P. N. Benjamin
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| Formation | 2001 |
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| Location | |
| Coordinates | 13°00′08″N 77°37′26″E / 13.002232°N 77.623899°ECoordinates: 13°00′08″N 77°37′26″E / 13.002232°N 77.623899°E |
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Region served
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India |
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Chairman & Coordinator
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P.N. Benjamin |
| Website | birdindia |
The Bangalore Initiative for Religious Dialogue (BIRD) is an organisation based in Bangalore, India that promotes dialog between people of different faiths, attempting to defuse tensions between religious communities such as Hindus, Christians and Muslims.
BIRD was established in 2001. The founder, trustee, chairman and coordinator is P.N. Benjamin. Another founding member was Fr. Mathew Chandrankunnel, a professor of Philosophy of Science and Registrar and Director of the Centre for the Study of world Religions at the Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram, Bangalore. BIRD is supported entirely through donations from well-wishers. These are not income tax exempt.
The BIRD coordinator P.M. Benjamin is often quoted as an opponent of activism among Christians. After an attack on a Mysore church in February 2002 a team from BIRD and from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh visited to ascertain what had happened. The BIRD team was led by P.M. Benjamin, who called for calm among Christians, saying "the need of the hour is to unitedly follow Christ's prayer amidst his agony on the cross — forgive them for they know not what they do ... Christians must learn to talk to their enemies for overcoming their sense of alienation and insecurity and halt the march of misunderstanding between communities".
P. N. Benjamin was cited in the 2003 report A Factual Response to the Hate Attack on the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) by Ramesh Nagaraj Rao, Narayanan Komerath and others. According to this report, Benjamin had said that Catholic and Protestant organisations had received far more money from abroad than Hindu and Muslim organisations combined, "especially the fundamentalist, and born-again Christian organisations that spread hatred against Hinduism ... Hindu-baiters are making a mountain out of a molehill while they themselves thrive under the shade of foreign funds". He was also quoted as saying "the biased Indian English media has always suppressed facts and encouraged the enemies of the country who received millions of foreign funds to tarnish the nation’s image everywhere by giving wide publicity to the so-called Global Council of Indian Christians and other vested interests.
In September 2005 the website "christianaggression.org" published an article titled "When Intolerance Begets the Loss of Reason" that apparently had been published in the Vijay Times on 9 September 2005, written by P. N. Benjamin. John Dayal, president of the All India Catholic Union and a member of the National Integration Council, had accused Hindu political organisations of atrocities such as raping nuns and murdering priests. The author said that Dayal "opens his mouth and wields his pen only to spew venom on the Hindu community". He said that most attacks on Christians were due to aggressive evangelising. In February 2012 P.N. Benjamin dismissed claims that the 2008 attacks on Christians in southern Karnataka numbered over a thousand. He said "It is just an exaggeration. I feel there have been a handful of attacks, which were instigated by some fringe Christian groups". He said these groups received funding from American Pentacostal churches.
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