. And yet, the dalits still within
the Hindu fold have risen to the highest positions in all walks of life including to the Rashtrapati
Bhavan.

Much noise is also made about the despicable practice of untouchability in our societies and this
is placed at the door of Hinduism in spite of the fact that there is no religious sanction for this
terrible social practice in the religious content of our traditions. Be that as it may but untouchability
is not the only form of discrimination faced by the dalits. There are other forms of discrimination
too and these concern their positions in the Christian institutions and also their marriage
practices. What is the percentage of inter-caste marriages among the Christians belonging to the
upper-castes and how many of the upper-caste converts to Christianity have married into families
of the dalit Christians? How many upper-caste Christians will accept the holy water from a dalit
Christian priest and in how many churches and cemetaries have walls been erected to separate
the upper-caste laity from the dalits, in life as in death? If dalits are indeed converting to
Christianity, not because of force, allurement or coercion, but voluntarily to empower themselves,
to end discrimination and to improve the quality of their lives, then it is relevant to ask our
editorialists and human rights activists, how many have indeed been so ‘empowered’ in Christian
institutions and organizations and if social discrimination of the dalits within Christianity has
indeed ended.

Now let us take a look at all these foreign missionaries who come to India and to other countries
of Asia and Africa to practice their Christian charity – ‘Mother’ Teresa, dispensing compassion in
India, unmindful of the deprived and the needy in her native country, Albania; ‘Father’ Marian
Zelazek, a polish missionary in Orissa ministering to the leprosy afflicted people of Orissa, not
mindful of the deprived and the needy in Poland; Graham Staines, the Australian missionary, with
nothing to do in Australia, ministering to the tribals in Orissa; and the much advertised Christina
Noble tending to the abused and deprived children of Vietnam and Mongolia!! They all have
nothing to do in their own countries. All these white Christians, they all want to palliate their
Christian souls by caring for poor brown people. I am reminded of the classic ‘Murder in the
Orient Express’ an Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot thriller where in response to Poirot’s question,
Ingrid Bergman says, she left the USA to look after the ‘poor brown babies of India’. And they all
manage to pick up a Nobel peace prize or at least a Magsaysay award or at the very least, get
nominated for them, along the way. And they also get to kiss the hand of the pope.

THE ROLE OF THE HIERARCHY

The Tamil Nadu ordinance therefore rubs salt into their wounded psyche by sternly declaring that
any attempt to convert minors, women and persons belonging to the scheduled tribes and
scheduled castes will invite very harsh punitive measures. When you educate a woman, you
educate the family, was the slogan of the Christian missionaries in the education industry; the
corollary is when you convert the woman, you convert the family. The state government has
acted creditably by accepting greater responsibility for the more vulnerable sections of our society
who are prone to fall victim to ill-motivated, falsely kind words, to allurements and to false
promises and claims.

The Christian groups are abusing the Chief Minister by calling her names – that she is moving
away from and indeed perverting the Dravidian legacy and culture. Be that as it may, but what
indeed is the ‘Dravidian’ culture whose fig leaf the Christians are wearing today? The Tamil word
“aavi” is both spirit/soul and steam. One of the ‘Dravidian” jokes by the followers of Periyar, in
whom the Christians are taking refuge today, is about the holy ghost – “Parisuddha aaviyil idli
veguma”? “Can idlis be steamed in the “parisuddha aaavi” (or the holy spirit) was the familiar and
frequent taunt of the rationalists.

And as for Valson Thampu’s gem of a quote that the more corrupt a politician is, the more he
seeks to flaunt his religious identity! The pope is the head of the Vatican empire. He is not only
the religious leader of the Roman Catholics but as Head of State, he is also a political leader.
Valson Thampu must be careful with his political science theories. Will Thampu’s psycho analysis
of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister hold good for the pope too?

And as for the accusation that the Chief Minister has forgotten that she came to power on the
strength of the minority vote bank, well, well, are the Christians by any chance actually saying
that the Church is influencing national policies on the strength of their vote bank? But then they
keep saying that they are barely 2% of the population when accused of rampant conversion
activities! Surely they cannot use the same argument to mean they are too few in one context and
that they are a powerful vote bank in another. Make up your minds will you?

