Use of Dalit & racism in anti-Hindu propaganda: How to deal with
cunning Xtian missionaries
June 27th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted in Great Hindu
Christian missionaries have cleverly used Dalits to divide Hindu society.
They have played the caste card to negate whatever is positive in Hinduism.
The way out is a heady mix of positive reforms and creative counter-propaganda.
This is what Belgian historian Koenraad Elst says:
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/chr/christiandalit.html
The use of Dalits and racism in anti-Hindu propaganda
How to deal with clever Christian missionaries
The ongoing commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in the
British empire (1807) is being used by Christian missionary circles as
an occasion for Hindu-bashing through the theme of caste oppression as
a still-existing form of slavery.
Hindu polemicists typically react by highlighting the human-rights
abuses committed by Christians or in the name of Christianity through
the centuries: witch-burning, persecution of pagans and heretics,
racism, apartheid and of course the slave trade itself.
The intended implication is that Christians are morally in no position
to berate Hindus for their social injustices and had better not meddle
in inter-Hindu matters. This may be a correct and convincing position
to take in front of a neutral or as yet uninformed audience, but with
Christians who know their religion, it is hopelessly ineffective.
Whereas Christian missionaries have invested heavily in studying Hindu
society and its subsets as defined by language, caste or social class,
most Hindus including anti-conversion activists are unfamiliar with
the Christian mentality. Hindu polemicists listen to their own and
each other's words and then think: how great, how clever. But if you
want to get a message across to an audience, you should listen to the
effect you're having on this audience.
So, as an ex-Christian and still daily in touch with Christian
circles, I would like to point out certain beliefs and attitudes that
immunize Christians against the charge of being no better than Hindus
with their caste oppression.
First of all, the historical facts and present eyesores which you want
to shove into their faces and of which you expect that they will shock
& awe Christians into silence about caste, are already widely known
and acknowledged.
On the 900th anniversary of the Crusades, a perfectly justified
Christian reaction against Muslim imperialism, numerous Christians
indulged a guilt trip and said sorry to the Muslims. But most of all,
they impressed it upon themselves (far more thoroughly than you could
hope to do) what evil sinners they had been back then, and how this
should spur them into being nice to today's Muslims.
To Christians, past sins are a matter for repentance vis-à-vis God,
but ultimately only the normal course of things, since we're all
sinners. So they are not uptight about having sins on their record and
won't be blackmailed about this. Secondly, repentance about sins past
is proven precisely by a commitment to avoid and combat similar sins
in the present.
It is not enough to say your confession of sins, you have to resolve
to undo the sins' consequences and go out of your way to remove them
from this world. So, precisely because Christians have been guilty of
slave-trading etc., they have a duty to combat similar inequality now.
And this must not be limited to their own backyard, for sins are both
by commission as by omission, i.e. standing by passively when others
get away with committing them. Because of their past sins, they feel
obliged to meddle in your sins today. Just as after abolishing the
slave trade and then slavery itself in the British Empire, the British
felt obliged to go out and impose its abolition on the Ottomans, the
Arabs and others. This is a moral imperative.
In missionary-speak: "We have been part of the problem so now we must
become part of the solution." Hindus could have guilt-tripped modern
Westerners into leaving the injustices of Hindu society alone if they
had been Africans or Muslims.
More perceptive Westerners would not be inhibited versus these two
either (Muslims traded black, white and Indian slaves; while Africans
enslaved and sold off their own brethren to Arab and European
slave-traders), but most of them, and especially politicians, don't
dare to speak against those two groups. But Hindus are a different
matter altogether.
Hindu polemicists talk about "white racism" as if they are totally
oblivious to the torrent of anti-racist re-education that has swept
Western society in the past half century. The problem is not just that
Hindus cultivate an anachronistic world-view, apparently drawing a
good feeling about themselves from pretending to live in the colonial
age and occupying the moral high ground of the anti-colonial struggle.
This is bad enough, for movements based on self-deception stand
defeated from the very start; but in the present case, it also blinds
them to the transformation of anti-racism from a force working in
favour of the standing of non-European peoples to one that actually
makes things worse for them. Or at least for those among them who have
a solid reputation of racism, viz. the Hindus.
It is precisely anti-racism that makes Westerners self-righteous
vis-à-vis Hindus. Whereas social injustice in Western or even in
Muslim society is duly recognized, it doesn't have the extreme stigma
of the caste system because the latter is conceived as a form of
racism. In the past, I have argued left and right that the basis of
caste is not racial, but who am I? International organizations and
influential observers keep on repeating that the caste system is a
huge instance of racial apartheid.
