The story of humanity is not a happy tale. Nor can we assume that it will have a happy ending. No animal species has been so cruel and destructive to itself as Homo sapiens. The age-old maxim goes, “Homo homini lupus”– “Man is a wolf to man.” With rare exceptions or brief lulls, war, conquest, plunder and bloodshed, ruthless exploitation has been crimson constants in the shifting equations of “human” history.
Of course, this behaviour has its roots in animal nature: territorial conquest and expansion, defending one’s kin, preying upon other species. Still, there are species and species: the tiger’s nature is not that of the deer. But even the tiger – or the wolf, for that matter – does not destroy its fellow creatures. Only man does. The beast is not “bestial,” only man is. The difference is the mind, our blessed or cursed instrument, which has multiplied our possibilities animal or human, sordid or sublime, divine or devilish.
Conquering Creeds
But if the human mind could be purified or controlled, perhaps things would change? Such has always been the hope of the pacifist and the idealist. And what better way than religion? Religion, which claims to make man better, nobler, purer. Yet looking at history from a Western standpoint, it appears that the opposite has taken place: man’s rapacity reached its height when it put on the cloak of religion. The torments of Europe’s Pagans that began with Constantine the Great ended with their extinction a few centuries later. Even afterwards, the common people had to live in the shadow of fear and slaughter, with the Crusades, witch hunts, the Inquisition and wars of religion spreading their dark wings. The Renaissance sowed seeds that were going to free minds, but also an expansionist fervour that spelt doom for people across the seas. Wherever they went, Columbus and his successors killed, enslaved and plundered in the name of Jesus – a century ago, the French writer Anatole France called it “the crimes of the whole military and commercial Christianity.”1 Europe’s advance was more recently described by an African commentator in these words: “White hordes … fortified in an aggressive spirit by an arrogant, messianic Christianity … motivated by the lure of enriching plunder, … sallied forth from their western European homelands to explore, assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the rest of the world.”2
Islam did not lag far behind. Much of what is called the “Islamic world” saw relentless destruction and massacres for the glory of Allah. So did India.
U.S. historian Will Durant summed up her case in these famous words:
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.3
So long as conquests were in the name of their god, those two creeds, born of the same exclusive god, legitimized and titanized man’s unregenerate nature instead of seeking to transform it. Such is religion of the aggressive and conquering type, claiming the earth and humanity as its God-given fiefdom. It sets out to make man better but ends up strengthening his worse propensities, if in so doing it can grow in power and influence.
True, monotheistic religions also provided higher elements, a simple morality, a rudimentary ethical guide, some limited mystical experience and teaching. But much of these can be traced to earlier traditions, from Gnosticism, Mithraism, to Buddhism and older Indian influences. And in practice, as far as the “Other” was concerned, it was their worse and not their better side that had the upper hand: the Pagan, the heathen, the infidel saw very little of Jesus’ love or Allah’s mercy. What they saw was the death of hundreds of millions in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia (and in Asia particularly India), the brutal disappearance of hundreds of cultures, scriptures, art forms, and the ruins of countless lives, bleeding psyches, uprooted ethnic groups and torn nations. “With all your brags and boastings, where has Christianity succeeded without the sword?”4 asked Swami Vivekananda of missionaries. As unpleasant as the reality may be, we must face it. If we are told, for instance, that Christianity and Islam preach peace, love and brotherhood, we must ask why their histories are full of war, hatred and division. We must ask why in their obsessional quest for heaven, they strove so hard to turn this earth into a living hell. And we must keep asking until we get an honest answer.
