India’s NGO Racket Of Human Trafficking

Dramatic scandals routinely fill India’s media headlines about some poor victim from a remote area being exploited by upper strata Delhi elites. Yet there is no investigative journalism to uncover the inconvenient facts about certain NGOs that operate what amounts to a human trafficking industry. One reason for this conspiracy of silence is that the traffickers are linked with some politically connected NGOs that make noises in the metros ostensibly on behalf of the victims. In reality the noise made serves to cover up the sinister role of NGOs in this industry that brings Christianity to the remote villages in exchange for maids to Delhi.

The elaborate scheme works as follows. Christian missionaries in adivasi (indigenous, “tribal”) areas offer poor families an inducement that is hard to resist: If the family converts to Christianity, one of its young daughters will be sent as a domestic servant to Delhi or another metro.

The affiliated “agencies” in the metros collect placement fees up to Rs 50,000 per maid from the household that hires them. In between the point of “recruitment” and the point of placement there are intermediaries that “sell”, transfer and move the young, vulnerable person through the supply chain. Money is exchanged at each stage.

The agencies keep relocating the same girl from one employer to another every few months in order to collect their placement fee repeatedly. This disruption adds to the trauma of the young girl. The agency becomes, by default, her only hope of security, and in the process she becomes even more vulnerable to the agency’s exploitation. Delhi alone is estimated to have several thousands of such girls being brought every year.

The cultural gap between India’s adivasis and its metro elites is larger in many ways than the gap between people living in Delhi and New York. The victim often gets duped into thinking that she is headed for the good life of an Indian metro, and her parents are often hand in glove in selling her into such a scheme. The money given to the parents is a “down payment” to convert them, their daughter’s placement as maid being part of the transaction. Many churches also provide safe transfer of the girl’s monthly salary back to her parents, with a certain “donation” charged by the church for its services. All this is a package deal for “being saved”.

This end-to-end system functions like the old slave trade from Africa to America and other continents — in which the church had also played a major role. Today’s racket hides behind the mask of helping the downtrodden by finding them employment in a faraway place. By no means do I wish to imply that all abuses of maids from villages are the result of this system, but that fact that such a system exists outside the bounds of investigative scrutiny is noteworthy.

In the most recent episode of this tragedy, a woman executive working for a French multinational in Delhi has been arrested on charges of committing atrocities against a girl from the Santhal tribe of Jharkhand state. The maid comes from Sahibgunj, one of India’s poorest districts. The media is having a field day sensationalising this as child labour, even after the police confirmed that documents in her village show her to be over the age of 18. The girl had worked for this executive for only 3 months, prior to which she had worked in numerous other households in Delhi since age 15. So the child labour stage of her exploitation was done under several previous employers. But there is no investigation of the previous employers. Why?

The reason for authorities not pursuing the earlier employers is that the girl is a Christian convert from a very poor family; and uncovering the entire chain of events and parties involved would expose the nexus of the Jharkhand church, the political parties that use these poor folks as their vote bank, and various NGOs involved in so-called “human rights” programs. The placement agency in Delhi is run by a Christian woman with likely links to the Jharkhand Church. The media sensationalises the matter as an isolated, localised episode when in fact it deserves to be investigated as a system of mafia-like underground network.

Brinda Karat, the rabid voice of the Communist Party of India, swung into rapid action targeting the maid’s employer, but not wanting a broader inquiry into the supply network that originates in the remote villages where her party seeks support from the church and NGOs.

Many other political leaders also saw opportunity in this scandal to show support for dalit communities whose votes can swing elections. These remote villages are also infested with Maoists seeking to topple the Indian state. The political stakes are high and NGOs compete to prove their worth by claiming to champion the plight of the poor. The same NGOs also raise funds under various “noble” pretexts.

The media ought to act more responsibly than selling us Bollywood-style action drama. To expose the large criminal networks and attack the roots of the problem, they should emphasize some systemic changes. First and foremost, it should be declared illegal to offer employment or other material inducements for religious conversion of poor and vulnerable persons. In particular, the church, parents and agencies that are involved in peddling the labor of a person under age 18 should be prosecuted. This is the nexus where the focus of prosecution should be targeted when incidents of abuse are discovered.

