National Security
Discriminative Funding & Promotion of Some Religions by Secular State(s)
Dt: 4/3/15
Discriminative Funding & Promotion
of Some Religions by Secular State(s)
Dr T.H.Chowdary*
One Chief Minister ordered that free food should be served for 5000 people every day in each of nine specified temples in Andhra Pradesh ; he ordered that Balaji temples should be built by TTD money in the capitals of all the states in India. Another Chief Minister says he will give Rs.100 cr every year to the Narasimha Swmay temple in Yadagiri Gutta; he ordered that Rs.10cr worth buildings should be constructed for different castes and linguistic groups ( other than Telugu) in Hyderabad. He gifts crores worth of jewellery to gods an goddesses in Andhra Pradesh & Telengana.
2. The Central government spends Rs. 1300 cr per year on sending Muslims on their Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. The Andhra Pradesh government ( before partition) funded the construction of Churches in 671 villages Urdu ghars and Shadi Khanas for Muslims and gave Rs. 25000 for each Christian going to Jerusalem. The same government gave spacious costly land and money for the construction of two Haj Houses in the center of Hyderabad and near the new airport in Shamshabad.
3. Are not these actions of the governments in violation of to the Constitution which mandates the State and the organs to be secular spend tax money of people for the benefit of some religions and not some others ? The state manage & control and administer the temples of Hindus but leave the Churches & Mosques of Christians and Muslims and the Gurudwaras of Sikhs leaving them to be managed by their own bodies? These are the troubling questions which no intellectual and champion of secularism is asking. Christian missionaries and allied bodies and Muslims have been converting for ages aided by invading armies, and alien rulers and free-flow of foreign money from the Gulf states and Europe and America. But when Hindu organisations are bringing those converts to Hindu fold, in ghar vapasi programme many “secular” parties and their champions are raising a furore that ghar vapasi should be stopped. Is this fair? Should non-Indic religions only have the freedom and right to convert Hindus but Hindus should not have such a right?
4. The non-Indic religions enjoin upon their faithfula as a duty to convert others to their own faith Islam & Christianity are competitively engages in converting the others to their own faith. Bharatiya dharma known as Hinduism does not believe in evangelism and adding numbers to it by converting other people. There is therefore a fundamental inequality arising out of the constitutional provision that minority religions have the freedom and fundamental right to propagate (obviously with a view to convert) on the one hand and Hindus who don’t have the fundamental belief and tradition to convert others. It is necessary that this inequality as regards the right and the freedom for different religions groups is done away with. It is necessary to see that organised evangelisation by non-Indic religions is prohibited and no foreign funds are allowed to these organisations and their allied NGOs; if necessary by amending the Constitution .
(505 words)