It took Europe several centuries to fully emerge from the Dark Ages that followed the rise of Christianity, and many thinkers of the fibre of a Voltaire, who in 1765 addressed the Church thus:
You are right, gentlemen, do overrun the earth ; it belongs to the strong or the clever who grabs hold of it. You have made the most of the times of ignorance, superstition, insanity, you have divested us from our heritages, trampled on us, you have grown fat on the substance of the wretched – dread the coming of the day of reason.5
And indeed, with the advent of enlightenment and reason, many announced the demise of religion – by which they meant the irrational belief in a god enthroned in heaven and busy sending the greater part of humanity to eternal torture. Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam, did lose much of their grip on the more advanced minds, and therefore much of their political power, and by the end of the nineteenth century were in a state of semi-slumber. Science, industry, commerce were the new gods. The good Lord was no longer needed, nor were his son and prophets. At last, order, prosperity, progress were going to reign in the world. That they never made it is another story, and with the increasing seething and boiling the earth has seen since World War II, the two slumbering giants have woken up again, as eager as ever to swallow the world.
Christianity could not recover much of the lost ground in a largely materialistic West,6 and has preferred to concentrate on the Third World, investing huge funds, deploying armies of missionaries, evolving sophisticated strategies and a defter language. Islam has expanded its horizons, thanks to colossal profits from the oil trade, a policy of rapid demographic growth, and a steady penetration into disadvantaged sections of Western societies. Today, despite all our claims to modernity, the two faiths pursue their openly hegemonic goals, usually – but not always – through subtler methods, claiming to spread peace and tolerance or brandishing “human rights,” and reasserting their exclusive ownership of truth and salvation,7 and therefore the essential falsity of other religions.
Non-Aggressive Religions and Cultures
But what of those other religions? What of the cultural traditions8 of Red Indians, Africans, Hindus or Buddhists, Shintoists or Mesoamericans, or the few others that managed to survive the onslaught, however diminished? They share at least one trait – a lack of aggressiveness, an unwillingness to use force, cunning or allurement in order to increase the flock.9 Many of them remained confined to a particular ethnic group or region; others, especially from India, did extend far and wide. Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, spread from Syria to the Far East, and cast their influence on much of the Old World – but without ever unsheathing a sword.
That is not the only difference. It has long been a fashion to advocate the “unity of religions,” to assume that all of them speak of the same god, teach the same truths, and to stress commonalities rather than differences. All the while, Christianity or Islam loudly reject any idea of “equality of religions” (as the Vatican again did recently), but proponents of unity and equality have chosen to be deaf to such noises. This is a costly error, which will in no way help the survival of non-aggressive religions and cultures.
The latter have celebrated life and generally viewed humanity as one, with an equal divine potential, while the Semitic (or Abrahamic) faiths have divided it into the faithful and the infidels, the saved and the damned, and celebrated death, not the here and now. Christianity could not have existed without the myth of Jesus’ crucifixion: his teaching in itself would not have given rise to a separate religion – after all there were many prophets and teachers before him – it was his death that made all the difference. The Pope, in a speech delivered during his last visit to India, made this very point when he declared, “If the Church is to fulfil its providential destiny in Asia, then evangelization, as a joyful, patient and progressive preaching of Jesus Christ’s saving death and resurrection, must be given absolute priority.”10 As French writer Madame de Staël remarked two hundred years ago, “Pagans divinize life, Christians divinize death.”11 The revolutionary poet Rimbaud, addressing “the Great Mother of gods and men,” exclaimed in 1870, “Oh, how bitter the road has been since the other God yoked us to his cross !”12 So too, Islam would lose all foundation without its concept of heaven and hell and would be reduced to a primitive morality. Because the two creeds are death-centred, it is no surprise if in their actual application they have chiefly worked towards the stifling of life, of life’s diversity, and of man’s free spirit. Dogma and fear are their central pillars.
By contrast, India’s spiritual paths generally encouraged debate and free inquiry, accepted new schools of thought or yoga or worship, and except for a few extreme monastic tendencies, sought to express life’s divinity through a profusion of art forms. Above all, their central goal – union with the Divine – did not brook any easy shortcut: it had to be achieved through one’s own aspiration, labour and efforts from life to life, growth from experience, not through blind adherence to a faith dictated by someone else.