At the same time, one should recognise the legitimate need for domestic servants in Indian metros. To serve this demand, agencies should have to be certified periodically that they are in compliance with all laws. This must include transparency of disclosure of the full details concerning every employee and employer served. There must be a mechanism by which the legal age of a potential maid can be formally ascertained and the agency must bear this burden prior to offering her as a candidate. All commissions and salary payments must be legalised.

The media must start educating the metro employers about the laws concerning minimum wages and others aspects. Right now most Delhi households lack such awareness, as the media has focused on sensationalism without its shouldering social responsibility or due diligence.

There are also many instances of exploitation in the reverse direction that should be noted: Elderly persons in Delhi are too often being criminally attacked by their domestic servants who threaten legal action with the help of NGOs, and thereby prevent the crime from being reported. I know of cases where a youth gang has repeatedly burglarised the house of an elderly woman living alone. The police have been reluctant to file charges because of the threat by NGOs that these youth criminals are protected as “minors”. This means tougher juvenile crime laws need to be enacted and enforced.

I have anticipated such NGO-backed crimes within India since the 1990s when I first became aware of foreign nexuses intervening in India’s so-called tribal areas. It was a Harvard Roundtable Conference on Indology sponsored by Infinity foundation where I found that Western scholars had become very interested in Indian communities belonging to the “Munda” family of languages. The thesis formulated was that the Munda people were the only indigenous peoples of India. They were first invaded by the “foreign Dravidians” coming from the Middle East, and later on both the Munda and the Dravidians got invaded by the “foreign Aryans”. Thus, Indians were classified into layers with the intention of empowering one group against the others. In my earlier book, Breaking India, I mention some important US based interventions through this type of anthropology and linguistics work.

The Santhal community where the maid in the latest scandal comes from is one of the largest communities in what is called India’s “tribal belt”. Most anthropological studies on them were done by Christian missionaries since British times. The colonial-evangelical lens used was the same as for other non-Christian peoples that were encountered outside Europe, and many of its prejudices have become accepted by modern Indians. The “tribals” are considered “pagans” because they believe in “animism”, meaning that they consider all of nature as inhabited with divine spirit. (Ironically, the latest trend among Western thinkers is to appropriate these very ideas into Judeo-Christianity, using fancy new terms like “panentheism” and “immanence” after studying Hindu philosophy on which such ideas are based.) These villages have been a hotbed for missionary activities for the past few centuries, and this intensified in 1914 when the first complete translation of the Bible into the Santali language was finished by a Norwegian missionary.

Clearly, the battle for fragmenting Indians has entered a new phase. “Tribal” Indians will be increasingly exploited in various ways in the guise of bringing them human rights. The media’s framing of such episodes as “secular” crimes of an isolated kind is a shallow and inadequate treatment of what is much deeper and multilayered. This issue has far reaching implications.

— Rajiv Malhotra

Rajiv Malhotra’s Interview With Rediff.Com’s Arthur J Pais

‘When Westerners make fun of our gods, they’re instigating trouble’

Arthur J Pais
‘In theory, yes, Hindus are very open. I’m one of them. I’ve coined the phrase ‘open architecture’.’

‘But I think the Wendy Doniger group is not allowing open architecture. They are closing this architecture.’

‘They are bringing a point of view in such a heavy-handed way that it tends to dominate and it tends to suppress the alternative points of view. So some kind of counteraction is necessary and using the law is a decent thing to do.’

Rajiv Malhotra, one of Wendy Doniger’s most vociferous critics, speaks to Rediff.com’s Arthur J Pais about the prejudices created by American scholars about Hindu gods and Hinduism.

Rajiv Malhotra, left, a constant critic of Wendy Doniger and what he calls her Chicago school of writers and thinkers, retired at age 44 some 20 years ago and put his money into the Infinity Foundation, an one-man think-tank.

The Indian-American writer of books on India has devoted himself, for more than a decade-and-a- half, he says, to “clarifying the many misperceptions about Indic traditions in America and among Indians.”

When did the fight against the book start? How did it go through? 

My involvement with this started in the year 2000. My kids went to Princeton Day School and one day the teacher asked me for information on Vedanta, (Swami) Vivekananda and Ramakrishna (Paramhamsa) because in their teaching of world religions they wanted to have knowledge of Hinduism.

One of the teachers told me that he has been advised by some American scholar not to teach Vivekananda and Ramakrishna because the parents would object to this. When I asked why the parents would object, he said it has been declared that Ramakrishna had a relationship with Vivekananda.

