The Peril of Conversions: In Defense of Hindus Protecting Themselves From Supremacist and Monopolist Christianity
- The Global Hindu Heritage Foundation is not only fighting for the survival of Hindus in the U.S. but also for protecting their ancestral land and civilization.
The carefully calibrated challenge to the Global Hindu Heritage Foundation (GHHF) based in Frisco, TX, the lining up of Indian Muslim protestors in support of Indian Christian organizations, and the overnight publication of screeds and manufactured outrage in Indian American ethnic media, as well as statements to local media reporters, go to show the globalization of Indian politics and the internationalization of attempts made to undermine India.
But this is not new for those of us who have been watching the Indian and âSouth Asianâ dynamic in the U.S. for the past three to four decades. Those young, and those new to these dynamics could do some reading of the three supremacist, monopolist, and violent religious/political creeds in India that sought to (and continue to) undermine India as a nation and Hinduism as the civilizational and cultural bulwark of India that is Bharat.
What is it that the GHHF, in its annual gala invitation, tells its supporters and potential donors? According to the American Kahani writer, a WhatsApp message that was forwarded to her said â ââŠwhere we are going to present our activities in Bharat to ensure the survival of Sanatan Dharma and also encounter aggressive Christian rampant conversion tactics through Ghar Waapasi, Bala Samskar (Sunday schools), renovation of grama devatas, demolition of illegal churches and other activities,â and âIt is the dharma of every Hindu to preserve, protect and cherish the ideals of Bharat Mata. let us not be a spectator for the destruction, suffocation, stabbing of motherlandâ.
This, says the writer, made her scared and she felt threatened. Sure, we all have the right to our emotions just as we have to our opinions, but we also must deal with facts here, and the stories behind the goals of GHHF. Making the GHHF message sound ominous goes to show the rhetorical strategies adopted by those who hate Hinduism and Hindus, and whose avowed goal is to shut Hindus up so that they can then be rounded up easily and pushed into corners.
So, what exactly is GHHF fighting for, and on whose behalf? Take for example one of the petitions that GHHF recently forwarded to local authorities in Andhra Pradesh. The petition submitted by GHHF to the District Collector of Bapatla, Andhra Pradesh, alleges that a Hindu temple priest named Raghavulu and his family who live in Sajjnavari Palam has sent out a video pleading for help. Sajjnavari Palam was until recently a majority Hindu community, and Raghavulu is the priest appointed by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams to perform daily pujas to the deity at the temple.
On December 3, 2022, Raghavuluâs video pleading for help went viral. In that video, we see Raghavulu desperately pleading for help and seeking protection for his family and himself. He says Christian missionaries have been harassing and threatening him and mentions that his pleas to the Government of Andhra Pradesh, TTD and law enforcement officials have not been responded to.
According to GHHFâs petition, Hindu organizations responded to the priestâs call for help and went to the village to set up a meeting. What the Hindu organizations found out was that the village now has very few Hindus left and that Christian groups have demanded that the priest surrender the temple to the local Christian pastor. âWe learned that the Christian community intends to demolish the temple and replace it with a church,â the GHHF petition states.
It is alleged that the very next day a mob of about 150 Christians along with a local âsarpanchâ (himself a Christian convert) went to the home of the priestâs brother, dragged the brother and his wife out of their home, and warned them of dire consequences. Priest Raghavulu went into hiding and has reached out for help.
The following day the Superintendent of Police, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and the Tahsildar held a meeting at the village to address the situation. And, according to the GHHF petition, the police officers and the tahsildar spoke in favor of the Christian community and supported the local pastorâs intention to convert the temple into a church.
These are the kinds of issues that GHHF takes up, seeks information and help from people, petitions government officials to redress grievances, and bring to the attention of authorities the various acts of proselytism, illegal encroachment of public lands, and the construction of churches on such land, close to Hindu temples.