And as for all the various articles of the Constitution that they are throwing around, they should go
back and do their homework about what the Supreme Court has said in the matter of the ‘right to
practice and propagate’ one’s religion. The right to propagate does not mean the right to convert,
the apex court declared unambiguously. (THE SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT ON
CONVERSION IN THE CASE OF REV. STANISLAUS V STATE OF M.P. ( A.N. RAY C.J) fpRS I-
8/S.C. 909).

The operative part of the judgement is as follows:

Point 19 of the judgement reads:

"We have no doubt that it is in this sense that the word 'propagate' has been used in Article 25
(1); for what the Article grants is not the right to convert another person to one's own religion but
to transmit or spread one's religion by an exposition of its tenets. It has to be remembered that
Article 25 (1) guarantees "freedom of conscience" to every citizen and not merely to the followers
of one particular religion and that, in turn postulates that there is no fundamental right to convert
another person to one's own religion because if a person purposely undertakes the conversion of
another person to his religion, as distinguished from his effort to transmit or spread the tenets of
his religion, that would impinge on the 'freedom of conscience' guaranteed to all citizens of the
country alike."

And in India, the law of the land shall prevail over any Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Human Rights is a pocket deep enough to hold any agenda from the right to self-determination of
Christians leading to secession, to right to evangelise and convert, rights of women, child labour
and much more. And as long as the Supreme Court Order of 1977 on the Stanislaus case
remains unchanged and unchallenged, the Tamil Nadu ordinance will withstand any legal and
constitutional scrutiny. Secularism is rapidly becoming the last resort of anti-nationals and
democracy the last refuge of every terrorist.

The same is true of the Christians’ bandying about of the western concepts of democracy,
secularism and freedom of conscience. When a religion like Christianity declares that it alone is
the repository of the ultimate religious truth and that Jesus Christ alone is the saviour of all
mankind, it is negating and trashing the beliefs, and the basis of the existence of the peoples of
non-Christian civilizations. To repeat, please go back to the Supreme Court order of 1977 and
read its operative part attentively. It deals with every one of these fancy western concepts. And
for another thing, there are peoples of the world who laugh at the immaturity of the concept of
‘original sin’ and the foolishness of the idea of Eve tempting Adam with an apple, and peoples
who don’t think that man is born in sin or that he needs to be saved.

When the church operates in such a climate of beliefs which have other ways of looking at Truth,
of other faiths which practice other modes of worship, then its insistence in India that it has the
religious mandate and the constitutional right to convert, because Christianity alone is the path
and the goal, is an obscenity and a gross abuse of the land and the peoples who allowed them to
open shop here in the first place. The Hindu editorial is right, we are a liberal people, not just the
people of Tamil Nadu but the people of India. We, the Hindus allowed these violent religions to
come into this country in various guises, allowed them the space and the liberty to practice their
violent religions, not realising that these alien religions will ultimately use our generosity, our
liberalism to prey on our own women and children, on our own societies.

It is by now established that the Vatican and other Churches of the world are now looking to Asia
to make up for the numbers they are losing in their own countries. So they are soliciting on behalf
of their faith in street corners, on roads, in trains and hospitals, in schools and other public places.
They crawl out from under every stone and every crevice - white, black and brown. I would be
called something else if I solicited so aggressively, and in a similar manner and would swiftly
invite the punitive arm of the law.

The Christians protest that they offer no allurement, make no false promises and perpetrate no
fraud. But let me give you two or three examples of what indeed they are doing, from personal
experience.

For three consecutive Sundays the same three women came to my home at nine in the morning
and offered to say a prayer for me and my family. On two occasions, I told them politely to leave
and pointed to the religious symbol on my doorstep which said clearly that I was a vaishnavite
Hindu, an Iyengar. But they kept coming back. On the third Sunday, I had to tell them that if they
dared to set foot on my street again, I would become physical with them.

A student of mine attending classes at NIIT was waiting for a bus at the bus stop when two
college going girls accost her on the road and invite her to come home with them for group
prayer. What she told them cannot be repeated in polite circles.

