How can police and politicians proactively support criminals persecuting innocent citizens for practicing their faith?
Please zoom with us on Thursday May 13 at 9 pm IST And explore India’s “Rule of Law” with and without the Bible:
Meeting ID: 899 2918 3268, Passcode: 140150
In January 1976, National Emergency had enveloped Delhi with a gloom that felt far heavier than the annual winter fog that prevents planes from landing. Mahatma Gandhi’s illustrious grandson, Raj Mohan Gandhi, invited Ruth and I to talk and pray because he saw a ray of light in my unpublished article, “Abortion of A Civilization.” One of his friends, a minister in Assam, had used that article as the basis for his Independence Day speech and then flown to Delhi to locate and connect me with Gandhi.
Raj Mohan Gandhi was then the editor of “Himmat.” He had not been thrown in jail, most likely because Mrs. Indira Gandhi perceived him as an armchair intellectual like the Constitutional Lawyer, Nani Palkhivala, also a critic of the “secular” murderers of liberty under law.
The Allahabad High Court had convicted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of using corruption to win the Parliamentary election from Rae Bareilly. The Opposition and the “free” press began demanding her resignation. She responded by suspending the Constitution, including the “Fundamental” right to liberty. She jailed all the respected trouble-makers who couldn’t go underground in time.
India’s mighty “free press” began to crawl before the Empress. “Himmat” was spared as harmless and Palkhivala was dismissed as naïve. He argued against the Emergency on the ground that no government of the day had the power to abrogate the Constitution’s “basic structure” such as “Fundamental Rights.” Mrs. Gandhi’s responded: “We wrote the Law, therefore, we have the right to change it.”
Secular and Hindu intellectuals could not answer Mrs Gandhi. For unless our laws apply God’s revelation to our context, we can have nothing but a “Positivist” law which is entirely a human construct.
Although the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was a Christian enterprise in the nineteenth century, after Independence the Christian Mind had been conspicuous by its absence from the public arena. Liberal theologians did not think that God knows how to speak or write. Evangelicals (including the Pentecostals) had followed American “Fundamentalism” into thinking that Grace had made God’s Law redundant. They thought that to be “Born Again” meant to respond to an Alter Call and repeat the ‘Sinner’s Prayer.” Preferably, followed by immersion and speaking in tongues. No mission or evangelist taught us that to be Born Again meant to have God’s Law written in our hearts so that God’s will is done on earth.
Some Churches did say that memorizing God’s Law was good. However, if God’s Law had to be internalized and applied as the Light for all of Life, then that had to be done by the Holy Spirit, not the Church. The Church did not need God’s Spirit to give us the gift of teachers. For the Dispensation of Grace had secularized teaching profession. As a prelude to the imminent Tribulation and Second Coming the Holy Spirit had handed over the ministry of education to the Anti-Christ.
My 1976 article did not critique theology. It intrigued Raj Mohan Gandhi because it presented the case that God’s Word, not Secular Humanism was the historic source of India’s freedom and Rule of Law. America’s Declaration of Independence put it this way “We hold these truths . . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Our right to life comes from God’s command, “You shall not kill,” even if you are a king like David or a Queen like Jezebel.
Our “modern” idea that unlike a cow, no woman can be bought, chained, caged or sold comes from the Bible’s teaching that a human being is qualitatively different from all other animals. A woman is made in the image of a God who is free. That is, he transcends the mechanistic, deterministic cosmos. Finite, yet God-like freedom is the essence of the human soul.
Unjust imprisonment of a journalist, a public figure or an evangelist is “slavery” because it violates God’s image (freedom) in us. The Messiah incarnated to break every yoke, loose every chain, to set the captives free. God incarnate said that if we abide in His word, we will know the truth and the truth shall set us free.
In 1975, India lost her freedom and got into a serious “Emergency” because secular universities had been misleading her intelligentsia to believe that Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party had set India free. Sadly, Anti-Intellectual evangelicalism had given up studying God’s magnificent works in history. No historian had been teaching the truth that India’s freedom under the rule of law was a fruit of the Gospel.
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, a protégé of the evangelical MP William Wilberforce, gave us the law that still governs India (at least in theory). Late Nani Palkhivala was one of the few intellectuals who kept reminding the nation that in nearly 4,000 years of history many civilizations rose and fell in India, but not one of them had given India even the concept of the Rule of Law, which is the essence of freedom.
