A Personal Experience of Missionaries in India
Having achieved a Group Captains rank, I thought it a good idea to make a foray in the civil and corporate world. One of my appointments was as the Project Director of the Tribal Welfare Project run by the WHO, with head quarters in Geneva. The project of which I was made incharge was at Palghar a tribal belt 90 miles from Mumbai. I recollect I was interviewed by AH Tobaccowala, an earlier colleage of the great JRD Tata. I still wonder why he selected me as i was a military officer and in addition 5 PhD in various disciples were to work under me. One reason could be that they wanted a senior officer to head the project as it involved a lot of liaison work and interaction with the IAS fraternity of the Maharashtra government.
During my stint as director the one most glaring aberration that stood out a mile was the role of the Christian missionaries. Let me add the tribal here followed a mixture of Hinduism and Animism. There were many missionaries floating around and they had also built a church with a small school to educate the tribal children. So far so good, but on deeper examination I found the missionaries would hold sessions on denigrating the Hindu gods and also try and convince the simple tribal folk that true god was Jesus who gave them bread and the goodies like powder milk, chocolates etc that came from abroad. There was big funding from the Vatican.
A peculiar aspect of this entire scenario was that the government ( It was a Congress government) was not allowing Hindu missionaries to enter the tribal belt as they felt that Hindu missionaries were all members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and RSS and they could not be allowed. This was confirmed to me by a senior official.
I decided to act and called the head missionary and had a long talk with him. He insisted that it was his duty to spread the Gospel and finally he confessed that future funds for schools and a dispensary would only come from the Vatican, if some tribal converted to Christianity.This was something I had long suspected. In one swift movement I got the local police to remove all the missionaries from my area.I brought in volunteers from the Art of Living of Sri Sri to help out. I was glad that the top hierarchy of the WHO backed me after I was called to Geneva to explain my actions. I was clear we wanted to uplift the tribal folk and not convert them.
This was a rare experience for me and as I am not Jesus , I left this appointment for a higher position as Vice President of large. multinational and later as a executive Director of an American firm abroad. But friends make no mistake, the missionaries main purpose is to convert to Christianity and welfare activities are just a cloak to cover it.
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