I have never heard of such a thing. We started investigating this and asked which scholar had said this and that is how I discovered a whole genre of scholarship which has this kind of view that Wendy Doniger and her students came up with. So, they used Freudian psychoanalysis to psychoanalyse (Hinduism).

Which book has talked about Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramhamsa?

A book called Kali’s Child by Jeffrey J Kripal. Then I found Paul Courtright, one of Wendy’s students, had a similar book called Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings. They had this very vulgar kind of view.

So, I tried to take this around to the religious, Hindu community and they did not want to touch it. Many of the Hindu leaders in this country (America) maybe were too arrogant, too cocky, or too embarrassed or too scared to talk about it. They did not think it important to take any action.

So I took it upon myself to start writing articles expressing that these are not correct interpretations…

This issue has nothing to do with Christianity versus Hinduism, because most of these people are Jewish, anyway. They are using a Marxist lens, a Leftist lens, a Freudian lens. The kind of theories they are using are completely inapplicable to the Indian way of life.

Then, I started attending the conferences of religion to see why this is happening. It was very strange. All religions had people represented from within.

You would see rabbis from Judaism, Buddhist monks, imams talking about Islam. In the case of Hinduism, there was hardly any practising Hindu speaking for it. It was entirely non-Hindus who felt that they have understood the text, learnt Sanskrit and they were able to interpret it. So, I felt that this is a huge untold story.

I started writing articles. These articles created a huge stir. And, this is the situation with these people. We compiled these arguments in a book called Invading the Sacred that came out in 2007, and since then I have come out with three more books that are not on Wendy but other issues related to Indian civilisation and Indian philosophy and thought and so on.

I personally moved on beyond Wendy Doniger. But I have created a huge awareness and awakening among the Diaspora and among people in India. So many other groups started getting immersed and started taking up my cause and they are the ones who started litigating on Doniger and her book and so on in India.

There has been quite a bit of criticism against the group that filed the case against Doniger’s book.

The person who filed the case is a woman called Monika Arora. She is a very reputed Supreme Court lawyer in Delhi. She filed this case.

Some people are trying to portray the Hindus involved in this case as some kind of savages, violent people and all of that. The point is that the Hindus who filed this case used the rule of law; they used the courts. There is no hint of any violence. They are very cultured, sophisticated people. They went to the court and filed a case.

The case has been going on for over two years. There was never a hint of any violence or anything indecent. It was a let’s go to court and fight. So, the Hindu site put out a petition in the court citing many, many instances of errors in the book, citing page numbers. Some of these are not matters of interpretation, but factual errors and these are available online.

There is a petition that lists many, many pages of errors and so the opposing side of Penguin gave Wendy Doniger’s point-by-point response. This went back and forth several times.

It was not like it was an uncivilised mob. It was a very civilised legal due process going on.

I’m not privy to what was the thought process of the Penguin side. But they must have concluded that they have the risk of losing. So, they reached an out-of-court settlement to withdraw the book.

Now, somehow, the Western scholars are making it sound like some kind of a Hindu mob pushed them and forced them with violence. There is no evidence of such thing; on the contrary, the entire evidence is that it was a legal due process by which a civilised country manages disputes.

Were you part of the litigation?

I deliberately decided that this should run its course through the legal system. I do not want any part of it. I’m available as a scholar. My criticisms of the writings are very publicly available. I’ve always said anybody can quote them freely, but I don’t want to be drawn into a legal matter myself.

The reason being that Wendy is one of the issues that I have raised, you know, Wendy and her whole lineage. But I’m a scholar with many things to write about. That is not the only thing I’m concerned about.

I’m writing about Indian history of science and technology; I’m writing about comparative philosophy; I’m writing about India as a nation and what are its narratives.

I’m writing on many topics and I don’t want to get stuck in one issue that will exhaust me. I realised that I should not personally get involved and I therefore decided to stay behind.

How else did you support the case?

I did not support them in any tangible way, but they have my ideas. They are pretty self-sufficient in how they funded it; the group has funded it, got the lawyers, and done the whole thing on their own. I basically lit the fire in the beginning by highlighting that these are issues.

I also hope to create a process in which Hinduism is properly interpreted and presented not only to Hindus, but to anyone.

The thing is that every religion gets criticised. But other religions are where they are producing people who are very qualified to represent their own religions and therefore these seminary products become scholars and they get launched in different universities for support. For Hindus, they never set up a seminary. So, I am a kind of a one-man show. I can only do so much.

