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Who is afraid of Cooper?

By A. J. Philip

"We want missionaries of Christ. Let such come to India by the
hundreds and thousands and bring Christ's life to us, and let it
permeate the very core of society. Let Him be preached in every
village and corner of India."

THIS is what Swami Vivekananda said during his visit to the United States as mentioned in an editorial in the Detroit Evening News on August 28, 1894. Readers who would like to read the full editorial can find it in Swami Vivekananda In Contemporary Indian News (1893-1902) - Volume 1 published by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata. Hundred and nine years after the Swami's exhortation to Christian missionaries to come to India, an evangelist from the US was not only beaten up but also ordered to leave the country even before he could recuperate his health. What's worse, the perpetrators of the ghastly incident are the ones who are never tired
of quoting the Swami to justify their version of Hinduism.

American evangelist Joseph W. Cooper was beaten up by RSS
workers when he was returning from a meeting of Pentecostals at
Kilimanoor in Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala. The RSS
leadership in the state promptly denied that their organisation was involved in the attack though the attackers belonged to the RSS. We could have given the RSS the benefit of the doubt, if they had left the matter at that. Instead, they mounted a campaign to have the arrested RSS workers released while levelling all kinds of allegations against the missionary from proselytizing to denigrating the Hindu religion.

So successful were the RSS men in their campaign that the
A.K. Antony government succumbed to their tactics and asked the evangelist to leave the country within a short period. The police were not even prepared to check with the doctors of the Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences where Cooper was admitted whether he was in a proper condition to take the long flight back to the US. In the end, he had to leave the country with one of his hands still in bandage. Antony's police behaved as if the heavens would have fallen and the ancient Hindu religion would have been in peril if he had stayed in the hospital till his wounds were fully healed.

The District Superintendent of Police who ordered Cooper to
leave the country claimed that he had violated the visa rules. The
tourist visa under which he was allowed to travel in the country did
not permit him to "preach". So what kind of visa should he have
obtained before he could have legally "preached"? As it is, the
Government of India gives five kinds of visas to foreigners visiting
the country. They are 1) Transit visa for those who are passing
through India to some other country; 2) Tourist/entry/business visa
for six months; 3) Tourist/other/business visa for one year; 4)
Tourist/other/business visa for more than one year and 5) Student
visa. The fact is none of these visas permit a visitor to "preach" in
the country.

So how do the foreigners who preach at the famous Maramon
Convention manage to do so? They take a special permission from the External Affairs Ministry through the "good offices of influential people like former Union Minister P.J. Kurien". The rule prohibiting foreigners from "preaching" was introduced in 1995. But in the case of Cooper, what was he doing? He was speaking at a meeting of the Pentecostal Church to which he belongs. In other words, he was only addressing his own people who are all converted or, to use the evangelical expression, "born again". By no stretch of the imagination can it be called "preaching" and a serious violation of the law inviting summary deportation from the country. In any case, Cooper had a valid visa and had been visiting the country quite often.

The police action appeared to be aimed at pleasing the RSS
and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders, who had been demanding even the arrest of the evangelist. One of them, Kummanam Rajasekharan, even claimed that it was under the orders of the Union Home Ministry that the state police had served the "quit" notice on Cooper. The campaign against Cooper's presence proved beyond a shadow of doubt
that the attack was engineered with a clear political motive. All
this was nothing surprising from organisations, which take pride in killing nearly 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat and winning an election on a vicious hate campaign.

But what was surprising was the clean chit Union Minister O.
Rajagopal gave to those who attacked Cooper. He said the people were forced to take action because the police were inactive. The minister had forgotten that he had taken an oath to adhere to the Constitution in both letter and spirit. Under the Constitution, what should prevail in the country is the rule of law, which does not permit RSS cadres to take the law into their own hands. Rajagopal was worried about the violation of the visa rules by Cooper. But does he remember that it is through a clear violation of the rules that he continues as a minister in the Vajpayee government?

