By P Kharel
A BBC report in January announced “Christian missionaries target the birthplace of Buddha in Nepal”, proclaiming one of the 20 oldest independent countries to be “one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian communities”.
It has been years since the demands for restoring Nepal’s status as a Hindu state but the United Kingdom’s state-supported BBC, which of late, faces serious criticisms within Britain itself, chose to ignore the issue. That it reported the story on conversion with a sense of glee sends a message all its own.
In a celebratory tone, the BBC narrative declared: “Converting people to another religion is illegal in Nepal, but missionaries are willing to risk prosecution to spread the Christian faith.”
UNUSUAL: The lengthy narrative has a staccato-like series of back-to-back direct quotes, with hardly any voices from the Hindu faith at a matching length in a country with “80 per cent” Hindus.
Describing them as “poor financially and spiritually”, South Korean Pastor Pang Chang-in points admits that his congregation of newly converts are from “the indigenous Tamang community, who used to follow the Lama faith”. He adds: “So, a miracle takes place and the whole village [in Dhading] converts.”
BBC adds: “Missionaries, many of them South Korean like Pang have helped build one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian communities in Nepal, a former Hindu kingdom and the birthplace of Lord Buddha.”
Commissioned by the Korean World Mission Association, Pang and his wife have been in Nepal for two decades. Almost 8,000 churches are said to have been built “in the still overwhelmingly Hindu country”.
The confidence exuded by both the narrators and the story characters reflects a defiance of Nepal’s law pertaining to devious means applied to boost religious conversions.
Although Nepal’s 2015 Constitution guarantees religious freedom, its anti-conversion law provides for up to five years of jail term to anyone found encouraging involved in conversion.
‘SHOCK & MIRACLE’: Pang’s wife Lee Jeong-hee claims that her husband “first received God’s calling [and] shortly after God beckoned us to move to Nepal”.
On arrival in Nepal in 2003, Lee said: “I was shocked to see so many idols being worshipped,” says Pang. “I felt Nepal was in desperate need of the gospel.” Five years later the 240-year-old monarchy was abolished following a decade of civil war, and a coalition government declared Nepal a secular republic. Pang is ecstatic: “This began the golden age for missionary work.”
According to BBC, Pang and his wife are part of a community of some 300 Korean missionary families in Nepal. They’re on business or study visas. Some run restaurants, while others have registered charities. In 1951 there were no Christians in Nepal and just 458 in 1961. But by 2011, there were nearly 376,000 and the latest census estimates the community is now around 545,000.
It is well known that missionaries in India and elsewhere invest time and money to plant moles to malign the images and reputations of Hindu high priests and prominent gurus interpreting religious scriptures.
There have been tens of thousands of converted Christians returning to the Hindu fold in India in recent years. In Nepal, foreign Christian pastors prevent indigenous converts from even going anywhere near Hindu religious events as far as possible. During major festivals, special fares and gatherings are organised simply to prevent the neophytes from feeling nostalgic about the faith they were attached to since their birth, though Christian tourists especially in autumn eagerly watch the events essayed with traditional rituals.
SUPPRESSION: The Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba suppressed a petition by the majority of his party’s Maha Samiti members calling for the party to press for Nepal to be declared a Hindu state, with freedom guaranteed to all religious faiths. Headed by Rastriya Prajatanra Party President and Deputy Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s cabinet is the only group represented in the current parliament that has a declared policy calling for Nepal to revert to its earlier status of the world’s only Hindu state.
Clearly, foreign forces are funding groups and influential individuals to retain the “secular” clause in Nepal’s Constitution, what with a plethora of surveys showing that Christianity will be a minority religion in most of Europe and the United States within the next three decades.
For that matter barely 50 per cent of people in the West have in recent times described themselves as practising Christians. The rest either belong to other religious denominations or do not uphold any particular faith.
Hence the search for fertile lands for “liberating misguided souls” so that they embrace “the only true faith” in the entire universe.
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