Religion: You Have No Place

Christianity in India is almost as old as Christianity. At Mylapore, in Madras State, stands an ancient granite cross which marks the traditional spot where St. Thomas the Apostle—Doubting Thomas —met a martyr’s death as India’s first Christian missionary. As early as 325 A.D. the Gospel was well enough rooted there for a bishop at the Council of Nicaea to sign himself “John … of all Persia and Great India.”

In modern times, Christian missions have brought India schools, hospitals and model farms as well as the Gospel. Today, nonetheless, the Christian cause in India knows a growing sense of insecurity.

Organized Hostility? For months, Protestant and Roman Catholic mission bodies have observed repeated evidences of the Indian government’s hostility to Christian missions, some of it open, much of it half-concealed in bureaucratic pigeonholes. Says the Protestant National Christian Council of India: “The hostility being displayed these days cannot be spontaneous. There seems to be an organized attempt to disrupt the good relations which have existed so far between Christians and their [Hindu] countrymen.” India’s Committee of Catholic Bishops admits that the situation is causing “gravest anxiety,” and the Apostolic Internuncio has taken up with the Indian government recent difficulties in obtaining visas for Catholic missionaries.

In India’s House of the People (Lower House of Parliament), a bitter debate brought the issues into the open. Deputy Home Minister Balwant Nagesh Datar declared that the right to propagate religion, as well as other rights guaranteed by the Indian constitution, applies only to Indian nationals; foreigners are subject to any obligations the government might see fit to impose on them. This was strongly contested by the Christian members of the House, who maintained that constitutional rights apply equally to all, and that the right to propagate religion has no meaning without the right to convert. Maniben Patel, spinster daughter of the late Congress Party strongman, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, countered with a demand that the government investigate all Christian missionaries, accusing them of being responsible for damage to Hindu temples in Travancore-Cochin and of discriminating against Hindu nurses in Christian hospitals.

Question of Order? At this point, Home Minister Kailas Nath Katju rose with a blunt statement and an appeal to the holy spirit of Gandhi. The constitution, Katju claimed, was “made by the Indian people for themselves, and it would be the height of impertinence for Parliament to make a constitution for American citizens . . . They can walk out any time they like . . .

“I look at the problem more or less from the law and order point of view . . . As Gandhi has said over and over again, in India we have been taught by our holy books that every religion is entitled to equal reverence, every religion contains the truth … If you come here into free India . . . saying, ‘My faith is good, your faith is hopeless, your faith is utter idolatry’ . . . then it will not be a question of religion; it will be a question of law and order. People will not tolerate this.”

Once again Dr. Katju quoted Gandhi: “If you [Christian missionaries] feel . . . that India’s religions too are true, though like all religions imperfect . . . and you come as fellow helpers and fellow seekers, there is a place for you here. But if you come as preachers of the ‘true Gospel’ to a people who are wandering in darkness, so far as I am concerned, you can have no place.”

Said the Christian Century this week: “This is not only a denial of the fundamental human right of freedom of speech and conscience, but it also wrongly imposes the Hindu conception of the nature of man on all … It is to be hoped that [ India ] will realize before it is too late that it is playing into the hands of a totalitarian theocracy.”