To be conscious of such essential differences is of special importance today, when aggressive creeds have raised the pitch in a desperate, perhaps final, conquering attempt, while many older cultures – from the Indian to various forms of “Paganism” – are asserting their right to peaceful existence, the plurality of forms and paths, and the universal value of their deeper contributions to mankind. And those deeper contributions, too, have suddenly come back to life. Our technological societies are busy mass-producing not just machines but more and more human wrecks, vacuous, rootless and aimless, and the call for a meaning in this race to nowhere has opened the field wide to renewed inquiry. Much of it may be misguided, muddled or clumsy, but the depth and intensity of the aspiration are undeniable and have led to the revival of traditions long thought to be gone forever. From the Druids and Europe’s ancient Pagan gods, from Red Indians or the Mayans, we learn anew to look upon the all-pervasive divinity of life, the sacredness of our mother earth, and our responsibility as humans. From India the West eagerly imbibes yoga, meditation of various kinds, reincarnation and a larger dimension of man.
Battle for Survival
This growing stream, peaceful and fed by individuals, not groups or institutions, is however outpaced by the feverish campaigns of Christian or Islamic groups, with institutional and often governmental support, and disproportionate resources in terms of finance and media. It is a grossly unequal battle – and in fact one side has not even realized that a battle is on.
Let us just take a look at India, a favourite hunting ground for those in the business of saving souls (often a lucrative one, judging from the preachers’ lifestyles). Christian and Islamic missionaries lecture Hindus on the virtues of tolerance and ahimsa – by which they mean that Hindus must tolerate aggression without a whimper. Bible or Koranic colleges are sprouting, with alluring facilities and sometimes fat cash rewards offered to students who commit themselves to proselytism ; government-aided Christian schools start the day with prayers to our “Father in Heaven,” offer “free tuitions” with heavy biblical content, and warmly encourage students to attend mass ; Hindu girls are often prohibited from wearing a bindi. Countless Christian magazines call for the “evangelization of India,” the building of “one church a week,” and exhort the faithful to work hard at it. Processions are more and more frequent, loudspeakers louder and louder. Christian activists barge into peaceful Hindu satsangs shouting “Halleluiah !”,13 knowing that local authorities will be reluctant to intervene for fear of being called “unsecular” or “anti-minority.” Many lower-class Hindus have experienced the harassment of frequent visits to their homes by representatives of dozens of Christian denominations, with unsolicited preaching and glowing promises of material benefits upon conversion.14 All these activities reflect a concerted campaign of aggression, generously financed from overseas. Most of India’s tribes have already suffered deep inroads, and are fast on the way to total alienation, division, and many of the other bitter fruits of conversion; after centuries of generally peaceful existence, they are taught the virtues of separateness and unrest, often also of secession.15 Lower castes are other favourite targets, “oppressed” victims which Christianity and Islam claim to “liberate” in the name of “human rights” – although if they do convert, the caste discrimination and economic deprivation they were suffering from continues unchanged; the very expression of “Christian Dalits” is proof enough of the hollowness of the “liberation” theory.”16
Similar scenarios targeting non-Christian or non-Islamic populations are visible in neighbouring countries such as Sri Lanka or Nepal, and in much of the Third World. Christian pamphlets and websites publish in great detail the regions they concentrate on, the reasons why they think conversions are easier to obtain there, district-wise statistics of non-Christians and Christians, how many of the latter are prepared to work for conversion, and so forth. To give just one example among hundreds, one such website17 recently proclaimed, “Unreached peoples are being identified, researched, profiled, and adopted as targets of focused, fervent prayer and outreach with an urgency that is unprecedented.”18 It then dilates on North India, because,
This part of the world is of enormous importance. The needs and the opportunities are staggering…. The time is right. North India is poised to receive an outpouring of His grace and His glory….19 North India is strategically important in completing the unfinished task of world evangelization.20
And coming to Varanasi, we get a sudden whiff of the nineteenth century: “Many consider this city the very seat of Satan.”21 Impressive statistics follow on the number of churches, baptisms, “intercessors” etc., concluding that “Research information on this part of India is available as never before.”22
Islam adds a military dimension to the missionary one, with militants from Kashmir to Bosnia and Chechnya fighting for Islamic rule and asking for reestablishment of a Khalifat, in Central Asia to begin with.23
The two giants are now wide awake and active, while “secular” nations either turn a blind eye or deny that there is any danger.