And this soliciting is being done to Asians not just in India. My daughter called me from Cardiff,
U.K, two days ago and told me the following hilarious story. She was sitting alone in a café in
Cardiff when a middle-aged man of African descent approached her and opened the conversation
thus. “Are you from Pakistan”? When my daughter shook her head and replied that she was an
Indian, he asks her, “Are you Hindu”? By now, my daughter told me, she knew in which direction
the conversation was heading. She waited nevertheless for him to continue, (to have some fun at
his expense, she said). Sure enough he told her, why don’t you convert to Christianity? Christ is
coming soon and you must be prepared to receive him”. To which she replied, I have no
particular desire to receive him, and please leave me alone. I do not like the subject of your
conversation”. The man is persistent and tells her, “You are ignorant. He can bring you back alive
from the dead. He can resurrect you”. And he persists with this garbage until my daughter
threatened to beat him up if he did not move away.

The target of the Church in the third millenium is Asia and non-Christian Asians. And as I said,
they crawl out from under every stone and rock and hole in the ground. One persistent member of
the laity even eaves-dropped on a conversation in a telephone booth at 11 in the evening by a
Kashmiri Hindu lady in Chennai who had come to participate in a seminar and told her that if she
came to the Church on Sunday, she would ask the pastor in her church to say a special prayer for
the Kashmiri Hindus!! A little boy of eleven, named Ramu working as a garage attendant in the
garage which cares for my cars, became Philip one fine day. I asked him why and he told me, two
women and the priest of the local church gave his grandmother 40,000 rupees to convert. But
why you, I asked him. Being just a little boy, he had not yet picked up the fine art of prevarication
or lying. That was the condition, he told me. The priest told Ramu’s grandmother that Ramu had
to convert too and also that attendance at Church on Sundays was mandatory.

Against this background, when these pimps target children, old women, the sick and the poor,
and the young and the impressionable, the Tamil Nadu government had no option but to take
special care of these vulnerable sections of Hindu society. The agenda of the Church is to
convert the world to Christianity, to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Christ. It is not a
hidden agenda, it is a well-documented, stated agenda. Given that, every society will protect itself
from this kind of aggression in its own way. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all
that bull shit notwithstanding. And even otherwise, this human rights business is an invention of
the Church and western nations. Eastern societies never felt the need for concepts like human
rights or democracy or secularism. These were invented as universal values only because they
provided the best excuse for the Church and its patrons, the developed nations of the West and
the USA to erode national sovereignty and to dilute national cultures.

The fact that the various churches in India and other Christian organizations are preparing
themselves for a street fight, for arm-twisting and other forms of threats and agitation, proves that
not only do they subscribe to but they also actively participate in the agenda of world churches to
Christianise the world. Now more than ever, is it necessary to discuss the issue of national
churches. The issue of national churches, religious conversion, of foreigners holding high office,
are all components of the same threat to national security, national sovereignty and national
culture. The secular brigade should study history to find out why Russia, Armenia, Georgia,
Vietnam, and China all have national churches and will not permit the Vatican or the other
denominational churches of the USA or Europe even a foot-hold in their countries.

As I mentioned earlier, the West and the Church act in tandem. And this was brought into sharp
focus because our editorialists and secular journalists had yet another of their periodical
hysterical attacks because some inconsequential organization had recommended to the
American Secretary of State that India be designated a ‘country of particular concern’.

THE U.S AND THE USCIRF - THERE IS NO END TO THEIR IMPERTINENCE

Sridhar Krishnaswami files a news report, featured on the front page of The Hindu dated 2nd
October, 2002, titled “Designate India, Pakistan as countries of particular concern”. The opening
paragraph reads thus:

“The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended
that the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, designate India, along with others, as ‘Countries of
Particular Concern’ under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998”.

According to this news report, the Commission is reacting to ‘periodic violence’ against the
religious minorities of the country, violence which has been on the increase because of the “rise
in political influence of groups associated with the Sangh Parivar, a collection of Hindu extremist
nationalist organizations that views non-Hindus as foreign to India and hence deserving of
attack”.

