Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

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GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
Meat-eaters and wine-imbibers
Did the missionaries ever raise a voice for this?
Besides this, there are popular reasons why Christianity has made itself disagreeable, to Hindus. Christians being meat-eaters and wine-imbibers
Ladies and Gentlemen, you have heard all your lives from your missionaries who claim to be the messengers of God, how ugly, wretched, immoral, and vile the heathens of India are; you have heard it over and over till it has become the national idea of your people. Your children are taught these ideas about us as they take in the mother's milk; but did you ever hear from these missionaries, the messengers of love, to all mankind, of the tyrannies that are perpetrated over the Hindus in India. Government have abolished duties on goods from Liverpool and Manchester for the purpose of finding a good market in India and have levied 200 per cent tax on the manufacture of salt in India to maintain a costly government. Did they ever tell you about all such things? If they have not, whose messengers would you call these people who always side with tyranny, who throw their cloak of hypocritical religion over murderers and all sorts of criminals who happen to belong to their religion or to their country. You may think these men to be messengers of God. They may cheat with their smooth tongued words the men and women of America into subscribing largely to mission funds and thus bribe their passage to heaven. But India knows them and their tricks.
seem to the Hindus to be representing a religion devoid of humanitarian or spiritual principles. You do not know what disgust and horror the meateating produces in the eyes of the simple-minded Hindu. The very practice of using wine at your Lord's Supper sanctions the use of wine at any other time. The Hindu cannot and does not want to accept such a religion. This is the reason why certain sects in India excommunicate their members who go to foreign countries and use meat and wine. That the representatives of a nation who torture and kill hundreds and thousands of animals every day for self-gratification should go to a mild and humane people of a country like India and preach humanity to them without ever practicing it, is beyond the comprehension of the Hindu mind.
These missionaries pose as friends of the poor; but did they ever tell you that the average income of a Hindu is about fifty cents per month? One half of the population of India has only one meal per day and with all this the pressure of taxation is increasing every day till the nation is almost driven to the verge of despair. Millions live habitually upon wild flowers. The year in which Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India and whilst the government was spending thousands and
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