Given the number of Hindus in the world, there are a thousand people like me who are standing there to study this, represent it, debate it, go and argue and be available to the media. But, right now, there aren’t that many Hindus who are really well read, highly sophisticated and being able to represent because we don’t have seminaries.

So, the real solution to all this is that Hindus should use seminaries which can produce a high calibre of leaders and then these leaders can go out there to take a stand.

A good education system should respect the non-Western culture, be it India, China, Japan, the Middle East — whoever. They should respect those people because Americans will be trading with them, having partnerships with them, having different relationships with them.

It will be good for America to train the next generation of Americans to be really appreciative of various cultures.

What kind of education did you have in India? 

I went to a Catholic school from kindergarten to the end of high school. I went to St Columbus School, a Catholic school, and I got a very good education from there. I have many Christian friends and now some of my closest friends are Christians.

I feel that the Western mischief of intervening and creating disruption inside India is a sad thing because Indians have had a long history of being able to get along in a very pluralistic society.

When these Westerners get in and start making fun of gods and goddesses — all these vulgar writings about gods and goddess, all the vulgar writings about many of the symbols, the festivals, making fun of the gurus — obviously, they are instigating trouble. I see it in that way.

I see it as a very sophisticated form of intervention that causes internal problems in India and then they can blame it on Indians, as the British used to do.

Have you tried to engage with American scholars?

I have always told the American Academy that for each religion you should always have certain people who are insiders at the table. The American Academy of Religion has 12,000 members at their annual conference.

You go to the panel on Hinduism, they should have a few Hindus able to represent their faith: Teachers, preachers, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, there are people from the Ramakrishna Mission, the well-known old-established organisations.

When they are describing something about Hinduism, they can bring in many kinds of people. But right now they do not bring outsiders of the academy. They only bring people who are qualified academics.

These qualified academics have very Western training and have a very narrow point of view on other religions because they are relying only on the texts.

Hinduism is not a religion of the book where you can learn everything by reading a text. You have to also understand how it is practised and how the people who practise it, see it and interpret it.

The proper way to learn Hinduism is not only to read the text as seen by outsiders but also what is the insider practitioners’ perspective. I’ve suggested to them that every time there are four speakers, three of them could be the normal American academic types; but one of them could be a practitioner who is brought in as a voice of the Hindu community — who will kind of represent their point of view. But they have never accepted this.

There is a kind of a power, arrogance and a sense of ‘We know more than you guys know about your own religion’. This kind of colonial hangover continues. I think these problems that we are now noticing are examples of things getting out of hand because people feel very insulted.

So many Hindu parents complain that when their kids go to school, they are made fun of because they are asked all these kinds of questions: Do you worship a monkey, why do you have this dot on your head, and so on. So these kids are vulnerable and are embarrassed.

I’ve become a kind of clearing house for these Hindus. People bring their problems to me and I refer them to somebody who can help. I get approached for advice by Indian students in colleges who write to me that they are facing a certain issue and then I get involved.

But one man cannot do this. This should not just be my job. So I organise this representation of people who are interested in this.

Was there any other way to deal with the Doniger book instead of asking for its withdrawal?

If Penguin had said that we are going to issue a new edition, thank you for telling us, sometimes books have an error issue, I think that would have made things OK.

But, my feeling is that Wendy Doniger, as a matter of principle and arrogance, did not want to change a single word.

Her books have been printed and stored in airport shops. Some Indian group in Mumbai also gave her awards. These awards were given by businessmen and industrialists who do not know anything about religion.

I know she has a good lobby firm. She gets her students to promote her work worldwide: In the US and the Indian press. She has all of us who have given her a privileged position where she is beyond criticism.

And so what has happened is because she enjoys this high prestige, it is not acceptable to her that all of a sudden — in the last 10 years — a lot of Hindus have started complaining about her.

But this is the reality of the Internet. And, what I have done and what Hindus are now doing about this was only possible because of the Internet. On the Internet, because of social media, people creating blogs, people tweeting.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve been tweeting, a lot of people have been re-tweeting and it has become a huge thing.

So, if it had not been for the Internet, they would have simply ignored us and continued and said who are you, we won’t bother about you. Now, they cannot ignore. I think that is a big part of it.

Several people from Princeton University and elsewhere in America, including devout Hindus, said they like the book.