My first thought was, this description of the RSS must have been given to these busybodies by
Arundhati Roy or Shabana Azmi or by Sahmat or Communalism Combat or all of them ‘together
separately’; and my first impulse was to consign this report to the ‘Garbage Bin’. And I would
have, had this been the ranting of some American Southern Baptist group or some disgruntled
Christian or Marxist NGO in one of their periodic diatribes against the RSS and the rising religious
and political consciousness of the Hindus of this country; or the ranting of the blatantly biased
American and European human rights industry. But this is the ranting of a statutory body of the
U.S government, a Commission that has been constituted by law, a Commission (which is
however allegedly non-governmental), whose members work closely with the American State
Department. The Commission is headed by the Ambassador-at Large and he is the Special
Adviser to the U.S President and to the U.S Secretary of State on International Religious
Freedom. And so, the very least that a native of a developing third world nation, whose country
has been stood in the dock by this “damning indictment” can do, when faced by the impertinence
of foreign busybodies, is to respond to this nonsense with a modicum of seriousness.

THE HITLIST
In the first three years of its existence, from 1998 to 2001, the entire focus of the Commission is
on China, Vietnam, Laos, Sudan and Burma. And these countries continue to remain on the hit
list of this Commission not only because these countries are ruled either by Communist
governments or by the military as in the case of Burma, but more interestingly, these countries
have a marked antipathy towards Christianity and Christian missionaries. Contrary to the pious
statements of this Commission that it is concerned about the lack of freedom of religion in these
countries, and that their heart bleeds for the Buddhists and the Falun Gong, it is the refusal to
allow Christian missionaries to operate in these countries that has incurred the wrath of this
Commission.

The list then expands to include Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and now Pakistan and India. Please
note all of you, there is this deafening silence on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1998,
despite strong protests from women’s groups in the USA about the Taliban’s treatment of the
women in Afghanistan. Of course let us all succumb to a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and
believe instead that this silence had nothing to do with the fact that major American oil and gas
companies were talking to the Taliban for rights to build pipelines across Afghanistan to transport
oil and gas from the Central Asian republics. The alternative was Iran but then Iran would have
laughed the Americans out of town. So that was ruled out. The U.S needed Afghanistan and the
Taliban came as a package deal. Religious freedom? What religious freedom? (Laughter please).

THE USCIRF AND ITS RATIONALE

Now let us first look at this USCIRF. It was constituted in 1998 because the U.S had no
international agenda then to project its super power status. The WTO had become a reality, the
Taliban were around but the USA needed pipelines across Afghanistan more than it wanted
freedom of religion from the Taliban. And September 11 was still three years down the line. The
Soviet Union had disappeared, the people of Iraq were being subjected to slow and unexciting
genocide by continuing U.S harassment and the U.S had no excitement that real cloak and
dagger stuff can give to its national life. It was spoiling for a fight and so it discovered
International Religious Freedom. The U.S passed the International Religious Freedom Act in
1998 and soon thereafter, in 1998 it also constituted the Commission for IRF by law. The
rationale for the Act is best expressed by the Act itself –

“SEC. 2. FINDINGS; POLICY.

(a) FINDINGS- Congress makes the following findings:

(1) The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States.
Many of our Nation's founders fled religious persecution abroad, cherishing in their hearts and
minds the ideal of religious freedom. They established in law, as a fundamental right and as a
pillar of our Nation, the right to freedom of religion. From its birth to this day, the United States
has prized this legacy of religious freedom and honored this heritage by standing for religious
freedom and offering refuge to those suffering religious persecution.

I will come to this hilarious self-description of “pillar of our nation” in just a while but it will be
interesting to see what triggered this pious decision to monitor international religious freedom.
There are two major causes for the U.S’ sudden love for religious freedom.

