Dilip's question

Dilip D'Souza in his blog wonders why conversions anger and threaten so many people. I have seen a bit of this anger and fear recently and have also been wondering about it. A few weeks ago, I contributed a bit of money to a micro-finance effort organized a village pastor P.Sunder (I have made similar small contributions to other efforts headed by Hindus and Moslems). Since then, I have been assailed by various relatives and friends that this money will be used for conversions and that a lot of money has been pouring in from abroad for conversions to Christianity. This may be true but I have seen very little evidence of this money reaching the few villages that I visited. I heard some stories in Hyderabad of money coming from in Germany but eaten up by middlemen and fake reports to satify the donors. In any case, that people feel threatened about some conversions seems to be true.
In an article on a related issue 'The Fundamentalist Challenge' ( from the collection "The Imam and the Indian"), Amitav Ghosh suggests a plausible cause: " I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy troughout this (20th) century: an ideology, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over particular stretch of geography." But why such a reaction now more than before is not clear to me. Is it due to recent prosperity and better communication systems? At another place in the article, he suggests:" ...the market ideal as a cultural absolute, untempered by any other ethical, political, or spiritual ideals, is often so inhuman and predatory in its effects that it cannot but generate dissent"
I have met many old people during this trip, many of them relatively prosperous. They seem to attribute their prosperity, not even in part to some sort of luck, but to their cultural and value systems and are very eager to impart them to others, particularly youngsters (It scares me because I too am old). May be similar things are true for groups that have survived.
P.S. (12th January, 2008) Annie Zaidi too ponders about Dilip's question.