I personally am not in favour of banning any book. I have never called for a book ban in my life. I will never do that. I’m more interested that my counter-position should get an equal voice.

My complaint is that they have banned me from all academic forums. The same Western people when discussing religions of south Asia, they do not include me in their reviews, in their panels, in their conferences.

The academic presses will not publish me; the literary festivals in India are so controlled by Wendy Doniger’s wavelength and fan club that people like me who represent an alternative point of view are not allowed.

So, there is a frustration that one side controls the forums. Their people control: They are on the editorial boards, they are on the selection committees, and their particular point of view gets in and the opposing voice does not.

It’s not a free market of ideas. It’s a market controlled by certain monopolistic ideas and the opposing ideas are not given a fair share.

I can write and sell to my Hindu followers. But they will not allow my books into the academy; they will not allow my books to be read in the courses and even in the mainstream media.

So what is happening is that as a matter of practical reality, one side is being represented in the mainstream channels of communication and the other side is blocked.

The argument is that Hinduism is an open-minded faith and so are Hindus. It doesn’t reflect well on Hindus.

Mahatma Gandhi was also using satyagraha against a big empire because they had too much control and power. And he was disrupting them and bringing them down. I consider what I’m doing is a kind of satyagraha against a very corrupt system of knowledge because it is misrepresenting knowledge: They control the printing presses, they control the academic presses, they control the journals, their friends are running the media.

So, their ideology is the one that gets in and therefore that is a kind of a monopoly that has to be broken.

If there was a similar monopoly in business, it would be an anti-trust case. In the business of the humanities and knowledge, you can (have) a monopoly and there’s no anti-trust law that covers that. So, that is an issue.

In theory, yes, Hindus are very open. I’m one of them. I’ve coined the phrase ‘open architecture’. I fully support it.

My new book is called Hindu Open Architecture. It says it is an open architecture, people are welcome to join, all kinds of different points of view are invited, we can criticise one another, we are evolving, we are not fixed in time, all that is fine.

But I think the Wendy Doniger group is not allowing open architecture. They are closing this architecture.

They are bringing a point of view in such a heavy-handed way that it tends to dominate and it tends to suppress the alternative points of view.

So some kind of counteraction is necessary and using the law is a decent thing to do.

Could the withdrawal of the book create more demand for it? People could be reading it for the first time.

I think that is always the case. But both sides will get something out of it. The people on the other side will play victim, that the Hindus are bad people, they banned us; they are bad guys, so they will try to get some sympathy.

But, on the other hand, the Hindu side will also get mileage by saying we know our fight… We can win. It will give more publicity.

More people now want to reprint my books because they want to understand what exactly was the criticism about Wendy Doniger. So, people on both sides will be interested in the published materials.

Some people will get interested in what Wendy Doniger is about because she is controversial; she always was. More people will also be interested in what I have to say. I keep getting calls from people in the last 48 hours wanting to get more of my stuff out.

It is more a matter of principle; we’re trying to make a statement. I don’t think that they’re expecting that the book will disappear because certainly you can buy it as an e-book.

The point is that the book has been out for so many years, a lot of people have bought it and it has done very well.

Penguin has made it into a bestseller. To bring the book down is more of a moral victory.

It’s not a victory in a practical sense that will make a difference. It makes a moral statement that we have a point against this very iconic author and we are able to make this point in a legal forum.

And we are able to make it so effectively that even the publisher agrees with that.

Arundhati Roy has talked about a fascist government coming to power and has suggested it was a factor that made Penguin withdraw the book.

I think that’s stupid. I think people are trying to link too many things. These are overdone. These are people trying to over-sensationalise. Everything you can link with Narendra Modi and fascism, you can try to get headlines.

I would not even waste time with her because that is stupid. Arundhati Roy is not a scholar of religion. She has not read either Wendy Doniger or critics of Wendy Doniger. They are just trying to get some quick mileage out of it.

None of the people who are criticising this move have actually read the petition and seen what the complaint was in the first place.

They are just trying to link all these petitions as some kind of Hindu goals and Hindu terrorists and fascists and Taliban and so on.

I know that these people are decent people. They are regular professionals and they have hired a very well-known, prestigious Supreme Court lawyer who has filed this in a very legal, correct way. They prepared an argument and they got counter-arguments back and forth and so this is how Penguin decided to settle it.