First – religion was coming back in a big way in the former Soviet Union and in Russia, Belarus,
and the Ukraine, in Georgia and Armenia the Church was once again becoming a force and an
influence to contend with. While all these republics were catholic, none of them acknowledged the
supremacy of the Vatican. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Serbia, Armenia and Georgia were all
components of the Eastern Orthodox Church. They all had their own national churches and the
Hierarchy too was national. Most of these republics refused to allow the Vatican or the American
and European churches to open shop in their territories. Indeed, the climate was distinctly hostile
to the expansionist designs of the Vatican and the American and European churches in the
vulnerable soil of these fledgling nation-states. This of course incensed the U.S and the Vatican.

Second – rapidly declining numbers of their flock in the West had the Vatican and the American
and European churches looking for new territories to conquer, new peoples to evangelise and
convert. They all turned their attention on Asia. On Easter’s eve in 1996, Pope John Paul II led
20,000 Roman Catholics in an Easter vigil at St.Peter’s basilica. “In his homily John Paul II spoke
specifically of Asia after having previously denounced discrimination against Catholics in Vietnam
and China. He spoke of “the great desire of Christ and the Church to meet the populations and
cultures of that immense continent, rich in history and noble traditions. ‘You constitute in a certain
way the answer of nations to the new evangelization’, he said”.

THE VATICAN AND ASIA

The Vatican had decided that in the third millenium the Church would plant the cross in Asia and
harvest the souls of the non-Christian and non-Muslim peoples of Asia – the Hindus, Buddhists,
Sikhs and peoples of other non-proselytizing faiths that originated in India. To this end, a Special
Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Asia was held in April/May of 1998 in the Vatican. The
Vietnam government as early as in January 1998 had refused permission to its Bishops to attend
the Synod. By April, China too had refused permission to the Bishops in China and Taiwan to
attend the Synod. On May 14th, a Mass in Saint Peter’s basilica brought to a close the work of
the Special Assembly for Asia of the Synod of Bishops. According to ‘Fides’ the Vatican news
agency, “At the end of his homily, the Holy Father voiced his intention to visit Asia in the near
future to present the post-synodal exhortation. “This led to excited discussion among the Synod
Fathers about possible places for the visit. In the end they suggested a journey with three laps:
Bombay, Manila, Hong Kong. Others suggested Jerusalem, Beijing, Calcutta, Ho Chi Minh city,
Tokyo or Baghdad”.

The intentions of the Vatican was clear. It intended for the Pope to make a high profile visit to
deliver the post-synodal exhortation in one of the Asian countries – China, Vietnam, India or
Japan – countries where the majority of the population is non-Christian - Hindus or Buddhists.
China of course and Vietnam too promptly refused to allow the Pope to come visiting them. In
India too there was growing awareness and unease about the intentions of the churches of the
world to aggressively convert the Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs to the Christian religion and the
Hindus were organizing themselves not only to expose the intentions of the Vatican and the
American and European churches but also to resist, militantly if need be, any and all attempts at
religious conversion.

THE DUPLICITY OF THE VATICAN AND THE U.S

One must see the U.S’ sudden love for international religious freedom against this background –
against the background of Asia’s growing hostility to Western trade war through globalization and
Christian missionary activities, both of which historically have always acted in tandem. Pope John
Paul II succeeded to the papacy precisely because he was polish and Poland was the weakest
link in the Soviet bloc – Roman Catholics like the people of Croatia and not Eastern Orthodox like
Serbia or Russia. The polish Pope John Paul II succeeded to the papacy because his mandate
was clear – to exert pressure on the weakest link – on Poland and bring about the collapse of
communism and consequently the Soviet Union. And the calculation was, when communism fails,
the west can step in with its IMF and the World bank and capitalism and free market and when
the Soviet Union disappeared it would also signal the end of the already weakened and
debilitated Eastern Orthodox Church and the Vatican can step in to open shop. A dream that the
West and the Vatican had nurtured and pursued unceasingly for more than five decades. They
succeeded only partially. Communism failed, the Soviet Union disintegrated but the Eastern
Orthodox Church rose like the phoenix and reacted ferociously to the Vatican and other western
churches attempting to open their industry in these territories.
One must also see the antipathy of the USA and the West and the Vatican to China, Vietnam,
and Serbia in this context. While the USA passed the International Religious Freedom Act in
1998, the seeds of the Act were sown cleverly in 1995 itself, to coincide with the creation of the
WTO, when Pope John Paul II was invited to address the UN General Assembly on the 5th of
October, 1995 to mark the 50th year of the UN. And he devoted his entire talk to the rights of
people to freedom, to human rights, to the rights of nations to come into being and to exist (the
call for enabling the fructifying of movements for self-determination, the forewarning of the
creation of Croatia, E.Timor). It is one of the cleverest, most cunning speeches ever made. Every
sentence should be read to mean that he is talking only of Christian interests, Christian political
and religious rights. Wherever he appeals for diversity, he is appealing to those nations and
peoples who are non-Christian to allow the Christian faith with its missionary agenda, to exist, to
grow. And for the first time, the Church and immediately thereafter, American think tanks begin to
make a distinction between ‘patriotism’ which is in their view, positive and ‘nationalism’ which in
their view is negative because it is synonymous with protectionism and shuts its doors on the face
of religious and economic invaders. One of the reasons cited by the U.S for constituting the
USCIRF is:

“ Though not confined to a particular region or regime, religious persecution is often particularly
widespread, systematic, and heinous under totalitarian governments and in countries with
militant, politicized religious majorities”.

This is an accurate paraphrase of the Pope’s UNGA address in 1995 where he invents his own
definition of nationalism and patriotism thus:

“We need to clarify the essential difference between an unhealthy form of nationalism, which
teaches contempt for other nations or cultures, and patriotism, which is a proper love of one’s
country. True patriotism never seeks to advance the well-being of one’s own nation at the
expense of others. For in the end, this would harm one’s own nation as well. Doing wrong
damages both aggressor and victim. Nationalism, in its most radical form, is thus the antithesis of
true patriotism, and today we must ensure that extreme nationalism does not continue to give rise
to new forms of the aberrations of totalitarianism”.

PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND ALL THAT CRAP

Now let us apply the pope’s yardstick of ‘true patriotism’ and ‘extreme nationalism’ to religion, to
Christianity and the Church specifically. If the pope were indeed sincere about his call for allowing
diversity to exist, about his devout respect for all cultures and traditions, he will acknowledge that
all cultural values and traditions derive from the religion and faith of the people. Then he owes us
all an explanation about the basis for religious conversion and the determination of the Vatican to
convert all peoples of the world to the Christian faith. Will this allow for diversity, will this express
respect for other cultures and traditions? Is this not an agenda for homogenization and does this
not violate the principle of the right to existence of other religions and faiths? Has the pope not
learnt anything from the destruction and the total annihilation of the religions of the native
Americans and the Africans by the Church?

The west of course is rediscovering ‘nationalism’ and is now beginning to understand the need for
protectionism when globalization opened the borders of their countries to immigration. Now they
realise how important it is to preserve their culture and their way of life from the onslaught of third
world natives. So while the USA and the West want Asians to open their borders to their capital
and goods, and throw open the doors of our societies and homes to Christian missionaries, they
frown upon religious and economic nationalism a.k.a. protectionism. They however want to clamp
down on immigration shut their borders to Asians and Africans and rediscover what it is to be
American, British, German and French.

“Our respect for the culture of others is therefore rooted in our respect for each community’s
attempt to answer the question of human life. And here we can see how important it is to
safeguard the fundamental right to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, as the
cornerstones of the structure of human rights and the foundation of every truly free society, No
one is permitted to suppress those rights by using coercive power to impose an answer to the
mystery of man”.

Right, right!! The irony or shall I say, the black humour of it all! The last line can be understood
better if we know that the Vatican believes that the catholic faith alone is the repository of all Truth
and it alone has the answer to the mystery of man. So when the pope talks of coercive power and
the use of coercive power to impose an answer, he is referring to regimes and governments,
which have refused the Vatican and Christianity even a toe-hold in their countries – China,
Vietnam, Japan, and Burma and of course the Asian Islamic nations of Malaysia and Indonesia
where to proselytize and distribute Christian propaganda material is a crime. What the pope is in
fact demanding is the Christian right to propagate, evangelise and carry out individual and mass
conversions in Asian countries with very large non-Christian populations.

