For thousands of years Hinduism has remained a religion practised by individual families, villagers and communities across the Indian sub-continent. The Hindu pundits, swamis and other high priests never attempted to coerce of force anyone to embrace Hinduism as their personal or family religion.
In fact for thousands of years Hindus in India and across the world never created organisations for the purpose of winning converts. We refused the strategy of denigrating the religious and cultural practices of any human being for the winning of converts. Campaigners for Hindu “souls” however, have mounted repeated programmes to “save” the Hindu. We in T&T have not been speared the onslaught of lies and misinterpretation of our religion.
In T&T, our constitution guaranties the freedom of religion but over the years we have not been saved from religious attacks about our beliefs and cultural practices. In the process of responding to our critics we have had to create an “answer back” strategy where we correct false images of Hinduism and also point to the inconsistencies in religious teachings of our critics.