However, one may justify the term "Adivasi/Aboriginal" on the patronizing assumption that their lifestyle is culturally more "original", meaning "pri… - Koenraad Elst

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However, one may justify the term "Adivasi/Aboriginal" on the patronizing assumption that their lifestyle is culturally more "original", meaning "primitive"; but in that case, the labels "Christian" and "Adivasi" are mutually exclusive, since the act of conversion is a dramatic break with their ancestral traditions... Thus, since 1947, several legal amendments to prohibit and effectively thwart conversions by force or fraud (practices documented in the 1956 Niyogi Committee Report, internationally misrepresented by missionaries as an attack on the freedom of religion) were pushed by tribal MPs. For another example, the genuinely indigenous revolt led by Birsa Munda in 1899 was modelled on the Hindu reform movement Arya Samaj (he wanted his fellow tribesmen to renounce witchcraft, intoxication and animal sacrifices, and to wear the Brahminical sacred thread), and started with an attack on a mission post. Birsa receives only a single and quite scornful mention in this book, eventhough he is still a national hero for the Mundas... To fully understand this drama, we must bear in mind a few events which did not take place because they could not have taken place. No missionary has stepped in and courted martyrdom to defend the tribals and Hindus of Pakistan, in fact no missionary was around when the initial massacres took place in East Pakistan, because the missions have disinvested in Pakistan. The missions in Islamic countries find their converts harassed and even killed by their own families, their schools and churches attacked on all kinds of pretext, their graduates not given jobs. So, the missionary headquarters prefer to direct their energies to more hospitable countries like India. The fact that a missionary was killed by a "Hindu" while defending the Muslims, and not the other way round, proves in the first place that Catholic priests can function in India, much more than in Pakistan... One of the chief culprits behind the massacre was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the patron of "secularism", who used Father Rasschaert's death as yet another occasion to parade his concern for the minorities in India, and to put "Hindus" in the dock. He himself (and the entire secularist establishment till today) reneged on his duty to defend the non-Muslims surviving in the Islamic state which he had helped to create. In the Nehru-Liaqat Pact of 1950, he had given up every right to interfere on behalf of the minorities in Pakistan. By effectively condoning the persecution of non-Muslims in Pakistan, he must accept a share in the responsibility for the retaliatory tribal violence which killed Rasschaert.