THE DEEP POCKET OF HUMAN RIGHTS

So, the seeds for an intrusive and aggressive foreign policy eroding national sovereignty are
being sown as early as in the late 1980s and in the 1990s with the USA, the West, the Vatican
and the European churches acting in tandem. Concrete shape for renewed aggression by the
USA against the nations of Asia is given through the inequitable WTO and the designing of the
deep pocket called ‘human rights’. It is a pocket deep enough to yield several agendas
demanding unilateral or multilateral interference into domestic national affairs. Human rights can
accommodate right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, women’s rights, children’s
rights, rights of labour, right to self-determination, right to….the list can be made as endless as
the U.S wants. But the striking absence of right to freedom from racial discrimination, and the
right to participatory democracy has not been noticed it would seem. The U.S is yet to begin the
process of participatory democracy. The highest offices of this land of the brave and the free is
reserved for the white/christian(protestant)/male. As long as women, African-American Christians
and Muslims, native Americans and Jews and the minorities do not qualify to be elected to the
White House, the USCIRF should deny itself the luxury of pointing fingers at India. By this single
act of commission alone, the U.S is guilty of several counts of human rights abuse.

The U.S owes us an explanation now. Is the USCIRF empowered to monitor religious freedom
only in the rest of the world or is it empowered to monitor systemic denial of religious rights which
includes right to practice of rituals, within the USA too? Because there are enough documents to
prove denial of the right to practice the rituals of their faith by native American students in the
universities of the USA. The U.S also owes the world an explanation on its silence and its polite
looking the other way when the Taliban incarcerated the women and the children of Afghanistan
in their homes. Now is the time to deal with the “pillar of our nation” joke. All of you, who are not
averse to waging this intellectual war against our adversaries, must read without fail two books –
“A Little Matter of Genocide – Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present” by
Ward Churchill and “American Holocaust – The Conquest of the New World” by David E.
Stannard. Once you have read these two books, it is difficult to listen to or read tanything the
Pope or the USA is saying about freedom and human rights and democracy and pluralism without
rolling on the ground, clutching your stomachs in laughter.

“RELIGIOUS FREEDOM – THE PILLAR OF OUR NATION”

What was that again? “The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of
the United States. Many of our Nation's founders fled religious persecution abroad, cherishing in
their hearts and minds the ideal of religious freedom. They established in law, as a fundamental
right and as a pillar of our Nation, the right to freedom of religion”. Yeah right! Now just see what
these noble nation’s founders, ‘who fled religious persecution abroad’, did to the native
Americans in the name of the Church and Christianity, in the name of religion. There is an
encyclical by the Pope in the 15th century severely condemning the genocide of native
Americans. The pope says, that as long as these barbaric natives are fit to receive the message
of Christ, their lives should be spared and should be elevated into the service of Christ. From then
on begins the savage christianising of the native Americans. They are driven like so much cattle
into Christian missions and there they are put to hard labour by the priests who think hard labour
is good for the soul of the native Americans. They thought the same thing about the Africans
whom they transported into North America later. Hard labour is always good for the non-white,
non-Christian peoples of the world particularly if the labour is for furthering the trade and
economy of the white Christian nations. In the words of Ward Churchill:

“In actuality, the missions were deathmills in which Indians, often delivered en masse by the
military, were allotted an average of seven feet by two feet of living space in what one observer
described as ‘specially constructed cattle pens’. Although forced to perform arduous agricultural
labour by the priests from morning to night, six days a week, the captives were provided no more
than 1400 calories per day in low nutrient foods, with missions like San Antonio and San Miguel
supplying as little as 715 calories per day.