If this is what the writer for American Kahani is afraid of, then we can ask if GHHF is making false claims. How can such an event happen in a state where Hindus are a majority, one may ask. If Hindus are a majority, and cunning and scheming as their detractors claim they are, how is it that the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh is a Christian whose special interest in and sops for the Christian community is public knowledge?
These sops are part of the strategy of âconversion by stealthâ Prof. Gautam Sen has argued, and that large-scale conversion is happening in Andhra Pradesh was admitted to by a Member of Parliament, Raghu Ramakrishna Raju, belonging to the YSR Congress Party. That such a claim had to be suppressed and the person who made it punished was soon evident when Mr. Raju was arrested by the YSR Reddy government on charges of sedition for âdisturbing communal harmony and attacking dignitaries of the Jagan Mohan Reddy governmentâ.
Is there any truth to the massive conversion of Hindus to Christians in Andhra Pradesh? Is the GHHFâs worry about the illegal construction of churches warranted? The illegal construction of churches continues all over Andhra Pradesh, including in the temple town of Tirupati. The official minders of these encroachments on public land and the illegal constructions on them as part of the global âchurch plantingâ drive are themselves Christian or commandeered by them.
Jagan Mohan Reddy has established himself as the most powerful politician in Andhra Pradesh and his father, S. Rajashekhara Reddy, also a Christian, had begun the overt âChristianizingâ project in the state in the early 2000âs when he was Chief Minister. Careful analyses by experts show that Christians in the state make up about 25 percent of the population while the official figures show that they make up 1.35 percent of the population!
The call to proselytize is not new or hidden. After all, Pope John Paul II, on his visit to India in 1999, called for a âcrusade in Asia.â But the Popeâs message is also not new, and it is not something alien to Christianity or to the other monopolist, violent, or supremacist faith like Islam. The two Abrahamic faiths stand opposed to each other as they seek to proselytize the worldâs non-Christians and non-Muslims, and they will join hands in their battle to convert the âheathenâ and the âkafirâ when it suits them to. They will bide their time and keep silent when a strong and powerful state like China slaps them around, but they know India and Hindus are fair game â the only ones that have stood and stand in their way to make the world Muslim or Christian.
Aiding in their endeavor is the supremacist, monopolist, and violent âfaithlessâ ideology â communism â whose adherents have burrowed deep into the intellectual, academic, activist, and political ground in India, seeking to make India communist. All of this is old news. Reading what Arun Shourie wrote in the 1980s and 1990s â âHarvesting our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claimsâ, âThe World of Fatwas: Or the Shariah in Actionâ, âMissionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas,â and âThe Only Fatherland: Communists, âQuit Indiaâ and the Soviet Unionâ â will allow us to understand the nature of these faiths that proclaim love, peace, and equality, and their agenda to undermine the Hindu ethos of India that is Bharat.
Eliza Griswold has observed that more than half of the worldâs Muslims and the worldâs Christians live along the tenth parallel. âItâs a place where ideological â and geographic â conflicts often arise,â she says. The African continent, once the largest home to indigenous faith groups, is now almost equally divided between Muslims and Christians. The Americas were Christianized in the second millennium, while Europe succumbed in the first millennium.
India has resisted as much as possible the attacks by these supremacist ideologies, but their battering rams are well-constructed, well-tested, and have been used for nearly two millennia. Hindus will succumb, they think, and they will continue to pummel the last bastion of reason, balance, individuality, diversity, and the human quest for transcendence. And wherever they find it convenient they will join hands to target Hindus, as they are doing now here in the U.S. where they find that hardworking Hindus have begun to succeed in their chosen fields and that Hindus donât come with bombs strapped to their chests nor fly planes into buildings to avenge whatever historical injustice done to them.
That the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) took on the role of challenging the GHHF on behalf of Indian American Christian groups goes to show the increasing clout of IAMC and its global Islamist sponsors who have done their bit these two past years to pass anti-India resolutions in Albany, Hamtramck, Cambridge, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and San Francisco, and to smear Hindu American organizations as fascist and extremist as they did recently in Teaneck, NJ.
