Crusade in India
India is key to the Bush religious agenda. His government has given grants to Christian charities that are involved in conversion activities in India. On October 3, 2002, the US department of health and human services announced that television evangelist, Pat Robertson's charity, Operation Blessing, would be given demonstration grants through the so-called Compassion Capital Fund. Robertson's organisation and the other "intermediaries" were free to distribute this federal grant (essentially American tax payers' money) to religious groups and community groups of their choice to provide social services. In other words, there was no restriction on how the federal grants were to be used. In an interview to Newsweek three years ago Robertson said, "I've got 10 good years left," and "my heart is on missions, and on getting people into the kingdom of God. That's the main thrust of my life." In the same interview, Robertson recalled fondly a recent crusade in India: "I spoke to a crowd of 500,000 people!" he said. "Eighty-two acres of people! The response was overwhelming." Robertson's Operation Blessing is very active in India through CBN India headquartered at Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad.
Incidentally, Robertson deftly defrauded the Indian government because Indian laws do not permit issuance of visas to Christian missionaries. In response to an unstirred question (NO. 969) in the Lok Sabha on February 27, 2001 the minister of state for home , Vidyasagar Rao, responded that "no new missionaries are allowed after 1984. However, short term visas are being issued to the foreigners who are coming only in administrative capacity, to review working of their organisations etc." Certainly, Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition in the US and head of the multi-million Christian Broadcasting Network, might have had "administrative" reasons to travel to India. But he, surely, did not have either the permission or the right to evangelise.
The Indian government has been caught napping. Rev Bush, head of a decade-long global evangelisation programme, visited India in January 2003. He was a guest of the Evangelical Fellowship of India and presumably traveled to India on a tourist visa. In the early years of 2000, many evangelists entered India fraudulently. Amongst them were extremist Christians like Don Noble, president of Maranatha Volunteers International affiliated to a fundamentalist Christian group, the Seventh Day Adventists and Pastor Michael Ryan, director of Global Mission, the Seventh Day Adventist church's international outreach department which co-ordinates India evangelistic initiative. The US state department website makes no bones about the fact that American evangelists enter India by employing fraudulent means.
In the context of the fact that Robertson is one of America's most rabid Christian fundamentalists, Bush's largesse to him certainly has implications for India. In an interview broadcast on his own TV channel this is what Robertson had to say on one of the religions followed in India: "Hinduism and many of the occult activities that come out of the Orient are inspired by demons and demon worship...There's this concept that all religions are the same and all are good. That is not true. The worship of the Devil is not good." Robertson's friend and fellow evangelist, Jerry Falwell, also a TV preacher, ignited anti-American violence across many countries in November 2002 when he called the Prophet Mohammad a "terrorist" on American television. In Jammu and Kashmir, Falwell's emarks were published in local newspaper. As word spread protestors spilled out into the street pelting stones and shouting anti-American slogans.
The Oval Office centre
According to Americans United, "Robertson's Operation Blessing, a $66 million-a-year agency, also has a controversial history
The controversy over Operation Blessing stretches back to 1994, when Robertson used his '700 Club' daily cable television programme to raise funds for the charity. Robertson told viewers Operation Blessing was using cargo planes to aid refugees from Rwanda who had fled into the neighbouring nation of Zaire (now known as Congo) to escape a violent civil war
In fact, Robertson was using his planes to haul mining equipment in and out of Zaire for African Development Corporation, his for-profit diamond mining company."
Incidentally, Robertson sought the Republican nomination for president in 1988 and later founded the Christian Coalition, a political group that has worked tirelessly to elect Republicans to public offices nationwide. Bush's presidential election victory has been, by far, the coalition's biggest success till date. After having installed a Christian fundamentalist as the President of America, Robertson stepped down as the president of the Christian Coalition in December 2001. The Washington Post, in a dispatch on December 24, 2001 noted that the religious right had found its "center in Oval office". The writer of this dispatch, Diana Milbank wrote, "A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to his faith, while Websites encourage people to fast and pray for the president."
For American evangelicals, Bush is "God's man at this hour". The Bush administration's faith based initiatives-'charitable choice' as it is often calle-was one of his key campaign planks during the 2000 presidential campaign. In fact, as Texas governor, Bush had become a fervent advocate of this policy that enabled Christian religious organisations to evangelise while providing publicly financed service.
As president, Bush has expanded the 'charitable choice' approach to virtually all aspects of government aid-national and foreign. "In every instance when my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based institutions, to charities and to community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives," Bush told a rally in Indianapolis on July 22, 1999. Evangelists all over the world were and still continue to be happy with the language used by Bush, full of Biblical references and metaphors, as it is. "Saving Souls" is a common and often-used expression by evangelists all over the world to refer to religious conversion.
Exploiting the AIDS victims
On September 21, 2000, Bush wrote in USA Today that he would allocate $80 billion over 10 years in tax incentives to help churches (in America) provide social services. The US government has established an unparalleled partnership with Christian religious organisations. In the last week of September 2003, the US administration announced new rules enabling Christian religious institutions to access $20 billion worth of federal grants. Faith-based organisations can access and use this fund to deliver services from drug/alcohol de-addiction to prison reform to HIV/AIDS related care and support activities. The idea, of course, is to give opportunities to those who suffer to be "reborn", just as Bush was after years of alcohol addiction.
Even though the Bush administration has denied that its initiatives support evangelical activities, the fact is that faith-based organisation use prayer and proselytising as an integral part of its provision of social services. After all, Bush has often cited his own "reborn" status to justify the interventions of faith based organisation in the social sector. In his autobiography, A Charge To Keep, itself a twist on a well-known hymn, Bush wrote that evangelist Billy Graham had "planted a mustard seed in my heart, and I started to change
It was the beginning of a new walk where I would recommit my heart to Jesus Christ."
Bush has repeatedly singled out and praised faith-based organisations whose core philosophy is conversion while dispensing social services. During last year's State of the Union speech his invited guests were Tonja Myles of the 'Set Free Indeed Program' at Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Henry Lozano of Teen Challenge, California. Both programmes use religious conversion as treatment. Within the US, Bush's praise for religious conversion programmes has raised concerns as well. Early into the Bush presidency, the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the US, made it plain that the president's faith-based initiatives were essentially about conversion. In a press release on June 14, 2001, a representative of the Methodist Church, Rev. Eliezer Valentin Castanon, said: "No one can honestly believe that a program funded with tax dollars, which requires as a major component of treatment the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, will not advance religion."