A Triple Task
That is what makes a concerted action by all non-aggressive traditions and cultures of the world so imperative. They represent the saner, wider, deeper side of man, and they bear a responsibility towards the present generations living in an increasing alienation from all human values. Their task is triple.
First, they must reject collective amnesia and study the history of religions – the conquering ones and the conquered. As the Belgian thinker François Perin wrote a few years ago,
Europe’s ancient civilization, chiefly developed on the shores of the Mediterranean, was not submerged by a religion of love, but indeed forcibly destroyed by a fanatical Church…. It is easy to understand why the history of Christianity is so uncommon at school ; the spread of such knowledge would have a disastrous effect on what is left of faith today. 24
Awareness of the misery inflicted for centuries over most of the world by Christianity or Islam (or both, as in India) is crucial. Forgetting the past only serves the aggressor, not the victim. And since we hear so much of apologies and reparations for past wrongs, I, for one, have never understood why Independent India has never had the courage to ask at least for an apology from the Vatican and Portugal for the horrors inflicted during the Goa Inquisition. “Goa is sadly famous for its inquisition,” wrote Voltaire as far back as 1773, while it was still in effect. “The Portuguese monks deluded us into believing that the [Indian] people worshipped the devil, but they are the ones who served him.”25 Though much evidence remains locked in the Vatican’s archives, we still have enough26 to put the horrors inflicted on Indians in the name of Jesus beyond doubt.
Secondly, non-aggressive cultures must avoid the snare of “unity of religions” – an impossible proposition as long as any of them claims exclusive property of the truth and a mission to overrun the earth. Unity of religions and cultures is only possible between fraternal and mutually respectful faiths. If Christianity and Islam explicitly reject such a unity, why waste time and mental clarity in vainly trying to force it upon them? Also, how can any interreligious dialogue be of any use if one side posits that its God-given mission is to gobble up the other? Those are awkward facts that Hindus in particular have been most reluctant to face, and we often see them going out of their way to praise Christianity and Islam, while remaining deeply ignorant of their dogmatic nature. It is strange to find the lamb too often eager to defend the wolf’s gospel.
As Sri Aurobindo said, “[Hinduism] has been synthetic, acquisitive, inclusive. . . . It is in the first place a non-dogmatic inclusive religion and would have taken even Islam and Christianity into itself, if they had tolerated the process.”27 But they did not. The I-will-unite-with-you-even-if-you-refuse-to-unite-with-me attitude has only led to confusion and will continue to do so until Christianity and Islam explicitly and truly renounce all desire to conquer followers from other faiths. Until then, the latter should be anxious to nurture their own withering tree rather than being unduly concerned with the tree next door.
This leads me to the third and most important point. Non-aggressive cultures and traditions must work to share, rediscover and revivify their common heritage – a considerable one. They must learn to formulate it anew, in the language of our age, not in that of bygone times. In so doing, they must not be afraid of shedding elements that, however picturesque, have lost all usefulness. Any tradition that refuses to adapt itself to changing world conditions is doomed to extinction. This means keeping the central spirit, but abandoning forms that have outlived their relevance. It means remembering that the spirit ever evolves. As Sri Aurobindo said of Hinduism,
The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould, which, however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future…. We must not cabin the expanding and aggressive spirit of India in temporary forms which are the creation of the last few hundred years. That would be a vain and disastrous endeavour.28
The soul of Hinduism languishes in an unfit body. Break the mould that the soul may live.29
Human Rights
In a word, the world’s ancient cultures must strengthen their naturally fraternal bonds and join forces, realizing that in union there is strength. This World Congress is a hopeful sign in this direction, but it must be followed by others and by an effective collective working. A concerted action alone can fight back and expose the falsity of proselytism.
