A new mood of aggressive evangelism has been emanating from America.
Well-funded, superbly networked, backed by the highest of the land, seized of
its moral supremacy, it has India as one of its key targets, reveals VK
Shashikumar in a disturbing exposé
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Preparing for the harvest ...
This could be the plot of a fevered thriller. A jingoistic president,
multi-million dollar corporations, high technology, a grand if furtive mission,
networks spanning the globe, and biblical invocations.
Only it's real. And its got India in its crosshair.
Religious expansionism has not witnessed this scale, scope, and state
resources in a long time. Detailed investigations by Tehelka reveal that
American evangelical agencies have established in India an enormous,
well-coordinated and strategised religious conversion plan. The operation was
launched in the early 1990s but really came into its own after George W Bush
Jr, an avowed born-again Christian, became president of the United States in
2001. Since then, aggressive evangelists have found pro-active support from the
new administration in their efforts to convert some sections of Indian society
to Christianity. At the heart of this complex and sophisticated operation is a
simple strategy-convert locals and then give them the know-how and money to
plant their own churches and multiply.
Around the time that Bush Jr moved into the Oval office, a worldwide
conversion movement, funded and effected by American evangelical groups, was
peaking in India. The movement, which began as AD2000 & Beyond and later
morphed into Joshua Project I and Joshua Project II, was designed to be a
sledgehammer-a breathtaking, decade-long steamroller of a campaign that would
set the stage for a systematic, sophisticated and self-sustaining "harvest" of
the "unreached people groups" in India in the 21st century. It was just as the
operation was taking off that the script changed. Much to the delight of
American evangelicals, one of their own, George Bush Jr, became the occupant of
the White House.
In a major policy decision taken very early into his presidency, Bush, on
January 29, 2001, unveiled a "faith based" social service initiative that
included a new White House office to promote government aid to churches and
Christian faith-based organisations. This, in effect, threw the massive weight
of the federal government behind religious groups and religious conversions.
The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was set up in the White
House in the first week of February 2002 and a man called Jim Towey was
appointed director. (A snap introduction to Towey: he was the legal counsel to
Mother Teresa in the late 1980s.)
Though Bush's initiative to fund "salvation and religious conversion" is
stalled in the Congress over constitutional and civil rights concerns, he has
pushed for its implementation through executive orders.
White House-Christian Coalition nexus
The American press is replete with reports on Bush's largesse to faith-based
organisations. They say it's his "return gift" to the Christian Right for
having loyally supported his presidential campaign. The Christian Coalition,
founded by American TV evangelist and head of the multi-billion Christian
Broadcasting Network (CBN), Pat Robertson, played a crucial role in the 2000
election. Recently, in his TV programme, Club 700, broadcast on CBN, Robertson
created a stir by announcing that he is confident Bush will win the 2004
election in a "blowout" because God has told him so.
Indeed, Bush is keen to retain what we call the votebank and Americans 'the
base'. After all, the Far Right Christian evangelists have also been the most
loyal backers of his hardline militarism in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
But there is another, perhaps more important, reason why Bush is keen on
supporting his evangelist friends who run huge transnational missionary
organisations (TMOs). In the decade 1990-2000 they ran a global intelligence
operation so complex and sophisticated that its scale and implications are no
less than staggering. This operation has put in place a system which enables
the US government to access any ethnographic information on any location
virtually at the click of the mouse. This network in India, established with
funding and strategic assistance from US-based TMOs, gives US intelligence
agencies virtually real time access to every nook and corner of the country.
(See 'List of TMOs Active in India')
Since Bush's ascendancy to the presidency this network of networks has
multiplied rapidly in India. Bush supports conversion in India because he
supports those American TMOs who fund and strategise conversion activities in
this country. Organisations like the International Mission Board, Southern
Baptist Convention, Christian Aid, World Vision, Seventh Day Adventist Church
and multi-billion enterprises run by evangelists like Pat Robertson, Billy
Graham and Roger Houtsma, amongst many others, were instrumental in running a
coordinated conversion campaign in India under the banner of AD2000. These
later became the Joshua Project and when the decade-long movement officially
closed down in March 2001, Joshua Project II was launched to sustain
conversions and intelligence-gathering. Graham's TMO, Billy Graham Evangelist
Association, supports conversion activities in Gurgaon, Haryana, and Kolkata.
When AD2000 was conceived for India, the plan was based on a military model
with the intent to invade, occupy, control, or subjugate its population. It was
based on solid intelligence emanating from the ground and well-researched
information on various facets of selected people groups. The idea was to send
out spying missions to source micro details on religion and culture. The social
and economic divisions in the various Indian communities were closely examined.
Given the oppressive and institutionalised caste system in the Hindu society,
American evangelical strategists chalked out plans for reaching these various
"unmixable" caste groups. The many faultlines running through the
country-divisions in terms of ethnicity, caste, creed, language and class-were
all factored in during the generation of ethnographic data.
North India was designated the core target of American evangelists. It was
described as the "core of the core of the core" of a worldwide evangelical
movement conceived by fundamentalist American missionaries. This movement that
took shape over the 1990s, has now taken off because of a unique collaboration
between the American government and US-based evangelical mission agencies. In
the 1990s this movement was shaped by the World Evangelical Fellowship (an
international alliance of national evangelical alliances), working with the
AD2000 movement. It brought together a wide variety of individuals and
organisations, under the single goal of achieving "a church for every people
and the gospel for every person by the year 2000." Its focus was missionary
mobilisation and church planting in India and other regions of the world where
the Christian population was negligible. This movement was also a massive
intelligence gathering exercise funded and supported by American
missionary organisations that were responsible for the election of George W
Bush.
Global evangelism plans
AD2000 first attracted attention at a convention of international evangelical
missions called Lausanne II in Manila in 1989. The movement then spread rapidly
around the globe to help catalyse evangelism. The strategy behind the movement
was to establish pioneering global partnerships to eventually provide a church
within every "unreached people group". Ralph Winter, founder of the US Center
for World Mission, characterised the movement as "the largest, most pervasive
global evangelical network ever to exist."
This movement, spearheaded by Luis Bush from the movement's headquarters in
Colorado Springs, US, was planned for large conversion of people living within
the "10/40 Window". Incidentally, Billy Graham, a Christian fundamentalist and
rabid evangelist, who was responsible for George W's "born again" Christian
status and whom the president considers as his godfather was the honorary
co-chairman of the AD 2000 movement.
For further reading:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main.asp?filename=ts013004shashi.asp&id=2
With Regards
Abi
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