Ideas
Woman holding a Christian cross. Representative image (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Something strange and disturbing has been caught in Indian social media.
‘Mission Kaali’ is a social media handle which has been monitoring and documenting how evangelist individuals and organisations violate laws in India and engage in outright abuse of human rights.
One aspect of this phenomenon this handle has been documenting is how powerful bureaucrats in India have been misusing their positions of power, as evangelists, and for evangelists.
Mr. D.P. Haokip is a senior official in the Indian Revenue Service (IRS).
In a talk obviously given in an evangelist convention Haokip reveals that he is also an evangelist even while on duty.
He claims that he summoned Rahul Dravid, former captain of Indian cricket team to his office and did proselytising manoeuvres for an hour, preaching him Bible.
An IRS top-level bureaucrat can make the life of any of his targets miserable. Every one knows the power of such a post.
Haokip reveals his evangelist zeal even in his visiting card which contains a verse from Gospel according to John [verse: 3:16].
Mission Kaali rightly points out that the very same chapter later condemns all non-believers who do not ritually drink the blood of Jesus to eternal hell (3:36).
Clearly the visiting card reveals both the offending and threatening implications of his mindset to the non-believers who refuse to listen to his fundamentalist evangelist ramblings.
No wonder a leading cricketer and a Hindu had to sit for an hour listening to his Bible preaching. If this is the case with a famous personality, then one can think about the kind of abuse his ordinary victims should have undergone.
Sen then added, according to the Senator, that he had found a solution which was that he would personally sign the applications and establish a pattern of dealing that would get around Indian bureaucracy.
This should likely be referring to IFS bureaucrat Ronen Sen, who was ambassador to the United States, during UPA-I.
Either the US Senator was exaggerating and grand-stating or the Indian ambassador to the US probably wanted to show Sonia Gandhi in Delhi how loyal he was to her brand of secularism.
Anyhow, the claim by Senator is in public realm and there has been no denial (at least as far as this writer knows) from ex-ambassador Ronen Sen.
If the public claims made by the US Senator are true, then we have a classic example of a top ranking diplomat going out his way to please and facilitate proselytising agents of a foreign country to operate in India.
The same is also true about C.Umashankar, IAS. .
Considered a honest bureaucrat, his evangelist zeal led him to become the target of online jokes and memes.
Some who have observed him think that the pressure from politicians made him the victim of evangelism.
Apart from citing Bible for capital punishment to homosexuals, he even preaches that those who keep any portrait, even that supposedly depicting Jesus, should be canned.
At times he also arouses end-times fear mongering derived from apocalyptic visions from the Christian sacred book.
In yet another more dangerous revelation a Jesuit clergy, Joe Arun, director of LIBA (Loyola Institute of Business Administration) claimed that when the state government of Tamil Nadu asked him to be one of the mentors in the board for revising the social science syllabus from first standard to 12th standard, he introduced Jesuit ideology into the syllabus.
He states:
So, the evangelism is happening at all levels of the Indian state, targeting not only immediate targets but also generations.
All these bring us to the larger problem.
Today, the evangelist crusade against Hinduism and hence all native spiritual traditions of India, has discovered a new strategy – to use the powerful Indian Civil Services for its cause.
What Mission Kaali has brought out is most probably only a tip of the iceberg.
From loan sanction to building approval, evangelists at all levels of bureaucracy can play havoc on Hindus.
Income tax raids can become the evangelist inquisitions for the non-believers.
Ration cards can become the rapiers of crusaders.
Perhaps during the decade of UPA rule, such bureaucratic evangelism became well-established in the system. We still do not know how many bureaucrats from top and middle level are sharing their success stories of evangelist crusades against Hindus (particularly Scheduled Communities and tribes) in unrecorded conventions.
It is time Hindus recognise as a society the existential danger posed by this bureaucratic evangelist crusade.
Ideally, the people and community leaders of various Hindu traditions should force the government to create bodies, both at the local and national level, to monitor whether the bureaucrats of other religions are misusing their positions of power to abuse the autochthonous traditions of Indian communities and tribes.
In this, more responsibility vests with we, the Hindus of India. We need to compel our law-makers to issue white papers for every constituency and then every Hindu majority state, as to whether the unethical bureaucratic evangelist activities happened in the constituency and state.
Irrespective of whether actions are taken against the unethical bureaucrats, at least as the significant first step they should be named and shamed.
Mission Kaali and quite a few social media handles have done a remarkable service of monitoring and recording such gross unethical abuse of bureaucratic power in India – perhaps an unwritten and unofficially implemented policy under UPA. But given the epidemic nature of this abuse and its potentially violent and dangerous consequences for the nation, what we need immediately is a national level intervention and detoxification.
This then is in fact true secular humanism fighting against predatory religious fundamentalism.