Allow me to give just one example, which I believe to be central to what has brought us here together. In the famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, Article 18 on “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” also stressed “freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief.” This formulation was the result of sustained pressure from numerous Christian groups.30 But the same Declaration states under Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment….” Yet proselytizing groups, Christian or Muslim, base much of their propaganda on the fear of eternal hell, from which they alone can offer salvation. A look at their thousands of pamphlets and slogans should be enough to convince anyone. Now, suppose I am a Red Indian, an African or a Toda tribal, a Hindu or a Jain, and someone comes and threatens me with eternal hell unless I swear by his creed. Is this not patently a case of “cruel treatment”? Because the torture is mental rather than physical, does that make it more acceptable?
I remember a British friend of mine, an anthropologist researching the lore of a Nilgiris tribe a decade ago. One day he visited a village hospital to comfort a sick tribal. A troop of Christians from a particular denomination entered noisily, and kindly informed all the patients in the ward that unless they accepted Christ, they would soon die and go to hell forever. Is this Jesus’ love, or mental torture? Were the patients’ human rights respected or violated? I could narrate many other such cases, as could many of you here I am sure.
If therefore we are so keen on Human Rights, I fail to see why Article 18 on freedom of religion cannot be amended to include freedom from religious cruelty, harassment, allurement or other unfair pressure exerted to secure conversion. Let us call it the “Freedom from Religious Cruelty Amendment.” Tolerant cultures must get their act together and start campaigning to remove such injustices, assert their right to peaceful existence, and convey the message that tolerance does not include tolerance of intolerance, and freedom to propagate one’s religion does not include freedom to harass, lure or slander. It also must be made clear that any religion holding the dogma of eternal hell for non-believers goes against the Declaration of Human Rights in spirit and letter, and pressure must be applied upon them to annul this dogma from their system of belief.
Ironically, the formulation of Article 18 on religious freedom was influenced by followers of a creed that always invoked “divine right” to trample on human rights. As Helen Ellerbe put it, “The Church, throughout much of its history, has demonstrated a disregard for human freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God. As a result, Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other, but also from the divine.”31 The same or worse can be said of Islam. If today those two faiths pretend to be so concerned with human rights, it is only to have liberty to resume their briefly interrupted conquests with renewed vigour. The pretence must be exposed. Nor is it hard to do so.
Non-aggressive traditions suffered much, they must remember why. Their spirit is now reviving, and they must understand why. They must learn to stand on their own strength, a reborn strength. As always in human history, fanatical elements are winning short-term victories. And as always, the Spirit and its genuine instruments will outlive their conquerors. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.32
Notes and References
1. Anatole France, Sur la pierre blanche (“On the White Stone,” Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1928, p. 163 ; written in 1905).
2. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (Vintage, 1975), p. 3, quoted in Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), p. 3.
3. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, part I, Our Oriental Heritage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), p. 459.
4. In a lecture on “Hindus and Christians” reported in The Detroit Free Press of 21 February 1894. (Complete Works, 1951, vol. 8, p. 212).
5. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (“Philosophical Dictionary,” Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1964), p. 22.
6. “Christianity has now almost been vanquished,” the Archbishop of Westminster (Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor) recently declared (quoted in The Times and reproduced in The New Indian Express of 7 September 2001). He refers to England, and his statement could be extended to much of Europe and America, where church attendance has long been dwindling and even priests are increasingly harder to recruit. Christian missionaries, with typical duplicity, have found Westerners too tough to preach to, and much prefer the gentler Hindus. In the West they cannot fight materialism or confront Christianity’s record, but they will still bring the light and salvation to benighted Hindus in the grip of the Devil!
7. Let us note that at the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church took the view that it was not strictly impossible for a sincere non-Christian to be saved through his own religion. However this view has remained wholly theoretical, and in practice Catholic priests and preachers continue with the old line that “Jesus is the only Savior.” Other Christian (and in particular Protestant) denominations do not even envisage making such a theoretical concession.
8. When we deal with pre-Christian cultural traditions, I tend to prefer the word “culture” to that of “religion” because of it wider scope and greater depth. Hinduism, for instance, is certainly more than a “religion” as understood in the West ; it is, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, a “spiritual culture.”
9. Buddhism and Jainism did campaign actively for conversion, but always peacefully and strictly on the basis of their teachings ; moreover their demarcation line with Hinduism was far more flexible than we are told, as they had so much in common and kept exchanging generously with the parent tree.