Penguin is interested in big deals and they would not have bowed down. I don’t think they would have settled for this kind of reason. They have many other titles that are very controversial. They have titles against Modi. They are not withdrawing those… So why would they withdraw only this one title?

Is karma-reincarnation compatiable with christianity.

It is commonplace these days to hear the word “karma” used in popular parlance. Broadly speaking, karma could be translated as, “as you sow, so shall you reap” and this is how it is usually understood and used by Christians. The word karma, in a popular context, underscores the idea that there is a universal law at work, that we do live in a just world and no action (or thought) is exempt from consequences. Many surveys also show that an increasing percentage of Americans believe in karma and its corollary, reincarnation.

But how genuine is this understanding of these notions that play a central role in dharma? A deeper understanding of karma and reincarnation within Dharmic traditions reveals that these notions are at odds with the most fundamental assumptions of Christianity.  Failing to understand the meaning of karma in the Indian context, presumes, mistakenly, that Judeo-Christian and Dharmic worldviews are one and the same.  They are not and it is this and other differences that I explicate in my book.

In Christianity, justice, while it may be approximated on earth, is finally accomplished on the “Day of Judgment” when each person is held accountable for all his actions and assigned permanently to either Heaven or Hell. This is to occur at the culmination of an apocalyptic struggle known as the “End Times”.  In Dharma, in contrast, time isn’t finite but infinite; hence the very notion of the end of time is meaningless. After this universe ends there will emerge another, just as prior to this universe there was another. The series of universes is without beginning or end. There will be no one final day of universal judgment.

Rather, karma is a perpetual cosmic system in which consequences of all actions follow as effects. Unlike the Christian notion of a perpetual Hell or eternal life in Heaven, in Hinduism, such celestial stays in svarga (heaven) and naraka (hell), respectively, are always temporary, in proportion to accumulated karma. They are always followed by rebirth to experience the fruits – negative or positive – of previous actions. Karma thus makes reincarnation important and necessary. Whereas in Christianity, the time span for outcomes is limited to one life, in Indian thought the cycle of causation extends across multiple lives.

Unlike the Christian concept of Original Sin, karma theory posits that it is only our own individual past actions (from both past lives and the current one) for which one must bear consequences. TheChristian belief in Original Sin – that all human beings, as progeny of Adam and Eve, partake of their sin, runs contrary to the Hindu understanding of the cosmos. For Hindus, karma is non-transferable. It cannot be accrued due to the actions of someone else such as Adam and Eve. Karma, unlike sin, is not a sexually transmitted condition. Adam and Eve’s sins would therefore, in the Hindu worldview, accrue only to Adam and Eve and not to all humanity.

More importantly, karma theory holds that human beings have the agency for their own liberation, the means to break their karmic bonds entirely by their own spiritual practices.  They do not necessarily need to believe in divine intervention. Hence, regardless of the stature of  Krishna, Shiva or Buddha, it is possible to be a good Hindu or Buddhist and to achieve liberation from the cycles of birth and death, without having heard of them as long as one lives in accordance with Dharma.

Dharma as I’ve pointed out in other blogs, has the Sanskrit root dhri, which means “that which upholds” or “that without which nothing can stand” and encompasses the natural, innate behavior of things, duty, law, ethics, virtue, etc. Since the essence of humanity is divinity, it is possible for man to know his dharma through direct experience without any external intervention or knowledge of saints, prophets or a church-like institution. A dharmic person is broadly one who performs his actions righteously and this is sufficient to lead humans to the divine. There is the grace of God in these traditions, but is not essential in the Christian sense of a historical mediation, because each of us is inherently divine already.

In Christianity, salvation and forgiveness from Original Sin is possible only through the unique historical act of God. The only Son of God, Jesus, is exempt from Original Sin because his Virgin Birth makes him not a progeny of Adam and Eve; only he can bring salvation to human beings. The intervention of the divine as flesh in the form of Jesus and his subsequent crucifixion and resurrection are essential for salvation. Here again, Christian belief collides with karma theory.

On the other hand, according to karma, the “phala” or fruit of one’s actions must be experienced by the doer of those actions in this or a future birth. Moreover, phala cannot precede karma but must follow it. Since phala can neither be used retroactively nor deposited as collateral against future sins, Jesus’ suffering could not either erase past sins of men nor the future ones of those not even born.

My hope in discussing these differences candidly is that once laid bare, they become the basis for more fruitful and effective interfaith discussions on a level playing field.

Author: Rajiv Malhotra