Why Spew Venom Against RSS & Hindus?
Self-styled Christian lobbyists’ campaign against Hindus outreach in US & Europe has not worked even with scaremongering and demonization tactics. Aniket Pingley There is a genre of writing immune to journalistic standards in gathering evidence, retaining balance and complete disclosure. It is the opinion piece. In its honest form, it declares a position and argues it. In its dishonest form, it uses the opinion format as legal exemption, a space where alarming assertions are made, dehumanising imagery deployed and contested allegations stated as settled fact, all under the protective cover of “these are merely my views.” John Dayal’s piece in UCA News, headlined, “The Indian paramilitary organization’s tentacles in the US,” is a distinguished specimen of the dishonest form. It is tactical scaremongering – calibrated to produce a specific emotional and political effect amongst a specific audience at a chosen moment in Washington lobbying calendar. The article makes claims about the RSS, Gujarat, lobbying firms, FCRA and about Indian-origin officials in the US government. I will not engage those claims here. They are matters of public record, available to any reader willing to search. Readers are capable of forming their own opinions about Gujarat 2002, Modi visa episode, Squire Patton Boggs and India’s FCRA regime. They do not need me to defend the RSS against Dayal’s version of events. What I will do is more useful: identify what this article actually is, what it is attempting at and why its final sentence, the most revealing sentence in the piece, tells the reader everything they need to know. Confession in last sentence Dayal ends his article with, “The RSS has money, access, a friendly executive environment, and the weight of geopolitics on its side, and for the moment seems able to counter the evangelical campaign.” Read it slowly. Counter the evangelical campaign. Not “respond to criticism.” Not “defend itself against allegations.” Counter the evangelical campaign. Dayal told his readers, in his own words, what this is actually about. There is an evangelical campaign, organised, funded and directed, targeting RSS in Washington DC. And, what is Dayal lamenting is that this campaign is not working. RSS is successfully countering it. This is the most important fact in the entire article and it appears in the last line, almost as an afterthought. Everything before it, the alarming language, assembled allegations, USCIRF references, lobbying firm drama, is the infrastructure in that evangelical campaign. The article is a dispatch from one side of an active lobbying contest, written by one of its participants, lamenting that the other side is holding ground. And, RSS has every right to hold its ground. USCIRF’s annual report is not scripture. It is not axiomatic truth. It is not a judicial finding. It is the output of an advisory commission whose India recommendations the US State Department has declined to act upon for six consecutive years, a fact Dayal buries in his final paragraph as if it were a footnote, rather than the most consequential sentence in his piece. American foreign policy operates on classified intelligence, diplomatic relationships and a comprehensive picture of the world that an advisory commission does not possess. What’s this Evangelical Campaign? The campaign Dayal laments, RSS is successfully countering, is a coordinated effort to have United States designate India as a Country of Particular Concern on religious freedom, impose targeted sanctions on RSS and restrict its members from entering the US. It runs through USCIRF, Congressional testimony, UN Special Rapporteur submissions and in coordination with International Christian Concern, National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Its substance: Christian organisations in India are being persecuted, FCRA restrictions choke Christian churches and anti-conversion laws are religious oppression. Each of these claims deserves a question Dayal never asks: why are there so many foreign-funded Christian organisations operating in India and what precisely are they doing? The answer is not theoretical. It is on the record. Compassion International (CI), a major US-based Christian child sponsorship charity that operated in India for 48 years, provides the most precise forensic answer available. In 2017, Indian Government placed CI on “prior permission” list under FCRA, requiring explicit case-by-case approval for every financial transaction, effectively halting flow of approximately $50 million annually. The government’s case rested on CBI First Information Report and Income Tax investigation into CI’s primary Indian affiliate, Chennai-based Caruna Bal Vikas (CBV). CBV was registered under FCRA with its legally declared nature of association as “economic, educational and social.” The CBI found it had, in its own documents, “invariably indulged in religious activities.” More precisely, in CBV’s own stated long-term organisational objective, the goal was “converting poor children into fulfilled Christian adults.” That is not a characterisation by the Indian government. It is what the organisation wrote about itself. Furthermore, CI was identified as part of an organised international missionary industry focused on what its own practitioners call “10-40 Window”, a geographic band encompassing majority of the world’s Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, deliberately targeted as a conversion frontier. This is what the FCRA regime was responding to. Not the practice of Christianity, the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala have worshipped in this land since the first century, and nobody has targeted them. What was being regulated is a specific, documented, foreign-funded, institutionally organised project of converting economically vulnerable children using charitable cover. When an organisation tells CBI investigators, through its own documents, that its goal is to convert poor children, it is not a policy concern. That is evidence. India’s state governments have enacted anti-conversion laws through elected legislative assemblies using constitutional procedures with clear majorities. These laws do not prohibit practice of Christianity. They regulate coercive, fraudulent or inducement-based conversions. Twelve states have enacted such legislation. That is Indian democratic federalism functioning as designed. Whether those laws are sound policy is a matter for Indian courts and voters, not for an American advisory commission whose mandate derives from US domestic legislation with no jurisdiction over a sovereign parliament. FCRA regime applies
