2.2 Million Baha’is in India ???. What a Joke !!!!!

Funny how the claimed numbers of Baha’i keeping growing exponentially when in fact membership is down! 7millions now, lol.

 Must be claiming 3 – 1/2 million in India alone! Growth in West has been not only been stagnant for the past 30 years but is in fact shrinking as Hossein Banani openly admitted when being asked why the Baha’is of Canada were trying to sell off some of their unused real estate in the Yukon near Whitehorse.

From The Yukon News article Dec.1 2004: although Banani and Tama stress the impending sale is not a sign the Baha’i community is leaving the territory, membership in the faith is down. “Some people have left the faith”, “some have gone into hibernation.” said Mr.Banani.

 In other words so many people have ” left the (Baha’i) faith” or have “gone into hibernation”, that the attrition rate is greater than the enrollment rate, forcing the Canadian National Spiritual Assembly to sell off it’s real estate to keep solvent.

 The number of claimed Baha’is in India is bogus. The greater majority of those who are claimed as Baha’i members in India are infact still Hindu’s. When a Hindu says that Buddha was an Avatar it doesn’t make them a Buddhist just as when a Hindu says that Baha’ullah was an Avatar it doesn’t make them a Baha’i.

 William Garlington’s personal experience in India bares this fact out: ..From my own experiences in the mass teaching areas of Madhya Pradesh in 1973-74 it was fairly apparent that declaring oneself a Baha’i did not mean that an individual was being put in the position of having to *leave* his own religious tradition (which in this case was primarily Hindu). Indeed, in the villages that I visited it seemed apparent that declared Baha’is for the most part continued to practice traditional behavioral idioms. Moreover there was little indication that they had abandoned the Hindu *world view*. They had declared their belief in Baha’u’llah as an avatar and were *compartmentalizing* their Baha’i activities so as not to directly come into conflict with traditional village or regional norms. As many were from the lower castes (unclean and untouchable) ritual purity was not as big a factor as for higher caste Hindus. My own conclusion was that the Baha’i Faith better fit the category of a *bhakti* movement rather than a new religion in that it 1)allowed for *converts* to express their *deviant* attitudes within a compartmentalized frame of reference (Baha’i institutions such as Feast and Assembly Meetings) 2) was highly devotional in nature and 3) tended to show a preference for symbolic and utopian expressions of change rather than direct social action. (With the onset of specific development programs in the 80s and 90s this aspect of the Faith in India may well have changed to some degree, although I would doubt that
there has been much attempt to openly combat caste prejudice in the name of the Faith.) All of this is to say that IMO what allows for the large numbers is the fact that in India one can be a Baha’i and still be a Hindu. If such an approach were taken in the United States I would imagine that the number of Baha’is here would also be dramatically increased.

 7 million, lol; more like 2 million at that is probably still a stretch.

 What could possibly be the Baha’i Administrative Order’s motivation for so grossly exaggerating the number of Baha’i in the world? Could it be because the Baha’i faith’s claimed: “global prominence”, is in fact: growing obscurity?

Larry Rowe

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