Under the Constitution, a Rajya Sabha member should "ordinarily be a resident" of the state from which he is elected to the Upper House. He has to give an affidavit to that effect when he is elected. Can Rajagopal hold the Bhagavat Gita in
his hands and say that he is "ordinarily a resident" of Madhya
Pradesh from where he was elected to the Rajya Sabha? To be fair to him, he is not the only violator of this rule. He has an excellent companion in Arun Shourie, who was elected from Uttar Pradesh, though he has always lived in one of the posh localities of New Delhi. Perhaps, Rajagopal was making the point that while the votaries of Hindutva were above the law, foreigners like Cooper should strictly follow the rules.

Rajagopal is a great follower of Mata Amritanandamayi
or `Mother of Immortal Bliss'. He can even take credit for bringing
her to Delhi and introducing her to the rulers of the time. I still
remember the public reception the then Delhi Chief Minister had
organised for her in March 1997. Since then she has been visiting the Capital at least once a year. There is nothing wrong about it. Why I mention "Amma" as she is popularly called here is to make a contrast. When I read about the Kerala police serving a notice on Cooper, I remembered how the New York police treated "Amma".

At that time New York city was being led by Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, a Catholic school-bred Republican politician who gained a reputation for cracking down on anything resembling deviant
behaviour, and giving broad licence to the police to be the same way. Rescuing New York City from the criminals was good politics, and the law of the land essentially became arrest first, ask questions later. Readers would recall that Giuliani became more famous following the September 11, 2001 incident, when he gave exemplary leadership to the city to cope with its aftereffects.

Judith Cornell, who has written the biography of Mata
Amritanandamayi, titled Amma: A Living Saint (Penguin), begins her book with "Amma's" encounter with the New York police. "Police officers William La Pough and Juan Colon were driving their unmarked patrol car through Central Park at 12.45 a.m. They found the park, like the tepid night air, to be quiet and tranquil. As they drove up Central Park West and passed the Museum of Natural History, they saw a large group of shoeless people dressed in white who were congregating outside the Universalist Church on the corner of West Seventy-sixth street. In New York this can only mean one thing: homeless people, so the officers decided to stop.

"What's going on?" they asked the people who were standing
outside the church.
"The people explained that Amma, a greatly respected saint from a poor remote village in southern India, was in New York City as part of her yearly world tour to the United States. "As a way of blessing people, Amma gives hugs of unconditional love. In the last three days she has given thousands of hugs to people coming to this Universalist Church", one man told them.

"William and Juan stepped into a mass of people jammed into a
church too small to hold them. Once inside, they heard the melodious and joyful sounds of sacred South Indian chants - chants composed by Amma herself." New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon, who was present at the meeting, had this to say about the arrival of the police: "My heart raced as I wondered if New York's Finest were actually going to handcuff the "Hugging Saint". Had the year's most bizarre news story suddenly fallen into my lap? Maybe a hug from Amma was paying early dividends for this ambitious, young reporter". But the officers never reached for the cuffs. Instead, they kneeled down before Amma, who, dressed in her silver crown and white sari, smiled broadly and pulled the burly officers to her chest and whispered her blessings into their ears. As it turned out, it wasn't these cops' first brush with spirituality. Officer La Pough met Mother Teresa
during a New York visit, and officer Colon guarded the Pope in 1995.

The point is they could have asked "Amma" whether she had the
requisite "visa" to preach. Alternatively, they could have asked them to disperse for a meeting at that time was not permissible. But nothing of the kind happened. "Amma's" is not a solitary case. There are hundreds of Indian swamis and gurus who visit the Western countries, set up ashrams or collect funds all in the name of "spirituality". Here it would be pertinent to quote from an
editorial in The Hindu (December 18, 1896): "Swami Vivekananda is reported to have written to a friend in Madras that "his interests are international and not Indian alone". To advance these international interests, it is the intention of the Swami to
establish two centres of missionary training in India, one in
Calcutta, and the other in Madras, first Calcutta being the scene of Sri Ramakrishna's work, and Madras afterwards... At these and other centres that may be established in course of time, it is proposed to train Hindu missionaries and send them to different parts of the world to preach the truths of Hindu religion.