10. Retranslated from the French version of the Pope’s speech of 6 November 1999 (given at New Delhi to Indian representatives of Christianity) circulated by the Holy See, p. EA-T/2 & 3 (emphasis added).
11. Quoted by Satprem in La Légende de L’avenir (“The Legend of the Future,” Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2000), p. 110.
12. Arthur Rimbaud, “Soleil et Chair,” Poésies (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1989), p. 73.
13. A recent example was reported from the region where I live (the Nilgiris) by M. Pramod Kumar in his letter to the Editor, The New Indian Express, Coimbatore edition, 8 September 2001.
14. For public consumption in the West and to avoid legal problems in India, Christian groups will always assert that they “do not accept any forced conversion or conversion by fraudulent means” (to quote from one of their innumerable Internet sites). In practice, however, just the opposite takes place, with not only cash rewards but promises of new houses, easy admissions to Christian-controlled schools, free treatment at Christian-controlled hospitals, etc. It is another matter that those promises are rarely kept, except for the first: many converts do get a new house, but little else.
15. As is painfully clear in India’s Northeastern States, where secessionist movements have long been supported by missionary activity. I could also mention how a Don Bosco priest (a South Indian) one day almost proudly confided to me that he was preaching to tribes of Maharashtra that they had “no future within the Indian Union,” and their only hope was “to take up guns.” Ostensibly, of course, Don Bosco is an “educational” organization. How much more such “education” is India going to need before she breaks up into a hundred warring fragments?
More than forty years ago, the famous Niyogi Committee Report provided a massive documented study of such practices, which should be prescribed reading for all those interested in the subject of religious freedom (originally published in 1956 and republished as Vindicated by Time-The Niyogi Committee Report on Christian Missionary Activities, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1998).
16. The continued caste discrimination converts suffer from is well known and has often been documented. See for instance Zariuna Bhatty’s”Social Stratification Among Muslims in India” and J. Tharamangalam’s “Caste Among Christians in India,” both in Caste – Its Twentieth Century Avatar, ed. M. N. Srinivas (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1996).
17. http://www.ad2000.org.
18. http://www.ad2000.org/utercall.htm. (Though the website remains, with detailed statistics, targets etc., this page is no longer available; I have an original printout, complete with colour photographs and tables, dating late 1999.)
19. Ibid.
20. http://www.ad2000.org/utermost.htm (same remark as above).
21. http://www.ad2000.org/uters4.htm (same remark as above).
22. http://www.ad2000.org/utermost.htm (same remark as above).
23. This call is not made just by Central Asian militants but also by Islamic leaders comfortably settled in the West. As an example, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, well-known London-based head of the Al-Muhajirun network (also called Maddad, Hezbet-Tahrir …), openly advocates the reestablishment of Khalifat, helps train militants fighting from Chechnya to Kashmir, and tells his dream of one day raising “the green flag atop Downing Street.”
24. François Perin, Franc-Parler (“Flankly Speaking,” Ottignies, Belgium: Quorum, 1996), p. 64.
25. Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l’Inde (“Fragments of India’s History,” first published Geneva: 1773), in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Hachette, 1893), vol. 29, p. 407.
26. See for instance Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition (Bombay: 1961, republished New Delhi: Voice of India, 1991)
27. The Foundations of Indian Culture (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), vol. 14, p. 76 & 90.
28. Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth (Mysore: Mira Aditi, 3rd ed., 2000), p. 61.
29. Ibid., p. 82.
30. See Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (New Delhi: Voice of India, 2nd ed., 1996), chapter 15, “The Hoax of Human Rights.” Interestingly, about the same time, such groups in India pressured India’s Constituent Assembly to insert the famous clause in Article 25 on “Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion.” See chapter 16 in History of Hindu-Christian Encounters.
31. The Dark Side of Christian History (Morningstar and Lark), p. 1 quoted in Yuva Bharati (Chennai: June 2000 issue), p. 14-15.
32. Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), vol. 5, p. 569.
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