The world is mostly Christian and Muslim now. India is one of the only two Hindu-majority countries in the world, whereas 50 countries have a Muslim majority, and in 119 countries Christians are a majority. There are 57 member-states in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the world body of Muslim countries, which proclaims that the â⊠Organization is the collective voice of the Muslim world.â Islam is the worldâs fastest-growing religion, and it seems that their increasing presence in Europe and the U.S. has led to an interesting dynamic where Christians find themselves on the back foot, and so find âsoft Hindusâ and the âsoft Indian stateâ preys they can work together with the Muslims to conquer, and delay for a while the defeat of Christianity. Small, pesky groups like the GHHF, therefore, become easy prey for the soldiers of monopolist armies.
We know that Islam and Christianity are supremacist and monopolist because Muslims and Christians claim their God is the only God, that othersâ âgodsâ (in lower case) are âfalse,â and that it is their bounden duty to preach their religions to others and convert them to their faiths. Communists have a political ideology whose ends and goals are the same but instead of âHeaven,â âJannat,â and âGod,â they promise equality, here and now, on Earth. All of these ideologies are violent, and this is not some hidden knowledge restricted to a few.
According to a study in 2009 by an Arab scholar, the people/faiths/groups most responsible for global genocides are Christians, Communists, and Muslims. Thus, it makes it convenient for these violent groups then to simply collaborate on their joint endeavors and blame Hindus for their faith, for their commitments to diversity and difference, and for their attempts to recover and restore their own. Why not simply label Hindus therefore as violent, deceptive, dangerous, and a threat?
The propaganda mills manufactured by them have been at this work for a while now and given the fact that the first propagandists were the Catholics, according to the French philosopher, sociologist and politician, Jacques Ellul, we can see how the lessons learned over a millennium are being used to tar, feather, and ride Hindus on a donkey.
Many Hindu Americans have tended to be apathetic, ignorant, careless, or their focus has been on earning enough to make their way in the world â to buy a house, two cars, some property âback homeâ â and to see their daughters and sons earn admission to fancy colleges that will earn them fancy degrees, which will then earn them fancy salaries in fancy corporations. Very soon they are going to realize that what Prof. Prakasarao and GHHF (among a few other Hindu American organizations) are doing to protect Sanatana Dharma is important for not only their survival here and for their childrenâs survival in those universities and corporations but for protecting their ancestral land and a civilization that has offered the world the highest and the grandest a human being can aspire for: to be one and in tune with the cosmos.
Ramesh Rao is a professor in the Department of Communication at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA. He serves as the Chief Editor of India Facts. Opinions are personal.
Thanks for articulating the concerns of many American Hindus. I was born and raised in this country, I canât tell you how many times Iâve heard folks refer to the âbig threeâ religions, while referencing the Abrahamic faiths. Their innocent ignorance of religious populations (Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world) speaks to unrelenting creep of the belief that the Abrahamics are the religions of the future and that erasure of the pagan is destiny. I wonder if we American Hindus should start boldly embracing and leaning into our legacy of being the last surviving pagan civilization on earth. Perhaps this will reframe our concerns in the minds of a global elite obsessed with preserving diversity while, sadly, expediting itâs destruction.
The fact is GHHF & its sister concern do not represent all Hindus. They advocate Hindutva , a hardline supremacist ideology which is harming the image of Hinduism. Government of India should publish data on all interfaith conversions.
You are either amongst those naive Hindus who will buy tickets to see Hinduism in the museum, or amongst those who conspire to impose the desert cult ideologies on indigenous nature worshipping populations, cultures, and civilizations. Hindutva is an awakened Hindu who asserts his/her Hinduness only when challenged by supremacist ideologues. There is nothing to fear in Hindutva for anyone, but two faced anti-Hindus like you have to be feared by both Hindus and non-Hindus.