"From these two points, the Swami says, "we will invade not
only India but (the first duty) send our bands of preachers to every
country in the world". This is a noble mission and this will appeal
with telling force to the national pride of the Hindus." The
editorial endorsed the Swami's programme and appealed to the readers to contribute to the cause. The Ramakrishna Mission is not the only Hindu order, which sends its missionaries to the West. Even the VHP takes pride in mentioning the number of branches it has outside India.

Centuries before Swami Vivekananda exhorted Hindus to send
their own missionaries to every corner of the world, people from
India had travelled to far-off places to spread their
religion. "Tradition unanimously ascribes the conversion of Ceylon to Mahendra (in Pali, Mahinda), the son or in some sources the brother, of Asoka, who had become a Buddhist monk. Though the relationship of the apostle of Ceylon to Asoka is very doubtful, there can be no doubt of his historicity, or of that of King Devanampiya Tissa, his first convert.

"By this time, a few Indian merchants had probably found their way to Malaya, Sumatra, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Gradually they established permanent settlements, often, no doubt, marrying native women. They were followed by Brahmans and Buddhist monks, and Indian influence gradually leavened the indigenous culture, until, by the 4th century AD, Sanskrit was the official language of the region, and there arose great civilisations, capable of organising large maritime empires, and of building such wonderful memorials to their greatness as the Buddhist stupa of Borobodur in Java, or the Saivite temples of
Angkor in Cambodia. Other cultural influences, from China and the Islamic world, were felt in Southeast Asia, but the primary impetus to civilization came from India." (The Wonder That Was India by A.L. Basham).

How many of these missionaries had obtained the right visa
when they travelled to those countries? The poet's poet Rabindranath Tagore was invited to deliver the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930. On his lectures, the Manchester Guardian commented, "no series of the Hibbert Lecture has aroused more public interest than the present one." The series, titled The Religion of Man (Rupa) was an extensive and commanding exposition of Tagore's understanding of the meaning
and significance of religion in the cultural history of man. Some
Christian organisations could have at that time accused him
of "preaching" Hindu religion by misusing the provisions of the visa regime and the British Police could have asked him to return to India in three days.

In the marketplace of spirituality, every religion should
have the freedom to propagate its doctrine. At a time when his
supporters were hounding out Cooper, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, was busy telling the authorities in Qatar the need for
religious freedom in that country. Maybe Advani had obtained prior permission to "preach" the virtues of religious freedom to his
counterparts in the Arabian Kingdom which currently heads the
Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC). Anjali Modi of The Hindu who accompanied Advani on this trip has quoted the minister as
saying, "Allowing the freedom to choose was the hallmark of
civilization" (January 23). Perhaps, Advani could not have put it
better.

But how does this square with his colleague O. Rajagopal's
demand that there should be a Freedom of Religion Bill in Kerala like the one Tamil Nadu has recently enacted? (It is the height of
euphemism to call it the Freedom of Religion Bill!) Rajagopal's is
not an empty threat as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has
already asked his officers to prepare a draft Bill to be presented in the next session of the Legislative Assembly.

There is no guarantee that if the Sangh Parivar pursues the programme in right earnest, A.K. Antony will not succumb to the pressures. It would be in the fitness of things if India seeks a patent on "preaching" so that the Advanis and Ammas can preach all over the world and we can send back guests like Cooper. What a pity Cooper had to undergo so much trouble in a country, which believes in the concept of athithi devo bhava (guests are like gods). The Advanis and Rajagopals will do well to remember Manu's stern warning: "If the King did not inflict punishment untiringly on evil-doers, the stronger would roast the weaker, like fish upon a spit." This has happened in Gujarat and it will happen in Kerala.

The writer can be reached at [email protected]