Thus it can be maintained no longer that the Portuguese and British imperialists alone were responsible for the expansion of Christianity in India. The native Indian rulers have proved far more helpful to the Christian missions. They have provided constitutional protection to Christian propaganda. They have made it possible for the missions to enter into areas from where the British had kept them out. What is most important, in the years since independence Christianity has come to acquire a prestige which it had enjoyed never before in this country. It cannot be said that the country has not faced problems created by Christian missions. Converts to Christianity in the North East and Central India have constantly evinced separatist and secessionist tendencies.

There was a view at that time which is, to a great extent, maintained today: that only those Christian nations had rights to the land. That only those who were in the folds of the church and were in the folds of Christ had rights to the land, and the rest of the vast majority of the world, who were not Christians, did not have rights to land on par with those who were Christians. That is why the church became a "handmaiden to colonialism."

For what purpose then, has this enormous territory been committed to England? .... that every man, woman and child from Cape Comorin ot the Himalaya mountains, may be elevated, enlightened, Christianised.

In later epochs, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries penetrated the interiors of China and Japan and the remotest parts of Africa and South America, but their presence was indissoluble from that of the trading post and the garrison. In the course of a profitable partnership with slavery, colonialism and forced labor, the Christian “civilizing mission” often came up against strongly entrenched local religions. Where it did not adapt to these, or eliminate their believers, it made little headway. In India, which was disputed as a prize between four principal European powers before passing under British suzerainty, the effect of Christianity has been relatively slight. The Indian authorities, who are suspicious to this day of the link between proselytization and foreign interference, have generally discouraged missionary activity. They have left Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity largely alone, however, in deference to the worldwide reputation of their founder. The Mother Teresa establishment in Calcutta, therefore, possesses elements of pathos and nostalgia: it is the chief and lonely relic of what was once a vast enterprise of conquest and crusading.

But to grant them churches, wherein they might celebrate mass, and have congregations and public assemblies, she could not with the safety of her realm, and without wrong to her own honour and conscience: neither did she see cause, why she should grant it, seeing England embraced not new or strange doctrine, but the same which Christ commanded, and what the primitive and catholic church had received, and was approved by the ancient fathers, as might be testified by their writings. Therefore for her to allow churches which contradicted the truth and the gospel, were not only to repeal the laws established by act of parliament, but to sow religion out of religion, to distract good people's minds, to cherish factions, to disturb religion and the commonwealth, and to mingle divine and human things.

Unfortunately, Christianity in India has been inextricably mixed up for the last one hundred years with the British rule. It appears to us as synonymous with the materialistic civilization and imperialistic exploitation by the strong white races of the weaker races of the world. Its contribution to India has been therefore largely of a negative character. It has done some good in spite of its professors. It has shocked us into setting our own house in order.

What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power. In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march.

India is a country which of all others we are bound to en- lighten with eternal truth…. But what is most important to you friends of missions, is this — that there is a large population of aborigines, a people who are outside caste…. If they are attached, as they rapidly may be, to Christianity, they will form a nucleus round which British power and influence may gather. Remember, too, that Hinduism, although it is dying, yet has force … and such tribes, if not converted to Christianity, may be perverted to Hinduism…. You may be confident that the missions in India are doing a work which strengthens the imperial foundations of British power…. I say that, of all the departments I have ever administered, I never saw one more efficient than the missionary department.

Supporting Christian missionaries is an article of faith for secularism in India. When the secularist-leftist magazine Tehelka, in one of its early issues, carried detailed reports about the heavily funded and militarily organized subversive activities of foreign missionaries in India, there was a sharp reaction from prominent leftist and secularist personalities who wrote floods of letters to the magazine expressing shock at the publication of such reports in a secularist-leftist magazine, and accusing it of having betrayed secularism. Ever since, Tehelka is in the forefront of “reports” indicting “communal” Hindu organisations for harassing Christian missionaries and neo-Christian converts. ... Furthermore, it is also a fact that Christian converts from the tribals manage to corner most of the seats reserved for the tribals to the disadvantage of non-Christian tribals: there is a detailed report on this, with facts and figures, by S K Kaul, former Deputy Commissioner, Commission for the Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, entitled “Christian converts corner the lion’s share of Reservation quota in services for Vanavasis”, in the Organiser, Republic Day Special, 1989.

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties.

...was ordained by a higher power than any on earth, that the destinies of India should be placed in the hands of an enlightened nation, whose principles of government were in accordance with those of intellect, justice, and reason. Yes, my friends, the great God above, He who is equally the God of the Jew, the Hindu, the Christian, and the Mohammedan, placed the British over the people of India-gave them rational laws (and no religious laws revealed to us by God can be at variance with rational laws), gave you, up to the year 1858, the Government of the East India Company. The rule of that now defunct body of merchant princes was one eminent for justice and moderation, both in temporal and religious matters. The only point in which it failed to satisfy the wants of the age latterly, was the fact of its not being a regal Government,-a necessity which had gradually forced itself more prominently into notice as time rolled on, when the once solitary factory on the banks of the Ganges had grown into an empire half as large as Europe, with a population of nearly two hundred millions. 117

profits made by the East India Company [...] in Bengal, financed [...] wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion. (pg. 164)

A new opportunity came again for Christianity when Europe, and particularly England, dominated the world during the last few centuries. During this while, one would have expected, according to Muir, that Christian Europe would have improved its advantages for evangelizing the East, that "Britain, the bulwark of religion in the West, would have stepped forth as its champion in the East, and displayed her faith and her zeal where they were most urgently required." But, alas! it was not to be so and, Muir continues, "England was then sadly neglectful of her responsibility; her religion was shown only at home and she was careless of the spiritual darkness of her benighted subjects abroad; her sons, who adopted India as their country, so far from endeavouring to impart to its inhabitants the benefits of their religion, too often banished it from their own minds, and exhibited to heathens [Hindus] and Mohammadans the sad spectacle of men without falth ... [and] their lives too often presented a practical and powerful, a constant and a living, argument against the truth of our holy faith."

The fourth phase which commenced with the coming of independence proved a boon for Christianity. The Christian right to convert Hindus was incorporated in the Constitution. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who dominated the scene for 17 long years, promoted every anti-Hindu ideology and movement behind the smokescreen of a counterfeit secularism. The regimes that followed continued to raise the spectre of ‘Hindu communalism’ as the most frightening phenomenon. Christian missionaries could now denounce as a Hindu communalist and chauvinist, even as a Hindu Nazi, any one who raised the slightest objection to their means and methods. All sorts of ‘secularists’ came forward to join the chorus. New theologies of Fulfilment, Indigenisation, Liberation, and Dialogue were evolved and put into action. The missionary apparatus multiplied fast and became pervasive. Christianity had never had it so good in the whole of its history in India. It now stood recognized as ‘an ancient Indian religion’ with every right to extend its field of operation and expand its flock. The only rift in the lute was K.M. Panikkar’s book, Asia and Western Dominance, published from London in 1953, the Niyogi Committee Report published by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1956, and Om Prakash Tyagi’s Bill on Freedom of Religion introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 1978.