NEW DELHI, India — The Catholic Church in India will continue to proclaim the Gospel in spite of calls for restrictions on evangelization.

“Proclamation is the essential activity of the Church,” the Latin-rite bishops of India declared. “We are not disciples of Christ if we do not proclaim Christ's message.”

Evangelization, they said, is a “human right,” and “difficulties, oppositions and even persecution will not deter us” from evangelizing.

Their declaration came during the Jan. 15-19 Assembly of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India. The bishops met at Tiruchirapalli in southern Tamil Nadu state, the site of massive protests last October in which Christians protested legislation the government said was to curb conversions by fraud, force or allurement.

“The Church does not believe nor indulge in conversions by force, fraud or allurement,” the bishops said in response.

Hindu nationalist groups have carried on a vociferous campaign urging states to emulate Tamil Nadu's conversion ban.

But conversions by force, fraud or allurement are “no conversions at all,” said Bishop Thomas Dabre, the bishops’ conference's secretary-general. The campaign is being used “to target the Christian community” by Hindu nationalist forces, he added.

The bishops’ declaration noted that an “ominous rise of militant [Hindu] fundamentalism [and] resurgence of a monocultural militant nationalism” is impeding the Church's mission of evangelization. “The negative attitudes of the mono-cultural nationalists who look at religious and ethnic minorities with a hostile eye is a matter of concern,” the bishops said.

The venue and theme of the assembly (“Sharing the Good News”) had been decided much earlier — last April.

“Yet, recent developments were very much in our minds when we drafted the declaration,” Bishop Dabre said Feb 4.

Speaking from his diocesan office in Vasai near Bombay, the bishop said the convention reiterated the Church's “duty to evangelize” but added that people are “free to respond” to it.

Describing the campaign against conversion as “bitter” and “neither theological nor philosophical,” Bishop Dabre said, “there are various sociopolitical factors behind it.”

At the political level, Bishop Dabre said, Hindu nationalist groups are trying “to hoist Hindu nationalism and consolidate the votes of the [Hindu] majority by using Christians as whipping boys.”

More than 80% of India's 1 billion people are Hindus while Christians account for 2.18%.

The bishop said the powerful Hindu elites find a “strong enemy in the Church's social work” among oppressed classes such as tribals and dalits (low castes treated as untouchables.)

“We have no problem with Christianity as long as it makes Indian society more just and egalitarian,” said Swami Agnivesh, a prominent Hindu reformist leader.

“We are extremely glad to hear that the mainstream churches are opposed to dubious conversions,” added the saffron-clad activist monk, who is the working president of the World Council of Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist group. He also serves as chairman of the U.N. Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

“I am all for conversion and it should be tolerated and promoted,” Agnivesh said, “if that would help people achieve a greater degree of self-respect and social justice.”

Controversial Conversions

But Hindu nationalist groups such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the World Hindu Council, do not share Agnivesh's reformist view.

“Christians have been all along indulging in questionable conversions,” said Vireshwar Dwivedi, Vishwa Hindu Parishad spokesman. “This is clear from the fact that Christians closed thousands of their schools in Tamil Nadu to protest a law that only bans conversions by fraud, force or inducement.”

Dwivedi also claimed that Christians’ fears of the law being misused to harass them were unfounded.

However, within weeks after the new legislation came into force, two conversion cases were blamed on Christian institutions in the state. After an investigation, police dismissed both complaints against the Christian schools as “motivated” by personal interests.

Though Dwivedi said groups like Vishwa Hindu Parishad have no problem if people change religion “out of conviction,” he failed to explain why entire Muslim families in the area often are forced to flee if a Hindu girl falls in love and marries a Muslim boy.

“These are all aberrations,” Dwivedi said.

However, John Dayal, a leading Christian activist in India, said that “such aberrations have become the norm” in states and areas under the control of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the federal coalition government.

“The conversion debate is a political ploy to demonize the minorities,” said Dayal, vice president of the All India Catholic Union and secretary-general of the All India Christian Council, an ecumenical lay Christian forum. “These very people who demand a law to ban conversions in fact have no respect for the rule of law, nor do they observe the statutes.”

To prove his point, Dayal cited the example of Dilip Singh Judeo, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament who has been organizing “reconversion” ceremonies for two decades after intimidating tribal Christians in remote jungle tracts in central India.

The Freedom of Religion Act in Madhya Pradesh state has never been applied to Judeo, who hails from an erstwhile Hindu royal family, Dayal pointed out. And, even after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee appointed Judeo to his federal cabinet in January, Singh has said his government job will not prevent him from holding reconversion ceremonies in his strongholds.

“It is not conversion that bothers them [Hindu nationalists]. For them, this is an emotive issue to garner the votes of the Hindu majority,” added Dayal, who took up advocacy for the beleaguered Christian community after retiring as editor of a national daily.

“We will not be intimidated or threatened by this vicious campaign,” Bishop Dabre said. “The Church in India will stand up for what it believes is its mission and duty.”

Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi, India.