Thankfully, deceived by her captive media, Mrs. Gandhi ended the made-up Emergency in 1977. She called for a general election and was shocked that the people voted her out. Two years later they re-installed her as the Prime Minister!
Only in 1980 did I realize that, thanks to Secular education, Mrs. Gandhi had won, not just the election but also the argument for secular philosophy of slavery. Our universities had replaced the Bible’s concept of “Rule of Law” with the (secular) humanistic idea of the Rule of the human Ruler.
I learnt this when the Superintendent of Police (SP) “invited” me to his colonial bungalow. He treated me with samosas and chai before telling me that his Intelligence had created a 300-page file on me. He knew everything that I was doing in every village. He had not read my book, “The World of Gurus”, he said, but he had read enough reviews in the national press to know that I was a “gem” in his district. “No one has done more for the poor than you are doing.”
“But,” the SP went on to say, “you must cancel that public prayer meeting you have planned for the victims of the hail storm. Or I will personally kill you. I do not need a warrant for I will not arrest you. I will not produce you before a judge, I will take you from your home into the jungle and shoot you. Hyenas will eat you. . . Are you going to obey our orders and cancel that Prayer Meeting?” I was naïve. I didn’t believe that a highly educated (Gazetted) IPS officer, who had taken the Oath of Office to protect the Constitution of India including my “Fundamental Right” to Life, would actually murder me. So, I said to him, “Before I can answer your question, I have to ask my wife if she is willing to be a widow.”
The SP sent me back in his Jeep after spending another hour telling me how many local “public figures” (trouble-makers) he had killed during his career. He had committed most of these extra-judicial murders during the Congress’ “secular” rule.
In my books such as “The Book That Made Your World: How The Bible Created The Soul of Western Civilization” (Thomas Nelson 2011) and “Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations” (YWAM 2009) I have answered the question: “What happened then?”
This post is to invite you to please zoom with us on Thursday May 13 at 9 PM (Indian Standard Time) to interact with Advocate Priya Aristotle’s presentation on how the Bible created modern India’s legal system.
A good way to prepare for next Thursday’s presentation will be to read the chapter “Law and Liberty: Did Rome Put the Law Above Caesars” in my book, “This Book Changed Everything: The Bible’s Amazing Impact On Our World” (SAM, 2019). The chapter explains that contrary to what secular historians teach, Divinity of Jesus Christ as articulated in the Church Councils of Ephesus (AD 431) and Chalcedon (AD 451) was the worldview foundation of the Justinian Code (AD 529 to 534). That Code began European attempt to bring human rule under God’s law.
These Thursday presentations are preparing chapters of a book, tentatively called, “How The Bible Created Modern India.” It is targeted to be published on 15 August 2022 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence. The presentations and your comments will be uploaded on a website. Your input will help writers revise their chapters before we meet in person in January 2022 to finalize the book. For more information please contact: [email protected]
This is far from an ivory tower discussion. Every day we get reports of the persecution of evangelists, pastors and new believers by criminals, claiming to be champions of Hinduism. They are supported by police and politicians. The press does not dare to cover this daily persecution. This sad reality is leading many Christians to blame Modi, Yogi, and Hindutva for Fascism. The blame is partially true, but mostly ignorance.
In 1984, when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, we were living in New Delhi in what was then a “high end” residential colony, Greater Kailash II. Several hours after that crime, Brad, an American young man, now a senior pastor in a Vineyard church in Los Angeles, landed in Delhi to spend three months with us.
Early morning, before breakfast, Brad decided to go out for a walk to check out the neighborhood. He did not return the whole day. We could not go out to look for him because the radio and television was announcing that Delhi was under strict curfew. Military had been called out on the streets; shoot-at-sight orders had been issued.
Brad returned after dark. “This place is crazy,” was the summary of his first day in India. “I’ve spent the whole day walking behind a mob, led by the police. They were setting fire to Sikh homes. Fire Brigade was behind us, only to make sure that non-Sikh houses did not catch fire.”
Well, senior Congress leaders, including Arun Nehru had sent mobs to teach Sikhs a lesson. Hindu Fascists are simply continuing the secular idea that rulers are above the law because God never gave a law to be the governing light for our path.
This book on the Bible’s impact on India is a prototype to encourage scholars in Africa, Indonesia, Korea, China, Europe and North America to research and write the Bible’s impact on their cultures and countries. Some of this research will go into various curricula envisioned by “The Third Education Revolution.” For more information please visit www.ThirdEducationRevolution.com
Pictures: Lord Macaulay and Advocate Priya Aristotle
