Missionaries creating climate of terror

I refer to the article headlined, 'India fears the death of secularism' (South China Morning Post, September 9). I am concerned about the campaign by Christian missionaries who are portraying themselves as 'victims' of 'growing intolerance' in India.

No minority group, including Christians, suffers from any form of discrimination in India. Hindus respect all religions and have no problems with anyone following any faith. However, most of the Christian missionaries operating in India have abused this trust, creating a climate of terror and chaos, especially in the tribal Hindu areas of the country.

Any act of violence is wrong and should be condemned, nevertheless the conversion activities of Christian missionaries represent the root cause of all violent crimes in tribal areas.

In previous letters to these columns, I highlighted how the sole aim of most, though not all, missionaries in India has been to convert people by deceitful means, using education and health institutions as a front. In some tribal districts, church workers have openly distributed cash to poor people as a means of persuading them to convert.

These incidents have been documented by official commissions appointed by previous non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments.

Because missionaries extended their campaign to certain tribal Hindu areas, even before the BJP assumed power in 1998, there were many recorded clashes in states like Orissa. This is because tribal Hindus, like tribal people elsewhere in the world, are extremely sensitive and over-protective about preserving their culture. The missionaries' open disdain and hatred of the Hindu religion and its customs has angered them.

The Director-General of Police of Orissa, Dilip Mohapatra, has accepted that the only reason behind the recent killing of Father Arul Doss was his method of converting tribals. The Wadhwa Commission, appointed to investigate the murder of missionary Graham Staines in January, held only the Orissa state's Congress Government responsible for failing to check the crime and the tensions in the area. It declared that the BJP and its affiliated organisations had nothing to do with the death of Mr Staines, or with other acts of violence. Despite that, the Christian missionaries have stepped up their malicious propaganda, blaming the BJP for any violence involving Christians, even when it has been proved that the violence had no religious agenda and in the majority of the cases was committed by Christians themselves.