And this much must be conceded, that it is at any rate hereditary
inequality, so that castes can be considered as micro-races. The
mega-scale and mega-age of Hindu society add to the image of the caste
system as the most monstrous racism in world history. Indeed, if caste
is arguably (though few would argue even this much) preferable to
outright slavery, even anti-racists consider it a few notches worse
than the apartheid as it existed in South Africa.
The whites oppressed the blacks, but they also provided some
elementary services to them, such as modern medicine and "the
liberating message of Christianity", they gave black elites the sop of
becoming government officials in the "homelands", they did not totally
neglect them. For all its exploitative ruthlessness in practice, the
apartheid philosophy (like post-slavery colonial policies elsewhere in
Africa) was not to ignore the blacks but to treat them as children who
would benefit from white supervision.
By contrast, the international image of caste society is one of
extreme callousness, in which upper-caste people see lower-caste
people dying on their doorstep and remain unmoved. Apartheid was an
institution within which human exceptions existed, with some whites
sympathizing with the blacks,– whereas in the international
perception, caste is so ugly and cruel because it is totally
heartfelt, with the upper-caste people persisting in caste-racist
discrimination even after its formal abolition as an institution.
Doesn't everybody outside India "know" that a Mother Teresa was needed
to pick up the paupers from the gutter where the smug upper-caste
Hindus left them to rot?
As Mark Tully has testified: "Whenever I go and give a talk on
Hinduism, and when I say something nice about it, invariably someone
from the audience will object: 'I think Hinduism is a disgusting
religion because of the caste system.'" And this from modern people
sufficiently educated to know that all societies have their problems
and iniquities, their own not excepted.
In their perception, the uniquely evil thing about Hindu caste-racism
is how deep it has gripped and moulded the Hindu mind, by virtue of
being a religiously-justified doctrine, not just a worldly
circumstance but entirely intertwined with deep philosophical stuff
about dharma and karma. Christianity has in fact managed to shed
slavery because slavery is not of the essence of Christianity, or so
the perception goes; whereas caste is of the very essence of Hinduism.
Another common anachronism in the Hindu position is to identify the
Christian missionary apparatus as "white". This does of course have a
basis in historical reality but is becoming increasingly inaccurate.
Christian missionaries in Asia are now typically Koreans or Filipinos
or Keralites, not whites. And don't say that they are only the
infantry: in most Churches you see them rising through the ranks.
Remember how in the Anglican Church, conservative African bishops
formed a formidable bloc opposing the Anglo-American progressives on
issues of women priests and acceptance of homosexuality. At any rate,
these non-white converts have interiorized the faith and the
missionary zeal, just as the white North-Europeans (the demographic
mainstay of the US Baptists and other missionary powerhouses) had at
one time interiorized Christianity after learning it from
Mediterranean missionaries, who in turn had it from the Jewish-born
"first Christians".
It is no use denying that Christianity has morphed across racial
frontiers several times already, and that it is repeating this process
right now. Even the remaining white Church leaders are clever enough
to send coloured Church spokesmen to interreligious forums where race
could be an issue, so Hindus won't be able to use the anti-white line
against them.
As for the anti-caste mobilization, millions of blacks too have
accepted the idea that caste is a form of slavery and racism. Just as
millions of Scheduled Caste converts who had never thought of caste in
terms of race have by now interiorized the idea that caste is the
ultimate in racism. You won't shock them into silence with references
to white injustice. On the contrary, to them the struggle against
caste oppression is simply the continuation of the historical struggle
against slavery and apartheid. So, that in my opinion is what Hindus
are up against.
The Christian missionaries are nothing if not clever. They sail with
the opinion winds and have ably made the switch from colonial racism
to postcolonial anti-racism, and now they are using this new line with
good effect against Hindu society.
Digging up the dirt on "white Christian" history will only evoke a
yawn, as that dirt has been dished out already all over the official
textbooks and media in Christian countries.
If Hindus want to stop the gains continually made by the Christians in
the battle for the souls, there is no alternative to the laborious
task of (1) informing the world about the more complex and less
extreme reality of the caste system in history and in the present; (2)
actually reforming society to the point where caste oppression is only
a memory,– and ensuring that the world knows about this; and (3)
refocusing the Hindu-Christian struggle to its proper doctrinal level,
where the defining Christian teachings can be exposed as the
unhistorical claims and irrational beliefs that they really are.
Plus, of course, reaching out to the converts who are willing or eager
to return to the Hindu fold. These are big and demanding jobs, but
carry a better promise of success than locking yourself in a smug
self-assurance of how evil Christians are.
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