Probably most remarkable in this regard is Fray Junipero Serra in charge of the northern
California mission complex during its peak period and a man whose personal brutality was
noteworthy even by those standards (he appears to have delighted in the direct torture of victims,
had to be restrained from hanging Indians in lots, a la Columbus, and is quoted as asserting that
the entire race of Indians should be put to the knife). Proposed for canonization as a saint by the
catholic Church, Serra’s visage, forty feet tall, today peers serenely down upon motorists driving
south from San Francisco along Highway 101 from its vantage point on a prominent bluff. Another
statue of Serra, a much smaller bronze which has stood for decades before San Francisco’s city
hall is being moved to a park. Officials denied requests from local Indians that it be placed in
storage, out of public view, however offering the compromise of affixing a new plaque to address
native concerns about the incipient saint’s legacy. (Hindus of India and Jews of the world please
note, ‘Mother’ Teresa and ‘Hitler’s pope’ are both all set to be canonized as the new saints of the
twentieth century in the catholic pantheon, a gesture of gratitude for services rendered in the
cause of furthering the catholic Church in difficult times and in difficult climes). Church lobbyists
however have undermined even that paltry gesture preventing the inclusion of wording which
might have revealed something of the true nature of the mass murder and cultural demolition over
which Serra presided. Both man and mission, the Vatican insisted, were devoted to '‘mercy and
compassion”.

In passing this Act on International religious Freedom the U.S is basing its case on the noble
founders of the nation, on ‘the pillars of our nation’ - a nation that was built on the blood and
sweat of genocide and slavery – both of which were practiced in the name of the Christian faith!!

WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU, IS RIGHT FOR ME

The U.S has set several precedents post September 11 – precedents worthy of emulation. The
right to revenge, the right to pre-emptive strikes when faced with threats to national security, the
right to demonstartive nationalism/protectionism. The U.S must ask itself why other religious
minorities in India, the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Buddhists and Jains never face the problems that
Christians and Muslims in India face at the hands of ‘Hindu extremists? Why did the normally
gentle Hindus take to extremism? Why did the U.S carpet bomb Iraq and Afghanistan? National
security is threatened not only when our borders are threatened by foreign invaders in
conventional war but when our homes, communities and societies are threatened by religious
invaders and terrorists. Christian missionaries and Islamic terrorists threaten Hindus and Hindu
society. The right to revenge is as much the prerogative of Hindus as it is of the U.S. So USCIRF
or ABCDEF, the U.S cannot preach to India what it has never practiced. Enough of this
impertinence USCIRF. Care for your backyard before you venture into other nations.

And one more thing, this constant harping on rising Hindu extremism threatening the secular,
democratic fibre of the country and all that crap. The Indian State is democratic and secular. The
Indian nation is not. The Indian nation like most nations of the world, is religious. And the rich
diversity and pluralism which you keep harping about, it has existed for over two thousand years,
when the first Christian and Muslim missionaries/traders/invaders begin to appear in our country,
not because of the USCIRF or the U.N or the Indian Constitution or the Human rights industry. It
has existed for centuries because the nation was Hindu. The Hindu thought is assimilatory not
exclusivist like the Abrahamic faiths. And it is this nation which is being threatened by the
missionary activities of the Christian fundamentalists and the secessionist activities of Islamic
fundamentalists. The Hindus have survived 600 years of Muslim barbarism, 200 years of savage
colonialism. We survived violent partition in 1947, and we are living through the problems in J&K
and the North-east. Hindus have the right to exist, the right to protect their faith, the right to
territory, the right to protect and defend their women and children, the right to revenge and the
right to pre-emptive strikes against their aggressors. Period.

And this right includes resisting the attempts of the Vatican and other western churches,
Protestants and other sub-denominational churches, to use any and every means to convert the
Hindus of this country to their faith. The fig-leaf of some religious mandate and a distorted
understanding of a constitutional right will no longer protect their evil intentions to de-nationalise
India’s civilisational character. And this was stated categorically and unambiguously by Swami
Dayananda Saraswati last year at an Extraordinary sitting of the UNGA on religious freedom.
Christianity and Islam are religions which have a very large political content in their very tenets
and precepts. Their history is more political than religious – tales of conquest, bloodshed,
plunder, genocide and destruction. Indian religions have to understand their nature if they have to
war with them and our religious leaders will have to understand that all religions are not the same,
all religions do not lead to the same goal and above all, all religions do not preach love and peace
and diversity. This understanding is essential as the first step in our war against these faiths and
their agenda for India and her civilizationally tolerant and accommodating people.